2024 - 69th Edition

Blackmail

La muchacha de Londres

Alfred Hitchcock

United Kingdom

- 1929

Almost a century has passed since Alfred Hitchcock directed, in 1929, the story of Alice, a young girl who commits a crime, and her boyfriend Frank, the Scotland Yard detective responsible for the investigation. Blackmail will be ‘revived’ at the 69th SEMINCI thanks to the Orquesta Sinfónica de Castilla y León (OSCyL), which on Friday 25 October will accompany the screening at the Centro Cultural Miguel Delibes with a performance of the film's soundtrack. The podium will be taken by the North American Timothy Brock, an outstanding score preservationist and specialist in live performances of silent films. SEMINCI and the OSCyL are renewing with this extraordinary concert a collaboration born in 2008 that has ‘given’ the audience the unforgettable live experience of the screening and performance of Metropolis, The Assassination of the Duke of Guise, Snow White, Battleship Potemkin, Nosferatu, A Symphony of Horror, The New Babylon, Safety Last!, Modern Times and The Kid Brother.

Alfred Hitchcock

Concert-screening with OSCyL

American conductor Timothy Brock, a specialist in live performances of silent films, will conduct the Castile and León Symphony Orchestra (OSCyL) attacking the score created in 2008 by British composer Neil Brand for ‘Blackmail’, a composition that Brock knows well since he was in charge of its orchestration. Brand said at its premiere that «it’s a score heavily weighted towards the tonality of Bernard Herrmann and Miklos Rozsa». For him Timothy Brock was a dream partner due to his «extraordinary musicianship and enthusiasm». «I have never scored a film for a full symphony orchestra before and if the challenges were daunting, the opportunities were dazzling», he claimed, and went on to point out that the silent version of ‘Glorious Youth” was, for him, the greatest British silent film of all time.

Intertitles in French with subtitles in Spanish