Chichester Cinema at New Park
MAHLER AND THE MOVING IMAGE: TRUTH OR TRAVESTY?
An illustrated talk by Jeremy Barnham
When we think about Mahler and film, ‘Death in Venice’ usually first comes to mind. But in fact Mahler’s music has been used in over 130 films and television programmes by directors as diverse as Fassbinder, Scorsese and Jarmusch. Some of these films pay homage, either seriously or humorously, to the Visconti model, some even pre-date ‘Death in Venice’, (eg The Honeymoon Killers) while others use Mahler in completely different ways, with varying degrees of regard for the composer’s historical context and traditional reception. But all seem to share an awareness of the emotional and communicative power of Mahler’s music, and its eminent suitability for use in scoring the moving image. This talk explores a range of examples of the use of Mahler on screen, from the bizarre to the breathtaking, and asks whether the music is in danger of becoming ‘typecast’ or whether its re-working in film contexts contributes new, deeper meanings to our understanding of both the film text and the composer’s creative output.
Jeremy Barham is Senior Lecturer in Music at the University of Surrey. He has published widely on Mahler (for example, Perspectives on Gustav Mahler, 2005, and The Cambridge Companion to Mahler, 2007), and on screen music, with articles on the use of pre-existent music in film (Music and the Moving Image (Chicago, 2010), and 19th-Century Music (2011)).