I developed music and film concepts for live performance with students at the Guildhall School of Music in conjunction with Professor John Harle’s Bauhaus collective. The projects were performed live at the Barbican on 23 May 2025.
This year, the Guildhall Bauhaus has been exploring the tantalising and unpredictable world of experimental film. Beginning with a thorough grounding in the subjects of the Bauhaus Preliminary Course, we studied the first works of abstract film. Hans Richter’s development of Absolute Film as moving paintings in the early 1920’s soon brought about comparisons with three great American experimentalists of the 1960’s and 70’s - Jordan Belson and the Whitney brothers. The effect of John Whitney’s work on more mainstream film-makers such as Stanley Kubrick and (the late) David Lynch led us to appreciate sequences from 2001 A Space Odyssey, Hitchcock’s Vertigo and Lynch’s Eraserhead in a new way. Throughout the year , we were visited by Colm McAuliffe, lecturer at Goldsmiths, University of London and Yale University. Colm’s inspirational use of archive materials, and his infectious enthusiasm is unforgettable.
What you are seeing tonight is the outcome of the loosest brief given to Guildhall Bauhaus students so far - simply the idea of making new personal work in video and music. Having the courage to challenge ourselves and discover new horizons in creative work was our aim, and tonight you can see the results.
– John Harle
