By Alex Barrett
A Brand New Silent Film about the Culture and Diversity of London.
London Symphony is a poetic journey through the city of London, exploring its vast diversity of culture, religion and design via its various modes of transportation. It is both a cultural snapshot and a creative record of London as it stands today. The point is not only to immortalise the city, but also to celebrate its community and diversity.
The feature-length film is being made in the style of a silent City Symphony, but it is not a pastiche. We believe that by looking at the present through recourse to the past, we can learn something new about life today. We will not parody the style, but be true to the spirit of the filmmakers that came before us, and the theories that fuelled them. We hope to capture the rhythm, the motion and the experimentation that made their films so wonderful, while simultaneously re imagining the City Symphony for the 21st Century.
Here’s what some other people have been saying about the project:
“In the early days of the cinema, there were several great City Symphonies – for Berlin, Paris, Rotterdam, but never for London. Alex Barrett is going to put that right, and his plans suggest a remarkable picture.” – Kevin Brownlow, Film Historian
“21st-century London deserves a City Symphony of its own” – Pamela Hutchinson, “Silent London”