Reciprocal references and borrowings between theater and film are myriad, since both articulate stories, images, spaces and characters. Apart from sharing a space where an audience sits, work in the two forms brings together poetic sources and literary genres, the techniques of playwriting and the diversity of the visual arts, leading to an infinite play of reflections.

The thresholds of the stage curtain and the screen are filled with light and shadows in the search for themes, concepts and accomplices to take forward reflections and representations of reality that show us ways of knowing it, accepting it and changing it.

Program

Shigeru Umebayashi in the UNAM

On April 12, 2012 an extraordinary session of the Bergman Chair was held, focusing on musical composition for the cinema. The special guest was the Japanese composer Shigeru Umebayashi, accompanied by the Mexican composer Leoncio Lara and Everardo Gout, director of the film Días de Gracia (Mexico, 2012), the soundtrack of which contains work by Umebayashi, as well as Nick Cave, Warren Ellis and Atticus Ross.
His collaboration on Gout’s film was thanks to the persistence of the producers and the openness of the musician, who agreed to work on the project after seeing sequences interpreted by Dolores Heredia. A making of about the music for the film shows the work of the director and his team with the various composers of the soundtrack in studios located in cities around the world.

Umebayashi’s experience with rock music and his admiration for the Beatles provided him with the grounding to interpret action movies through different languages, and later to find a composition method that follows his instincts, and which leads him inside the images. He defines the instruments and allows the melodies to flourish, starting with the piano, and then with each instrument assigned to a different character, thereby preserving an essence that definitively places the music in the right sequence. It is a question of balance and silences.

To gain inspiration he seeks to surround himself with colleagues who benefit his creativity. In response to Leoncio Lara’s question on his personal style, he accepted that his melodies bear an imprint he feels proud of as a sign of identity. Even if he were to work with mariachis, he agreed that they would always be marked by a Japanese touch.

As well as recounting how he arrived at an understanding with Everardo Gout and how they reached decisions on the music to underline the emotional charge of the story, the composer gave details of his friendship and work with Wong Kar-Wai and revealed working techniques and situations to define the issues that have achieved popularity worldwide. Umebayashi is far from complacent, and with the simplicity and profundity of a sensei, claims that the best films are those that require no music at all.

The UNAM Ingmar Bergman Chair in Film and Theater is an initiative of the National Autonomous University of Mexico, promoted by the Department of Cultural Affairs with the collaboration of the Zacatecas State Government and the Mexican Institute of Cinematography. The aim of this Chair is to create a space to advance academic reflection and learning that enhances and broadens the culture of cinema and theater.