About Puffs of Smoke
Johnston’s silent film scores not only bring historical silent films to life but also interrogate the relationship between music and image, challenging preconceptions about what film music can be. He has written about this art form in his 2023 book Silent Films/Loud Music: New Ways of Listening to and Thinking about Silent Film Music, about which the Alloy Orchestra’s Ken Winokur wrote, “Johnston analyses silent film scores with the keen eye of someone who has himself created some of the seminal works in the field”.
This program of short ‘silent’ subjects from the earliest era of Australian film history includes The Sick Stockrider (1906), A 1906 Bird’s Eye View of George Street, a number of Harry Julius’s WW1 Cartoons of the Moment, (1915) and new works created from excerpts and remains of The Story of the Kelly Gang (1906) and Soldiers of the Cross (1900).
“Johnston’s soundtrack adds an extra dimension to the 2D-nature of the animation, with energetic jazz layered over the pre-recorded percussion track that builds up and flows through the film. While Johnston and Reiniger’s compositions are each complex in their own ways, they come together simply and beautifully, stripping animation back to its abstract qualities of light, shadow, image and sound.”
(from a review of Johnston score for Lotte Reineger’s The Adventures of Prince Achmed (1926)
–Anna Madeleine, The Guardian, 19 Jan 2015
About Phillip Johnston
Phillip Johnston is a contemporary composer/performer who straddles the worlds of jazz and art music. In addition to writing music for performance, contemporary film, theatre, opera and multimedia, he began in 1993 composing and performing scores for silent films by French, German, American and Japanese directors, In Australia he has performed these works at The Australian Museum of the Moving Image, The Melbourne Festival of the Arts, The Sydney Film Festival, Sydney Vivid Festival, Revelation Perth Film Festival, The Big Day Out, Woodford Folk Festival, The German Film Festival, MONA FOMA, the Sydney Opera House and the Capital Jazz Project (Canberra), and also across Europe and the US. This premiere performance of Puffs of Smoke is his newest work.
Johnston tells the fascinating story of the birth of the Australian film industry, through the projection of a curated collection of film shorts, while performing original scores for the films live. The music consists of improvised saxophone accompanied by pre-recorded audio ranging from piano, to loops and samples, to overdubbed music for 16 saxophones. The event combines a concert of cutting-edge New Music with a multimedia exploration of Australian cinematic history.