Sat, Nov 28 / 7 pm
Sun, Nov 29 / 3 pm
Directed by Steven M. Martin
1994, USA, 83 min
A special screening for the upcoming Winnipeg Symphony Orchestra’s New Music Festival (Jan 23-29, 2016), it is presented to mark the upcoming performance of Icarus (which incorporates a theremin) by Russian/American female composer Lera Auerbach who will be performing on Wed, Jan 27, 2016 at the New Music Festival.
You’ve heard the instrument, even if you don’t know its name. The theremin – the first electronic instrument – makes that spooky sound you’ve heard in 1950s horror and sci-fi films (The Day the Earth Stood Still) and in The Beach Boys’ “Good Vibrations”. Astoundingly, the other-worldly cry is created not by touching the theremin (essentially a black box of tubes with two antennae), but by manipulating the magnetic field in the air around the instrument. The film offers an account of the instrument and its creator, Leon Theremin, a Russian inventor who immigrated early in the century and started the electronic music age in 1920 with the instrument that bears his name. It follows his life, including being imprisoned in a Soviet gulag, and the influence of his instrument, which came to define the sound of eerie in 20th Century movies, and influenced popular music as it searched for and celebrated electronic music in the 1960s.
Plays with:
The Highwater Trilogy / Dir. Bill Morrison, 2006, USA, 31 min / Examining our relationship to the threat of natural disaster by combining rare archival footage from the 1920s of icebergs, hurricanes, and footage of flooded cities. The devastating imagery is accompanied by David Lang’s haunting soundtrack (who will be composer-in-residence with several of his works being performed at the Winnipeg New Music Festival in 2016).
Sponsored by the Winnipeg Symphony Orchestra
