The Film Scores of Philip Glass – Philip Glass (original) (raw)

The British Film Institute hosts a series of film screenings to showcase Philip Glass’s unique contribution to the history of cinema.

Event dates and ticket information below.

August 2, 2024

The Thin Blue Line

Showtime – 20:45
Errol Morris began his hugely successful, long-term collaboration with Philip Glass on this pioneering documentary, which combines interview footage with striking crime-scene re-enactments as a way of walking the audience through the events leading up to the shooting of a Dallas Police Officer. The power of that sequence, repeated from multiple perspectives, is enhanced by Glass deploying a memorable theme that, in its own way, probes the events in question. The film’s critical success saw the case re-opened, although documentary purists remained wary of Morris’s techniques.
Tickets and info

August 3, 2024

Dracula (Philip Glass Special Edition)

Showtime – 13:20
The vampire Count Dracula relocates from Transylvania to England, hoping to nourish himself on the blood of unsuspecting victims. Bela Lugosi’s seminal performance as Count Dracula was an early – but not the first – entry in Universal Studio’s remarkably successful monster series of the 1930s. Glass’s score, performed by long-term collaborators the Kronos Quartet, tweaks out the tale’s emotional undercurrents, its romance and elements of the sublime, while never resorting to the trappings of a conventional horror score.
Tickets and info

Inquiring Nuns + Four American Composers: Philip Glass

Showtime – 15:30
Inquiring Nuns
This early piece from Kartemquin Films (the company behind Hoop Dreams and Minding the Gap) is an impressive slice of cinema verité that captures nuns approaching strangers on the streets of Chicago to ask them if they’re happy. Rarely seen on the big screen, Tamaner and Quinn’s disarmingly simple documentary is bolstered by Glass’s distinctive organ music – his first film credit.It’s the perfect accompaniment to the nuns’ quest.

Four American Composers: Philip Glass
Peter Greenaway’s TV doc features Glass in conversation and his ensemble playing some of the composer’s early works.
Tickets and info

Candyman

Showtime – 20:30
A university student studying urban myths pursues the truth behind the legend of Candyman. The residents of a large housing project believe this 19th-century spirit is responsible for a number of recent unexplained deaths. Bernard Rose’s adaptation of Clive Barker’s story was notoriously cut by its studio. With it went elements of a score by Glass that some regarded as his finest. Nevertheless, what remains of both the film and music – a score for voice and pipe organ – is audacious and chilling.
Tickets and info

August 4, 2024

Mishima: A Life in Four Chapters

Showtime – 17:20
One of the highpoints in Glass’s career as a composer for narrative cinema is this collaboration with Paul Schrader. It’s a wholly original and unconventional portrait of writer Yukio Mishima. This ‘mosaic biography’ interweaves moments from Mishima’s life with scenes from his fiction. It shows an individual grappling with the growing materialism of the time, as well as his obsession with notions of masculinity and military solutions to national problems.
Tickets and info

August 5, 2024

Joseph Conrad’s The Secret Agent

Showtime – 17:50
A double agent for both the Metropolitan Police and the Russian government finds his position increasingly precarious, even risking the safety of his family. Christopher Hampton’s adaptation of Joseph Conrad’s novel is a morally complex study of isolation and madness in 19th-century London, with Glass’s sweeping score evoking the claustrophobia of life at the heart of a turbulent industrial city, whose barely civilised veneer masks talk of revolution and political terrorism.
Tickets and info

Kundun + Intro by Writer

Showtime – 20:00
Introduction by Ian Haydn Smith
A breathtaking visual and aural experience, Scorsese’s magisterial epic charts the early life of the Dalai Lama, from his being identified, aged two, as the 14th Dalai Lama to his escape from Tibet following its annexation by China. Glass, a Buddhist, worked on the film throughout the shoot and edit, combining Western and Tibetan instruments. From the earlier, playful scenes capturing a child’s sense of wonder to the extended escape sequence, this is a marvel of music and image – of two artists collaborating at the height of their powers.
Tickets and info

August 6, 2024

Koyaanisqatsi

Showtime – 18:20
This groundbreaking, thrilling film is as much a musical tour de force from Philip Glass as it is an original documentary. It not only depicts how humanity has parted ways with nature, but how we are experiencing a ‘life out of balance’ (one of five translations of the Hopi-language title). Reggio’s innovative use of time-lapse photography, perfectly chimed with the tempo of the Glass score, has often been emulated but never bettered.
Tickets and info

