Screening: “Providence” featuring original score by Miklós Rózsa

Get Tickets

April 9, 2025
6:30 pm - 8:30 pm 
Miles Nadal JCC
750 Spadina Avenue Toronto

This film screening is presented in partnership with the ARC Ensemble, following a concert called Hollywood Exiles, featuring music by Franz Waxman and Miklós Rózsa, on Sunday, April 6, 2025. [LINK to https://www.rcmusic.com/events-and-performances/arc-ensemble-hollywood-exiles]

Miklós Rózsa (1907-1995) wrote the score for Alain Resnais Providence (1977, 35mm, colour, 110 min), the director’s first English-language film starring John Gielgud, Dirk Bogarde, Ellen Burstyn, David Warner and Elaine Stritch. The film won 7 César Awards (the French Academy) including one for Rózsa’s score, one of which he was particularly fond.

This portrait of a writer’s last days, both autumnal and nightmarish, finds him surrounded by family, but retreating into his imagination, with his final work reflecting his ambivalence towards his children and the women in his life. As in so much of Resnais’ work, history, memory and fantasy are more permeable than solid, represented brilliantly by shifting spaces between the real and the imaginary.

Dr. Owen Lyons, DocMedia Program Director and Assistant Professor in the School of Image Arts at Toronto Metropolitan University, will introduce Rózsa and the film.

Dr. Owen Lyons is a researcher who works at the intersection of media archaeology, documentary, digital media, and critical theory. He holds a PhD from the Institute of Comparative Studies in Literature, Art, and Culture at Carleton University as well as an MA in Film and Media Studies from the University of Amsterdam. His forthcoming book with Amsterdam University Press examines representations of finance during the Weimar Republic and the emergence of the idea of the world economy. His current research projects include Liquid Screens: The Media Landscape of Financial Markets, which addresses the visual culture of 21st-century financial markets and their reflection in digital media, as well as an examination of the application of artificial intelligence to cinema entitled Machine Learning and the Moving Image.