By John Riley
Among 1929 and 1970, Dmitri Shostakovich wrote virtually forty movie ratings of Soviet movies, from Stalinist cult epics to classical literary variations. His lengthy and unique cinema occupation has hitherto been ignored. Combining research and anecdote, John Riley offers this primary account to ascertain the rankings and their contexts within the movies for which they have been written, the ways that modern occasions formed either motion pictures and rankings, and the way he thought of, built and utilized his movie track.
Read or Download Dmitri Shostakovich: A Life in Film: The Filmmaker's Companion 3 (The KINOfiles Filmmaker's Companions) PDF
Best film & television books
Contemporary Hollywood Stardom
Taking account of the foremost advancements within the box of celebrity reviews, this ebook explores the political economic system of stardom, questions of functionality, the influence on stardom of convergence among the movie and different relaxation industries, and the function of audiences. The publication combines a evaluate of present traits with case stories of person stars permitting scholars and researchers to widen their wisdom of the sphere and discover new methods of coming near near the megastar phenomenon.
Zasu Pitts: The Life and Career
In general remembered for her gestures, expressive eyes, and physique language at the display, ZaSu Pitts used to be an strange actress (and additionally an outstanding cook dinner: she frequently gave home made chocolates to her coworkers, and her choice of sweet recipes used to be released posthumously). This affectionate research of either her inner most existence off-screen and her public character information how the multi-talented actress develop into certainly one of filmdom's favourite comediennes and personality gamers.
Video and Filmmaking as Psychotherapy: Research and Practice
Whereas movie and video has lengthy been used inside of mental perform, researchers and practitioners have simply simply started to discover the advantages of movie and video creation as treatment. This quantity describes a burgeoning region of psychotherapy which employs the artwork of filmmaking and electronic storytelling as a way of therapeutic sufferers of trauma and abuse.
- A Companion to the War Film
- Politics and Politicians in American Film
- Disruptive Feminisms: Raced, Gendered, and Classed Bodies in Film
- 'All Quiet On the Western Front': The Story of a Film (British Film Guides)
- The Language and Style of Film Criticism
- Presidents in the Movies: American History and Politics on Screen (The Evolving American Presidency)
Extra resources for Dmitri Shostakovich: A Life in Film: The Filmmaker's Companion 3 (The KINOfiles Filmmaker's Companions)
Example text
41 Nevertheless Shostakovich hedged his bets by announcing a ‘Lenin Symphony’ though nothing came of it. Whether or not this was a serious proposal, it was a period of false starts as he also considered an opera based on Ilf and Petrov’s Twelve Chairs and, in a bout of Lermontov-mania, operatic versions of A Hero of Our Times and Masquerade, and a ballet-biography of the poet. Friends [Druz’ia] Arnshtam’s next production was Friends, which centred on the relationship between the Ossetians and the Ingush in 1916 – a potentially tricky subject, since Stalin was Ossetian, though he came from a different part of the region.
An earlier attack is shown only by its effect – bullets raking a lake – but this is not just a technical innovation; it sets up the idea of an invisible enemy. The final scenes intensify this as Shostakovich’s grim music struggles for glory but is ultimately ambiguous, while we see a long, static shot of the sky, using New Babylon’s ‘principle of contrast’ – the threat is present but unseen. A gunshot is heard. Only now do we see the ‘enemy’, which turns out to be the returning Red Army, heralded by a weird noise that sounds like an orchestral decrescendo played backwards.
There is a stand-off between the militia and the workers. The eerie silence is broken when Maxim’s drunken friend staggers into the street playing ‘Whirling and Twirling’ on an accordion, but the time for the happy-go-lucky proletarian is past and it is an ironically inappropriate song and instrument for this moment of intense seriousness before a pitched battle breaks out. Shostakovich’s use of the iconic ‘You Fell as a Victim’ stretches a long way before and after this. In 1917 he, his mother and his Revolutionary aunt Nadezhda were among the many mourners who went to Petrograd’s Field of Mars to bury 184 victims of the February Revolution.