Virgil Thomson

Sound

November 25, 1896 (92 years)

† September 30, 1989

Biography

Virgil Thomson (November 25, 1896 – September 30, 1989) was an American composer and critic. He was instrumental in the development of the "American Sound" in classical music. He has been described as a modernist, a neoromantic, a neoclassicist, and a composer of "an Olympian blend of humanity and detachment" whose "expressive voice was always carefully muted" until his late opera Lord Byron which, in contrast to all his previous work, exhibited an emotional content that rises to "moments of rea…

Filmography

6.0

The Goddess

A woman adored by the people around her ultimately struggles to be happy with herself.

8.0

King Lear

In this abridged television production, Lear vows revenge against his conniving daughters after they try to take swift control of his power.

5.7

The River

This short Depression-era documentary describes the importance of the Mississippi River to the United States and laments the environmental destruction committed in the name of progress, particularly farming and timber practices and their impact on impoverished farmers.

5.9

The Plow That Broke the Plains

A documentary about what happened to the Great Plains of the United States and Canada when uncontrolled farming destroyed the soil and led to the Dust Bowl.

6.3

Louisiana Story

The idyllic life of a young Cajun boy and his pet raccoon is disrupted when the tranquility of the bayou is broken by an oil well drilling near his home.

6.6

The Spanish Earth

Joris Ivens’s advocacy documentary for the Republican cause intercuts a besieged Madrid with a nearby village digging an irrigation canal, linking the war to bread, land, and survival. Produced by the writers’ collective Contemporary Historians, edited by Helen van Dongen, scored by Marc Blitzstein, and narrated in its U.S. version by Ernest Hemingway (after an initial Orson Welles track), it blends frontline reportage with persuasion against Franco’s forces and their German–Italian backers.

N/A

Power Among Men

Four episodes on the theme of human hope and survival set in Santambrogio, Italy; Fermathe, Haiti; British Columbia and Kjeller in Norway.

8.0

Tuesday in November

A propaganda short about the 1944 United States presidential election, produced by the Office of War information, for overseas distribution. It is meant to explain how the democratic process in America works. Preserved by the Academy Film Archive in 2007.

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