The title of the experimental programme “Five Minutes of Pure Cinema” refers to Henri Chomette’s film of the same name, which became a manifesto of the directors of “pure cinema”. Soloists of the Studio for New Music ensemble will perform music by young Russian composers written especially for selected films. The concert is a kind of exploration of how music changes the sense of time in a film, and of the metamorphoses music itself undergoes as it interacts with on-screen temporality. Works for flute, harp and viola will be performed: the choice of line-up refers to the unusual Sonata for flute, harp and viola by Debussy – the composer whose music French directors emulated when realising the concept of “integral cinegraphy”.

From its very beginnings, the art of cinema sought interaction with the art of music. Thus Thomas Edison originally conceived his famous device – the kinetograph – as a means of presenting operas: “If someone wants to hear or see an opera,” he wrote during his first attempts to synchronise image and sound, “it will be enough to sit at home and watch its exact reproduction on a screen.” In the era of so-called silent cinema, musical accompaniment was used not only for the practical purpose of drowning out the noise of the projector, but also to “highlight” particular emotions on screen. Special collections of background music were compiled for this, based mainly on the classical repertoire. There was also a practice of composers writing film music based on the leitmotif principle.

Music and cinema drew especially close in the 1920s with the birth of the French theory of so-called “pure cinema” (Cinéma pur). The directors of “pure cinema” strove to emancipate themselves from theatre and literature, to do away with narrative and to cleanse the frame of the signs of the real world. They staked everything on the play of light and shadow, on the rhythmisation of the cinematic image, on the “visual symphony”. Freeing themselves from mimesis and experimenting with temporality, the directors of “pure cinema” created visual works that were in essence closest to music – an art that is fundamentally non-mimetic.