International film-music scholar Gillian B. Anderson will discuss the musical score of D.W. Griffith’s Way Down East in a public talk at 11 a.m. Friday (Jan. 28) in Room 2520, Frieze Building.
The title of Anderson’s lecture is “Lillian on the Rocks or Ice in the Proper Position: Music and Image in D.W. Griffith’s Way Down East.”
Sponsored by the Program in Film and Video Studies, Anderson’s talk is a prelude to the screening of Griffith’s silent-era film at 7 p.m. Sunday (Jan. 30) at the Michigan Theater.
Anderson, music librarian at the Library of Congress, will conduct the Michigan Symphonieta in a live musical accompaniment of the movie.
“To see this film with a full symphony orchestra playing the original score is to feel as if one were witnessing film history,” says Ira Konigsberg, director of the Program in Film and Video Studies. “It’s as if one were actually leaping back in time to the original milestone performance.”
The 1920 box-office hit stars Lillian Gish as an innocent country girl who is seduced and abandoned by a city slicker, then saved by a kindly farmer. A famous scene in which Gish is trapped on an ice floe heading toward an ominous waterfall is referred to in the title of Anderson’s talk.
This is the third year that Anderson and the Michigan Symphonieta have appeared at the Michigan Theater, previously accompanying Douglas Fairbank’s Thief of Bagdad and Griffith’s Intolerance.
Movie tickets, $7–$19, are available at the Michigan Theater box office, 668-8397. For more information on Anderson’s talk, call 764-0147.
