Sound & Silents: Mary Pickford Revived I – Birds Eye View – 9th March 2012
LIVE MUSIC TO SILENT FILM
Fri 9 March, 8pm Purcell Room, Southbank Centre
Tickets and information: www.southbankcentre.co.uk 0844 875 0073
In partnership with the Southbank Centre’s Women Of The World festival.
Birds Eye View has commissioned four cutting-edge female musicians to write and perform new live scores to a range of Mary Pickford’s most visionary and entertaining work. Three short films are featured in this event; see below, and for the fourth feature see Mary Pickford Revived II.
This work was supported with funds from the PRS for Music Foundation.
Amarilly of Clothes-Line Alley
Plus live score from Welsh/Iranian folk fusion singer songwriter Roshi
US 1918. Dir Marshall Neilan, 67Min. Feisty Amarilly (Pickford) lives in a working class district with her contented but poor family. She is adored by her boyfriend Terry but their relationship is tested when she meets a flighty artist and is introduced to high society. Amarilly was adapted by Frances Marion, Pickford’s life long friend and ‘official scenarioist’. Marion was the most prolific and highest paid scriptwriter of the time. Through her titles she provides an explicit social commentary and criticism of the upper classes. Indeed Pickford and Marion did much to bring working class audiences into the cinema.
The New York Hat
Plus live score from classical/electronic composer Anna Meredith
US 1912. Dir D. W. Griffith. Small town bigotry is revealed in this tragicomic film starring a luminous Pickford. When a priest (Lionel Barrymore) buys a new hat for a recently bereaved girl (Pickford), he is mistakenly believed to be courting her. This delightful Biograph short shows how, even at this early period of filmmaking, sensitive direction and nuanced performance could combine to reveal a character’s inner life.
The Female of the Species
Plus live score from British/Canadian/Rwandan experimental pop multi-instrumentalist Tanya Auclair
US 1912. Dir D. W. Griffith. Four survivors of a deserted mining camp head for the desert. A woman, encouraged by her sister, becomes suspicious that another woman has designs on her injured husband. When he dies their loneliness and paranoia, encouraged by the arid, windy landscape, lead to murderous intentions. See Pickford here in wicked Machiavellian guise.
