InMute Festival 2014

Taking silent cinema and contemporary music as its starting points, the 3-day InMute '14 festival sets out to explore and suggest new points of contact between sound and the moving image. Narrativity, abstraction, new and archive material come together to be re-interpreted and re-composed in a program which includes short and feature-length films from the 1920s, American postwar avant-garde selections, and 21st-century silent cinema. The festival, now in its second year, focuses on experimentation and the unexpected, providing a platform where sound and image come to complement, contradict and counter each other in the dynamic, real-time context of a live performance.

This year's program starts with a series of short experimental films by Stan Brakhage, Man Ray, Harry Evert Smith, Wallace Berman and Hans Richter accompanied by the electronic and acoustic sounds of Mike Cooper, Yiorgis Sakellariou, Balinese Beast and Giorgos Katsanos.

On Day Two, Canadian director Guy Maddin's contemporary silent film, "Cowards bend the knee", accompanied by the sounds of the British turntablist Philip Jeck, and the video score by Vicki Bennett, "Notations", in a one-off performance by the Greek duo Acte Vide, reveal the contemporary nature of the silent moving image.

The Festival's third day includes two films which were censored in the pre-war era, while Voltnoi & Quetempo present an audio-visual performance based on "Social Decay" (Koinoniki Sapila), which Stelios Tatasopoulos directed in 1932, the Festival will close with Carl Teodor Dreyer's emblematic "The Passion of Joan of Arc", for which the Danish artist Jacob Kirkegaard composed new music especially for InMute '14.

Abstracts of Stelios Tatasopoulos's film "Social Decay" (Koinoniki Sapila) are provided courtesy of the Greek Film Archive / Film Museum.
We thank Stelios Tatasopoulos's family for the permission to present the film.