Radiohead producer Nigel Godrich and L.A. artist Alex Prager collaborate on new film - Los Angeles Times
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Radiohead producer Nigel Godrich and L.A. artist Alex Prager collaborate on new film

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Radiohead’s Jonny Greenwood has earned plenty of acclaim for his recent film work, but now the band’s producer, Nigel Godrich, has an immersive and unsettling new score for a film by one of L.A.’s finest rising photographers.

Godrich has teamed up with Alex Prager, the renowned photographer and director whose color-saturated portraits depict young women soaked in California’s idyll and menace. Their new short film, “La Grande Sortie,” explores the transaction between a performer and her audience, as a ballerina slips between live-show tension and hallucinatory visions.

Film fans might feel a bit of “Black Swan’s” anxiety here, but that film’s campiness has been replaced with more ravishing colors and harder-to-define moods and ideas about what it means to be watched onstage. All the while, Godrich’s score toes the line between traditional beauty and the sound of a mind turning on itself.

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“I came to La Grande Sortie while thinking about my personal experience with anticipation and anxiety in connection to important projects,” Prager said in her directors’ statement. “To a viewer, it may be just another night. They’ll go home and carry on with their lives. But, for performers, I think it’s much more than that. If they’re really giving a great performance, it can be a moment between life and death.”

The Paris Opera Ballet commissioned the film, which is make its debut at the Galerie des Galeries in Paris on Tuesday.

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