3-18 year-olds

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Jean Jadin proposes a moment of silent cinema with scents of erstwhile, the time when music was improvised live to colour the action, to enhance it with a thousand lights, to adorn it with magic, grace, fantasy or mystery.

He presents some excerpts from short comedy films... or not, made between 1902 and 1930 by great masters of the genre such as Méliès, Buster Keaton, Charlie Chaplin...

We enjoy infernal chases, delicious vaudevillian situations, but we also take the time to think about more serious subjects such as the escalation of violence at Laurel and Hardy's, for example. We let ourselves be taken to the moon by Méliès or freeze in terror in front of "Nosferatu", the sinister vampire of Murnau.

Through these films, with their powerfully contrasted atmospheres, all the favourite springs of non-verbal communication are summoned and their effects on the young audience are unmistakable: the unbridled hilarity generated by the ridicule of the falls and the chain gags of adults with children's hearts, is followed by anguish and fear in the face of phenomena that arise from the darkness and remain unexplained. But fascination transcends fear, allows it to be overcome and most often leads to asking for an extra dose of it!

Totally improvised on the piano, the "soundtrack" is reinforced by the use of a few "mouth instruments". Its objective is to express the unspeakable, the tacit, and variedly underlines the rhythm and nature of the events that are brought up to the screen. Thus, depending on whether the melody is more linear or fragmented, the rhythm more regular or irregular, the harmony more consonant or dissonant, the whole accompanied or not by sound effects, glissandi or... silences, the impressions felt by the audiences will obviously be quite different.