3epkano

You really haven't enjoyed a silent film fully until you have seen one accompanied by the unique strains of 3epkano, "an experimental/instrumental post-rock seven-piece band/ensemble formed in Dublin, Ireland in early year 2004 by Matthew Nolan and Cameron Doyle." Their unique and really quite beautiful sound rejuvenates and enhances old silent films, many of which are great on their own, but that take on a new resonance and interest by virtue of this band's virtuoso playing.

The film we saw last night at the Brooklyn Academy of Music was "Diary of a Lost Girl" by the great Bohemian director G.W. Pabst and starring the American screen siren of the time - Louise Brooks. Brooks had hit it big with her previous film with Pabst - "Pandora's Box" - a sexy and sordid romp for the famously bobbed-haired star. "Diary," though billed as more of the same is really quite a tame story about a perfectly innocent girl who is unloved and abandoned and then reluctantly and briefly becomes a prostitute before returning to polite society and in the end risks everything she has gained to defend "wayward girls" like herself.

What is especially wonderful about 3epkano's accompaniment is the way it twice subtly builds through music to the two emotional peaks of the film. The first is when the teenage residents of the Home for Wayward Girls rebel against their uncaring supervisors and the second is when our star returns to the School to care for an old friend who is regarded as stubbornly recalcitrant but who is in actuality really quite good at heart if only shown the love that ultimately "redeems us all." Hackneyed, awkward plot raised to high art by the power of a superb and carefully matched musical accompaniment.