The rescoring of silent films has become a fascinating feature of contemporary music, with the live accompaniment of old films by modern ensembles and DJs turning the idea of the silent Bijou pianist into performance art.

For those who've become fans of coupling ancient celluloid with new music (forgetting, if you can, Giorgio Moroder's attempt to improve Fritz Lang's Metropolis with lashings of Pat Benatar and Freddie Mercury), it is occasionally difficult to think of some films without their new scores. Georges Mélies fanciful A Trip to the Moon (1902) without Phillip Johnson's jazz-klezmer collisions seems rather tame. Then there's DJ Spooky's reordering and remixing of D.W. Griffith's bedeviling classic, The Birth of a Nation, which cleverly addresses the film's blatant racism with both music and editing — perhaps the only way to now watch Birth. The importance of new scores for silent films can be seen in the fact that American tycoon Ted Turner actually gives a yearly prize to young film composers who are providing intriguing soundscapes for Greta Garbo, Lon Chaney and Cecil B. DeMille.

As part of the annual Music on Film Film on Music Festival, Prague audiences will have a chance to see and hear a new silent film–modern sound union when Canadian hip-hop and klezmer artist Socalled performs his new score for Paul Wegener's classic German silent, Der Golem.

Der Golem is, of course, the Golem of Prague, the fabled clay man who was brought to life by Rabbi Loew to protect the Jewish Quarter. Contemporaneous with Gustav Meyrink's rather overheated novel, actor/director Wegener made three Golem films: Der Golem (1915), Golem and the Dancer (1917) and Golem: How He Came into the World (1920). The last, an actual prequel to the earlier films, is the most famous and a true classic, and has assumed the general title of Der Golem among cineastes.

Wegener himself played the role of the Golem in all three films, which also starred his Czech wife, actress Lyda Salmonová. One of the great films of German Expressionist cinema, Der Golem's look remains startling. Prague's Jewish Quarter, the original Golemstadt, becomes a Medieval warren as re-imagined by a surrealist, with buildings pitched at oblique angles appearing as if they were melting into each other. The film also features a cast of thousands playing the inhabitants of the Jewish Quarter, who must live with the consequences when Rabbi Loew's Frankenstein goes on a murderous rampage.

The reference to Frankenstein is not accidental. Der Golem is a milestone in that it came to influence many horror and sci-fi films that followed it, especially Universal Pictures' horror films of the early 1930s, most particularly James Whale's Frankenstein (Whale was an avid student of German Expressionist movies).

Cinematographer Karl Freund, responsible for the menacing chiaroscuro (or stimmung, as the Germans say) of Der Golem would go on to shoot Metropolis for Fritz Lang. Leaving Germany for Hollywood, Freund also became the master eye behind Tod Browning's Dracula. He stayed on at Universal to direct Boris Karloff in The Mummy, a film that carries many Golem undertones (Freund ended his days shooting I Love Lucy, but that's another horror story).