WUNDER DER SCHÖPFUNG (OUR HEAVENLY BODIES)

With live accompaniment by Stephan Moore, Scott Smallwood, and Rives Collins

(Hanns Walter Kornblumm, 1925, 91 minutes, DCP, silent with live score)

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At once an astounding feat of visual imagination and a rigorous explication of celestial mechanics, OUR HEAVENLY BODIES represents an early and lasting pinnacle in the use of cinema as an educational medium. Director Hanns Walter Kornbum’s silent 1925 masterpiece takes viewers on an interstellar tour from the distant corners of the earth to the far reaches of the known universe, offering as comprehensive and accurate representation of astronomical knowledge as cinema could produce. Created as a “kulturfilm”—a didactic form of cinema that emerged in Weimar-era Germany to promote public education and uplift—OUR HEAVENLY BODIES makes dramatic use of animation, multiple exposures, miniatures, and other special effects more commonly seen in the Expressionist films of Kornblum’s contemporaries like F.W. Murnau and Fritz Lang. Stunningly restored by the Munich Film Archive, OUR HEAVENLY BODIES remains an unforgettable feast for the eyes and the mind alike, almost 100 years after its production.

For this screening, Block Cinema will welcome sound artists Stephan Moore (RTVF) and Scott Smallwood to perform a live original score to the complete film; English narration of the film’s intertitles will be performed by Rives B. Collins, Professor of Theatre at Northwestern University.

An initiative of the COOLIDGE CORNER THEATRE, with major support from the ALFRED P. SLOAN FOUNDATION.

About the guests:

Rives Collins was honored with a Charles Deering McCormick Professorship of Teaching Excellence at Northwestern University, where he has taught in the Department of Theatre for the past thirty five years. An acclaimed professional storyteller (ORACLE AWARD, National Storytelling Network), he works with full faith that planting stories in the world is a bit like the work Johnny Appleseed once did. He recently delivered the keynote address at the National Storytelling Conference, celebrating the role of storytelling in the 21st century, and was subsequently honored to reprise the presentation at The Cradle of Creativity conference in Cape Town, South Africa, as an American delegate to the international congress of ASSITEJ. At the Kellogg Graduate School of Management, he teaches business narrative in the Advanced Management Program, asserting that storytelling is a differentiating skill in the 21st century that strengthens leaders, brands, and organizations. He is the co-author with Pamela Cooper of The Power of Story: Teaching Through Storytelling, proclaiming that, “Storytelling is at the heart of everything I do.” In addition, Collins is head of the Theatre for Young Audiences program at Northwestern, and is an active professional stage director, specializing in the development of new work. As an active member and past president of the American Alliance for Theatre and Education, and as a current board member of the Children’s Theatre Foundation of America, he works with an international community of artists, educators, and scholars to champion the cause of drama and theatre in the lives of young people.

Stephan Moore is a sound artist working at the intersection of performance and interactive systems. His creative work is primarily concerned with the creation and perception of sonic environments, encompassing practices in field recording, physical programming, studio production, audio spatialization, loudspeaker construction and interactive software design. These often-collaborative projects manifest as sound installations, sound designs and scores for dance and theater productions, solo and group performance works and improvisations, generative compositions, and recordings. He is a co-founder of the Chicago Laboratory for Electro-Acoustic Theater, which produces monthly concerts of multi-channel audio at Chicago’s Elastic Arts. As a musician and sound engineer, he toured with the Merce Cunningham Dance Company from 2004 to 2010. Moore holds an MFA in Integrated Electronic Arts from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, where he studied with and later toured with Pauline Oliveros. He also has a PhD in Computer Music and Multimedia Composition from Brown University. He joined the Department of Radio, Television and Film at Northwestern University in 2015.

Scott Smallwood is a sound artist, composer, and sound performer who creates works inspired by discovered textures and forms, through a practice of listening, field recording, and sonic improvisation. He designs experimental electronic instruments and software, as well as sound installations and site-specific performance scenarios. Important to his process is exploring the subtleties of sonic texture through gradual transformations of timbre, particularly with sounds that may have originated from specific recordings of objects or spaces. His compositional and improvisational work makes use of space explicitly, and often involves multiple channel environments, found sounds, and non-conventional instrumentation. His work has been presented worldwide, including recent presentations at SARC in Belfast, the Issue Project Room in NYC, the Burning Man Festival in Black Rock City, Nevada, the The Hong Kong Arts Centre, and Caramoor Center for Music and the Arts in Katonah, NY. His recorded work has been released on Autumn Records, Deep Listening, Wowcool, Simple Logic, Static Caravan, and Dead Definition Records.

In addition to his artistic work and research, Smallwood has been an educator in music composition and technology in the US and Canada for over 25 years. He holds music degrees from Seattle Pacific University, Miami University, Peabody Conservatory, and Princeton University, where he also held postdoctoral research associate position, working with the legendary Princeton Laptop Orchestra (PLOrk). From 1997 until 2003, he worked as a studio engineer, faculty member, and technical director in the electronic arts program at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, where he developed a continuing interest in collaboration with artists in other media. He is currently the Director of the Sound Studies Institute at the University of Alberta, where he serves as a Professor of music composition and technology.

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Tags: Block Museum of Art, Evanston, Hanns Walter Kornblumm, Katherine Buse, Northwestern University, Rives Collins, Scott Smallwood, Stephan Moore, WUNDER DER SCHÖPFUNG (OUR HEAVENLY BODIES)