"From Citizen Kane to Taxi Driver, Bernard Herrmann composed over 50 film scores. He is, however, best known for his long, fruitful collaboration with Alfred Hitchcock in films such as Psycho, Vertigo, The Man Who Knew Too Much, North by Northwest, and others. A fiery, romantic perfectionist, Bernard Herrmann had a gift for writing timeless, simple, refined musical themes. Illustrated by a number of film scenes and interviews with his friends and collaborators, this portrait helps us to better understand Bernard Herrmann's immense contribution to film scores and to cinema."

Contains interviews with Bernard Herrmann, Elmer Bernstein, Martin Scorsese, Claude Chabrol, David Raskin, etc.


Bonus features:

The Hollywood Sound (85 min)
A film by Joshua Waletzky
(English version, French subtitles)

"From the same director, this film looks back on the two 2 main schools of film score composers during the Golden Age of Hollywood: the Europeans (Max Steiner and Franz Waxman) who drew heavily on the rich tradition of Romanticism, and their American counterparts (David Raskin, Jerome Moross and Alex North) whose scores were influenced by jazz and folk music. A variety of scenes from "Gone With the Wind", "Rebecca", "Big Country" and "A Streetcar Named Desire" illustrate these two trends."