Art & Music Film Series Scheduled At Yale Center For British Art

NEW HAVEN— In conjunction with the current exhibition “Art & Music in Britain: 1730-1900,” Yale Center for British Art will offer a two-day film series that draws attention to film scores written by major British composers in the mid-20th Century, a golden age for British orchestral music. The screenings are free and open to the public. Seating is limited.

The films will be shown on Saturday and Sunday, December 16-17, and will include:

*Saturday, 2 pm, Night Mail (1936), directed by Harry Watt and Basil Wright (not rated; 25 minutes).

A short film that depicts the nightly journey of the mail train from London to Glasgow on which mail is sorted, dropped and collected, featured music with Benjamin Britten, composer.

*Saturday, 2:30 pm, Instruments of the Orchestra (1946), directed by Muir Mathieson (not rated; 20 minutes).

A short film that introduces all the instruments in the contemporary symphony orchestra. Benjamin Britten, composer.

*Saturday, 3 pm, Coal Face (1935), directed by Alberto Cavalcanti (not rated; 11 minutes).

A look at the once-dominant coal mining industry within the United Kingdom. Benjamin Britten, composer.

*Sunday, 12:30 pm, A Christmas Carol (1951), directed by Brian Desmond Hurst (not rated; 86 minutes).

In this adaptation of Dickens’s classic, Ebenezer Scrooge is given a chance for redemption when ghosts haunt him on Christmas Eve. Richard Addinsell, composer.

*Sunday, 2:30 pm, Things to Come (1936), directed by William Cameron Menzies (not rated; 92 minutes).

A decades-long global war, which began in 1940, leaves plague and anarchy in its wake. Then in 2036, a rational state rebuilds civilization and tries space travel. Arthur Drummond Bliss, composer.

Yale Center for British Art houses the largest and most comprehensive collection of British art outside the United Kingdom. Presented to the university by Paul Mellon (class of 1929), the collection of paintings, sculpture, drawings, prints, rare books and manuscripts reflects the development of British art, life and thought from the Elizabethan period onward.

One of the center’s greatest treasures is the building itself, which opened to the public in 1977 and was the last building designed by the internationally acclaimed American architect Louis I. Kahn (1901-1974). It stands across the street from Kahn’s first major commission, Yale University Art Gallery (1953).

Yale Center for British Art is at 1080 Chapel Street (corner of High Street). For more information, visit yale.edu/ycba or call 203-432-2800 or 877-BRIT ART (877-274-8278).