Live cinema: Phantom of the Opera (1925) with live score

Reserve your place for our 8.30pm session on 13 May - this screening is open to the public - unallocated seating - members do not need to book.

After celebrated screenings of Faust (2022) and Waxworks (2023) with live musical accompaniment, Wellington Film Society is screening another great silent horror film at the Embassy Theatre with live musical accompaniment.

We are working with Ruby Solly (Kai Tahu, Waitaha, Kāti Māmoe) on taonga puoro and cello, Hikurangi Schaverien-Kaa (Ruawaipu, Ngāti Porou) on drums and Seth Boy on bass to compose and perform a live score for The Phantom of the Opera (Rupert Julian, 1925) in recognition of its 100th anniversary. There is no better place than the Embassy for Julian’s masterpiece, especially since it too is celebrating its centenary.

WFS screenings are usually members-only but we have decided to hold two performances (12 and 13 May) with the second open to everyone. WFS has held a couple of screenings in 2024 where the Embassy has packed out and we have had to turn people away, so we want to ensure nobody misses this film and music event.

Decades before Andrew Lloyd Webber’s ostentatious Broadway show, Whangaroa-born Rupert Julian directed the definitive adaptation of Gaston Leroux’s 1910 novel. It stars Lon “Man of a Thousand Faces” Chaney (last seen in our 2024 screening of The Unknown) as a deformed Phantom who haunts the Paris Opera House. The Phantom seeks to manipulate the goings on of the theatre to make his beloved Christine (Mary Philbin) a star, but is thwarted by the men in her life.

Julian directed a large number of films after he arrived in Hollywood in 1911, Phantom being the most acclaimed, but he was reportedly a difficult collaborator and rumours abound that Chaney was the true artistic force behind the film. Regardless of whether New Zealand can lay claim to any of the movie’s success, it has gone on to be a classic. It was added to the United States National Film Registry in 1998 and Chaney’s Phantom, obscured with hideous makeup, has endured as one of the most indelible images of the silent era.

For more detail on Rupert Julian, check out the work of Robert Catto, the foremost historian on the filmmaker.

Dr. Ruby Solly (Kāi Tahu, Waitaha, Kāti Māmoe) is a writer, musician, and taonga pūoro practitioner living in Pōneke. She has performed with the likes of Yo-yo Ma, Trinity Roots, Whirimako Black, French For Rabbits, and Marlon Williams. As a writer, she has two books of poetry published under Te Herenga Waka University Press; Tōku Pāpā (2020) and The Artist (2023). In 2024, Ruby graduated with a doctorate in public health, investigating the use of taonga pūoro (traditional Māori instruments) in hauora Māori. 

Seth Boy is a double bassist and composer and has been based in Te Whanganui-a-Tara for the last eight years, working as a sideman and bandleader of numerous jazz and improvising music groups in the city as well as being involved in many cross-disciplinary projects. Born in the Philippines and raised in Pukekohe, Boy’s composing and arranging sensibility draws from the starkly different perspectives of the spaces in which he’s grown up and grown.

Hikurangi Schaverien-Kaa is a chameleonic drummer, percussionist and composer of Ruawaipu, Ngāti Porou and Ashkenazi descent who works in Te Whanganui a-Tara, Aotearoa. He studied improvised music in the Black American tradition at Te Kōkī (the New Zealand School of Music) and has brought his eclectic tones and approach to Aotearoa and the world with artists including Dawn Diver, Dateline, Ebony Lamb, French for Rabbits, DARTZ, Mā, Chris CK, Mireya Ramos (Flor de Toloache, Mariachi El Bronx), Glass Vaults, Whirimako Black, the late Aaron Tokona, Ben Shepherd (Chance the Rapper, Schoolboy Q), Tom Warrington (Buddy Rich) and Rodger Fox. Hikurangi’s greatest musical accomplishment is being mistaken for a drum machine by Hugh Sundae.

12 May Screening – Members only (6pm)
13 May Screening – Screening open to the public as well as WFS members – koha welcome (8.30pm)