Event

SILENT SALON 2018

SILENT SALON SPECIAL!
L.A. PREMIERE of the digitally restored version of
THE ANCIENT LAW
(Germany, 1923, Dir. E.A. Dupont, 2 hours, digital)
Live accompaniment by Donald Sosin (piano) and Alicia Svigals (violin)

The film tells the story of Baruch, the son of a rabbi in Galicia during the 1860s. Fascinated by the theater, Baruch leaves his shtetl for Vienna to pursue an acting career, against his fathers wishes. Through the love and support of an archduchess he succeeds at becoming a great classical actor. But he longs for home and is reconciled with his family, where he embraces his heritage, but, at the same time, his father comes to appreciate the beauty of secular literature. The movie paints a complex prorate of the tension between tradition and modernity and was made at the last moment when the future of German an Austrian Jewry still looked hopeful. (Hannah Brown for the Jerusalem Post, 2/24/2018)

Pianist and Composer Donald Sosin grew up in Rye, NY and Munich, Germany. Since 1971 he has performed his silent film music at Lincoln Center, MoMA, the Kennedy Center, and major film festivals here and abroad. He records for Criterion, Kino, Milestone and TCM. His one-act opera for families, Esther, was performed at the National Yiddish Book Center.

Violinist/composer Alicia Svigals is the world's leading klezmer fiddler and a founder of the Grammy-winning Klezmatics. She has worked with violinist Itzhak Perlman, the Kronos Quartet, playwrights Tony Kushner and Eve Ensler, poet Allen Ginsburg, Robert Plant and Jimmy Page of Led Zeppelin