Behind The Scenes: The Art And Craft Of Cinema Composer Mark Isham

Description

Behind The Scenes: The Art And Craft Of Cinema
Composer Mark Isham

An extraordinarily prolific composer, Mark Isham has written scores for over one hundred feature films. After getting his musician’s chops down in San Francisco’s eclectic jazz and rock scene, particularly with the legendary prog-rock Group 87, Isham scored his first film, Carroll Ballard’s Never Cry Wolf, in 1983. Many films followed that displayed Isham’s diversity as a composer, ranging from the rustic orchestral arrangements in A River Runs Through It (1992), through the synth-driven ethereal waves in Crash (2004), to the cool, noir jazz of The Black Dahlia (2006). For his efforts as a film composer and a performing artist, Isham has garnered Grammys, an Oscar nomination, an Emmy, and ASCAP’s Henry Mancini Award for Lifetime Achievement.

Composer Isham belongs to a century-old tradition: as early as 1899, films were circulated with original music scores. This “special music” was often the sign of a film’s stature: an important film deserved outstanding and intentional music. With the advent of the sound motion picture, music scores grew from compositions that merely recalled popular styles to highly original tracks serving the aims of the accompanying story. Yet it would be wrong to think that a musical score endures on originality alone. The relationship between the director’s intentions—regarding the pace and temperament of a film—and the score’s intrinsic mood and tempo is one of infinite subtlety and arrangement.

Join composer Mark Isham for some sound advice.

Steve Seid, Video Curator

Saturday / 2.4.12
7:30
Mark Isham on Film Scoring

A performing artist as well as composer, Mark Isham talks about his three decades of musical scoring for cinema, addressing how a composer brings emotional texture and added drama to a film’s final reception and how a score is shaped to fall within the form of a finished film. Isham concludes his talk with an introduction to his creative participation in A River Runs Through It, which screens immediately after the talk at 8:45.

Followed by:
A River Runs Through It
Robert Redford (U.S., 1992)

Set in rural Montana, A River Runs Though It recounts the uneasy reunion of two brothers, the studious Norman (Craig Sheffer) and the impetuous Paul (Brad Pitt). As the brothers struggle to define themselves under the harsh gaze of their stern minister father (Tom Skerritt), they find connection in their shared rapturous affection for fly-fishing—it is in the silken flow of the river that they commune with a kind of prelapsarian grace. The brilliant lensing of the great French cinematographer Philippe Rousselot finds its counterpoint in Isham’s airy but rustic melodies that bob to the surface with blissful lightness. Steve Seid

Written by Richard Friedenberg, based on the novel by Norman Maclean. Photographed by Philippe Rousselot. Music by Mark Isham. With Craig Sheffer, Brad Pitt, Tom Skerritt, Brenda Blethyn. (123 mins, Color, 35mm, From Sony Pictures)

Behind the Scenes is a collaboration between BAM/PFA and the San Francisco Film Society. Major support has been provided by the National Endowment for the Arts. Behind the Scenes is made possible in part by the continued support of the BAM/PFA Trustees.

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http://bampfa.berkeley.edu/filmseries

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