Where Does the Music Come From?

Gain a new perspective on film, music, and the creative process in this special evening with Neil Brand, one of the best-known silent film accompanists working today. Brand will lead the audience through the creation of an improvised score, playing piano accompaniment to excerpts from Pandora's Box (G. W. Pabst, 1929), South (Frank Hurley, 1919), and Menschen am Sonntag (People on Sunday, Robert Siodmak, 1930)-as well as one clip from the PFA Collection that will be a surprise to both the audience and Brand himself-and discussing ideas of emotional color and narrative structure in a presentation that promises to be funny, self-revealing, and provocative. This talk is adapted from a lecture first delivered at the Pordenone Silent Film Festival in memory of New Zealand's Jonathan Dennis, a tireless archivist, champion of silent film, and dear friend of PFA who passed away in 2002.

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