Michael Nyman
Michael Nyman (born UK, 1944) currently lives and works in London, UK.
He studied at King’s College London, University of London (London, UK) and the Royal Academy of Music, University of London (London, UK).
Nyman has received honorary doctorates from the University of Warwick (Coventry, UK) in 2007 and University of Leeds (Leeds, UK) in 2009. He was awarded Commander of the Order of the British Empire (CBE) by Queen Elizabeth II in 2008.
His moving image work has been screened at CPH PIX, Copenhagen Film Festivals (Copenhagen, Denmark) and Berlin International Film Festival (Berlin, Germany) in 2011, Toronto International Film Festival (Toronto, Canada) and Turino Film Festival (Turin, Italy) in 2010, and LOOP Festival, Screen from Barcelona (Barcelona, Spain) in 2009.
Nyman had a solo exhibition of his visual art at The De La Warr Pavilion (Bexhill-on-Sea, UK) in 2009.
“My enduring preoccupation in my visual work is to collect images as visual translations of objects and artifacts of the past and of the present. In the film I have created for the films4peace initiative, I have used a series of police photos, full-face and profile, of gypsies who were interned in concentration camps in the south of France during the Second World War, combined with those of Jewish prisoners killed in Auschwitz.
The portraits fade in and out—vertical features animated by a wind of hope, hope of a better future for younger generations. The human tragedy of the Jewish Holocaust, like many others committed in the recent history of the 20th century, is depicted through the layering of images and music, as a deeply-rooted scar left by this atrocious event on our collective memory. The film soundtrack is an excerpt from my String Quartet No. 1 – fig. J which I wrote in 1985.”