“The Man Without a World”
is now a
4K Restored Print Traveling the World With a New LIVE Score

After having played in Poland in Lublin and Krakow, the film and its “Cine-Concerts” are awaiting NEW destinations!

Thanks to a grant by the Sunrise Foundation for Education and the Arts
it is now quite affordable.

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“How did we not know about this outrageous, transgressive masterpiece?!? … It is truly a shoo-in for BFI Sight & Sound’s next “Greatest Films of Al Time” poll.
… there’s more than enough narrative leeway for a legion of dybbuks to raise Cain and wreak havoc.
… Equal parts tragi-comic parody and provocative fabulation, The Man Without a World stood its own material test of time – the print had already deteriorated when Milestone and the Sunrise Foundation undertook a 4k restoration in 2020. Today, it feels as relevant as ever.”
—  Maggie Hennefeld, The Man Without a World, Journal of Film Preservation, April 2024
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“The film is beautifully lit and wonderfully acted; the sets are as canny as they are elaborate… The Man Without a World manages to be both funny and sensual.. an insolence that seems beyond the range of most male directors… what stays in the mind are its alternately nightmarish and playful set pieces.”
— J. Hoberman, It’s Déjà Vu All Over Again, Premiere Magazine, July 1992

The Trailer

The director: Eleanor Antin and her screenplay.

The film’s website!
AND
its presskit!
[I make seemingly old films in order to enter the lost world of the past from the inside, not to stand outside of it and see it as history. — Eleanor Antin]

Alicia Svigals, a co-founder of the iconic Grammy-winning The Klezmatics, taught Itzhak Perlman the Klezmer technique and is the recipient of an honorary degree of Doctor of Humane Letters by the Jewish Theological Seminary  for “extraordinary contributions to the arts and Jewish life.”
And, she taught Itzhak Perlman the technique!
Donald Sosin, a resident accompanist at the New York’s Film Society of Lincoln Center, the Museum of the Moving Image, and the Brooklyn Academy of Music has scored more than 500 silent films all around the world!

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FOR MORE INFORMATION, PLEASE CONTACT EITHER: DIANA VENTURA dianaventuraarts [AT] gmail.com ALICIA SVIGALS aliciasvigals [AT] gmail.com DONALD SOSIN dsosin [AT] gmail.com

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ARTIST BIOS:
Violinist/composer Alicia Svigals is the world’s leading klezmer fiddler and a founder of the Grammy-winning Klezmatics. She has performed with and written for violinist Itzhak Perlman, and has worked with tthe Kronos Quartet, playwrights Tony Kushner and Eve Ensler, poet Allen Ginsberg, Robert Plant and Jimmy Page of Led Zeppelin, Debbie Friedman and Chava Albershteyn. In May 2023, Svigals was awarded the honorary degree of Doctor of Humane Letters by the Jewish Theological Seminary for “extraordinary contributions to the arts and Jewish life.” Svigals was awarded a Foundation for Jewish Culture commission for her original score to the 1918 film The Yellow Ticket, and is a MacDowell fellow. Her CD Fidl (1996) reawakened klezmer fiddle tradition. Her newest CD is Beregovski Suite: Klezmer Reimagined, with jazz pianist Uli Geissendoerfer—an original take on long-lost Jewish music from Ukraine.

Pianist/composer Donald Sosin grew up in Rye, New York and Munich. Sosin received the Lifetime Achievement Award from the Denver Silent Film Festival, and the Best Original Film Score award by the 2022 Mystic Film Festival. He has performed his scores for silent films, often with his wife, singer/percussionist Joanna Seaton, at Lincoln Center, MoMA, BAM, the National Gallery, at major film festivals in New York, San Francisco, Telluride, Hollywood, Yorkshire, Pordenone, Bologna, Shanghai, Bangkok, Berlin, Vienna, Moscow, and Jecheon, South Korea and many college campuses. He has worked with Alexander Payne, Isabella Rossellini, Dick Hyman, Jonathan Tunick, Comden and Green, Martin Charnin, Mitch Leigh, and Cy Coleman, and has played for Mikhael Baryshnikov, Mary Travers, Marni Nixon, Howie Mandel, Geula Gill, and many others. He records for Criterion, Kino, Milestone, Flicker Alley and European labels, and his scores are heard frequently on TCM. He has had commissions from MoMA, EYE Amsterdam, Deutsche Kinemathek, L’Immagine Ritrovata, the Chicago Symphony Chorus, the San Francisco Chamber Orchestra and the Jerusalem Symphony Orchestra. He lives in rural Connecticut with his family.

