Forget Bogart and Bacall, Astaire and Rogers, Burton and Taylor: cinema’s most enduring relationship is with music. To celebrate this partnership Watershed and St George's are working together to produce Filmic, a brand new festival of film and music.

Running throughout February and March, Filmic’s talks, concerts and films focus on two of the world’s best loved film composers: Ennio Morricone and Michel Legrand.

The festival launches on Thu 9 Feb at St George's with theatrical Aussie quintet the Spaghetti Western Orchestra, an endlessly inventive tribute to Morricone, the musical mind behind Sergio Leone’s operatic films. Featuring a good, bad and ugly array of unlikely instruments including cabbages, cornflakes, inhalers and balloon pumps alongside the more usual suspects, it’s bound to be a spectacle to behold.

Shooting from the hip, over at Watershed we’ve invited Sir Christopher Frayling to select the best Spaghetti Westerns for your viewing pleasure throughout the month, and he’ll be joining us for a special illustrated talk on Sun 5 Feb about the genre’s revolutionary use of music.

In March, shortly after his 80th birthday, the indomitable Michel Legrand, triple Oscar® winner and composer of over two hundred film soundtracks, will be making a special visit to Bristol.

Responsible for such classics as The Umbrellas of Cherbourg, The Thomas Crown Affair, Yentl and The Summer of ’42, as well as his long collaborations with the likes of Barbra Streisand and Miles Davis, Legrand will be at St George's on Sat 31 March for a special concert performance of his best work.

Watershed will be screening a complementary season of his films and just before his St George's gig Legrand will be here for an intimate talk about his life and career, giving a fascinating insight into the genesis of his film scores, his ‘natural instinct to always write sad music’ and how ‘critics are bums’.

One of those so-called ‘bums’, incidentally, will be also be a highlight of Filmic: film critic Mark Kermode’s rocking and rootsy country-billy band the Dodge Brothers will be slapping that bass at St Georges on Thu 8 March.

Mark Cosgrove, Watershed’s Head of Programme, said:

“Would Hitchcock's films work without Bernard Herrmann's music or vice versa? Film and music are inextricably creatively linked, an artistic partnership that defines the uniqueness of the cinematic experience. This collaboration between Watershed and St Georges will explore this rich relationship drawing on our own unique strengths in presenting film and music events to celebrate the creative exchange between filmmakers and musicians.”

Phil Johnson, Contemporary Programmer at St George's, said:

“Film and film music has become such a part of our subconscious that we can imagine ‘surprise’ through crashing chords, ‘tension’ through taut strings, and transitions of mood and setting through dissolves of sound and vision. We can even drift around the city creating our own filmic version of reality, plugged into our iPods or not. And Bristol, of course, is a very filmic place. It’s most famous bands – Massive Attack, Portishead – quote from and refer to the conventions of film music, with the result that the famous ‘Bristol sound’ is, essentially, cinematic. Filmic will explore some of these thoughts – and we’ll be back next year with something completely different.”