This project aims to immerse itself in the visual heritage of the filmmaker Segundo de Chomón (Teruel, October 17, 1871 – Paris, May 2, 1929) in order to generate a future stage artifact that merges the projection of several of his films that will interact with three other stage manifestations:

The creation and live performance of a small soundtrack created for each of the films, either through a specific musical composition, the creation of invented dialogues, or the use of electronic sounds that are not only musical or concrete, but also of an abstract and surrealist nature.

The creation and live performance of textual materials that contextualize, disseminate and also question or investigate the character of Segundo de Chomón and his work.

The execution of performative actions that, interwoven with the interpretation of music and text, contribute to broadening, escaping or re-signifying the expressive and semantic potential of the film.

The objective of the research is, therefore, to investigate different scenic possibilities, both musical, theatrical and choreographic, while reactivating Segundo de Chomón's visual heritage, understanding it not so much as mere silent film footage to be viewed on a screen, but as visual, historiographic and poetic materials to be (re)activated on stage through any of his dialogues with any element of the theatrical machinery.

About Segundo de Chomón

A photographic technician, inventor of special effects, cameraman, painter, producer and director, Segundo de Chomón is considered one of the pioneers of cinema and special effects. Specializing in magic and fantasy cinema, his films are full of phantasmagoria, sorcerers, devils, improbable transformations, dance and wonderful substitutions; worlds of unbridled imagination that captivated the audience with their innovative visual effects and innovative trick techniques, which made him known as the “Spanish Méliès”.

His career began in Barcelona in 1902, where he would open the first film set in Spain, painting films with a system invented by him and helped by his wife, Julienne Mathieu, who had worked for Méliès. That same year he manufactured his own movie camera and shot his first film, entitled “Choque de trenes” (1902). In 1905 he traveled to Paris and in a short time became one of the most important technicians of the Pathé Frères production company, and the most important directors of the time, such as Zecca, Pastrone or Gance, competed for him.

After traveling through Italy, Morocco and Tunisia generating his own projects or collaborating with other artists, his last work was the technical collaboration on the film “Napoleón” by Abel Gance. He died in Paris on May 2, 1929. Chomón is a clear example of the cinema of the time, a craft cinema, in which the anonymity of the technicians was almost always the norm. Few primary sources and documents of the filmmaker have been preserved and the few references that his contemporaries in Spain dedicated to him were minimal and often vague. After his death he fell into oblivion, and it would not be until the end of the 1940s when different film historians became interested in his work and began to spread the great influence of his work, which still endures today, on contemporary cinema.