new score for Alfred Hitchcock’s ‘Champagne’ commissioned by the BFI
As part of the British Film Institute’s “Genius Of Hitchcock” project. The BfI Southbank will screen a complete retrospective of the director’s surviving feature films from August to October 2012. The BFI is also commissioning new scores
for the directors early silent films which were produced in the United Kingdom during the 1920’s.
Electronic Experimentalist composer Mira Calix has been commissioned to write a new score for the newly restored Champagne (1928) the bubbly story of a 1920’s It-Girl celebrity heiress which will be screened and accompanied by Mira’s live score at BFI Southbank on September 27th.
Champagne contains many flashes of Hitchcock brilliance, with witty shots through a champagne glass and a disturbing sequence in which the feckless heroine imagines herself sexually assaulted by the man who (as it ultimately emerges) has been employed by her father to spy on her. The deftly observed voyeurism by this and other characters is another emblematic Hitchcock touch.
Mira Calix said ” the synopsis of Champagne, created in 1928, could quite easily be an entry on TMZ in 2012. It’s this very synchronicity that has informed my approach the creation of a new score for this silent film. With a mixture of electronics, voice and classical instrumentation, i hope to reveal the very contemporaneous of Hitchcock’s thoroughly modern tail.”
Mira Calix joins a growing roster of British musical talent who have composed scores for the new silent Hitchcock restorations including Nitin Sawhney (the Lodger) Soweto Kinch (the ring) Neil Brand (Blackmail) and Daniel Patrick Cohen (The Pleasure Garden)