Future of Arab World’s Film Heritage also to be examined.
The 2009 Middle East International Film Festival in Abu Dhabi today announced four more in its slate of Special Programs. A series of three Master Classes devoted to celebrated film composers will give rare insight into their creative process, while a fourth Master Class will focus on the role of film archives in the modern world, with particular attention given to the fact that out of 149 such institutions throughout the world, the entire Arab world has only four.
All the programs will be offered at 11am on the days noted below, in the MEIFF Festival Tent on the main terrace behind the Emirates Palace Hotel. The Festival Tent is open daily to the public throughout the festival from noon to 2am.
Composer-Performers Sussan Deyhim and Richard Horowitz will talk about how they compose for films, and how their film scores have been influenced by Middle Eastern music. Tehran-born Deyhim is a dancer, composer and vocal artist whose work has appeared on soundtracks including Martin Scorsese’s The Last Temptation of Christ; Horowitz, who studied Middle Eastern flute and music theory during a 12-year sojourn is perhaps best known for his soundtrack for Bernardo Bertolucci’s The Sheltering Sky. Their presentation carries the provocative title, “THE COSMIC SYMPHONY: HOW TO USE THE ORIGINAL VIBRATIONS FROM THE BIG BANG IN FILM SCORING”.
Composer, conductor and musician David Amram is perhaps best known for his film scores for Robert Frank and Alfred Leslie’s classic underground film Pull My Daisy (1959) as well as Splendor in the Grass (Elia Kazan, 1961) and the original version of The Manchurian Candidate (John Frankenheimer, 1962). He has recently composed a score which fuses classical and jazz music for T.C. McLuhan’s The Frontier Gandhi, premiering in MEIFF’s documentary competition section. His talk will include a mini-concert with performances on the “dumbek” (a Middle Eastern ‘chalice drum’), shenai (Indian woodwind) and various Middle Eastern flutes. His presentation is entitled, “FROM NEW ORLEANS JAZZ TO THE EGYPTIAN HIJAZ”.
Silent film accompanist Neil Brand, who will provide live keyboard accompaniment for MEIFF’s “Laugh Till It Hurts” program of silent comedies on October 16, will offer a master class the previous day entitled, “THE SILENT PIANIST SPEAKS” in which he will illustrate the art of improvising for silent films, which he’s been doing for over 25 years. Having originally trained as an actor, Brand’s skill and charisma as a performer have been widely noted, and his show leaves viewers in far from silent awe at the art of the great filmmakers of the silent era and the magic of the accompanists who breathed life and sound into their work. Brand’s work was described by the UK’s Guardian newspaper as ‘elevating silent movies from slapstick to subtle ballet’
A fourth MEIFF master class will be presented by Paolo Cherchi Usai, author, film historian, and director of the Silent Film Festival in Pordenone, Italy. His talk, “PRESERVING THE FILM HERITAGE OF THE ARAB WORLD” will lay out the challenges faced in the attempt to preserve the moving images of the preceding century. Over 80% of the films made before 1930 no longer exist, and although 149 film archives now exist throughout the world dedicated to collecting and archiving motion pictures, only four of them are in the Arab world.
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