For the third year running, Autrement Classique is delighted to welcome the improvising pianist Cyrille Lehn, now well known to — and eagerly awaited by — our audiences. After the enchantments of Méliès and the burlesque virtuosity of Buster Keaton, we set off to meet Harold Lloyd.

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Safety Last! (1923) is one of the summits of silent slapstick cinema and Harold Lloyd’s most famous film — instantly recognisable by his round glasses and his air of an ordinary man swept into extraordinary situations. The story follows a young provincial who has come to the city to make good: out of love and ambition, he finds himself caught up in a spectacular climb up a skyscraper, a sequence that has become emblematic of film history. Between situational comedy, suspense and physical virtuosity, Lloyd unfolds an art of the gag founded on the realism of danger and the precision of timing. Behind the laughter, the film also captures the energy and the vertigo of urban 1920s America. Safety Last! remains today a major reference of silent cinema, combining acrobatic prowess, visual invention and timeless charm.

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The film-concert is surely one of the truest and most alive ways to enter this cinema. The improvised music does not “illustrate” the image: it converses with it, sometimes contradicts it, often intensifies it. It makes perceptible the film’s inner rhythm — its breaths, its tensions, its silences. In return, the image stirs the musician’s imagination, compelling them to invent in the moment, to follow the movements of the story and of the bodies.

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A rare phenomenon then occurs: the spectator is no longer before a fixed work of the past, but at the heart of a creation taking shape before their eyes. The film by Harold Lloyd, engraved on celluloid for more than a hundred years, becomes fragile, open and unpredictable once more, because it is traversed by music that will exist only once — that evening.

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That is the whole joy of the film-concert: to make cinema a living event, and music a way of seeing. A way of recalling that these two arts were born together, in the darkened halls of the silent era, and that their alliance — far from a relic of the past — remains one of the most powerful ways to feel the force of story, emotion and imagination.