People active in the silent era and people who keep the silent era alive. Copyright © 1999-2024 by Carl Bennett and the Silent Era Company. All Rights Reserved.

Theodore J. van Houten

Born 1952 in Aalsmeer, The Netherlands

Dutch-Scottish silent film and film music historian, researcher, musicologist, writer, and live cinema producer. Published Leonid Trauberg and His Films — Always the Unexpected (1989), “Einsenstein Was Great Eater” — In Memory of Leonid Trauberg (1991), and Silent Cinema Music in the Netherlands (1992).

Responsible (with conductor Alan Fearon) for the restoration of Edmund Meisel’s original Potemkin (1925) score in 1986 (an apocryphical, incomplete restoration of the same score with incomplete music material is popular in Germany), Lou Lichtveld’s score for Joris Ivens’s Regen (1929), and Shostakovitch’s score for Odna (1931) (with conductor Mark Fitz-Gerald and Krzysztof Meyer).

Organized 200 large scale and many smaller live cinema screenings, particularly in Holland and Belgium, also in the United Kingdom, France, Italy and Russia.

Artistic director of the Film in Concert Foundation.

Commissioned new orchestral scores for By the Law (1926) (Jan Bus), The Overcoat (1926) (Jo van den Booren), and The Patsy (Maud Nelissen).