Chamber Cinema Set is an experimental film by American filmmaker Robert Schaller and composer Simon Christensen. Parts of the work were performed at Wundergrund Festival in 2014 and then released on Blu-ray by Dacapo Records.
Now, the first complete live performance of the work is presented in Husets Biograf in Copenhagen.
Chamber Cinema Set consists of five short films (or sets) with the titles 'Signals', 'Three Years On', 'If Not One And One', 'Mail', and 'In The Shadow Of Marcus Mountain'. Rather than a classic plot, the films display moods, hints, textures, all imbued with an ultra analog aesthetic that Robert Schaller creates using a homemade pinhole camera and homemade photo emulsion. We are very far from Hollywood… and closer to the early avant-garde.
Robert Schaller describes the ideas behind the collaborative work: "Chamber Cinema Set is most fundamentally characterized by two ideas. One, that film is, to use film scholar William Wees' term, light moving in time. It is thus fundamentally like music, and can be structured using principles analogous to those that apply to writing music: it is capable of being "visual music."
The second idea is that film and its projection can occupy the same performative space as musicians, and needn't hide invisibly and magically in a booth. Rather, it can and should take it's place as an equal among equals. Thus, 'Mail', our first collaboration, has a cello part, an electronic part, and a film part. The music was not written for the film, nor the film made for the music: they were made as parts of a single score, to be performed live."
Robert Schaller: film
Simon Christensen: composition, zither, piano, percussion, electronics
John Ehde: cello
Husets Biograf, CopenhagenSaturday 19 August 20:00Find more information about the performance here.