Science on Screen: Sci-lent Cinema Night

For the last installment of this spring’s Science on Screen series, the Belcourt refocuses its lens from the future to the past. The cleverly titled Sci-lent Cinema Night will feature a collection of short films from the seventh art’s early years, mostly culled from the realms of science-fiction and fantasy. The world of silent movies was a magical place, as evidenced by the numerous angels, devils, mummies, anthropomorphic cockroaches and underwater kingdoms that populate this program. Among my personal favorites of the films screening are Ralph Steiner’s H20 (1929), a lyric tone poem about the many manifestations of water, and The Cameraman’s Revenge (1912), a Russian stop-motion animation about the truly bizarre love triangle between a deer beetle, a dancer and her jealous grasshopper husband. The evening’s selections will be live-scored by Hyasynth House, a local electronic music collective for female, trans and nonbinary individuals (read more about them in the Scene’s recent People Issue). NATHAN SMITH