A/V

Benny heeft het aan zijn hart - live score

Benny heeft het aan zijn hart is a short feature film by the Dutch author of children’s books Dick Laan. Young Benny loses his best friend when he is no longer allowed to play football following a heart misdiagnosis by Professor Oudewijf.
The movie is provided by Netherlands Institute for Sound and Vision.

RE:VIVE, EYE Filmmuseum and The Rest Is Noise asked Laura to compose and perform new music for this movie, the soundtrack was premiered at the event _underscore_ (20/01/2019 EYE Filmmuseum).

KyoKyoKyo scores Kurutta Ippeji

KyoKyoKyo is a musical trio from Bologna (IT), composed by Carlo Marrone (Guitars, electronics), Bob Nowhere (guitar and synths) and Laura Agnusdei (saxophone, electronics) that ranges from rock-noise, ambient and lyrical moments. They are currently focusing on live scoring silent movies. They performed soundtracking Kurutta Ippeji in Bologna (IT) at Kilowatt and Ravenna (IT) at Soundscreen Festival and in Utrecht (NL) at Moira and Amsterdam (NL) at Cinema of the Dam’d.

Kurutta Ippeji (A Page of Madness) (1926) is a cult silent Japanese movie directed by Teinosuke Kinugasa, a former female impersonator who entered films in 1917 as an actor, turned to direct in 1922 and made some of the most formally brilliant Japanese films of the following decades. An old print of Kurutta Ippeji (A Page of Madness) was found by Kinugasa in his attic and re-released in the 1970s. Time Out Magazine, praised the film, writing, “A Page of Madness remains one of the most radical and challenging Japanese movies ever seen here”.

FUGA - soundtrack

For Dekmantel Festival 2019, The Netherlands Institute for Sound and Vision’s RE:VIVE initiative and Dekmantel teamed up for the third time to invite four artists to bring fresh music to a curation of Dutch archival films.

FUGA, a 1996 short film from Hans Nassenstein is a stark, stoic piece of reflection. Made near the end of his career, Fuga is a stark vignette of life. For Italian composer Laura Agnusdei, it was a coincidence the film’s title came from the Italian word for “escape”. She composed a simple whistling melody to enlighten the elements of liberation she interpreted in the film. The score ebbs and flows like the film’s beach scenes, ending with an embrace of life as the man sits at the piano, his coat that he’d previously donned presumably on his way to work, cast aside in the corner unafraid of the cold as his life enters its winter.

You can watch the films with score and get a copy of SCORES II vinyl here

The Night has a Thousand Eyes/ The Night has a Thousand Years (A/V installation)

A/V installation
3 cathodic-ray tube TVs and 3 speakers.
Laura Agnusdei
28-29/04/2017
Haagse Kunstkring
Den Haag (NL)

All video loops are taken from film noir from 40’s and 50’s. The aim of the installation is to free them from the narrative for empowering their evocative connotations. In this period of the history of cinema, montage was used to creating an illusion of continuity in the narrative so the 3 tv screens are used to disable this mechanism. This work is a celebration of cinema as art that can create many alternative world’s to exist in.