SURREALISTIC CINEMA

Eric Sleichim & BL!NDMAN [sax] provided 3 groundbreaking silent movies with a new score.

‘La Coquille et le Clergyman’ was regarded as the first surrealist and feminist film. Germaine Dulac used a screenplay by Antonin Artaud about the erotic hallucinations of a priest who was burning with desire for a woman.

In ‘Anémic Cinéma’, Marcel Duchamp alternates between images of spinning rotoreliefs and spirals of text. Some scenes are mildly erotically suggestive. Duchamp uses abstraction to create space for the viewer’s imagination.

For ‘L’Etoile de Mer’, Man Ray worked with surrealist poet Robert Desnos. Using mirrors and glass, Ray shows images of a man and a woman, transforming the spectator into a voyeur. Composer Eric Sleichim will provide these three films with live musicians in an experimental setting.

The three directors have – each in their own unique way – explored the limits of film. For the music Eric Sleichim departed from the specific atmosphere of each movie and wrote a new score for respectively tubax and electronics (Man Ray), 5 turntables (Duchamp) and 5 saxophones and percussion (Dulac).