- Courtesy of Thomas Dempsey
On the evening of Saturday, January 23, 2016, over 400 students, faculty, and guests packed Buckley Auditorium for a special showing of “The General,” a classic black and white silent film staring Buster Keaton that featured a full film score written by Environmental Studies major Dana Coppernoll-Houston as her senior capstone student research project. Under the directorship of Dr. David DeLyser, the film score was performed live by the UP Orchestra. Sponsored by the McNerney-Hanson Endowed Chair in Ethics, Dr. Andrews, Dean of CAS, noted that, “The General explores ethical themes of war, love, death, honor, loss, and joy. Produced in 1926, it is a film that critics have called the greatest comedy ever made, the greatest Civil War film ever made, and perhaps the greatest film ever made. The film and orchestral score invite us to enter-into a work of art in order to be transformed by it. The film raises the question of the relationship between ethics and art. Why do human beings create art / music / poetry / drama / theater at all? The General illuminates for us deep, moral truths about the human condition. It is no accident that artists, ranging from Plato’s Republic down to our own American democratic experiment, are often viewed as perhaps the single most dangerous element in society. After all, artists speak thru the discourse of symbol, illusion, metaphor. On the other hand, ethics, the Greeks remind us, entails rational discourse amidst the search for virtuous action. As a work of art, The General pushes rational discourse to its absolute limit. Think of Greek tragedy, the medieval passion play, 19th and early 20th century Italian and German opera, the works of Moliere and Jean-Paul Sartre and Chekov, improvisational jazz, contemporary RAP music, etc. In the College of Arts and Sciences, this uneasy relationship between ethics and art underlies what is principally meant by the ‘liberal” or ‘liberating’ arts. It is what makes the humanities and the liberal arts possible, it is what animates the Catholic sacramental imagination and the Holy Cross mission of this University.” Edmund Stone, national film score expert, presented a pre-concert film and music talk.