- When:
- Tuesday, September 30, 2003, 7:00pm - 10:00pm
- Description:
- The lecture, featuring Neil Brand accompanying himself on piano and illustrated with clips from Pandora's Box, South, Menschen Am Sonntag, and one mystery clip not revealed to Brand beforehand, is an attempt to explain what takes place when he improvises a score to a silent film. Drawing on his background as a writer, actor and composer, Brand takes the audience through ideas of emotional color, narrative structures, consensus and attitude, attempting to define that which is universal in the movies and so explain what the music is attempting to "say". Brand's talk is funny, self-revealing and provocative, as well as informative, and while aimed at all audiences, will be of particularly great interest to film, theater and music students. Neil Brand has been accompanying silent films for over 17 years, regularly at the NFT on London's south bank and throughout the UK, and increasingly at film festivals and special events throughout the world, including Australia, New Zealand (twice), America, Israel, Sweden, France, Germany, Ireland, Luxembourg, and the Pordenone, Bologna and Bergamo festivals in Italy. Training originally as an actor, he has made his name as a writer/performer/composer, scoring BFI video releases of such films as South (Shackleton's Journey to the South Pole), The Ring by Alfred Hitchcock (also touring live with a swing band), the great lost film The Life and Times of David Lloyd George (for which he performed the world premiere in 1996 and subsequently recorded his acclaimed score) and Early Cinema, avant-garde cinema and Russian pre-Soviet cinema.
- Co-sponsored by Committee on Cinema and Media Studies
Where Does The Music Come From?
Lecture by Neil Brand
