Aquebogue artist Cliff Baldwin has long been fascinated by the earliest moments of cinema — the jittery flicker of 19th-century cameras, the surreal playfulness of hand-tinted moon landings and the ghostly silence that once defined the moving image. Now, the veteran artist and filmmaker is pairing those ancient images with something thrillingly alive: spontaneous, genre-blurring live music.
Baldwin’s new series, debuting next month at the Jamesport Meeting House, is equal parts performance art, cinema history lesson and improvisational jazz session. Featuring restored silent films — some more than a century old — accompanied by a four-piece band performing live, improvisational scores, the project aims to reinvigorate the cinematic experience for a 21st-century audience.
“I made silent films myself for many years,” the artist said in an interview this week. “I started back in the late ’80s doing Super 8 films, and they were all silent. So I really have an affinity for silent film — contemporary and the early stuff.”
For the series, Baldwin dug deep into film archives around the world, from the Library of Congress to collections in the Netherlands, the U.K., and Rochester’s Eastman House. The selections include early Edison films, the fantastical work of French pioneer Georges Méliès, and rarely screened gems by women filmmakers from the early 20th century. “There are some incredible women filmmakers from like 120 years ago,” he said. “They’re just amazing.”
Each night features a different theme — one program spotlights multiple early “trip to the moon” shorts; another revolves around Sigmund Freud’s home movies. There’s also a show built entirely from AI-generated films Baldwin created using his own dream journals.
“I’ve been writing down my dreams and transcribing them into AI programs, and generating films from those descriptions,” he said. “The cool thing is that AI is so messed up… you get all kinds of very strange things, like three-legged horses and wagons without a wheel. That’s what fascinates me — the imperfections within the AI world.”
It’s not just the films that make the event singular. Baldwin has curated a quartet of improvisational musicians — jazz artists with an ear for risk and adventure — who will score the films live, reacting in real-time to what’s happening on screen.
“We generally have a rough idea of what we want to do,” Baldwin said, “but it’s not very rehearsed. It’s very much on the fly, and it’s fun.”
Among the musicians is blues pianist Gail Storm, whom Baldwin calls “so skilled with her blues charts and the history of blues and R&B,” and who brings a particular focus on women blues musicians. Bassist Iris Ornig, who leads an all-women jazz ensemble and splits her time between the East End and New York City, brings a “fantastic ear for improvisation.” Drummer Rob Shepperson, a longtime collaborator of Baldwin’s from their downtown Manhattan days, rounds out the group.
“We’ve been collaborating for almost 50 years,” Baldwin said.
The live band, coupled with century-old visuals and a setlist of experimental imagery, makes for a kind of high-wire act that Baldwin believes is sorely missing from today’s moviegoing experience.
“Moviegoing has really changed, especially after COVID,” he said. “To make something happen with cinema, you’ve got to do something really different and really unusual.”
Baldwin plays saxophone and electronics — including turntables and custom laptop effects — to complete the quartet. “It’s fun to use electronics, too, because it adds a whole other dimension,” he said. “I prefer to use kind of raw electronic sounds… a little more unusual stuff.”
The artist’s approach to building each program is equal parts archival detective work and thematic curation. “I was thinking I would do a piece about the moon, and so I found a couple of different old ‘trip to the moon’ films,” he said, referring to both the famous Méliès short and a 1908 Spanish variation. “That guy hand-painted the color on his. It’s really sloppy, blurry, and messy. And it’s a great look.”
Other films are drawn from obscure home movie collections: “There’s this great home movie of a Black family in Detroit. It’s a mixed-race family … probably about 1965. They dress up with their Polish friends in Polish native costume and are dancing around. I really went far and wide,” Baldwin said with a laugh.
The Meeting House, with its wood-plank floors and vaulted ceiling, offers a fittingly vintage setting for Baldwin’s time-traveling art. He’s no stranger to this kind of work, having debuted the concept back in 2018, but this is perhaps the boldest iteration yet.
“When you connect with your audience,” Baldwin said of the live shows. “When it all comes together, it’s … amazing.”
For Baldwin, who has shown his films at venues like Anthology Film Archives and The Kitchen in Manhattan, this Jamesport residency is more than just a performance. It’s an experiment in community, memory and sonic alchemy.
And the key, he says, is to keep it fun.
“We want to have fun with it,” he said. “And you know, when you’ve got a picture to play with, it gives you a lot of latitude. With four players, that multiplies that even more. It adds a lot of color to what you’re looking at.”