This month at the Jamesport Meeting House a live music/silent film festival will provide an out-of-the-box experience for cinephiles and performance lovers alike.
Artist, composer and filmmaker Cliff Baldwin has curated a program full of fascinating screenings with live soundtracks to be played Aug. 8, 15, 22 and 29 starting at 7:30 p.m.
“They should expect the unexpected,” says Baldwin of attendees.
This is the seventh year of the event, which has quadrupled in size since its start in 2018. Initially, the one-night festival showed surrealist films at the Jamesport hub, where Baldwin is a board member.
“The meeting house has been a great venue because it’s so historic and has such a great feel to it,” says Baldwin.
But now, the four-night event has a much greater range of genres.
On Aug. 8, Voyages to the Moon will be played, which includes actual NASA footage; on Aug. 15, Home Movies featuring Sigmund Freud will be shown; on Aug. 22 Deep Sea Adventures is on the docket, depicting mysterious marine creatures; and on Aug. 29 for the first time in his career, Baldwin will display an artificial intelligence-developed film based on his own dreams and other subconscious descriptions fed to the technology.
What sets this festival apart from other film settings is that the Aquebogue Contemporary Music Ensemble will provide a live audio component for each feature. Baldwin started the group in 2014 and they have played around the North Fork, including performances with the Rites of Spring Music Festival. He brought on this component in recent years in order to spice up regular screenings.
“After the pandemic, cinema really changed a lot and people were staying away from the movies,” says Baldwin. “We tried to come up with some things that would get people out and make cinema more exciting, so live music with the films was a fun idea.”
Right in line with his experimental-in-nature style, Baldwin is most looking forward to showing the artificial intelligence-produced film.
As a life-long creative who made videos and films from childhood on, he likes the unpredictability of artificial intelligence.
“AI is interesting to me because it makes a lot of strange decisions that are not necessarily correct,” says Baldwin. “It’s very messy, like horses have three legs, carts have three wheels or are missing a wheel or someone’s got six fingers on their hand.”
Otherwise, finding material to share for the festival and music to go with it came down to searching in unexpected, old-timey categories.
“It’s about just doing the research and finding the archives that have the things that you want to see and that might be fun,” says Baldwin. “Things that are unusual, things that are not the same thing you see in a theatre.”
Tickets are $20 per show or $60 for a series pass. Advance purchase is recommended. Buy tickets here.
