Piano Lessons: A weird, quiet little relic

Is this for you?

Honestly, you probably already know if you want to watch this. If you are a piano nerd or someone who digs into old film archives just to see how people held their hands back in the day, you’ll find this weirdly charming. If you’re looking for a plot or, like, an actual movie, you’re going to be bored out of your mind in about three minutes.

Giuseppe Aldo Randegger is a character. He walks with this specific Vaudeville energy that you just don't see anymore. You can tell he’s used to performing for a crowd, even when the crowd is just a silent camera lens sitting in a room.

The Lesson

He sits at the keys and you realize pretty quickly that this isn't a masterclass in the way we think of them today. It’s more like watching a guy show off his favorite tricks. There’s a stiffness to his posture that makes you want to reach through the screen and tell him to relax his shoulders.

Cinematic perspective: Exploring the visual vocabulary of Piano Lessons (1931) through its definitive frames.

There’s this one moment where he pauses, looks directly into the lens, and just waits. It lasts way longer than it should. It’s not awkward, exactly, but it’s human. It feels like he’s waiting for a student to catch up, even though there is no student.

• The lighting is surprisingly flat, which makes his face look like a mask sometimes.
• I kept waiting for a joke or a Vaudeville gag, but it never comes.
• The audio is… well, it’s old. You can hear the scratchiness of the room.

It’s funny how a film like this makes you think about The Heart of a Child, mostly because both films feel so stuck in their own little bubble of time. They don't care if you're watching them in 2024. They just exist.

The whole thing is basically a skeleton of a lesson. It lacks the warmth you’d get from a real teacher, but it has this strange, historical weight. You’re watching a man demonstrate technique that was probably considered 'the right way' at the time. It’s rigid. It’s precise. And occasionally, he hits a chord that just rings out beautifully, making the whole thing worth the price of admission (which is free, if you find it in the right dusty corner of the internet).

I wouldn't call this good cinema. I would call it a weird, dusty window. Sometimes you don't need a masterpiece; you just need to watch a guy play the piano for ten minutes while he pretends you're his pupil. 🎹