Le Regard: An evening celebrating women in surrealist silent film, with live musical performance

This event is part of our Surrealism on Film season, marking the centenary of the Surrealist Manifesto with an eclectic programme of films reflecting the influence of surrealism across many decades of cinema history. More details to be announced soon. 

Hoolan Ensemble is a recently formed collective of musicians and composers dedicated to performing innovative and unusual contemporary music, and to collaborating with other art forms. Join them here at DCA for an electrifying evening of live music and film inspired by the forgotten artistic achievements of women in early cinema.

The event will consist of two experimental film screenings by female directors, accompanied onstage by new scores composed by ensemble members Nancy Johnstone and Niall Docherty. The first, Germaine Dulac’s subversive 1928 classic The Seashell and the Clergyman, is a dreamlike tale of male sexual obsession mischievously presented from a razor-sharp feminist perspective. Widely regarded as the first film ever to use surrealist editing techniques, it caused a riot at its Paris premiére and retains a brilliant sense of modernity almost a hundred years after its creation.

The second film Foreign Body, a brand-new short directed by emerging Irish-Czech filmmaker Sára Ní Eithir, explores themes of self-objectification, alienation and fetishisation in order to reveal the struggle of being in a female body today. Riffing on the poetic imagery and daring visual techniques of Dulac’s Seashell, Eithir creates a stirring 21st century response to the 1928 masterpiece by recontextualising these in contemporary film practice. The two beautifully atmospheric scores will be played by a distinctive instrumental line-up of wind ensemble, guitar and electronics, with the evening also including two short talks discussing the fascinating history that inspired the project and the process of making the new film.

This performance will showcase the work of exciting young artists all committed to innovation, collaboration and to reaching wider audiences. Together, they will use long-forgotten cinema history as raw material, engaging with the neglected heritage of the form to inspire an experience that is fresh, compelling and totally out of the ordinary.