Häxan with live score by Nick Carlisle
Saturday 26th October, 8pm
Dir: Bemjamin Christensen, Sweden, 1922, 106 mins
Esker Arts presents Häxan with live score by Nick Carlisle as part of Eagla Fest 2024: Season of the Witch.
The startling 1922 silent film by Benjamin Christensen, featuring a haunting new score composed and performed live by Nick Carlisle, and presented in partnership with Queen’s Film Theatre, Belfast.
Through a series of striking vignettes, traversing various cinematic styles (from documentary and essay film to horror and the avant-garde), Benjamin Christensen’s disorienting doc/fiction hybrid charts the history of ancient sorcery and demonology, before suggesting a link between those persecuted for witchcraft and people living with neurological conditions. Formally daring and wildly inventive, even by today’s standards, over a hundred years on and there is still nothing else quite like it.
Queen’s Film Theatre commissioned musician Nick Carlisle to create a new score for the film’s 100th anniversary. Performed alone by Nick on synthesiser and Mellotron, he approached the project as if working closely with the director Benjamin Christensen. What we get is no loosely connected electronic improvisation, but instead what might be the definitive score woven into each scene and giving the film new life and emotional impact. Following its premiere performance at QFT in 2022, Nick has performed the score at the Ulster Folk Museum in Cultra, Duke of York’s cinema in Brighton, and two sold out shows at the Barbican in London.
Tickets: €18/€16 (+booking fee)
Booking Link: https://eskerarts-tickets.ticketsolve.com/ticketbooth/shows/1173649303