Celebrate Italian silent cinema’s golden age with our Silent Divas film concert featuring live musical accompaniments by trailblazing Melbourne-based female electronic composers.
Rapsodia Satanica with live score by Carolyn Schofield
Rapsodia Satanica
Director: Nino Oxilia
Italy | 1917 | 50 mins
Silent with English subbed Italian intertitles
Trailer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5_eu2RuPR3U&ab_channel=CinetecaMilano
Rapsodia Satanica’s Faustian tale follows the Countess Alba d’Oltrevita, an old woman who makes a pact with Mephisto to regain her youth in exchange for her soul.
Nino Oxilia’s ambitious movie was meant to be a total work of art created for the silver screen, condensing literary references to the Faust tradition, aesthetic decadence and spectacular art nouveau architecture. Rapsodia Satanica, however, was not only a sophisticated and aesthetic compendium of the best artistic movements of the time: it’s a film in a league of its own, combining Nino Oxilia’s poetic sensitivity and Lyda Borelli’s extraordinary performance as the Countess. Lyda Borelli was the leading Italian actress of the time, a star so bright to become a cultural phenomenon. Her mannerisms and the way in which she expresses with her body and eyes distil her character with the sensuality of eroticism, and the raving hysteria of madness.
Rapsodia Satanica will be screened with a new score composed and played live by Carolyn Schofield.
Carolyn Schofield is a Vietnamese-Australian electronic musician, synthesist, composer and pianist, often performing under the moniker Fia Fell. She performs as a keyboardist on multiple synthesisers, playing and processing them in real-time to create dreamlike sonic worlds that meld lush melodic cycles, vibrant digital textures and soaring drones.
Schofield’s versatility and distinctiveness as an artist have found appeal among electronic, experimental and contemporary classical audiences alike; since her debut release ‘A Hair, A Heap’ in 2016, she’s performed at celebrated Australian events such as Rising Festival, Berlin Atonal & Dark Mofo’s ‘Laterne’, Inner Varnika, Resident Advisor’s 24/7 Melbourne and Room40’s Open Frame, and supported acclaimed international artists such as Laurel Halo, Merzbow, Rashad Becker and Loraine James. Her solo and ensemble work has been commissioned and supported by Melbourne Electronic Sound Studio, Liquid Architecture, the Australian Art Orchestra, Melbourne Recital Centre, Arts Centre Melbourne, Play On and more. She has collaborated with artists including Jonnine Standish of HTRK, members of King Gizzard and the Lizard Wizard, guzheng artist Mindy Meng Wang and trumpeter Peter Knight of the Australian Art Orchestra. She also plays in acclaimed art-rock band Jaala, and experimental dance duos Rolling Mass and Walking Light.
Website: https://www.fiafiell.net/about
This film concert is part of Silent Divas, a program of film screenings with live musical accompaniment celebrating the brightest stars of the Italian silent cinema’s golden age.
