From Stanley Kubrick’s Napoleon to Orson Welles’ Don Quixote to Alejandro Jodorowsky’s Dune, cinema history is littered with unfinished, “lost” projects. But what if you could listen to a soundtrack to a film that has never existed?
That’s the idea behind The Unfilmables, a new joint venture from musicians Mica Levi and Wrangler (featuring Stephen Mallinder from Cabaret Voltaire, and Benge and Phil Winter from Tunng).
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Levi, who has provided some of our favourite film scores from the past few years, including Under the Skin and Jackie, is teaming up with her video artist sister Francesca to create ‘The Colour of Chips’, a riff on Armenian director Sergei Parajanov’s The Colour of Pomegranates.
Meanwhile Wrangler are writing the score to ‘The Tourist’, which tells the story of a sex-charged alien underworld in the heart of Manhattan, based on the greatest sci-fi script never made. Stephen Mallinder has said of the project: “The idea of ‘imagining’ a film that has never actually been made is fascinating if a bit daunting. It’s not an attempt to make the film but rather abstract the ideas behind it – to reduce the original design and story to a series of visual and sonic cyphers.”
It all sounds rather intriguing to us, although we can’t quite imagine what it will be like to sit in the audience and listen to a live soundtrack to an entirely fabricated movie. John Carpenter did something similar with his excellent ‘Lost Themes’ albums, which were written for films that exist only in the listener’s head.
The Unfilmables will combine live musical performance with visual projections, and is heading to Manchester, London and Brighton this May. For more information visit livecinema.org.uk
