Conference Agenda

Erik Satie, René Clair, and Francis Picabia’s pioneering twenty-minute Entr’acte shown in the intermission of Relâche has received ample scholarly attention. While Douglas W. Gallez (1976), Martin Marks (1997), Robert Orledge (2008), Jonathan Hicks (2017), and Sandra Skurvida (2025) put their emphasis on Satie’s music, Christopher Townsend (2009, 2011, 2021) and Claudia Kappenberg (2009) investigate the film’s visual aesthetic through the lens of contemporary art critics and philosophers (Henri Bergson, Gilles Deleuze). The missing link is a study that explores rhythm and motion resulting from the interrelationship between Satie’s music and Clair’s moving images. In addition to the existing scholarship, this study takes into consideration the recently found primary sources, including Satie’s holograph score for Entr’acte housed at the Harry Ransom Center in Austin, Texas, and additional footage shot by Clair for Entr’acte, which has been released by the film production company Gaumont on BluRay in a restored version of the short film in 2019. With the premise that Entr’acte is one of the first films, which was truly conceived as a sound film avant la lettre, this presentation explores how Satie and Clair envisioned Entr’acte as a critique against 1920s ambitious French avant-garde cinema. Clair disapproved of such overformal films as Abel Gance’s La roue (1922) with music by Arthur Honegger. He claimed that the only way to overcome this misled trend is by returning to the roots of cinema and by embracing rhythm and motion. Satie and Clair realized this concept in the second half of Entr’acte with a highly ironic chase sequence of a runaway hearse during a funeral. This six-minute sequence with the camera constantly in motion showcases Satie’s extraordinary score. His repetitive, yet elegant and genuinely cinematic music featuring simple, short, and memorable patterns being mirrored in the rhythm of the editing, gestures of the actors, and camera movements embodies a radical renouncement of the romantic tradition. The music is exceptionally effective because it avoids doubling the visuals in the aural realm. It instead promotes an anti-romantic film music, which would only become a viable inspiration for composers in the 1980s and beyond.

The migration of Metropolitan Opera stars to the silent screen in the 1910s generated profound cognitive dissonance. “Farrar voiceless!” a Photoplay reporter protested: “The Mona Lisa without her smile; a Stradivarius without its strings.” While the phonograph had accustomed audiences to the disembodied voice, the silent screen presented an inverse paradox: the voiceless body. Extending Elena Mosconi’s concept of the Silent Singer from Italian cinema to the American context, and drawing on Walter Benjamin’s concept of translation as a work’s necessary afterlife (Fortleben), I argue that these appearances were not a technological deficit but a generative mode of what I term fractured performance: a specific mode of reception in which opera’s traditionally unified sensory experience is ruptured into independently circulating visual and sonic components.

Employing intermedial archaeology—a methodology that triangulates material, institutional, and discursive connections—I analyze the Robinson Locke scrapbooks, the Geraldine Farrar Papers, studio contracts, and trade journals to reconstruct this media convergence. The screen’s structural constraints functioned divergently across gender lines. Enrico Caruso, whose authority was acoustically bound, collected a reported $100,000 for My Cousin (1918)—a personal windfall yoked to a public failure. The film was undone by misjudged publicity and the tenor’s discomfort before the camera, but above all by audiences who viewed a voiceless Caruso as a negation of his primary asset. Geraldine Farrar, by contrast, converted the same silence into a site of agency, negotiating contracts upwards of $150,000 across a sustained screen career. Willing to sacrifice “tonal beauty to dramatic effect,” she shed the “exaggeration of the operatic stage,” translating the sacralized aura of the Met to the democratized landscape of the feature film.

This analysis posits a reverse genealogy in which cinematic realism began to unsettle operatic performance practice. Reading the “public frenzy” documented in Moving Picture World alongside the calculated “democratizing gestures” of studio press releases, I demonstrate that the Silent Singer did not merely document a loss of voice. Rather, this figure used the medium’s fracture to dismantle the barriers between highbrow and lowbrow culture, transforming the prima donna from a distant elite into a mass-mediated icon of American modernity.

This paper examines the musical accompaniment compiled by Max Winkler (1888–1965) for Straight Shooting (1917), John Ford’s first feature film, in order to reconstruct aspects of early twentieth-century audience experience and to begin to trace the development of the Western film score. The film emerged during a period of increasing standardization—and commercialization—of silent film music. Winkler stood at the forefront of this transformation, producing detailed musical “scenarios” that combined carefully selected repertoire with room for local interpretation.

Winkler’s accompaniment for Straight Shooting reveals a hybrid strategy: the integration of pieces that evoke a Western atmosphere alongside compositions from photoplay anthologies, particularly for action sequences, as well as romantic works. At times, he recommended specific selections to underscore particular characters or dramatic situations; at others, he deferred to the accompanist’s discretion, encouraging nuanced and context-sensitive performance. This balance between specific direction and flexibility highlights the variable nature of silent-era exhibition practices.

Analyzing Winkler’s scenario in relation to the film’s narrative—an archetypal yet tragic conflict in which ranchers kill homesteaders to preserve the open range—allows us to approximate how contemporary audiences may have experienced its emotional and moral tensions. Music played a crucial role in shaping sympathy, suspense, and the imaginative construction of space, especially in a genre so closely tied to landscape and myth. Moreover, Ford’s early stylistic traits evident in Straight Shooting, including the framing of action through open doorways (anticipating the mise-en-scène later made iconic in The Searchers), gain further resonance when considered alongside their musical framing.

As an early and influential Western, Straight Shooting offers a valuable case study for understanding how silent films—and Westerns in particular—were accompanied. Winkler’s scenario not only reflects broader practices but also demonstrates how silent-era accompaniment shaped audiences’ perception of the West as both romantic and contested terrain, helping to establish conventions that would influence Western film scoring into the sound era.