The Unfilmables

This chapter presents a case study of The Unfilmables, a creative practice project in which music composers are invited to create a score to accompany a film that doesn’t exist. Once the score is complete, a filmmaker is asked to provide visual accompaniment. The ‘film’ is then played in a cinema setting with either the filmmaker or the composer live mixing their work to ensure each performance is unique. The project was a collaboration with Live Cinema UK. The chapter outlines examples of unmade films that were projected to audiences in this way, including Gnodorowsky, a project that attempted to realise director Alejandro Jodorowsky’s unmade adaptation of Frank Herbert’s 1965 science-fiction novel Dune. The chapter considers how creative practitioners and audiences collectively imagined and speculated what these unmade projects would have been like through a live event.