Radiohead producer Nigel Godrich and L.A. artist Alex Prager collaborate on new film

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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