APPARITION & COWARDS BEND THE KNEE: LIVE SCORE BY ELA ORLEANS
SUNDAY 6 MAY
7:45pm – 9:10pm
Tickets: £5
MAIN AUDITORIUM – TOWER MILL
Ela Orleans presents her new work Apparition, a work extending from Gustave Moreau’s sketches exploring the character of Salome, followed by a live performance of her new score for Guy Maddin’s Cowards Bend the Knee, one of Maddin’s greatest, but least known films.
The screening with live performance will follow a specially recorded introduction by Guy Maddin.
Apparition
Ela Orleans / 13m 6s / 2017 / United Kingdom / World Premiere
The hundreds of sketches made by Gustave Moreau exploring the character of Salome, as portrayed in his series, L’Apparition are the starting point of this practice-based research project. As an extension of Moreau’s images of Salome, the project considers gestural control sound design based on “striking” and “bowing” movements, and how these might operate as metaphors by mapping gestures with strong physical associations to sound and rhythm modules specifically designed to represent them. Apparition also investigates music and visuals in the form of a contemporary “composed novel”, exploring the syntax of found footage, pattern, texture, colour, text, gesture and electroacoustic composition.
Biography/Filmography
Ela Orleans is an audiovisual artist, composer, multi-instrumentalist and vocalist. She has gained an international cult reputation for her haunted, noir-inflected torch songs. She recently came to more mainstream attention when her magnum opus Circles of Upper and Lower Hell was nominated for the SAY Awards. However, the Polish-born musician has a parallel career, scoring film soundtracks having studied composition under David Shire (The Conversation, The Taking of Pelham 123) in New York. She has composed new soundtracks for films as diverse as Frank Borzage’s Lucky Star, Carl Dreyer’s Vampyr and Jack Smith’s Flaming Creatures.
Ela has accepted many artist-in-residence positions such as the École nationale supérieure d’art de Bourges, France and the Warsaw Chamber Opera Theatre, Poland. She has played live and had her work presented internationally in galleries such as Tate Britain, Venice Biennale, Massachusetts MoCA, MoMA PS. She has been commissioned to score music for TV, film, and opera. She is a PhD candidate in Music at the University of Glasgow, where she expands on her subject: ‘Apparition: The language of the archaic and decadent in the contemporary audiovisual experience’.
Cowards Bend The Knee: New Score by Ela Orleans
Guy Maddin / Ela Orleans / 1h 4m 6s / 2017 / Canada /
Guy Maddin is one of the most distinctive and idiosyncratic directors currently working. The Canadian auteur has mined and subverted the imagery and style of late silent and early sound cinema in such films as The Forbidden Room and The Saddest Music In The World to disorientating, often hilarious effect. Cowards Bend The Knee is one his greatest, but least-known films. Originally conceived of and presented as a peephole show, the film’s ten chapters concoct an alternative cinematic biography for Maddin, torn between the influence of his hockey star father and his attraction to Meta, the beautiful girl from the local beauty salon / illegal abortion clinic. This is Guy Maddin in the purest form, the most concentrated and probably craziest film of his career. Never have hockey, hairdressing, homophobia and hand amputations collided to such dizzying effect, in perhaps the most authentically surrealist film of the 21st century.
The new live score by Ela Orleans (see above) was originally commissioned by Matchbox Cineclub for Scalarama 2017 at the CCA, Glasgow.
Biography/Filmography
Guy Maddin is a Canadian filmmaker with numerous shorts and 11 feature films to his credit, including the Emmy Award-winning ballet film Dracula — Pages From A Virgin’s Diary (2002); The Saddest Music in the World (2003); My Winnipeg (2007); and US National Society of Film Critics Best Experimental Film Prize-winners Archangel (1990) and The Heart of the World (2000). He is also a member of The Order of Canada & The Order of Manitoba.
http://guy-maddin.com
Guy Maddin on IMDB
Guy Maddin on Wikipedia
http://www.matchboxcineclub.com
