Kinoorgel | SLEEP HAS HER HOUSE (UK 2017, Scott Barley)

UK 2017, D: Scott Barley, 90′, no dialogue, DCP

We are delighted to continue the cooperation between GEGENkino and the Musical Instrument Museum of GRASSI Museum, which began in 2023 with the soundtrack to BEGOTTEN (1989), and to once again put viewing and listening habits to the test at GEGENkino meets Kinoorgel: Silent film organist Jürgen Kurz will join us in the experiment of live scoring a film from 2017 on the Welte organ – thus combining contemporary filmmaking with a venerable cultural practice associated with the silent film era up to the end of the 1920s.

SLEEP HAS HER HOUSE is the title of Scott Barley’s award-winning British experimental film – and it is as ambiguous and other-worldly as the visual world of the film itself. It stands for a dreamlike, hypnotic, not least unusually decelerated cinema experience. In his first feature-length film, Barley shows us a world immersed in deep shades and sublime lighting moods. A world in which there are no people and only a few animals to be seen in front of the camera. It is a cosmos without words, without comments. During SLEEP HAS HER HOUSE, the audience is completely thrown back onto themselves and their own inner perception of nature impressions. Forests move eerily in the wind or are consumed by flames. Lightning flashes through the night sky and is reflected in water surfaces rhythmically set in motion by raindrops. Other natural formations are so shrouded in shadow and mist that they only gradually reveal themselves as grottos and forest clearings. Time is the topic of the film, if there is a topic: The trance-like stasis of the images brings us closer to the real passing of time, it confronts us with our inner sense of time. How much time has already passed? How long will it take for the sun to set behind the mountains? 

What appears like a moving, strictly composed romantic painting and therefore “anachronistic” is nothing less than a technical marvel in terms of production: Barley shot the images for his film entirely on an iPhone 6 – now, the powerful soundscapes of an instrument from 1931 are added. Like us, the filmmaker is thrilled by this unorthodox pairing. We hope you are too! 

Sat 05 Apr	Grassi Museum Musikinstrumentenmuseum der Universität Leipzig
7:30 PM	Live score by silent film organist Jürgen Kurz Tickets available at tixforgigs

---

TRAILER