THE SILENT TREATMENT

The Film Archive, Wellington

13/06/2014 - 14/06/2014

Production Details



Old Films, New Tricks

For two nights in June, members of PlayShop are taking over The Film Archive to mix cinema with live performance.  

Two actors and a musician will be attempting to reimagine the dialogue and soundtrack for the Hopalong Cassidy western Six Shooter Justice. This hidden gem from 1947 is your archetypal cowboy film, but what happens if you silence the film and improvise over the top?

The PlayShop trio of Ralph McCubbin Howell, Jennifer O’Sullivan and Amand Gerbault Gaylor have only seen the film three times. They’ve never even heard it. We are asking them to bring this film to life, voicing the many characters to bring you their own take on this gun-toting classic. And as this is a PlayShop event, there’s bound to be some audience participation!

Before the film, join performer and designer Ria Apps in the foyer as she attempts to recreate one of NZ’s first ever silent films, Butterfly Dance. This short interactive installation will transport you back to the beginning of the film industry in New Zealand. 

PlayShop and the NZ Film Archive present The Silent Treatment

Dates: Friday 13 and Saturday 14 June 2014
Butterfly Dance 6.30pm
Six Shooter Justice 7.00pm (approx 70 minutes)
Venue: NZ Film Archives, 84 Taranaki Street
Tickets: $8 Students, $10 Waged, available from NZ Film Archives & on the door

More Info: www.facebook.com/playshopnz 

PlayShop is a performance company started in 2012. We work with a focus on playfulness and audience interaction. We perform and facilitate for community and corporate groups around New Zealand.




High calibre performers

Review by James McKinnon 14th Jun 2014

The Silent Treatment is Playshop’s answer to Mystery Science Theater 3000. Rather than wisecracking over an old lousy movie, though, the performers (Ralph McCubbin Howell, Jennifer O’Sullivan) and a musician (Amand Gerbault-Gaylor) improvise new dialogue, plots, characters and score, with a little help from the audience. (So I guess it’s actually PlayShop’s answer to What’s Up Tiger Lily?, a hilarious Woody Allen-directed overdub of a Japanese James Bond rip-off.)

For the maiden voyage of this experiment, the film is a Hopalong Cassidy Western, one of over 60 produced between 1935 and 1948. Although it is billed as Six Shooter Justice, my research suggests that was a 1917 film and the Hopalong Cassidy filmography lists no such title so, amazingly, I am not sure which film I saw last night. However, I suspect it was much improved by the introduction of a nefarious plot involving fair trade coffee and a cure for the common stroke.

Reviewing improvised performance can feel pointless, since one is unable to predict the quality or even content of future performances based on the performance under consideration. But there are a few indices we can use to predict the likelihood of a good improvised performance, such as the calibre of the performers, the construction of the game (this is essentially a long-form improv game), the integration of the audience, and the appropriateness of the ‘givens’ (in this case, the film).

Are the performers any good? 

Yes! These are among the rootin’est, tootin’est live performers around, and they take to improvising film dialogue like a cowboy takes to spouting off folksy, homespun metaphors. Based on the high-powered .45 calibre performers, the likelihood of the performance sustaining a medium to high level of enjoyability for 75 minute is high to certain. While they sometimes struggled to keep their characters straight (not aided by the black-and-white film, which makes it hard to tell them apart visually), the improvisation was generally good and there were a few real gems among the characters.

Is the game well-conceived?

Yes. Improvising the score and dialogue of a film is a game with good potential to amuse. The rules are simple, but demanding enough to make it difficult for the performers, which is what the audience enjoys. Enough is left to the audience to make the game interesting every night, but not enough that one bonehead suggestion can derail the whole evening. Having said that, the game might benefit from some tweaking of the rules. The actors claim to have seen the movie, but not heard the soundtrack; while I understand why they didn’t want to know too much, I wondered if they might have been better off had they been more familiar with their source. Or…

Are the given elements appropriate?

…perhaps the event would work better if they picked a source film that the audience was more familiar with. While the western seems like a good choice, this particular film is a very obscure example of a genre most of us know only through parody. Contemporary audiences remember Westerns mainly as Clint Eastwood /Sergio Leone joints, and Hopalong Cassidy is pretty obscure by comparison.

By way of analogy, if you were going to parody Elizabethan tragedy, you would probably use something by Shakespeare as your source, not Thomas Kyd. This film is so abundantly bizarre and defamiliarised by history that its casual racism, terrible editing, and weird plot might have been more hilarious to watch as-is. While I enjoyed the evening, I think the game would work better if the source film, or at least its genre, was at least slightly more familiar to the audience.

Is the audience used well? 

I give this one four bullets out of six. The audience gets a couple of interesting tasks to do, but some of these get old fast, and need more variety (horses have more than one speed!), while others only occur once or so late that everyone has forgotten what they’re doing.

Would I go back? 

Yes. If this game comes back with different film, I will absolutely give it another shot.

Comments

Jennifer O'Sullivan June 14th, 2014

We had the same confusion! Turns out Six Shooter Justice was a 1917 film that was either remade or had its title stolen for the film we used, which was originally titled Dangerous Venture and then (we think) renamed for the NZ release. The IMDB page is here:

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0039299/

Stars William Boyd as Hopalong Cassidy :) 

Editor June 14th, 2014

Wikipedia says Six Shooter Justice was a 1917 film starring Harry Carey (a somewhat suicidal name, wouldn’t you say?). Hopalong Cassidy was played by William Boyd, who may or may not have been and ancestor of Billy (‘Pippin’) Boyd.

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