SELECTED LIST OF PAST PERFORMANCES:
Lincoln Center,NYC: New York Jewish Film Festival
The Michigan Theater,AnnArbor, MI
DCJCC Music and Film Festival
Center for Moving Image Arts, Bard College, Annandale-on-Hudson, NY
Paramount Theater,Seattle (a co-presentation of Seattle Jewish Film Festival and Silent Movie Mondays)
Toronto Jewish Film Festival
Dartmouth College
Mini Teater, Ljubljana
Slovenia Festival of Tolerance, Maribor
Slovenia Festival of Tolerance, Kamnik
University of Kentucky, Worsham Cinema, Lexington, KY
Swarthmore College,PA
New York Klezmer Series, NYC
Jacob Burns Film Center, Pleasantville, NY
Denver Silent Film Festival
National Museum of American Jewish History, Philadelphia
Chicago Music Box Theater
Cleveland Museum of Art
Yale University
San Francisco Silent Film Festival
San Diego Jewish Film Festival
Atlanta Jewish Film Festival
Le Giornate del Cinema Muta/Pordenone Silent Film Festival, Italy (and Ljubljana, Slovenia and Rijeka,Croatia)
Cornell University
Houston Cinema Arts Festival
AFI Silver Theater and Cultural Center, MD
Chicago Music Box Theater
Cleveland Institute of Art
Miami Jewish Film Festival
Cinema Arts Centre,Huntington NY
Orpheum Theater, Fairfield, IA
Boston Jewish Film Festival
Temple Emanu-El-Beth Sholom, Montreal
Temple Israel, Ottawa
Ashokan Center
Metro Kino, Vienna
Istanbul Silent Film Festival

QUOTES:
“What an amazing evening! I was absolutely blown away by the film and the music. What a gift to bring this story back to life for a very appreciative audience. From the bottom of my heart, thank you.” —Rabbi Lisa Grushcow, Temple Emanu-El Bet Sholom, Montreal

“Thank you both so much for coming to the Berkshire Jewish Film Festival and for an absolutely superb performance. As you could tell, the audience was swept away by your music!” — Judy Seaman, Co-Artistic Director, Berkshire Jewish Film Festival

“We were mesmerized! The music—the klezmer violin and piano score—magnified the story line and captured our hearts. It was really a wonderful 2+ hour experience.”—Peter Benoliel, former president, Philadelphia Orchestra and board member at Marlboro Music Festival.

“The score’s incredible strength lies in the strong themes and exemplary performances, especially Svigals, whose impassioned solos…are devastating in their beauty.” — Mark Hasan, KQEK.com

“Their performance was masterful, as the duo cleverly wove scored music with improvisation. The blending of the Eastern European Yiddish folklore-style melodies…with well-known synagogue cantorial pieces and Viennese classical excerpts sounded as authentic as Dupont could have ever imagined. The playing was confident, and each musician had the opportunity to shine.” — Jocelyn, Classic Film Obsessions

“To speak to today’s audiences, what The Ancient Law needed was an intelligent, well-executed film score to carry viewers across the multiple social settings and characterizations, rife with internal conflict. An ideal team has done just that. Alicia Svigals, whose work on another silent film, The Yellow Ticket, was widely praised on her multi-city tours, combined with Donald Sosin, a titan of early-cinema scoring, to produce an unusually supple, accurate, thoughtful, and moving score. I saw it live at Lincoln Center and then on video, which only intensified my admiration for the soundtracks craft, accuracy, and emotional charge. To date, the Svigals-Sosin duo have performed it live some 55 times, to universal acclaim.” — Ethnomusicologist Mark Slobin, professor emeritus, Wesleyan U.

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TWO OTHER FILMS TRAVELING AS CINE-CONCERTS
ALSO with Alicia Svigals & Donald Sosin

THE ANCIENT LAW

THE CITY WIHTOUT JEWS 

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THREE EXCERPTS FROM MAN WITHOUT A WORLD
(with Pier Marton,as Zevi in the title-role)
FROM A 2023 CINE-CONCERT
AT WEBSTER UNIVERSITY in ST. LOUIS, MO USA

As I said at that performance: “the great “secular” luminaries, Allan Kaprow, Newton Harrison, Jerome Rothenberg play rabbis! – a time warp of New Yorker transplants!”

… and for those who wonder…
Zevi Der Alter (the Older)  may have escaped the Angel of Death more than once.

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BONUS!

ALICIA SVIGALS & DONALD SOSIN

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The idea that we could go back and imagine the pain that we lived in, back in Eastern Europe, is a strange and wonderful opportunity… a chance to see ourselves as the flawed people our ancestors were.
It is at once both a comedy and not that at all. The caricatures or archetypes/stereotypes are all there. It’s a film that one will watch and think about for a long time.
A rare insight into a time inside of time 1928 as imagined in 1991,.The meta-exploration of our condition as Jews seems most relevant. We are in strife today as a community, and a world- this is a conversation that must be had!
We were lucky to have experts in Jewish silent film, and Russian film, to clue us in on some of the brilliance, we might have missed in the brilliance in the films creators and cast, and to have amazing musicians to accompany and play the soundtrack of this film. – A recent audience member.

And a chain reaction…