Sound of Silence

Time was you could see a live performance before or after a movie. That was way before multiplexes, of course, back when films were shorter, tickets cheaper, and performance venues fewer. The Marx Brothers, for instance, honed their funny bits and shticks before audiences in movie palaces of the day. It’s not often you can see a live performance with a movie today — oh, maybe a performer making a guest appearance IN the movie house, but not often providing the music FOR the movie.

But that’s just what’s happening at the Lark Theater next week, when the Hot Club of San Francisco performs on a bill with three unusual soundless films. These are not your Buster Keaton/Harold Lloyd/Charlie Chaplin comedy classics. These films — The Fall of the House of Usher, The Land Beyond the Sunset, and There It Is — are definitely more surreal than silly. Which is why the program is titled Silent Surrealism.

The Land Beyond the Sunset (1912) is a one-reeler from Thomas Edison’s film company (did you even know he had one?) that’s been called “unclassifiable” and “one of the earliest masterpieces.” There It Is (1928) is a detective tale with some interesting stop-motion and other special effects.

Film critic Roger Ebert wrote of the great hall in The Fall of the House of Usher (1928), one of the best-known French surrealist films, “It is not impossible that this vision … inspired the designers of the great hall of Xanadu in Citizen Kane.“ You can’t be mentioned in the same breath with a more important film than that.

And instead of the melodramatic organ music you tend to hear performed with silent films, we’ll get the Hot Club’s “gypsy-flavored jazz” — inspired by the great guitarist Django Reinhardt, violinist Stéphane Grappelli, and their 1930s Quintet of the Hot Club of France but played in the local quintet’s own swinging American style. The Hot Club plays on its own during the first half of the evening and accompanies the films in the second half.

The band (leader Paul Mehling, Isabelle Fontaine and Jeff Magidson — guitar, Clint Baker — bass, and Evan Price — violin) first brought its sound to Silent Surrealism for the San Francisco Silent Film Festival. Later, they contacted San Rafael-based event organizer Ellie Mednick. Knowing that she was producing events in Larkspur’s movie house, Mednick says the band told her, “We have the perfect combination for you: film with live music. And the Lark" — a beautifully restored 1936 Art Deco theater — “is the perfect setting.”

Even though they’re based in the Bay Area, Mehling says, the Hot Club almost never performs in Northern California. Consider this a two-fer.

March 3, 8 pm, Silent Surrealism, Lark Theater, 549 Magnolia Ave., Larkspur, (415) 924-5111; $20 members and in advance, $25 at the door, $30 special reserved section; www.larktheater.net.