Month / June 2019
Judge José Cabranes: Threats to Academic Freedom Are a ‘National Problem’
Former trustee of Yale, Columbia, and Colgate Universities, the Honorable Jose Cabranes maintain here that American universities must choose now between “academic freedom or civilizational decline.”
The Present Ends Here…
“Every record has been destroyed or falsified, every book rewritten, every picture has been repainted, every statue and street building has been renamed, every date has been altered. And the process is continuing day by day and minute by minute. History has stopped. Nothing exists except an endless present in which the Party is always right.”
George Orwell, 1984
Sheldon Mirowitz: Dreyer’s The Passion Joan of Arc—Everything is infinitely meaningful, miraculous, and beautiful
Sheldon Mirowitz , Berklee Professor of Film Scoring, is the prime composer of the new score for Theodore Dreyer’s The Passion of Joan of Arc (1928) premiered by the Berklee Silent Film Orchestra June 6, 2019 at the Coolidge Corner Theater. Professor Mirowitz developed and directs the Berklee Silent Film Orchestra.
Below are remarks he delivered at the world premiere of the score.
Like all great pieces of art, THE PASSION OF JOAN OF ARC is about everything. Religion and Authority, Power and its abuse, Belief and its costs, Truth and Lies, Women and Men, Innocence and Experience, and the responsibilities of action and human choice – this is the subject matter of the film. And all of this is particularly resonant now, when all of these issues are playing out in our own time.
But before we watch I want to think about a single, small thing. I want to think about framing – in particular the way that Dreyer frames his shots in the film. In many ways, art is fundamentally about framing. In fact, if you put a frame around any thing, if you hang a frame around any space on the wall, we will think that the thing inside the frame is a work of art. Because, of course, it is.
The first thing that you will notice in the film is how austere the frame is in general, how empty it is of things, how EMPTY it is. This is essential to Dreyer’s attempt to move us OUT, out of our world, out of THE world, and into a different sphere. The world he is conjuring is a world which is not anywhere, or that is everywhere. It is world in which everything is very very particular, and therefore very universal, so that the film seems very stylized, while at the same time being very “realistic”. This is quite tricky, and it was essential to our understanding of the film and how to score it. Continue reading →
Story>Script>Storyboard>Animatic in FilmScript Writing: Adaptation
Stage One: Story (Angela Gerst, The Fibonacci Sequence)
Stage Two: Screenplay (Evan Willard, The Fibonacci Sequence)
Stage Three: Storyboard (Evan Willard, The Fibonacci Sequence)
Stage Four: Animatic (Nelly Peshlova, Claudia Thomas, Serena Gabriels, The Fibonacci Sequence)
Summer Afternoons..
One perfect afternoon we spent at Bodiam–my first visit there. It was still the old spell-bound ruin, unrestored, guarded by great trees, and by a network of lanes which baffled the invading charabancs. Tranquil white clouds hung above it in a windless sky, and the silence and solitude were complete as we sat looking across at the crumbling towers, and at their reflection in a moat starred with water-lilies, and danced over by great blue dragon-flies. For a long time no one spoke; then James turned to me and said solemnly: “Summer afternoon–summer afternoon; to me those have always been the two most beautiful words in the English language.”
Edith Wharton, A Backward Glance (1934)
What Are You Reading This Summer?
Marcel Proust, 1906, “On Reading, “(trans. and edited by Jean Autret and William Burford)
N.C. Wyeth (Illustration), Treasure Island by Robert Lewis Stevenson