Like the titular undead spirit in “The Dybbuk,” which inhabits the body and mind of the film’s heroine, a band of young musicians took over and transformed the film itself at a screening of the 1937 Yiddish-language classic at the JCCSF on Dec. 11.
Although the film has an extant audio track of dialogue and musical score, “The Dybbuk” was presented with its original audio turned off. The audience read the dialogue as translated subtitles and listened as a band performed a new score live on a stage lined with pillar candles that gave the performance an appropriately seance-like vibe.
Well, I say a “new score,” but that’s not entirely accurate.
Forest Reid, 27, a multi-instrumentalist and program coordinator for JCCSF’s Arts & Ideas series, led the music, which was based in part on selections from the film’s original 1937 score and from Eastern European Jewish folk melodies. S. Ansky, the revolutionary-turned-folklorist-turned-playwright upon whose stage play the film is based, recorded some of the folk tunes on wax cylinders in the early 20th century.
The resulting partly improvised score had a pulsating, fuzzily electrified sound driven by Reid playing electric guitar and slide pedal steel guitar and drumming from Conner McNesby that lent much-needed pace to the slow-moving film.
The rest of the band was filled out by former J. editorial assistant Daniel Bromfield on pump organ, Christian Reynolds on bass guitar and Edan Mor on saxophone, which filled the role often played by clarinet in Jewish folk music.
The slightly distorted electric guitar and pedal steel guitar created an ethereal, uncanny atmosphere, which complemented the film’s eerie tale of kabbalistic spellcasting, dybbuk possession, rabbinic exorcism and ties that persist beyond the grave.
“The Dybbuk,” an adaptation of Ansky’s 1916 play of the same name, tells the twisted shtetl love story of Leah and Khonen. Their fathers were best friends, who pledged that their unborn children would one day marry. Khonen’s father drowns on the night of his birth, and his son ends up getting raised in another town.
When Khonen returns to his father’s hometown to attend yeshiva, he encounters Leah and they fall in love. They seem destined to be together, but a tragedy of errors keeps them apart, and Leah’s father engages her to another man. Khonen falls under the thrall of a dark strain of kabbalah and calls upon Satan (yes, there is a malevolent force in Judaism by that name, but it bears little resemblance to the Christian devil) to help him marry Leah. He dies in the attempt. Leah then visits his grave on her wedding day, inadvertently enabling his spirit to possess her body.
Everything goes haywire from there, transforming from love story into horror.
There is humor too. In the funniest scene, the possessed Leah is brought before an aged, half-asleep rabbinic sage who grumpily demands that everyone just go away and leave him alone. He is, to borrow a phrase from a very different sort of movie, too old for this shit.
Visual trickery — cutting edge for the time — allows a ghastly rabbinic wanderer to fade in and out of scenes as he offers grave warnings to several characters.
In one memorable early scene, Leah’s father misses out on her entire childhood as he obsessively counts his growing fortune. The camera pans away from him to her as an infant, then back to him counting money, then to her as a young child, then back to him counting money — back and forth until finally she is an adult and he has missed out on getting to know his daughter. It’s an inventive and memorable scene.
There are a couple of dance scenes that vibrate with the energy of Jewish shtetl life, rendered on Polish soundstages just years before its destruction. The most visually exciting scene features Khonen in a synagogue chanting and writhing, surrounded by smoke, attempting to use kabbalistic magic to thwart Leah’s engagement.
The acting is stiff, barely having moved beyond the silent film era. At the JCCSF screening, the acting seemed even stiffer than it does when “The Dybbuk” is viewed with its original sound. (You can watch the full film for free on YouTube. It’s the same 2016 restoration we viewed at the JCC.)
So why did the JCC present the film in this way? If Reid wanted to do a live score to an old Jewish-themed film, there are certainly silent films that could benefit from the enhancement. I’ve seen several over the years, including a couple of screenings of “The Golem” with unnecessarily avant garde orchestrations that greatly distracted from the film; Reid and his ensemble could do a lot for “The Golem” and its ilk.
When I asked Reid why he chose to do it this way with this film, he was upfront about the decision.
“I feel like it’s borderline a crime that we did that,” he told me over the phone a couple days later. “The restored audio is very good, it’s ridiculous. A few years ago, the audio available was trash; you could barely make it out. This recent restoration from a few years ago — the audio is phenomenal.”
Reid, who has a master’s in digital arts and new media from UC Santa Cruz, mentioned his studies in music, audio engineering and Yiddish folklore — all of which were clearly at work in his presentation of “The Dybbuk.”
For years, he said, he avoided folklore about dybbuks. “The way it’s been digested into our pop culture is pretty dumb,” he said. They have become cliches, in other words — “Divorced from its roots, it’s become just a Jewish monster.”
So it was at a synagogue in Michigan a few years ago that he first encountered a copy of Ansky’s play “The Dybbuk” in a stack of free books. He picked it up and devoured it on the flight home.
“I was floored. It leveled me. I was astounded by how moving and rich it was and how fresh it felt,” he said. “I also just didn’t understand 90% of the cultural references.” So he went down a rabbit hole of Eastern European Jewish history and kabbalah, learning to better understand and digest the depths of the tale.
But why rescore the film and strip out its audio? I didn’t get a straight answer. The short version seems to be because he wanted to. And I’m glad he did. It’s a strange film, and Reid’s choices led to a newly strange, and not unenjoyable, presentation of it.