Indiana University alum sets new score to ‘lost’ silent film

(WXIN/WTTV) — So much depends on a film’s score. Changing the tempo, the key or even a single note can completely alter the audience’s reaction to a scene.

That’s something composer Eli Denson knows very well.

“The magic of seeing music being set to the visuals, and the effect that that can have on an aesthetic level,” Denson said. “I think is something that’s drawn me from a very early age.”

Denison started writing scores as a freshman at Mississippi State University, when his sister needed music for plays she was writing for her own classes. But he says his love for film, specifically film scores, started with his parents, who would regularly play John Williams, Jerry Goldsmith and Bernard Hermann albums at home.

“I remember growing up, just the recognition of the pivotal role that music can play within a film and changing a scene,” he said.

Denison enjoys playing that role and helping to shape the feeling in a particular scene.

“Texture, specifically, how that plays a role. That’s always what I’ve gravitated towards,” he said. “Especially with editing. The two are intertwined so much. They’re both so rhythmic and they play into each other.”

One of his latest projects is a film that was thought to be lost almost 100 years ago, “Queen Kelly.”

Director Erich von Stroheim never got to finish the 1929 film, which tells a pre-World War I love story between a young woman and a man betrothed to the queen. The studio canceled production amid scandals over shooting scenes in Africa.

However, in 1985, producer Dennis Doros finished the film using von Stroheim’s notes. In 2025, he’s restoring the film in 4K resolution.

Denison earned the opportunity to write the first-ever score for “Queen Kelly” by submitting for the Jon Vickers Scoring Award, put on by IU Cinema. It’s a competition he admits he was nervous about jumping into.

“I saw the scene, and it was a pretty complex, emotionally, scene, with multiple different characters,” Denison said. “It was a bit daunting to try to tackle, and I’d never tried to score anything without dialogue or sound effects or anything. And I was intimidated at first. Then, leading up to the submission date, I saw it on the calendar and decided right before the submission date came up, ‘You know what? I’m just gonna do it. I’m gonna try it, and we’ll go from there’.”

He decided to set his submission apart by having a live musician play his score. He found one friend who played cello and agreed to help him out for free. Then he just had to write the music for the short scene provided to him.

“I just wrote down these little cells, basically,” he says. “These, like snippets of 1-to-2 bar melodies, phrases. Nothing, really. Just these tiny little cells that I thought could possibly work like building blocks.”

With those “cells” recorded, Denison crafted a score for a cello quartet. The Vickers Award Jury liked what they heard and awarded him the honor, with a one-year deadline to score the entire film.

“It’s a monumental undertaking, typically,” Denison said. “Being a silent film, the entire thing is music. So it’s a lot of music to write. It was quite the experience.”

The IU Jacobs School of Music provided the musicians, the recording space and the engineers to turn his vision into reality.

On top of having a lot of music to write, Denison faced the challenge of interpreting the emotions of each scene, when there are no sound effects or audible dialogue to help.

“There’s a lot of space where it’s left up to the audience to determine what is happening in the scene with no other context clues,” he says. “So the score is now even more so, Atlas holding up the world. It is responsible for sonically telling the story even more so than in anything else.”

Beyond that, he wanted to take the footage from 1929 and make it feel fresh for modern audiences.

“There’s this preconceived notion of what a silent film score should sound like. We all picture the guy, the pianist, playing on a clinky piano. Somebody falls down the stairs (imitates piano notes), that kind of thing,” says Denison. “So we have this notion of what it’s supposed to sound like. That’s one thing I was battling. How do I bring this score into modernity? And go against that notion and that draw to a very canonized sound that silent films have.”

The restored edition of “Queen Kelly,” along with Denison’s score, will premiere at the Venice Film Festival on August 26th.

Denison said the production company, Milestone Films, is planning a physical release sometime next year, including special features showcasing his composition process. Beyond that, the team hopes to keep competing at film festivals and make it into theaters.

Learn more about Milestone Films on its website, where the eventual physical release will be for sale.