Events / Talking Pictures

Each season takes a specific theme or personality from the world of cinema. The format is a brief spoken introduction based on a prepared handout, the screening of the film, and an informal follow-up discussion. Screenings are usually in English.

Membership €5, membership is free for British Institute students and library members. Tickets cost €5, reduced price for 60+ years and students €2.50.
* Note: starting time for all movies is 8.00 pm

Bernard Herrmann 1911-1975

Music on the screen can seek out and intensify the inner thoughts of the characters. It can invest a scene with terror, grandeur, gaiety or misery… It often lifts mere dialogue into the realms of poetry… it is the communicating link between screen and audience, reaching out and enveloping all into one single experience. - Bernard Herrmann

Why do films have music? What constitutes good film music? What are the narrative or emotive functions of music in films? To what extent is music in films explicitly heard by the moviegoer, and even if it is heard subliminally, what are the implications of the viewer attending or not attending to a film’s music? Stravinsky asked ‘Who likes film music? Who understands it? Who needs it?’ No name stands out more in the annals of film music history than that of Bernard Herrmann (1911-1975), often described as Hitchcock’s maestro (for his most celebrated work in that director’s films). But Herrmann’s film compositions have enriched the movies of Hollywood over a much wider range, beginning with his debut in Orson Welles’s Citizen Kane – until recently the ‘greatest film ever made’ – and ending with the memorable score for Martin Scorsese’s Taxi Driver.

The critic William K. Zinsser declared that film music ‘should be heard but not noticed. It must induce certain emotions in those watching the film, but never intrude upon their consciousness. If the composer does his job well, his music… will be remembered only by a grateful producer or director and by the composer himself.’ Surely a focus on the music of Bernard Herrmann will refute this assertion. David Thomson says ‘It is in the nature of movies to be melodramatic. They need just you and the night and the music, and there was music long before there were soundtracks. There is an extraordinary skill or trick in writing snatches of music that enhance the mood and life of a film. And there is art in making music a raft on which the whole movie may sail away.’ He goes on to describe Herrmann as ‘great and indispensable’…, ‘the best’, and identifies precisely his strengths as probably the greatest ‘auteur’ film composer: ‘He knew how to make music that came not just from the action we are seeing or the characters, not just from the heart of a film or the incoherent dream of its director, but from the unique marriage of a particular film and the large medium. Herrmann knew how lovely the dark should be, and he was at his best in rites of dismay, dark dreams, introspection, and the gloomy romance of loneliness.’

So, climb on board the raft and sail away with a selection of movies showcasing Herrmann’s talents, from Citizen Kane (1941), the lush melodrama of Jane Eyre (1943), the innovative futuristic soundtrack of The Day The Earth Stood Still (1951), the four Hitchcock (and Herrmann) masterpieces, The Man Who Knew Too Much (1956) – in which Herrmann appears as conductor – Vertigo (1958) – as of 2012 ‘the greatest film ever made’ – North By Northwest (1959) and the all-time classic Psycho (1960). Cape Fear (1962) features music in a slightly different key, as does Obsession (1976) – partly filmed in Florence. The season ends with Herrmann’s last score, for Taxi Driver (1976), described by Thomson as ‘universally cinematic: it speaks to sitting in the dark, full of dread and desire, watching…’

In a good film score one is not aware whether the music is making the film go forward or whether the film is pushing the music forward. - Bernard Herrmann

Wednesday, June 19, 2013. 20.00

Film: Taxi Driver

(1976) with Robert De Niro, Jodie Foster, Cybill Shepherd

Past events

Wednesday, June 12, 2013. 20.00

Events / Talking Pictures

Each season takes a specific theme or personality from the world of cinema. The format is a brief spoken introduction based on a prepared handout, the screening of the film, and an informal follow-up discussion. Screenings are usually in English.

Past events

The British Institute of Florence