Sonic Cinema

Bangkok Screening Room begins a new season of music and movies next month, with its Sonic Cinema programme of film screenings with live, experimental soundtracks. The season begins on 1st March with Sergei Eisenstein’s Battleship Potemkin (Бронено́сец «Потёмкин»), and this silent classic will be shown with live music by Viveka (Pakorn Musikaboonlert and Pachara Chirathivat).

Battleship Potemkin is an agitprop dramatisation of the 1905 Russian Revolution, though it also demonstrates Eisenstein’s revolutionary montage editing. The Odessa Steps massacre is arguably the most famous sequence in silent cinema. It was previously shown at Bangkok Screening Room in 2018, with a soundtrack by the Pet Shop Boys, and I saw it in 2011 at the Thai Film Archive with live music by Nipat Chaisap.

Sonic Cinema builds on a previous one-off screening of Suspiria, which also featured live accompaniment by Pakorn. (The season was originally scheduled to begin on 6th March with a different silent film, The Lodger.)