Metropolis Screening/Live Orchestra
Lost In New Haven
Hamilton Street
Sept. 20, 2025
At a screening of the 1927 silent film Metropolis with a live score from metal band The Silent Light, Joe Dahlmeyer’s drums and Michael Formanski’s guitar and synth provided ominous, post-industrial sounds of a machine that grew too big.
Viewers followed the unnerving choreography of workers blown through the air by factory explosions as the band played the groaning winds of fate.
All around the audience — gathered in the Hamilton Street museum Lost in New Haven — hung artifacts from the city’s recent past and present, including Haven Hot Chicken paper bags, merchandise from Devil’s Gear bike shop, and “Elicker for Mayor” signs.
Saturday’s show marked the halfway point in the band’s cross-country tour and a special hometown show for frontman and composer Formanski, from North Branford, and his cousin Dahlmeyer on the drums.
Michael called the show a tribute to “one of the towering visionaries of silent cinema,” director Fritz Lang. His band played an original live score to Lang’s 1927 science fiction classic, a tale about, in Michael’s words, the “underground workers and the machine that consumes them.”
Tim, it seems, did a great job outfitting the building with state-of-the-art technical equipment. Invoking a giant from New Haven’s past, Lost in New Haven founder Rob Greenberg declared, “We may have the acoustics of the Coliseum in here tonight.”
With The Silent Light’s score rumbling through the Hamilton Street space with oceanic depth and precision, the movie rose to operatic heights reminiscent of Pink Floyd’s The Wall or Daft Punk’s Interstella 5555.
The imagery constituted excellent source material for a metal band, interspersing miracles of technological advancement with flashing images of skulls, stars, eyeballs, and a dead robot wife. Characters on screen, limited in dialogue, managed to say all they needed with body language. Worlds of drama unfolded in every prolonged glance.
Control boards whirred with dials and knobs, a charmingly flawed early 20th century vision of the future. Dipping into those same sands of time and swirling them in the opposite direction, Lost in New Haven’s displays verged on a future vision of the past.
Among the relics and vintage pieces were artifacts you could walk downtown and find in the present day. A section on New Haven’s mayors, including Ben DiLieto and John DeStefano, didn’t wait for Justin Elicker’s run to be over to memorialize his tenure.
Looking at the “Elicker for Mayor” signs, I suddenly felt authorized to encapsulate my feelings and opinions of his time in charge. The present feels hard to grasp, and the future even more so. But a memory is an item with a start and an end, something to dust, polish, and put on display.
The museum felt a little Twilight Zone‑y. (Picture, if you will, a world where the present barely emerges before it’s placed in a museum.) It was creating memories as they happened. As I scribbled live notes in the past tense, the product of which you’re seeing now, I started to wonder: was I not doing the same?
I aimed my camera toward Dahlmeyer’s drum set and watched him play. No, I wasn’t watching him; I was watching his image pass through the lens and into the viewfinder, framing my view with the reader in mind. The present blurred into the future-past, and I angled my head above the camera for a second in order to avoid an existential crisis.
After the show, Greenberg confirmed that all this playing with time was done on purpose. He told me he wanted the space to give viewers a point of reference as to “where they are in the future.” In the context of a museum, everyday living was celebrated as a momentous act. Museumgoers perusing the displays got to find something interesting on the timeline: themselves.
I turned the corner and found the sign from Phil’s Hairstyles on Wall Street, along with a barber’s chair from the shop. It’s only been three weeks since one of our reporters received the last haircut from that location. If this was a real Twilight Zone episode, perhaps I’d start to see things pop up that hadn’t even happened yet. As it was, this was just a well-researched and well-stocked museum run by someone with an eye for memorabilia in the making.
“I hunt down things,” Greenberg said. “I need future generations to see them.”