August 7, 2024

Powaqqatsi

Showtime – 20:40
Reggio and Glass’s follow-up to Koyaanisqatsi focuses on ‘life in transition’ (one of the translations of the film’s Hopi-language title), presenting the argument that without humanity Earth would be a much better place. Expanding the geographical scope of his images – journeying from a gold mine in Brazil and villages in Africa to temples in India and Nepal – Powaqqatsi depicts the striking disparity between nations. Likewise, Glass’s score embraces an expansive array of instruments and styles.
Tickets and info

August 8, 2024

Naqoyqatsi

Showtime – 18:20
The final part of Reggio and Glass’s visually rich symphonic trilogy concludes with a title that translates from the Hopi language as ‘life as war’. It depicts an interconnected world where nature has been dominated, even overrun, by technology. Reggio employs digital techniques to manipulate everyday images in order to chronicle the way our society is changing. Renowned cellist Yo-Yo Ma’s performance is the centrepiece of Glass’s score, bringing spirituality and humanity to an increasingly cold and technologised environment.
Tickets and info

The Truman Show

Showtime – 20:30
Truman Burbank lives an unassuming small-town life, unaware that every movement in his life is anything but ordinary. His wife, his friends, the people on the streets he walks on everyday know something that is secret to Truman, and his quest to understand what is happening to him may affect the lives of people around the world. Burkhard Dallwitz composed the bulk of the score to Peter Weir’s brilliant film, but Glass contributed two key new pieces, alongside the use of tracks from Mishima. The composer even makes a brief cameo in one scene, playing a piano.
Tickets and info

August 9, 2024

The Illusionist

Showtime – 20:30
Eisenheim, a mercurial illusionist, has provoked the wrath of Austria’s crown prince. As the narrative shifts between past and present, it becomes clear that Eisenheim’s presence in Vienna is part of a grander scheme. Director Neil Burger combines Dick Pope’s lustrous cinematography with Glass’s sensual score to winning effect, evoking the splendour of late 19th-century Austro-Hungarian court life, but infusing it with a suffocating sense of an empire in its final throes.
Tickets and info

August 10, 2024

The Truman Show

Showtime – 18:30
Truman Burbank lives an unassuming small-town life, unaware that every movement in his life is anything but ordinary. His wife, his friends, the people on the streets he walks on everyday know something that is secret to Truman, and his quest to understand what is happening to him may affect the lives of people around the world. Burkhard Dallwitz composed the bulk of the score to Peter Weir’s brilliant film, but Glass contributed two key new pieces, alongside the use of tracks from Mishima. The composer even makes a brief cameo in one scene, playing a piano.
Tickets and info

August 11, 2024

UK Premiere: A Place Called Music + Q&A with Director

Showtime – 15:15
‘Music is a place, and if you’re a musician, you go there.’ So says Philip Glass in this engaging documentary, which follows him and Mexican Wixarika musician Daniel Medina, both in their individual lives and as collaborators on some extraordinary music. The film captures them in rehearsal and performance around the world. What shines through is how music is not only an articulate and heartfelt form of expression, but also the main way these two artists communicate.
Tickets and info

The Hours

Showtime – 18:00
The lives of three women living in different decades are connected through Virginia Woolf’s novel Mrs Dalloway. Under Stephen Daldry’s sensitive direction, Meryl Streep, Julianne Moore and Nicole Kidman – giving an Oscar-winning performance as the novelist – bring Michael Cunningham’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel thrillingly to life. Glass was awarded a BAFTA for his score, whose mellifluous beauty channels the fluid nature of human emotions.
Tickets and info

August 14, 2024

Expert Panel – “The Philip Glass Effect”

Panel Begins – 18:10
Join our special guests, including Richard Guerin from Philip Glass’s publishing company and record label, for a richly illustrated discussion about the composer’s distinguished career. The panel, hosted by season programmer Justin Johnson, will consider Glass’s unique approach to film scoring, his distinctive musical language across documentary, fiction and archive works, as well as his immense musical contribution outside of the cinema.
Tickets and info

Mishima: A Life in Four Chapters

Showtime – 20:20
One of the highpoints in Glass’s career as a composer for narrative cinema is this collaboration with Paul Schrader. It’s a wholly original and unconventional portrait of writer Yukio Mishima. This ‘mosaic biography’ interweaves moments from Mishima’s life with scenes from his fiction. It shows an individual grappling with the growing materialism of the time, as well as his obsession with notions of masculinity and military solutions to national problems.
Tickets and info

August 15, 2024

Dracula (Philip Glass Special Edition)

Showtime – 18:10
The vampire Count Dracula relocates from Transylvania to England, hoping to nourish himself on the blood of unsuspecting victims. Bela Lugosi’s seminal performance as Count Dracula was an early – but not the first – entry in Universal Studio’s remarkably successful monster series of the 1930s. Glass’s score, performed by long-term collaborators the Kronos Quartet, tweaks out the tale’s emotional undercurrents, its romance and elements of the sublime, while never resorting to the trappings of a conventional horror score.
Tickets and info

Visitors + UK Premiere: Once Within a Time

Showtime – 20:10
Visitors
Reggio returns to a familiar theme, contemplating humanity’s relationship with technology. This time, through each of the film’s 74 shots, he homes in on people rather than their environments, employing a mirrored camera to capture his subjects in a unique and captivating way. Responding to this more intimate approach, the film’s score finds Glass working at his plaintive best.

