Romance and War/Music and Technology
From David Lean’s Brief Encounter to His Lawrence of Arabia 

Event postponed – date TBC

NYUAD Institute, Conference Center

Open to the public

Supported by Abu Dhabi Festival

Curatorial team: Dale Hudson, Tina Sherwell, Terri Geis, Katia Arfara, Sheetal Majithia.  

This talk explores the connected themes of romance and war in two classic films by David Lean. Both films were highly charged in a post-Second World War context. They were about transports of love and the transportation of warring parties. What did it mean to make a British film for a newly emerging British film industry? How did this industry differ from that in America? How did the films play to an emerging sense of tourism and travel through British colonies? Most particularly, I explore the role of the new post-war technology that brought music into film as an indispensable part. How did the radio, for example, play to the transmission of music and news, or to a broadcast of information that brought the formal movement of film into a parallelism of tracks with the high speed and lines of a train, a plane, and an automobile?

    Speaker

    Lydia Goehr, Fred and Fannie Mack Professor of Humanities, Columbia University

    Moderated by

    Gwyneth Bravo, Assistant Professor of Music, NYUAD; Global Global Network Assistant Professor of Music, NYU