SIGHT & SOUND: SHORT FILMS WITH LIVE MUSIC

Like every year, De Cinema and the Royal Conservatory Antwerp join forces to offer the musicians of the future a stage where they can develop their talents outside the lines of the classical constellations. In a space where music and film come together, just like they did for the first time more than a century ago at the beginning of cinema.

This edition focuses on SIGHT & SOUND: SHORT FILMS WITH LIVE MUSIC, a selection of short films that centre around seeing and experiencing. Due to the efforts of the musicians the element of ‘listening’ is added to the mix, with the new soundtracks they’ve composed for the film which they bring for us live.

Part of the programme:

• Hans Richter’s pioneering Dada work FILMSTUDIE was an early attempt to combine Dadaist aesthetics and abstraction. Made in 1926, Richter’s film presents the viewer with a disorientating collage of uncanny false eyeballs, distorted faces and abstract forms.
• UN CHIEN ANDALOU is a European avant-garde surrealist film, a collaboration between director Luis Buñuel and Salvador Dali, and one of the most famous short films in film history. It was made in the hopes of administering a revolutionary shock to society. “For the first time in the history of the cinema,” wrote the critic Ado Kyrou, “a director tries not to please but rather to alienate nearly all potential spectators.”
• LIGHT RHYTHMS is a strictly abstract film that added new dimensions to photographed paper shapes exhibited by American photographer Francis Bruguière in the late 1920s. Moving light sources, a scheme of superimpositions, and the elements of time and music come together in this short film.
• By Belgian filmmaker Henri Storck, we screen VOOR JE MOOIE OGEN, the bizarre story of a young man who bought a glass eye and sent it in the mail. Just like Storck’s previous works, the movie is based in surrealism, where eroticism and social criticism go hand in hand. Our second Storck film is REUNION D’ARTISTES. A family movie about the happiness of being together. This simple panorama becomes a time document and preserves for us the memories of a Summer’s day.
• Samuel Beckett’s FILM is a twenty-minute, silent film in which an elderly Buster Keaton attempts to evade observation by an all-seeing eye. But, as the film is based around Irish philosopher Bishop Berkeley’s principle ‘esse est percipi’ (to be is to be perceived), Keaton’s very existence conspires against his efforts.