The Academy-Award-nominated film score by Alex North for Elia Kazan's A Streetcar Named Desire (1951) is credited with opening up jazz scoring to a new generation of composers, including Elmer Bernstein, Duke Ellington, Jerry Goldsmith, Bernard Herrmann, Quincy Jones, Lalo Schifrin, and Henry Mancini. Significantly, this development coincided with the breakup of the Hollywood studio system that began in 1948 and with the commercial and artistic success of independent film directors like John Cassavetes, Shirley Clarke, and Robert Frank, who experimented not only with dramatic themes and film genres, but also with more improvisational forms of jazz like bop, free jazz, and Afro-Cuban jazz.
This was equally true of New Wave filmmakers in the 1950s and 1960s, such as Bernardo Bertolucci, Jean-Luc Godard, Joseph Losey, Louis Malle, Roman Polanski, Jerzy Skolimowski, and Roger Vadim, who enlisted musicians Miles Davis, Gato Barbieri, Dizzy Gillespie, Krzysztof Komeda, Thelonious Monk, and others to compose jazz scores that would reinforce or provide a counterpoint to their disjointed imagery. These collaborations, and more recent ones like those between Spike Lee and Terence Blanchard, Clint Eastwood and Lennie Niehaus, and David Cronenberg with composers Ornette Coleman and Howard Shore, are featured in the film retrospective.
The gallery exhibition will present some of the finest original film posters, album covers, moving-image clips and movie trailers, animation art, and other printed materials relating to jazz and cinema. The concert series will feature contemporary musicians performing some of the original jazz soundtracks featured in the film program.
Organized by Joshua Siegel, Assistant Curator, Department of Film, The Museum of Modern Art. The gallery exhibition is organized by Ronald S. Magliozzi, Assistant Curator, Department of Film, The Museum of Modern Art, and Joshua Siegel. The exhibition is supported by the Nicholas Martini Foundation.
For more information contact All About Jazz.