Once Within a Time
Reggio and Glass team up again, but change direction with this humorous tale about the end of one world and the start of another.
Tickets and info

August 16, 2024

Notes on a Scandal

Showtime – 18:30
Barbara Covett is a teacher at a local school who hides her loneliness with her prickly, unkind demeanour. She develops an unhealthy interest in new teacher Sheba Hart and sees an opportunity to manipulate their relationship when she discovers Sheba’s inappropriate liaisons with an underage student. There’s a steeliness to Glass’s score that perfectly chimes with the malevolent undertow of Richard Eyre’s impressive adaptation of Zoe Heller’s acclaimed novel.
Tickets and info

August 17, 2024

Jane

Showtime – 20:40
Much of the footage in Morgen’s dazzling portrait of the trailblazing English primatologist and anthropologist Jane Goodall, capturing her groundbreaking work with chimpanzees in late 1950s Tanzania, was thought lost. Beautifully restored, it provides a stunning account of Goodall’s interaction with the chimp world, in which she often put herself at high risk. Her incisive and frequently witty voiceover is accompanied by Glass’s fine orchestral score.
Tickets and info

August 18, 2024

Kundun

Showtime – 18:00
A breathtaking visual and aural experience, Scorsese’s magisterial epic charts the early life of the Dalai Lama, from his being identified, aged two, as the 14th Dalai Lama to his escape from Tibet following its annexation by China. Glass, a Buddhist, worked on the film throughout the shoot and edit, combining Western and Tibetan instruments. From the earlier, playful scenes capturing a child’s sense of wonder to the extended escape sequence, this is a marvel of music and image – of two artists collaborating at the height of their powers.
Tickets and info

August 19, 2024

The Thin Blue Line

Showtime – 18:10
Errol Morris began his hugely successful, long-term collaboration with Philip Glass on this pioneering documentary, which combines interview footage with striking crime-scene re-enactments as a way of walking the audience through the events leading up to the shooting of a Dallas Police Officer. The power of that sequence, repeated from multiple perspectives, is enhanced by Glass deploying a memorable theme that, in its own way, probes the events in question. The film’s critical success saw the case re-opened, although documentary purists remained wary of Morris’s techniques.
Tickets and info

Koyaanisqatsi + Intro and Discussion (BFI Relaxed Screening)

Showtime – 18:45
A timely alert to how life on Earth is changing, Reggio’s film was produced on a surprisingly small budget over many years, only to become an instant cult success. Philip Glass’s gorgeous music swells in intensity as the growing impact of technology on humanity becomes more apparent within the film’s procession of images. Join us after the screening to reflect on the film through a neurodivergent lens.
The post screening discussion will be led by creative Sam Chown Ahern, of the Neurocultures collective.

Relaxed screenings are presented each month for neurodivergent audiences, with their companions and assistants. More detailed information can be found at bfi.org.uk/relaxed.
Tickets and info

The Fog of War

Showtime – 20:30
Errol Morris’s Oscar-winning portrait of Robert S. McNamara, the former US Defence Secretary, who offers his thoughts on modern warfare, is both compelling and provocative. The director made great use of his ‘interrotron’ – a device that allows the subject to see their interviewer on a screen in front of the camera, giving the impression that they are engaging with the audience directly. The film’s score underpins the gravity of the issues under discussion, but also adds a lyricism that elevates the artistry of the whole project.
Tickets and info

August 23, 2024

Candyman

Showtime – 18:20
A university student studying urban myths pursues the truth behind the legend of Candyman. The residents of a large housing project believe this 19th-century spirit is responsible for a number of recent unexplained deaths. Bernard Rose’s adaptation of Clive Barker’s story was notoriously cut by its studio. With it went elements of a score by Glass that some regarded as his finest. Nevertheless, what remains of both the film and music – a score for voice and pipe organ – is audacious and chilling.
Tickets and info

Joseph Conrad’s The Secret Agent

Showtime – 20:40
A double agent for both the Metropolitan Police and the Russian government finds his position increasingly precarious, even risking the safety of his family. Christopher Hampton’s adaptation of Joseph Conrad’s novel is a morally complex study of isolation and madness in 19th-century London, with Glass’s sweeping score evoking the claustrophobia of life at the heart of a turbulent industrial city, whose barely civilised veneer masks talk of revolution and political terrorism.
Tickets and info

