Little Lieutenant

A look back at the late Weimar era with its struggles and celebrations leading up to war. A period piece, scored to John Zorn´s arrangement of the Kurt Weill song, "Little Lieutenant of the Loving God," and drawing its imagery both from the original song & its somewhat idiosyncratic rearrangement and from a Silvers dance solo scored to the same musical piece. Closely following the
Zorn arrangement, the film was storyboarded in 30 scenes (the arrangement changes approximately every four measures) and principally shot in a small studio employing rear projection, with foreground movement choreographed to interact with the projected imagery which reflects themes apparent in the
song and its arrangement (Weimar cabaret scenes, labor footage, empty industrial landscapes, water, slides of moody photographs by James Casebere, a kinescope of Silvers´ performance of her solo, battle newsreels, Walther Ruttmann´s film Berlin: Symphony of a Great City, and a restructured animation, The Youth Machine). Silvers and Cydney Wilkes portray dual aspects of the Salvation Army Lieutenant who sang the song in the Brecht/Weill play Happy End, with Kumiko Kimoto, Leonard Cruz, Pilar
Alamo and Toby Vann.

(Henry Hills)