Cinematic Symphony on Organ / Safety Last! - NOSPR

Organ improvisation complements old cinema exceptionally well, lending century-old films a new dimension. The concept is almost as old as cinematography itself. 

Harold Lloyd – the third genius

This is one of the most easily recognisable shots in the history of cinema, and certainly in the history of slapstick comedy: a young man wearing a suit, a hat and horn-rimmed glasses is hanging off the minute hand bending away from the face of a street clock… Beneath him, a dozen storeys lower, there is the real bustling life of an American city. Safety Last! (1923, dir. F.C. Newmeyer, S. Taylor) is the most famous Harold Lloyd film, which enabled the American comedian to momentarily outshine Charlie Chaplin himself. Nevertheless, for posterity he remained “the third one” of comic geniuses, after Chaplin and Buster Keaton. He was characterised by a charming comicality rooted in his physique (the expressive body and... teeth) and laughter of the most spontaneous kind – one that stems from treating life as a game, approaching it in a purely comedic, slightly mad, fashion, with no need to fix the world (as opposed to Chaplin). In Safety Last!, the joyous madness, capable of infecting audiences with its laughter, has already survived for 101 years! The slapstick gags (panicky escapes, frantic chases, people slipping and falling over, falling ladders and comedy of errors) feel surprisingly fresh, as if the sense of humour had been preserved just for us. And one more thing: the American urge to go “higher still and at any cost, putting safety last” – does it still work?

Anita Skwara

Concert duration: approximately 80 minutes