Silent film with live original music by Alicia Svigals & Donald Sosin
Based on the bestselling dystopian novel by Hugo Bettauer, H.K. Breslauer’s 1924 silent masterpiece The City Without Jews (Die Stadt ohne Juden) was produced shortly before the satirical events depicted in the fictional story transformed into all-too-horrific reality. Set in the fictional Austrian city of Utopia, the story follows the consequences of an anti-Semitic law that forces all Jews to leave the country. Though darkly comedic in tone and stylistically influenced by German Expressionism, the film contains eerily realistic sequences, such as shots of freight trains transporting Jews out of the city. The film’s stinging critique of Nazism is part of the reason it was banned. All complete prints were thought to be destroyed but in 2015, a nitrate print was discovered in a Parisian flea market and this “lost” film can once again be appreciated in its unfortunately ever-relevant entirety. Featuring an original live score by violinist Alicia Svigals and pianist Donald Sosin, including a performance by Svigals on one of the instruments from the Violins of Hope collection. Featuring an original live score by violinist Alicia Svigals and pianist Donald Sosin, including a performance by Svigals on one of the instruments from the Violins of Hope collection.
The silent film is 91 minutes with English intertitles.
Alicia Svigals (violinist and composer) is the world's leading klezmer violinist and a founder of the Klezmatics. She has performed with and written for violinist Itzhak Perlman, the Kronos Quartet, Debbie Friedman, Osvaldo Golijov, Robert Plant and Jimmy Page, as well as playwrights Tony Kushner and Eve Ensler, filmmaker Judith Helfand, poet Allen Ginsberg and many others. Her live silent film scoring projects – the award-winning The Yellow Ticket and her new score, The Ancient Law (co-composed with Donald Sosin) – are touring the world to acclaim. Her CD Fidl (1996) reawakened klezmer fiddle tradition. Her newest CD is Beregovski Suite: Klezmer Reimagined with jazz pianist Uli Geissendoerfer, an original take on long-lost Jewish music from Ukraine.
Donald Sosin has performed his scores for silent films at Lincoln Center, MoMA, BAM and the National Gallery, as well as college campuses including Yale, Harvard, Cornell and Brown, and major film festivals in New York, San Francisco, Telluride, Hollywood, Pordenone, Bologna, Shanghai, Bangkok, Berlin, Vienna, Moscow and Jecheon, South Korea. He records for Criterion, Kino, Milestone and Flicker Alley, and his scores are heard frequently on TCM. Sosin has had commissions from MoMA, the Chicago Symphony Chorus, the San Francisco Chamber Orchestra and the Jerusalem Symphony Orchestra. His score for The Ancient Law, co-written with violinist Alicia Svigals, was released on DVD/BluRay in 2018 by Flicker Alley.