When a hundred-year-old German expressionist film called Nosferatu ended after a screening in Kerala, all of the audience, packed across two floors of a large building, stood up and clapped for several minutes. Standing in front of the screen, beside his prettily lit piano, was Jonny Best, who had for the past one-and-a-half hours tirelessly performed live music to FW Murnau’s silent film. It was the first of his five scheduled sessions at the International Film Festival of Kerala (IFFK), playing live music for silent films from around a century ago.
The morning after his first show, Jonny Best, the musician who came down from the UK for the fest, is quite happy with the reception. “The audience is great, the atmosphere is good,” he says. He has been tweeting about the IFFK, posting pictures of events. A resident musician at the BFI Southbank, a repertory cinema in London, Jonny has for long been into silent films, doing his PhD on them (“just submitted”). He has also been working at art festivals for 10 years, even curating one in Birmingham. It was at one such festival that he got the pianist Neil Brand to accompany a two-part silent film Die Nibelungen. After he heard it from among the audience, he thought, “I think I could do this.”
There's an amazing atmosphere at #IFFK2022 today. I played Nosferatu for a thousand people and afterwards everyone gathered for a live performance in the gardens. https://t.co/c3RXIVw5HN
— Jonny Best (@JonnyWorst) December 10, 2022
Jonny had watched Nosferatu before the screening on Saturday, but sometimes he doesn’t get to do that. Ideally, he’d like to watch the film in silence and experience it as an audience first, before he begins to think about the music. “It is important for me to have a strong sense of what the film is, of what it is trying to do, or what it is about,” he says.
It is interesting to note how he pieces together the film. He does not look at Nosferatu, for instance, as simply a vampire film. He talks like a critic, explaining the relationship between Nosferatu — the vampire — and a young woman he goes seeking. In the film, you have a young man called Hutter, married to a very sensitive Ellen, who gets upset when the husband brings her flowers because they were killed for her. You can then imagine her horror when she discovers about a vampire with a taste for human blood. Hutter is the opposite, always high in his spirits, going cheerfully on a long trip to find the man who wishes to buy a deserted building in his neighbourhood. The man, of course, is our vampire.
Nosferatu/ IFFK
Jonny’s music, calling attention at the beginning of the film, mainly because you have just seen him walk to his piano and take the seat, gradually fades into the background. No matter how high it goes – and it has to go high a lot in a vampire film – you barely shake yourself away from the screen and look at the pianist. “Your job is to bring the film alive, not to play music. The film doesn’t need the music to function. It is already complete. I am just shaping the audience's experience of the film. I am intervening but I don’t want that intervention to be "hey, look at me!" all the way through,” he says.
His love and understanding of cinema is apparent every time he speaks of films. Of Nosferatu, he speaks passionately about the ‘two parallel journeys’ in the film — “Hutter’s hurried journey back home to save his wife, and Nosferatu’s steady and unstoppable journey on his slow moving ship. There is a musical idea. I am always looking for things in the story or structure of the film that I can latch on to.”
On Wednesday, during his last session, he will be playing music for The Woman Men Yearn for, another German silent film from 1929. Jonny found his musical moment in a scene on a train when two people just look at each other. “This moment of pure silent cinema… it is dialogue-less, there is no need for dialogue. There is no need for music! It is absolutely magnetic.”
He does that sometimes during a film — become completely silent, fingers off the keyboard. And when it comes back, it slowly seeps into the screen. But Jonny, despite all his preparations of watching a film ahead and forming ideas around it, plays a different tune every time a movie is played. He rarely repeats patterns, and relies quite a lot on spontaneity. If you take some moments to observe him, he is watching the film too, making quick decisions and then spreading his magical hands across the piano, patting and plucking and gently pressing the keys.
Jonny has not played music for an Indian film, because he thinks it would be more authentic to use Indian music. He has, however, produced screenings of Indian silent films, collaborating with Indian musicians in the UK.