Word: french
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...even as Obama spoke in the Locarno Room, a grand, gilded space in the Foreign and Commonwealth Office that was designed at the height of Britain's colonial powers, plans were afoot to challenge a stage-managed G-20 consensus. Demonstrators took to the streets, and French President Nicolas Sarkozy and German Chancellor Angela Merkel sent out invitations to their own joint London press conference, to signal their determination to resist any Anglo-American pressure for additional fiscal stimulus and to highlight their demands for stricter financial regulation. They are not the only G-20 leaders to arrive in London...
...Scalding sun; fields of snow. Maurice Jarre created memorable anthems for these two extremes in his first films for David Lean: the 1962 Lawrence of Arabia and the 1965 Doctor Zhivago. The French composer, who died Sunday in Los Angeles at 84, after a losing bout with cancer, wrote the scores for more than 150 features, but he'll always be associated with Lean, as much as Bernard Herrmann is with Alfred Hitchcock or John Williams with Steven Spielberg. The director devises the images; the composer gives them emotional heft. Both the pictures and their accompanying sounds lodge indelibly...
...Born in Lyon in 1924, Jarre was no child prodigy; he was in his late teens before he decided to study music. In Paris after the war he hooked up with two exceptional impresarios of French theater: Jean-Louis Barrault and Jean Vilar. For Vilar he wrote incidental music for modern readings of classical plays. In 1951, Georges Franju, a director of spare, uncompromising documentaries, hired Jarre to score his film essay on wounded veterans, the 1951 Hôtel des Invalides. In the next dozen years they would collaborate on two more shorts and five sepulchral features, including Head...
...Jarre had been commuting between French films and Hollywood-financed ones for a few years before Lawrence. He graduated from short films (for Alain Resnais and Jacques Demy as well as Franju) to international employment with the 1960 doppleganger mystery The Crack in the Mirror; perhaps writer-producer Darryl F. Zanuck had been impressed by Jarre's scores for the early Franju features. Zanuck used him for two other Fox films, The Big Gamble and his D-Day superproduction The Longest Day. But it was not this work that led Jarre to Lawrence; it was his music for Serge Bourguignon...
...However Arabic or Russian the orchestrations, Jarre's music fit the plangent mood of French postwar pop: the mordant, worldly-wise chansons of Gilbert Bécaud, Marguerite Monnot, Jacques Brel, Charles Aznavour. The simple melodies follow a clear ascending or descending line, and sound either inevitable or predictable, depending on the extent of the listener's fondness for the form. Jarre didn't write pop songs, exactly; "Lara's Theme" was his one Top 40 hit. But the sound was marketable in movies, and after Lawrence, Jarre's tinny, tinkly, discordant music was in high demand by directors searching...