Off-Screen: Further Readings

Noted musicologist and orchestra conductor Gillian B. Anderson discusses several misconceptions surrounding the term “silent cinema”—in fact, films were never silent. Anderson has spent many years restoring the original orchestral scores that were written to accompany pre-1929 classic films. She has conducted these scores with their films at concert halls, film festivals, museums, and other venues around the world. Several of her reconstructed scores are available on DVD. Her publications include Music for Silent Films 1894-1929: A Guide and Composing for the Cinema: The Theory and Praxis of Music in Film by Ennio Morricone and Sergio Miceli, for which she served as translator. She is the co-editor of the online journal, Music and the Moving Image.

The film series Affinities, or The Weight of Cinema was cocurated and presented in person by filmmaker Kevin Jerome Everson and writer Greg de Cuir Jr. at the National Gallery of Art,  January 2018. Eight programs of international works of film and video art were arranged along various thematic lines that corresponded to the cocurators’ shared interests and concerns.

Vanguard European cinema and American art blossomed concurrently during the 1960s. The creative strategies and the issues these filmmakers and artists grappled with, and reacted to, are many times isomorphic and convergent.

Three films by the late Polish director Wojciech Jerzy Has (1925-2000)—How to Be Loved, The Saragossa Manuscript, and The Hourglass Sanatorium—appear unrelated in terms of their genre, setting, and character. Yet, the cinematic realities created in those films reveal broad underpinning qualities common to the three works.

A literary and cultural giant whose influence can be seen in many aspects of our rapidly evolving media, Umberto Eco (1932 – 2016) produced a critical oeuvre that remains important to the study of cinema. Throughout decades of interdisciplinary writing, Eco seamlessly moved between academic work, semiotic analysis, acclaimed novels, and more informal cultural commentary, leaving indelible marks on each area.

This short text written by Babette Mangolte on the occasion of her 2016 film series, tries to bridge the gap between the original intent of films conceptualized in the 1970s or the 1990s with what can be seen in those same films today.

The “national cinemas” of the countries of the former Eastern Bloc are hardly unknown to film lovers elsewhere in the world. Despite Cold War–era cultural divisions and conflicts, a number of filmmakers from Poland, Hungary, and the former USSR, Czechoslovakia, and Yugoslavia received international acclaim from the 1950s through the 1980s and have continued to receive it since 1989.