Alex Greene & the Rolling Head Orchestra
with special guests
Blueshift Ensemble
& Kate Tayler Hunt, Thereminist
present an original live score to
Buster Keaton's 1928 silent classic
The Cameraman
Gates open at 6:30 PM for food truck fare and drinks from the full bar on the First Horizon Foundation Plaza. The film and live orchestra performance begins at 7:30 PM.
Food Truck: Fuel Food Truck
Local musician and composer Alex Greene has worked for over twelve years with the Rolling Head Orchestra, a sextet of some of Memphis' finest jazz players he first assembled in 2009. Since then, they have performed throughout the region and recorded soundtracks for film and television. In 2019-20, when Greene was the Resident Composer at Crosstown Arts in Memphis, he composed an original score for two silent films, A Trip to the Moon and Aelita: Queen of Mars, which the Rolling Head Orchestra and classical collaborators from Blueshift Ensemble performed live as the films were projected at Crosstown Theater. Special guest Kate Tayler Hunt also joined the group on the archaic electronic instrument known as the Theremin, first developed in 1920, lending uniquely eerie sounds to the soundtrack's ambience.
Now, this July 10 at The Grove, the same group will perform all new original music to accompany Buster Keaton's The Cameraman (1928), widely considered his last masterpiece, a tour de force of comedy and cinematic inventiveness. Set to the vibrant textures of Greene's music, with echoes of classic composers ranging from Bernard Herrmann to Duke Ellington, the film will be brought to life in a way few films ever are — with an ensemble of virtuosos performing live music as the film unfolds.
About The Cameraman
Buster Keaton’s last masterpiece: a brilliant slapstick treatise on the highs and lows of shooting movies.
Buster Keaton is at the peak of his slapstick powers in The Cameraman—the first film that the silent-screen legend made after signing with MGM, and his last great masterpiece. The final work over which he maintained creative control, this clever farce is the culmination of an extraordinary, decade-long run that produced some of the most innovative and enduring comedies of all time.
Keaton plays a hapless newsreel cameraman desperate to impress both his new employer and his winsome office crush as he zigzags up and down Manhattan hustling for a scoop. Along the way, he goes for a swim (and winds up soaked), becomes embroiled in a Chinatown Tong War, and teams up with a memorable monkey sidekick (the famous Josephine).
The marvelously inventive film-within-a-film setup allows Keaton’s imagination to run wild, yielding both sly insights into the travails of moviemaking and an emotional payoff of disarming poignancy.
