Puffs of Smoke is a live musical performance featuring a program of short silent films, mostly from before 1920, accompanied by live music composed and performed by Phillip Johnston. Interspersed with these films are short narratives that together create a fantasia exploring the little-known history of the Australian silent film era.
These films combine a variety of techniques, subjects and styles, including dramatised poems, newsreel footage, fragments of bushranger melodramas, advertisements and short documentaries. The program also includes magic lantern slides from the Salvation Army’s proto-multimedia event Soldiers of the Cross (1900).
This performance includes short films and other excerpts from the NFSA collection.
ABOUT PHILLIP JOHNSTON
Phillip Johnston is a saxophonist, composer and arranger of both jazz and new music.
He has composed extensively for film, including Paul Mazursky’s Faithful, Philip Haas’ The Music of Chance and Money Man, Doris Dörrie’s Paradise and Geld, Stolen Life by Peter Rasmussen and Jackie Turnure (which won a New York Machinima Award for Best Music Score), Noise by Henry Bean, and Kathryn Millard’s Shock Room.
He has performed original scores for silent films at Sydney Film Festival, Sydney Vivid, Melbourne Festival of the Arts, MONA FOMA, Woodford Folk Festival, Revelation Perth Film Festival, Melbourne International Jazz Festival and at the Sydney Opera House, Australian Centre for the Moving Image and National Film and Sound Archive.
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