A Subject you've enjoyed studying this semester

First, this has been the semester that I have had the most time, because I have to attend nine subjects. In addition, being in year number four university I feel a little tired and unmotivated. In spite of that, there are some subjects that really have achieved that enjoyment, particularly the elective of musical composition.

Musical theory is a subject that has always interested me since I was a child, when I was in the conservatory studying violin and music theory. I especially liked to print opera scores, listen to the music on my computer and follow the music as if I were reading a book.

This we have learned through the viewing of movies and the subsequent analysis of scenes with special attention to the relationship of the music with the visual and sound elements that are seen on the screen.

In musical composition we have seen basic notions of musical theory (such as the pentagram system, harmonies, counterpoints) as well as the history of music from the baroque era until the twentieth century and see how music has influenced the language of cinema.

An expert on your field

A while ago, watching different films I came to Fassbinder. He was a German film director, screenwriter, actor and film producer, part of the New German cinema movement, a period on German cinema which lasted from the late 1960s into the 1980s.

He was the son of a military doctor and a translator, who divorced when Fassbinder was only six years old, being taken care of by the mother. In his films, the paternal figure is almost non-existent.

After making his first film, Liebe ist kälter als der Tod (1969), Fassbinder does not stop working, performing in only 15 years makes almost forty films. His films are on the one hand a portrait of Germany before, during and after Nazism as well as an image of a hypocritical society.

Personally what I admire most of this director is that he was able to make a cinema with a clear political awareness of his context without leaving aside his aesthetic vocation: his films are melodramas almost always starring by strong womans, representing the figure of the antihero, where the way of telling the story takes on a meaning as important as what is being told.

Fassbinder dies at 37 years old after a cocaine overdose, in 1978.