Скачать или смотреть Toll of the Sea (1922) with new accompaniment

A 1922 silent film with accompaniment by Gary McGath. The first successful Technicolor feature film and the first leading role for Anna May Wong. Her performance makes this blatant lift of "Madama Butterfly" a better movie than it had a right to be.

I know little about Chinese music, but I wanted to give my accompaniment a Chinese feeling without sounding clichéd. My approach was to make the music a contest between diatonic and pentatonic sounds. The diatonic music (7-note scale) represents Carver and the West, the pentatonic music (5-note scale) Lotus Flower and China. Lotus Flower is caught between two cultures, and her music sometimes veers into the diatonic, depending on her mood. In places I use dissonances within the diatonic scale or diatonic accompaniment with a pentatonic melody, which I hope makes it sound less like imitation Chinese music. A third element is rolling chords, representing the sea.

Toll of the Sea was directed by Chester M. Franklin and released by Metro Pictures. In 1985 the UCLA Film Archive restored the film from the original 35mm nitrate negative, retaining the two-color Technicolor. The final minutes of the film remain missing; the ending provided is modern footage of the sea with a camera similar to the Technicolor cameras of a century ago.