Contemporary Music and Film
Part of the museum's ongoing film series
"Panorama: Moving Pictures @ the Art Museum." Admission to each film $7, CMA members $5, students and seniors 65 and over $3. Gartner Auditorium, except as noted.
The Death of KlinghofferFriday, October 17, 6:45Saturday, October 18, 1:30(Britain, 2003, color/b&w, 35mm, 120 min.) directed by Penny Woolcock, with Sandford Sylvan, Christopher Maltman, and Yvonne Howard. John Adams's opera about the 1985
Achille Lauro incident-in which four Palestinians hijacked an Italian cruise ship and killed a wheelchair-bound Jewish passenger-is brought to the screen in this provocative film shot aboard a cruise ship at the actual Middle Eastern locations. Documentary excerpts flesh out the story. Adams conducts the London Symphony Orchestra. Cleveland premiere. Screening courtesy of Blast Films and Channel 4; special thanks to Beth Beamer.
NaqoyqatsiFriday, October 24, 7:00(USA, 2002, color, 35mm, 89 min.) directed by Godfrey Reggio.
A hypnotic score by Philip Glass animates this wordless, visually staggering meditation on technology, dehumanization, competition, and conquest. This is the conclusion of Reggio's "Qatsi" trilogy begun with
Koyaanisqatsi in 1983; the title is a Hopi word meaning "war as a way of life."
Michael Nyman's Man with a Movie CameraFriday, November 7, 7:00Sunday, November 9, 1:30(USSR, 1929, b&w, silent, English subtitles, DVD, 68 min.) directed by Dziga Vertov, music by the Michael Nyman Band. British composer Michael Nyman, long associated with filmmaker Peter Greenaway, has composed and recorded a new score for this British Film Institute DVD reissue of a great Soviet silent movie. Conceived as a filmed record of a typical day in the life of Moscow, this ecstatic "city symphony" is full of dizzying camera tricks-from slow-, fast-, and reverse-motion to superimpositions and animation. An avant-garde classic! "Radical, provocative cinema at its wittiest and most enjoyable" -
Time Out Film Guide. Cleveland theatrical premiere. Lecture Hall.
DecasiaFriday, November 14, 7:00(USA, 2002, b&w, 35mm, 70 min.) directed by Bill Morrison, original music by Michael Gordon. This unique compilation of aged, silent film clips on disintegrating nitrate stock bills itself not as a movie, but as "a Michael Gordon symphony." Gordon, a respected contemporary composer, penned the orchestral music that accompanies this haunting, visually stunning meditation on creation, transience, and destruction. "This shower of black-and-white psychedelia is quite beautiful . . . [A] truly original work" -
The New York Times. Preceded at showtime by Morrison's short
The Film of Her (USA/Italy, 1997).