Gary Lucas’s “Golem” (Mass MoCA, July 15, 2000)
By Seth Rogovoy

(NORTH ADAMS, Mass., July 16, 2000)
(NORTH ADAMS, Mass., July 16, 2000) - Western art and culture is awash in Promethean legends, but few have gripped the imagination of artists as persistently and tenaciously as the Jewish legend of the Golem. Whether it is called a Golem or a Frankenstein monster, the mystical belief in man’s god-like ability to bring life to a shapeless mass of clay has fueled countless versions of the tale in seemingly every form, including music, opera, theater, literature, painting, sculpture, comic books, websites and film.

The German director Paul Wegener’s 1920 silent film classic, “The Golem,” was a signal event in cinematic art: an internationally popular commercial success, it was an artistic high point of German Expressionism, a groundbreaker in terms of mise en scene (set design, lighting, costumes, makeup and special effects), and a pioneer in the horror genre. No wonder, then, that the film should grab the interest of composer/guitarist Gary Lucas, one of contemporary music’s most innovative, virtuosic and restless minds. Lucas boasts a long resume of composing music for films, many of which have been about real-life horrors of violence and technological and environmental destruction, including a documentary about the Exxon Valdez. (What is the Exxon Valdez, if not a man-made, latter-day Golem run amok?). Lucas is also a pioneer of Radical Jewish Culture, a musical and cultural movement that seeks to revisit and reimagine artistic responses and commentaries to traditional Jewish material. Hence, Lucas’s score to “The Golem,” which he performed live before an audience watching a beautifully-restored print of the film in the Hunter theater at the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art on Saturday night (the program, intended for the outdoor Cinema Courtyard, was moved indoors due to rain).

Wegener’s “Golem” draws its inspiration from the Jewish legend, but the German filmmaker added non-traditional material and background to his story. Wegener’s “Golem” included a romantic subplot involving the daughter of the Golem’s creator, Rabbi Yehudah Loewe, the historical, 16th-century Great Rabbi of Prague, as well as some very un-Jewish nonsense about astrology, borrowed mostly from pagan myths. While it is possible to read a positive message about Jewish power in this pre-Nazi, Weimar-era film, Wegener’s version also betrays a stereotypical vision of medieval Jews as sexually promiscuous practitioners of the black arts. Lucas pointed out in a post-film discussion, however, that the non-Jews in the film are portrayed with equally heavy-handed satire.

To his credit, Lucas’s original score works with Wegener’s vision, adhering closely to the action while subtly and slyly subverting and commenting on it.

Wielding an arsenal of acoustic and electric guitars as well as an array of electronic effects, Lucas was a one-man orchestra, underlining, punctuating and puncturing Wegener’s film with lyricism and dissonance, with atmospheric abstraction and melody, with improvised distortion and ironic quotation.

Thus, when the emperor decrees that the Jews must vacate the Prague ghetto in a matter of days, the swirling cacophony of sound builds into a heavy-metal version of Wagner’s theme from “Ride of the Valkyries,” a pointed reference to Nazism (Wagner was Hitler’s favorite composer). And when Rabbi Loewe responds by secretly attempting to create a Golem to rescue his people, Lucas playfully underscores the scene with a phrase borrowed from the children’s Hanukah song, “I Have a Little Dreidel,” leaving listeners to fill in the punch line, “I made it out of clay.” Lucas’s music ranged from Brian Eno-like space music and ambient washes of sound to ominous, thundering textures and distorted feedback, all cued by the action or the emotional undercurrent of the story. His acoustic guitar theme for the romance between Prince Florian and Miriam recalled the “exploding-note” solos he fashioned for Captain Beefheart when he was a member of that rock legend’s band, and his theme for the rebellious Golem, played on a National steel guitar, sounded like Robert Johnson on acid. The addition of a pre- and post-screening commentary and discussion with the artist to the program - Lucas introduced the film with a brief explanation of how he came to write the score, and entertained audience questions afterwards - was a welcome innovation to MoCA’s ongoing film-and-music series to which the crowd responded with interactive enthusiasm.

[This review originally appeared in the Berkshire Eagle on July 17, 2000. Copyright Seth Rogovoy 2000. All rights reserved.]

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