Postponed from our recent Extraordinary Film Season, we’re pleased that we’ve been able to reschedule what should be a fantastic night, with Kieron Maguire & The Cabinet of Living Cinema providing a live soundtrack to this incredible film using an array of instruments including cello, hammer dulcimer and banjo and live effects.
Less a movie, more of a series of tableaux inspired by an 18th century poet, the film was made under the Soviet regime in Georgia for an illiterate almost medieval audience with a highly refined storytelling tradition and hence is unconventional stuff compared to traditional Western movie-making. But for that very reason, this was a definite in the season as one of the most visual, expressive, inspiring and wonderful movies of the rituals of childhood, monasteries and death. The closest comparison perhaps could be the cinema of Andrei Tarkovsky.
Either way, a visual feast, which we decided deserved the return of the hugely talented Cabinet of Living Cinema who have performed many amazing rescores, including Svankmajer’s Faust here last year and will be performing a specially commissioned rescore live along to the film tonight.