The 1926 Mixtape + Live Scores

The clock is ticking on the silent era.

With 2027 marking a full century since the talkies shook the foundations of cinema, our window for 100-year silent celebrations is slowly closing. We’re seizing the moment to look back exactly one hundred years to 1926 - a vintage year for avant-garde subversion and fledgling animation.

To breathe fresh life into these mini masterpieces, we’ve handed the baton to composition students at the Royal Birmingham Conservatoire. Each composer has crafted a brand-new live score for a seminal short, ranging from the hypnotic, rotating visual puns of Marcel Duchamp’s Anémic Cinéma to the surrealist cine-poem of Man Ray’s Emak-Bakia.