Silent-film concerts: playing cinemas, museums and cultural centres

A fee that has nothing to do with a bar gig

The silent-film concert is one of the rare formats where a musician can quote a four-figure fee without being a headline name. The range listed on this pack runs from €800 to €3,000 per screening. The spread is easily explained: a solo piano accompaniment to a short silent film is not a five-piece ensemble scoring a feature with an original composition.

What justifies those figures is not your profile. It is that the screening is a one-off event, announced in advance, that fills a room on a night it would otherwise be half empty — and the cinema knows it.

Three kinds of venue, three logics

The pack brings together 2,167 French cinemas, museums and cultural centres. These are three different contacts, and confusing them costs you replies.

Cinemas

An arthouse cinema programmes event screenings to bring back an audience that has stopped coming. It wants an occasion: a heritage film with live music, a themed evening, a silent-film accompaniment. The contact is the director or the programmer, and the decision comes quickly — a few weeks is enough, because one screening does not disrupt a schedule.

Museums

A museum thinks in terms of interpretation, not performance. It will programme your proposal if it illuminates an exhibition, a collection, a period. Museum nights and heritage days are its natural windows, and they are prepared six months ahead. The budget often comes from a cultural-outreach line separate from programming.

Cultural centres

These are closest to a conventional venue: a season built a year at a time, decisions between January and May for the following season, and a real programming budget. They are also the most solicited of the three.

What makes them say yes

In this circuit the proposal matters more than the CV. A cinema programmer does not know your band and is not trying to: they want an evening that can be told in one sentence in their programme and in the local paper.

"A duo accompanies The General live" sells. "Our quartet performs an original repertoire" does not, because the reader of the programme has no idea what they would be coming to see.

Visibility as an argument

These venues have a relationship with the local press that bars and festivals do not. A silent-film concert in a town-centre cinema earns an article, a photograph, sometimes a radio slot. That is a real return — and it is also an argument to turn around: offer to supply the images and a ready-to-publish text, and you take work off a programmer who has no press officer.

Choose the film before the music

This inversion makes the difference, and almost nobody does it. Most proposals start from the artist's repertoire and then look for a film to match. Programmers receive these messages all year and do not reply, because they have no idea what to do with them.

Start from the work. Public-domain silent cinema offers a substantial catalogue, familiar to audiences without being worn out, and free of authorial rights for the work itself. A recognisable title in your first email turns a vague proposal into a project.

Choose the length deliberately too: a silent feature demands seventy to ninety minutes of continuous music, which is not the same commitment as a programme of shorts where you can breathe between pieces. For a first collaboration, the shorts programme is easier to sell and easier to sustain.

The mistakes that sink an approach here

Proposing a concert instead of a screening. A cinema does not programme music: it programmes films. Your proposal has to start from a work, not from your repertoire.

Ignoring rights. Screening a film requires clearances, and they are not your problem — they are the venue's. But showing that you know the question exists, and proposing public-domain works, saves an entire conversation.

Sending the same message to all three kinds of venue. The word "interpretation" opens doors in a museum and means nothing in a cinema.

What the pack contains, and what it does not

2,167 venues for €59, each with a technically verified email address. Town and postcode are filled in on more than nine rows out of ten.

A phone number is present on a little over half the rows, and a postal address on slightly under half. So the file lets you follow up by phone with a good share of these venues, but not all: build your method on email and use the phone where it is there.

Where to start

Filter to your region and start with the cinemas: they decide fastest and pay best relative to the work involved. One successful screening gives you an image, an article and a reference — the three things you lack when approaching museums and cultural centres, whose lead times are far longer.

Two neighbouring circuits work on the same event logic: film festivals, which return every year on fixed dates, and public libraries, which programme on municipal budgets.