Pula Film Festival becoming the most important meeting place of Croatian film and its audience
Dr. sc. Mitja Reichenberg
Composer, studied composition in the class of professor Dane Škerl, primarily focused on composing for film and theatre. He received his PhD from the Faculty of Art at the University in Ljubljana (mentor: prof. Rastko Močnik, PhD), Department of Sociology with the thesis Film Sound and Music in Social Function. He teaches film, music, audio production, and modern sound installations at a number of faculties and universities, composes music for films of various genres, and performs as pianist for silent films. He also records solo albums and organises different concerts and recitals of electronic, classical, but also electroacoustic- experimental music.
He is the author of more than 35 books about music and films and scores for more than 70 various genres of film and type He started working as a pianist as a student, at the Yugoslav Cinematheque in Ljubljana (prof. Borut Lesjak), and then started composing on his own and shaping his style of playing the piano. The use modern composition techniques and style, and a modern approach to today’s pianism, make his film scores a combination of classically formed compositions of fully modern performance. In his thirty year career, he has given many solo performances, including those for film classics by the greatest silent film masters (Murnau, Lubitsch, DeMille, Chaplin, Lang, Keaton, Eisenstein, Oswald, Bertini, Lumiere, Korda, Alberini, Reinger, Epstein, Choux, Vertov, Griffith).
Reichenberg’s film music is fresh, readable, epic, coquettish, lyrical, and dramatic at the same time. His performances always receive praise in the media, as high-quality artistic encounters with live music and film are today very special and rare. To experience the charm of film images of almost forgotten past becomes a magical and unique experience in his scores, as a music critic once wrote after his performance to Eisenstein’s film Battleship Potemkin. However, we can also read that the music has become larger than the images, because the pianist and composer Reichenberg brought the great masterpiece Metropolis (F. Lang) alive in a modern and unique way. His film music is also extremely poetic and emotional, as it can happen, in the case of dramas, that the darkness in the cinema hides silent snoring, but the end of the film reveals a loud applause.
