I must study politics and war, that our sons may have liberty to study mathematics and philosophy. Our sons ought to study mathematics and philosophy, geography, natural history and naval architecture, navigation, commerce and agriculture in order to give their children a right to study painting, poetry, music, architecture, statuary, tapestry and porcelain.
Tag Archives: music
film music
So music has a fiction in that kind of film, but in most films, music is only present to fill in emotions that are lacking. Most films claim to be realistic and the use of music in them is therefore a lie. In real life we never hear music in our lives unless it’s played on the radio or television or a musician is present. But music is used then to make up for lack of tension that the director hasn’t managed to create. I have nothing against musicals—for example, I love the films of Fred Astaire and the films of Hitchcock, but those aren’t realistic films. The use of music in conventional cinema is usually used or almost always used to make up for what’s lacking in emotion because the director has not done his job properly.
Georges Delerue – Shoot The Piano Player: Finale (from Georges Delerue: Music from the Films of Francois Truffaut)
Gene Wilder & Peter Boyle in Young Frankenstein (1974, dir. Mel Brooks)
Fellini – E La Nave Va
Musical moment No. 3 in F minor
From Metamorphosis, Franz Kafka.
“Her face leaning to one side, her glance followed the score carefully and sadly. Gregor crawled forward a little more and put his head as near as possible to the floor to meet her gaze. Could it be that he was only an animal, when music moved him so? It seemed to him to open a way toward that unknown nourishment he so longed for.”
Chris Marker 1921-2012
Chris Marker, the influential French filmmaker whose career spanned six decades, has died, France’s Culture Ministry confirmed Monday. He was 91.
Chris Marker’s death seems to have occurred on the same date as Bergman and Antonioni’s, dead five years ago today.
Chris Markers large body of work includes the 1962 classic "La Jetee" – an award-winning post-apocalyptic movie that’s often ranked among the best time-travel films ever made.
Set in a post-World War III nuclear-devastated Paris, "La Jetee" tells the story of a prisoner sent to the past and future to save the present. The film was one of the first to use sci-fi notions of circular time and has since spawned a myriad of references.
La Jetée (1962) on Vimeo.
Who said that time heals all wounds? It would be better to say that time heals everything – except wounds. With time, the hurt of separation loses its real limits. With time, the desired body will soon disappear, and if the desiring body has already ceased to exist for the other, then what remains is a wound, disembodied.
Sans Soleil
Chris Marker has been credited with inventing the "essay film," a style of documentary popularized by other filmmakers like Jean-Marie Straub, Danielle Huillet, Jean-Luc Godard, Errol Morris and Michael Moore. Despite his long legacy spanning from the early 1950′s, the eccentric filmmaker was still actively working well into his 80′s.
Coming from a fiercely polemical and intellectual political background, Marker experimented with film’s narrative and evocative possibilities in more ways than one. While it is difficult to trace the genealogy of modern cat videos, for instance, his 1990 documentary short "Cat Listening To Music" helped solidify the form.
A noted cat-lover himself, as well as something of a recluse, Marker would rarely allow himself to be interviewed or photographed for the press, offering pictures whenever asked for a photograph.
Otto Dix, Big City, 1927-28
"There is nothing more musical than a sunset."-Claude Debussy
Tonight I rode off into the sunset.
It’s true. Char and I realized we had a golden opportunity to saddle up this late afternoon and enjoy a little January thaw ride. We groomed and round-penned Izzy & Ruger Jac, then tacked up and took off. By the time we got to the other side of our driveway, Good God gave us a glorious sunset. As we turned into the big field, the colors of what I think of as apricot preserves started to transform into rose pink shades. Deep Larkspur and Delphinium purple-y blues prepared to fill the rest of the sky at twilight.
It was exquisite. A gift.
But we had to return, naturally, so at a certain point we picked our way back east. The rest of the barnyard was happy to see us return in time to serve dinner, and our ponies that served us so well were given a special treat.
“Music is a mysterious mathematical process whose elements are part of Infinity. … There is nothing more musical than a sunset. He who feels what he sees will find no more beautiful example of development in all that book which, alas, musicians read but too little — the book of Nature.”
- Claude Debussy, as quoted in The Harvard Biographical Dictionary of Music (1996) by Don Michael Randel
violin hanging on the wall
pablo picasso (1881-1973)
1913
