Romance and War/Music and Technology: from David Lean’s Brief Encounter to his Lawrence of Arabia

This talk explores the connected themes of romance and war in two of David Lean’s classics. Both films were about “transports of love and the transportation of warring parties”, both comment on the post-Second World War context. 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, Lydia Goehr,  Professor of Humanities at Columbia University, wants to 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?

The talk, in NYUAD’s ‘Distinguished Lecture in Music Studies’ series, is moderated by Gwyneth Bravo, Assistant Professor of Music at NYUAD.