Trumpets, Terrors, & the Talkless Tale of LOUIS

May 7, 2025 17

louissilentfilm

Trumpets, Terrors, & the Talkless Tale of LOUIS

Ladies and gentlemen, gather ’round the Victrola — or, for you modernist maniacs, swipe open whatever luminescent slab you carry in your pocket — for I bring you news so thrilling, so synesthetic in scope, it may cause a mild trembling of the knees and an overwhelming desire to drink absinthe at noon.

The tour, dear listeners — THE TOUR — is upon us. A cinematic séance is about to be conjured on the West Coast, an electrified love letter to shadows, silence, and syncopation. I speak, of course, of LOUIS — a celluloid fever dream directed by Dan Pritzker and shot by none other than the late, lens-wielding warlock Vilmos Zsigmond, whose name alone should be whispered in reverence and lit by gaslight.

Imagine, if you dare, a silent film — yes, you heard me — a SILENT film in this age of unrelenting noise, where every object beeps and every person screams. But do not confuse silence with stillness. No, this is a riot in monochrome! A black-and-white opera of New Orleans alleyways, grand Storyville bordellos, and jazz-soaked childhood dreams. Picture it: a 6-year-old boy, Louis — played by Anthony Coleman with cherubic gravitas — weaving through a jungle of lust, politics, and trumpet valves in 1907 New Orleans. All the while, Jackie Earle Haley grins with villainy as Judge Perry, a man so crooked he could lie in bed and still sleep standing up.

But here’s the kicker — the real head-spinner — the music! For what is a silent film without its heartbeat? Wynton Marsalis himself, the undisputed Don Quixote of jazz, will lead a battalion of brass and breath live at every screening, joined by the transcendental pianist Cecile Licad, whose fingers have been known to bend time. They will duel and dance with the ghost of Louis Moreau Gottschalk, whose 19th-century American compositions now find themselves slinking beside Marsalis’s New Orleans thunder.

And yes, Pritzker — our madcap visionary director — began this whole affair while writing a different film entirely. Then he saw “City Lights” with a live orchestra and, like Moses with the tablets or a man discovering psychedelic mushrooms in a salad, everything changed. He knew then: jazz needed a silent film. A visual improvisation. An homage not to the facts of Louis Armstrong’s life, but to the fever-dream of what could have happened in a city born of voodoo, vice, and virtuosity.

This is not a biopic. This is an invocation. This is a punch to the senses in a velvet glove.

And so I ask you, noble listener, seeker of the sublime and the strange — will you be there? Will you sit in the half-light, watching a silent story burst into song not with words, but with Marsalis’s trumpet and the ghost-pulse of a city that no longer exists? This is not just cinema. This is ritual. This is jazz resurrected in flickering light and live breath.

LOUIS is coming. May 2025. West Coast. Bring your soul.