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The Fine Arts Cinema is again hosting live music accompanying silent film, as is their wont. This time it’s not local musicians making melodies for the movies but a four-piece combo, touring the West Coast with instruments and film canisters. 

The After Quartet has its show set up at the Fine Arts until Monday night to perform an original score for “The Man Without a World,” a black and white, silent Jewish film set in a “shtetl” of Poland. 

The band, consisting of trumpet (Brian McWhorter), guitar (Kyle Sanna), bass (Eric Warren), and drums (Aaron Trant), is traveling from Seattle to Los Angeles playing mostly one-night stands in museums lobbies and second- (or third-) run theaters. 

The five-night Fine Arts Cinema gig is the longest stay of the trip, and one of the most welcome ones. It’s the most legitimate theater space on the tour, according to McWhorter, who also said, judging from the third row seat after sound check Thursday afternoon, “it’s the most clean.” 

McWhorter composed the 28 movements for the film score, adding up to 98 minutes of music. The band members met at the University of Oregon in 1993, when they started improvising jazz, and recently they recorded McWhorter’s original score for Fritz Lang’s expressionistic masterpiece, “Metropolis.” 

“We wanted to contrast ‘Metropolis’ with a new silent film,” said McWhorter. New silent films being hard to come by, he posted a query on the Internet and came up with “The Man Without a World.” 

The film’s scrolling introduction reveals the turbulent history of Yevgeny Antinov’s 1928 work. The Soviet director’s penchant for “decadent sexuality, questionable politics and friendly reference to Trotsky” made him unpopular with Soviet officials on the eve of World War II. Commissioned by American capitalists for the lucrative “Jewish nostalgia market,” the film never made it to the States and sat, forgotten, in an obscure archive in Odessa. 

It looks like an extraordinarily well-preserved treasure. Film buffs who tolerate Eastern European archival silent films with their choppy, fragmented scenes projected at the wrong speed may register a note of artifice in the pristine images and, curiously, no missing sequences. It looks too good to be true. 

And, in fact, it isn’t true. “The Man Without a World” was made by Eleanor Antin in 1991. A highly regarded performance and installation artist, Antin imagined Antinov and constructed his “oeuvre.” “The Man Without a World” is Antin’s attempt to connect with her unrequited heritage – she has never set foot in a temple – while keeping an eye on the historical space between then and now. 

Few Fine Arts Cinema regulars will be taken by the charade. Although it looks (and sounds) like a silent film, the film has visual touches and a narrative sensibility of a modern film. The pans are a little too smooth, the close-ups linger a little too long, and the intertitles are a little too wordy to be mistaken for a genuine 1928 picture show. 

The man of the title is Zevi, a young Jewish man with poetic leanings who must choose between the bohemian artist’s life, filled with Anarchists and Zionists, and the quiet life of a shtetl tailor. Accordingly, he must choose between a traveling Gypsy dancer and his longtime sweetheart Rukheleh. Zevi runs off with the Gypsies while Rukheleh pines at home under the affections of the village butcher. 

“I focus on her a lot,” said McWhorter. “I sometimes feel for her more than Zevi.” 

Flashes of homoeroticism and radical political activism (complete with a big black ball with a bomb wick sticking out of it) take the storytelling out of its supposed early-century milieu. 

Antin’s masquerade is not a trick. It evokes a mood of a bygone era, when communism was the intellectual’s great social hope, and shtetls were still where the hearth was. Rather than point to early-century Jewish intellectual and cultural vibrancy in a period drama or documentary, Atin, here, has created her own artifact. Albeit artificial. 

Antin even had a musical score written for an organ. But that soundtrack has been removed to allow the After Quartet to play its own music.  

The music begins with acoustic guitar and concertina playing a lilting klezmer tune befitting the setting of the film’s story. Then, said McWhorter, it “creeps into a modern sounding score” as the instruments become electric, with the noise electricity allows. 

The music returns to a klezmer feel a few times during the performance, which can be loud and forceful, or softly ambient – particularly in the village scenes of wedding preparation where the festive gaiety of dress fittings and ritualistic bathings are tainted by the music’s poignant sadness. 

McWhorter wrote the music to allow for moments of improvisation, a tricky maneuver when your music needs to reflect the changing tones of different scenes. He said one of the challenges is getting the tempo right during the performance, so that the end of a measure equals the end of the scene. 

The After Quartet will take advantage of the extended stay at the Fine Arts Cinema by recording each performance. They say being able to settle into a space for five days allows them to get acquainted with the layout of the room and get some good sounds on tape. 

For showtime information, call the Fine Arts Cinema at 848-1143.