Event Details
Date & Time:
Thu February 13, 2020
7 PM
Location:
The Block Museum of Art
40 Arts Circle Drive
Evanston, IL 60208
Audience:
Free and Open to the public
Details:
Electro-Pythagoras (a portrait of Martin Bartlett)
(Luke Fowler, 2017, UK/Canada, 35mm, 45 min)
British film artist Luke Fowler lends his unmatched gift for portraiture to this sensitive, curious exploration of electronic music composer Martin Bartlett. Electro-Pythagoras turns the conventions of biographical documentary on their head, weaving personal photographs, letters, notes, rare performances, and new 16mm footage into a dense, evocative fugue. Sound artist Ernst Karel’s soundtrack is every bit as adventurous, a fitting tribute to the film’s defiantly queer, uncompromising subject. Following the screening, Karel will perform a quadrophonic sound composition, drawing on recordings from Bartlett’s archives.
In Person: Sound designer Ernst Karel
Co-presented by Block Cinema with the MFA in Documentary Media at Northwestern, the MA in Sound Arts and Industries, the Department of Performance Studies, and CHIRP Radio 107.1 FM.
PART OF THE BLOCK CINEMA SERIES:
SONIC SIGNATURE: APPROACHES TO FILM SOUND
Cinematography captures a picture of the world, but film sound creates a world. These two films– one, an experimental biography of a pioneer of experimental music, the other, an invaluable primer on the history of sonic innovation in cinema–offer vastly different understandings of the possibilities of the soundtrack. Both, however, reveal how innovative spirits and changes in technology echo across generations of sound artists working with the moving image.
Contact The Block Museum of Art for more information: (847) 491-4000 or email us at block-museum@northwestern.edu