Bloomsbury Academic
David Lean: Filmmaker and Philosopher
David Lean: Filmmaker and Philosopher
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David Lean's extraordinary films enact themselves through the sights and sounds of the technologies of modernity: through trains, planes, ships, and automobiles - through the radio and the gramophone.
His musical motifs are known worldwide: Lara's theme in Zhivago; the Colonel Bogey March in Kwai; Estella's motif in Great Expectations; Rosy's motif in Ryan's Daughter; Lawrence's motif for his adventure in Arabia, and of course Rachmaninoff's pounding chords in Brief Encounter. When, however, Lean described the process of cutting pictures as akin to the music flowing through them, what sort of music or musicality had he in mind: a classical or popular music, or a way of using musical form to mix up the meaning and material of his films?
Lydia Goehr's new book tracks the soundscape of Lean's films not only through their musical scores, but also through the radios and gramophones that, at the start of Lean's career, were becoming indispensable household commodities. The book begins and ends with a motif, running from the early domestic films situated in the English home, to the subsequent extensive epics of colony, commonwealth, and empire. The fidelities and infidelities of the domestic world are traced across to the loyalties and betrayals of nations in war and peace - dualities that are bound up in this book with the witty British filmmaker's art itself
Author: Lydia Goehr
Binding Type: Hardcover
Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
Published: 08/07/2025
Series: Philosophical Filmmakers
Pages: 304
Weight: 1.1lbs
Size: 8.50h x 5.50w x 0.69d
ISBN: 9781350429314
His musical motifs are known worldwide: Lara's theme in Zhivago; the Colonel Bogey March in Kwai; Estella's motif in Great Expectations; Rosy's motif in Ryan's Daughter; Lawrence's motif for his adventure in Arabia, and of course Rachmaninoff's pounding chords in Brief Encounter. When, however, Lean described the process of cutting pictures as akin to the music flowing through them, what sort of music or musicality had he in mind: a classical or popular music, or a way of using musical form to mix up the meaning and material of his films?
Lydia Goehr's new book tracks the soundscape of Lean's films not only through their musical scores, but also through the radios and gramophones that, at the start of Lean's career, were becoming indispensable household commodities. The book begins and ends with a motif, running from the early domestic films situated in the English home, to the subsequent extensive epics of colony, commonwealth, and empire. The fidelities and infidelities of the domestic world are traced across to the loyalties and betrayals of nations in war and peace - dualities that are bound up in this book with the witty British filmmaker's art itself
Author: Lydia Goehr
Binding Type: Hardcover
Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
Published: 08/07/2025
Series: Philosophical Filmmakers
Pages: 304
Weight: 1.1lbs
Size: 8.50h x 5.50w x 0.69d
ISBN: 9781350429314