August 24, 2024

Koyaanisqatsi

Showtime – 12:50
This groundbreaking, thrilling film is as much a musical tour de force from Philip Glass as it is an original documentary. It not only depicts how humanity has parted ways with nature, but how we are experiencing a ‘life out of balance’ (one of five translations of the Hopi-language title). Reggio’s innovative use of time-lapse photography, perfectly chimed with the tempo of the Glass score, has often been emulated but never bettered.
Tickets and info

Powaqqatsi

Showtime – 15:20
Reggio and Glass’s follow-up to Koyaanisqatsi focuses on ‘life in transition’ (one of the translations of the film’s Hopi-language title), presenting the argument that without humanity Earth would be a much better place. Expanding the geographical scope of his images – journeying from a gold mine in Brazil and villages in Africa to temples in India and Nepal – Powaqqatsi depicts the striking disparity between nations. Likewise, Glass’s score embraces an expansive array of instruments and styles.
Tickets and info

Naqoyqatsi

Showtime – 18:00
The final part of Reggio and Glass’s visually rich symphonic trilogy concludes with a title that translates from the Hopi language as ‘life as war’. It depicts an interconnected world where nature has been dominated, even overrun, by technology. Reggio employs digital techniques to manipulate everyday images in order to chronicle the way our society is changing. Renowned cellist Yo-Yo Ma’s performance is the centrepiece of Glass’s score, bringing spirituality and humanity to an increasingly cold and technologised environment.
Tickets and info

August 26, 2024

The Hours

Showtime – 17:30
The lives of three women living in different decades are connected through Virginia Woolf’s novel Mrs Dalloway. Under Stephen Daldry’s sensitive direction, Meryl Streep, Julianne Moore and Nicole Kidman – giving an Oscar-winning performance as the novelist – bring Michael Cunningham’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel thrillingly to life. Glass was awarded a BAFTA for his score, whose mellifluous beauty channels the fluid nature of human emotions.
Tickets and info

The Fog of War

Showtime – 20:10
Errol Morris’s Oscar-winning portrait of Robert S. McNamara, the former US Defence Secretary, who offers his thoughts on modern warfare, is both compelling and provocative. The director made great use of his ‘interrotron’ – a device that allows the subject to see their interviewer on a screen in front of the camera, giving the impression that they are engaging with the audience directly. The film’s score underpins the gravity of the issues under discussion, but also adds a lyricism that elevates the artistry of the whole project.
Tickets and info

August 27, 2024

_Visitors + UK Premiere: Once Within a Time

Showtime – 17:50
Visitors
Reggio returns to a familiar theme, contemplating humanity’s relationship with technology. This time, through each of the film’s 74 shots, he homes in on people rather than their environments, employing a mirrored camera to capture his subjects in a unique and captivating way. Responding to this more intimate approach, the film’s score finds Glass working at his plaintive best.

Once Within a Time
Reggio and Glass team up again, but change direction with this humorous tale about the end of one world and the start of another.
Tickets and info

August 29, 2024

The Illusionist

Showtime – 18:10
Eisenheim, a mercurial illusionist, has provoked the wrath of Austria’s crown prince. As the narrative shifts between past and present, it becomes clear that Eisenheim’s presence in Vienna is part of a grander scheme. Director Neil Burger combines Dick Pope’s lustrous cinematography with Glass’s sensual score to winning effect, evoking the splendour of late 19th-century Austro-Hungarian court life, but infusing it with a suffocating sense of an empire in its final throes.
Tickets and info

Notes on a Scandal

Showtime – 20:40
Barbara Covett is a teacher at a local school who hides her loneliness with her prickly, unkind demeanour. She develops an unhealthy interest in new teacher Sheba Hart and sees an opportunity to manipulate their relationship when she discovers Sheba’s inappropriate liaisons with an underage student. There’s a steeliness to Glass’s score that perfectly chimes with the malevolent undertow of Richard Eyre’s impressive adaptation of Zoe Heller’s acclaimed novel.
Tickets and info

August 31, 2024

Jane

Showtime – 15:10
Much of the footage in Morgen’s dazzling portrait of the trailblazing English primatologist and anthropologist Jane Goodall, capturing her groundbreaking work with chimpanzees in late 1950s Tanzania, was thought lost. Beautifully restored, it provides a stunning account of Goodall’s interaction with the chimp world, in which she often put herself at high risk. Her incisive and frequently witty voiceover is accompanied by Glass’s fine orchestral score.
Tickets and info