Puffs of Smoke is a live musical performance featuring a program of short silent films, mostly from before 1920, accompanied by live music composed and performed by Phillip Johnston. Interspersed with these films are short narratives that together create a fantasia exploring the little-known history of the Australian silent film era.

These films combine a variety of techniques, subjects and styles, including dramatised poems, newsreel footage, fragments of bushranger melodramas, advertisements and short documentaries. The program also includes magic lantern slides from the Salvation Army’s proto-multimedia event Soldiers of the Cross (1900).

This performance includes short films and other excerpts from the NFSA collection.