Film Matters Magazine

Film Matters is pleased to bring you an exciting multimedia collaboration between professor and undergraduate student at Ursinus College, Scoring Night and the City. Professor Jennifer Fleeger and Jordan Scharaga have produced an insightful compare-and-contrast commentary on the scoring differences between the two versions of  Jules Dassin’s Night and the City (1950) — both of which you can view on Criterion’s 2015 Blu-ray release. We hope to see more collaborations like this in future and thank Fleeger and Scharaga for their work!

Author Biographies

Jennifer Fleeger is an assistant professor in the Media and Communication Studies Department at Ursinus College. She is the author of two books: Sounding American (Oxford UP, 2014) explores the importance of opera and jazz during the conversion to sound in Hollywood and Mismatched Women (Oxford UP, 2014) examines the connection between women who don’t sound like they look and new technologies for recording and visualizing music, from Trilby and the phonograph to Susan Boyle and the internet. She has published articles and reviews in Camera Obscura; Music, Sound, and the Moving Image; Quarterly Review of Film and Video; and Popular Music and Society.

Jordan Scharaga is a junior Media and Communications major and eager film minor at Ursinus College. Her love of film began at the early age of three when she would watch The Philadelphia Story with her mother. She looks forward to pursuing her interest in film through both scholarly and production-related outlets.

The Start of an Ending is a side-by-side comparison of the opening and closing shots of 75 films. It’s based on similar videos by Jacob T Swinney, which inspired me to create my own using new films. It’s a very visual homage to filmmaking, cinematography and editing, because it provides a peek at what is possible when filmmakers devote themselves to visual storytelling. Moving images are incredibly powerful and convey a very wide range of meanings and emotions, but what is even much more powerful is the relationship between several moving images (or frames). This is the reason why editing is one of the most important aspects of cinema, because it is through the comparison of various images that we understand what a movie is trying to say. In my video, some frames are incredibly similar, some are very different, some show progress, others decline, but all of them teach us something about this great art that is cinema. Finally, I’d like to point out that the selection is not based on the value of the movies per se (although many of them are great masterpieces, and almost all of them are great films) but on the power of the comparison between the first and last frames.

Author Biography

Miguel Faus is a 23 year-old business graduate from Barcelona; he divides his time between his internship as a copywriter at an ad agency and his undergraduate program in Humanities. He’s passionate about films and is a contributing author at Jot Down Magazine, where he tries to figure out why he loves the films he loves.