Ramona Poster

Ramona: Mont Alto Motion Picture Orchestra plays the 1928 silent film

Tuesday, November 4, 2014 - 6:30pm to 8:30pm
  • Library Hall

A special ONE BOOK STEAMBOAT silent film night: Mont Alto Motion Picture Orchestra scores Ramona...live in Library Hall!

Mont Alto Motion Picture Orchestra will play an original score for the 1928 production of Ramona, a the silent film starring Dolores Del Rio and Warner Baxter.

About the film
This was the third silent film made of Helen Hunt Jackson's novel. It disappeared in 1931. Until a single original print was discovered in the Czech Film Archive in 2010, the film was regarded as forever lost. The Library of Congress has since repatriated the print and translated the titles back into English (using the novel as a source for the lines). Earlier this year, the Mont Alto Motion Picture Orchestra was commissioned to make a score for the premiere of the rediscovered Ramona film at the UCLA Film and Television Archive in Los Angeles. Despite being set in the mountains of Southern California, the film was actually made in Utah, in the canyons of what is now Zion National Park. It was one of the first movies made using those locations.

Run time: 80 min.

About the song inspired by the silent film
The song "Ramona", while not featuring in the film itself, was specially written by Mabel Wayne (music) and L. Wolfe Gilbert (lyric) for Dolores del Rio to sing during promotional appearances for the film. It is thought to be the first instance of a song being "inspired" by a film. There was a program book with nice illustrations produced for the film, some of which was used to illustrate this video of the original theme song:

About the musicians

Mont Alto


The Mont Alto Motion Picture Orchestra is a five piece chamber ensemble that revives the repertoire of silent film orchestras. Using historic libraries of music, and selecting pieces for each scene in the film, Mont Alto creates vibrant, emotional, and historically appropriate musical settings. “The results are often breathtakingly beautiful and always in the strict service of the film on the screen,” raves the New York Times. Mont Alto was formed in Colorado in 1989, and has scored over 100 silent films using historic orchestrations, recording over 30 film scores for releases on DVD, Blu-Ray, and Turner Classic Movies. The Mont Alto Orchestra are regulars at the Telluride Film Festival, the San Francisco Silent Film Festival, the TCM Classic Films Festival, and the Kansas Silent Film Festival; and have toured around the country from Films at Lincoln Center in New York to Grauman's Egyptian Theater in Hollywood.
 

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THIS EVENT IS GENEROUSLY SPONSORED BY BEAR CLAW CONDOMINIUMS/BREO, INC.

 

This is a featured event in the  ONE BOOK STEAMBOAT 2014 community read of Helen Hunt Jackson's novel Ramona.