Filibus x Claire Rousay

On 4 December 2022, the Art Gallery of New South Wales screened an anarchic landmark of Italian silent cinema with a newly commissioned live score by acclaimed electronic musician Claire Rousay.

Filibus (1915) follows the exploits of a female jewel-thief who drops from the sky in a futuristic gondola to steal from the rich and bamboozle the police.

Floating high above the Italian Riviera, Filibus’ airship also serves as a costume department, where she assumes multiple disguises and identities. This quintessential trickster – heralded by some as cinema’s first lesbian heroine – delights in a game of cat and mouse with authorities involving masks, miniature cameras and an Egyptian statue with glowing diamond eyes. Boasting proto-SFX, split-screen cinematography, and pink and aqua-tinted cloudscapes, Filibus offers an early vision of technology as a means of reinvention and rebellion. Or, as Milestone Films, put it: ‘The 1915 Italian feminist, steampunk, jewel thief, cross-dressing, aviatrix thriller of the year!’

Filibus is set to a propulsive live score by Claire Rousay, whose acclaimed compositions and improvisations unite field recordings, voice memos, electronics and piano. Per the New York Times, ‘she turns these found sounds into musique concrète that locates grains of emotion in the mundane — a car door slamming, a lighter igniting, the plink of an Apple keyboard mid-text. What a songwriter might convey in poetry, Rousay evokes with raw audio’. She is based in Los Angeles, California. 

Screened in association with the Outlaw exhibition, Filibus was the first film in our Badlands series, which continued in early January 2023. The event was part of celebrations to mark the opening of the Art Gallery’s new building, known as the North Building, in December 2022.