Film Score by PhD Candidate in Literary Translation Studies performed at the NZ International Film Festival
The Paramount Theatre on Courtenay Place in Wellington was packed on the afternoon of 7 August for the screening of a recently restored version of E A Dupont’s 1925 silent film Variety about a troupe of trapeze artists in interwar Berlin.
The screening of this classic of Weimar-era cinema was a special feature of the New Zealand International Film Festival (NZIFF). What made it especially exciting was the performance by a live chamber orchestra of the new musical score for the film by School of Languages and Cultures PhD Candidate in literary Translation Studies, Johannes Contag.
Johannes is well known in the Wellington music scene and his score for Variety, for which he received sponsorship from the Goethe-Insitut, is his second silent film score following The Crowd (1929), which premiered at the NZIFF in 2013.
Johannes has recently embarked upon a PhD in Literary Translation Studies in the School of Languages and Cultures. The centrepiece of his research project will be a new translation of the short stories of early 19th-century writer Heinrich von Kleist. Johannes’s aim is to restore Kleist’s syntactic idiosyncrasies for English-language readers.
For further details, see the NZIFF webpage: http://www.nziff.co.nz/2016/wellington/variety/.