I founded Birds Eye View as a response to the fact that fewer than 10% of directors - and 15% of screenwriters - are women. And the stats for the music industry aren't much better - in 2010 women represented just 14% of the membership of the PRS Foundation (which collects royalties on behalf of composers and artists across the UK).
Sound & Silents is a flagship BEV project that faces both those stats head on. It breathes new life into classic silent films created by pioneering women of early cinema by presenting them alongside specially-commissioned scores from some of today's leading female musicians.
Tonight's film, Germaine Dulac's The Seashell and the Clergyman, premiered in Paris 74 years ago and portrays the erotic hallucinations of a priest lusting after a general's wife. While some saw it as the first Surrealist film, the film's scriptwriter Antonin Artaud declared Dulac's vision too narrative in structure to be truly Surrealist; and the British Board of Film Censors just didn't get it at all, dubbing it "apparently meaningless… [but] if there is a meaning, it is doubtless objectionable."
We couldn't have hoped for a better team for our accompaniment, with Grammy and Ivor Novello Award-winner Imogen Heap's a capella score performed with the Holst Singers and conducted by the London Contemporary Orchestra's Hugh Brunt. I continue to be blown away by the sheer ambition of Imogen's vision, and her score's breathtaking combination of voices (and body parts) that fits the film – without ever overpowering it – beautifully. She is, to my mind, as pioneering an artist as Dulac was in her day.
I hope you enjoy the show.
