The Many Moods of Melodrama: Sentiment, Satire, Horror, and Noir

An evening of short silent films exploring the melodramatic mode, with original scores performed by students from Oberlin Conservatory at the Cleveland Museum of Art’s Transformer Station.

This end of semester performance will be given by students in the course "Music and Melodrama on Stage and Screen," taught by Emily Laurance.

Five separate titles from France and the United States offer different takes on melodrama, from the traditional to the avant-garde. The program includes Mary Pickford in a new restoration of An Arcadian Maid (1910), the historical drama The Assassination of the Duke of Guise (1908) featuring an original score by Camille Saint-Saëns, the 1928 film adaptation of Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Fall of the House of Usher,” episode 2 of the French protonoir crime serial Les Vampires (1915), and Charlie Chaplin in the Keystone Studios comedy The Face on the Barroom Floor (1914).