What to expect
Dudley Murphy’s short preserves an early screen performance by Duke Ellington and his orchestra while integrating music, décor, movement, and tragedy. Its stylisation gives Black modernist performance unusual visual and sonic space.
How to ease in
The film is compact and emotionally direct. Listen to how Ellington’s music changes function—from work, to performance, to an expression of grief that the dialogue cannot contain.
Heads-up
A quick, non-exhaustive note Includes illness, death, poverty, exploitative working conditions, racialised entertainment history, and emotional distress.
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The music keeps expanding beyond the room even when the characters’ choices contract. I am moved by the way performance becomes livelihood, intimacy, and mourning within nineteen minutes.
— Momo
Credits & versions
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