The Black Pirate (1926)

A new series of silent-era classics arrives at The Pound Arts Centre, all accompanied by live piano score.

Note: Pianist John Sweeney will be standing in for our initially advertised performer Meg Morley.

A tale of adventure on the high seas. An aristocrat joins a pirate crew in order to avenge the death of his father and, along the way, rescues a princess. This is the first major feature film to be made entirely in Technicolor and contains one of the silent screen’s most spectacular stunts. Starring the legendary Douglas Fairbanks.

John Sweeney

John Sweeney has played for silent film since 1990, starting at Riverside Studios in London and subsequently playing at many venues in Britain including the National Film Theatre, the Barbican Cinema, Broadway in Nottingham, the Imperial War Museum, and Watershed in Bristol. He has played for the British Silent Cinema Festival since its inception and has since 2000 been a regular pianist at the Giornate del Cinema Muto in Pordenone, Italy. He is a regular performer at the Slapstick Festival of silent comedy in Bristol, and has also played at other festivals in Austria, Germany, Italy, and Slovenia. He has recorded DVDs for the BFI ('Wonderful London', parts of 'Pioneers and Primitives') and also Cineteca di Bologna ('Albert Capellani') and Edition Filmmuseum ('Crazy Cinématographe') as well as recording a soundtrack for Hitchcock's 'Downhill' for broadcast on Sky TV. He has played the Hitchcock silents at the Shanghai International Film Festival, and in Istanbul, Hong Kong, Moscow, Taiwan and Kazakhstan . He is one of the founders of the Kennington Bioscope (http://www.kenningtonbioscope.com), doing regular screenings of neglected silent films at the Cinema Museum London with live music. He has recently written a score for the DVD release of Lois Weber’s 1916 film The Dumb Girl of Portici, and also recorded a piano score for A Couple of Down and Outs and the restoration of Manolescu . In 2018 he composed and performed a score for the London Film Festival Archive Gala, The Great Victorian Picture Show, which he
subsequently performed at MOMA in New York and at the CInema Ritrovato festival in Italy, where he is a regular performer. Recently he has performed at festivals in Istanbul, Zürich, Tromso, Weimar, Vilnius, Berlin, Cluj and Tallinn, as well as round the UK, and ha composed a score for Rose von Stambul, premiering at the 2025 Cinema Ritrovato festival.