Media Contact:  Dolores Davies, (858) 534-5994 

UCSD TO SCREEN FILM ON FRENCH WINEMAKING JAN. 25

“Burgundy and the Language of Wine,” a documentary exploring winemaking and the lives of winemakers in Burgundy, will be screened Jan. 25 at the University of California, San Diego Mandeville Recital Hall.

The event, which is free and open to the public, will feature an original music score. There will be two screenings, at 5:15 p.m. and 8 p.m., which will include live orchestration.  The director, composer and musicians will participate in a brief discussion following the performances.  A reception will also be held following the performances.

According to the film’s director Roderick Coover, a visiting professor in the UCSD Department of Communication, “Burgundy and the Language of Wine” is the result of a two-year study on winemakers and winemaking villages in Burgundy. The film interweaves montage studies and interviews locating culture at the intersection of language, image, and sound. In particular the film concentrates on the life of winemakers in two villages, Vosne Romanee, in the famous Cote de Nuits, and Bouzeron, in the less prestigious Cote Chalonaise.

The work is constructed in twelve sections that describe the work and lives of winemakers in the region through terms of winemaking. These terms, like "Clos," "Cru" and "racking" are translated both literally and as metaphors by which to understand broader cultural conditions. The work includes discussions with winemakers such as Aubert de Villaine (Romanee Conti), Jacques Seysses (Dujac), Francois Faiveley, and Louis Latour who talk about their life histories, the place of their work in local culture, and lifelong goals.  

The montage studies are complemented by musical composition designed to offer a range of ways to envision the land and work, its tensions, textures, rhythms, and contrasts. The sequences combine literal presentations with metaphoric comparisons and abstractions, constructing a picture of a place through a series of variations as well as shifting formal constructions. The montage sequences are filmed on black and white and color film and combined with the interviews on digital video.

During the film’s production, filmmaker Roderick Coover lived and worked at vineyards in the Burgundy region for periods of up to two months at a time, integrating traditional anthropological techniques of participant observation with experiments in visual representation.

Coover, has made documentary and narrative works in Japan, Western Europe, West Africa, and the U.S. He is known for producing the University of Chicago's first all-electronic dissertation, a work combining anthropology and media studies on Ghanaian performance. He has numerous works in print and on CD-ROM including  “Cultures in Webs: Working in Hypermedia with the Documentary Image,” which will be published by Eastgate this June.  A visiting lecturer from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, Coover is teaching production and theory in the UCSD Department of Communication.

David Smooke, the composer of the musical score for “Burgundy and the Language of Wine,” teaches music history, theory , and composition at Columbia College and Roosevelt University. The musicians performing at the Jan. 25 screening include Amy Dissanayake on piano, Paul Kosower on cello, and Rika Seko on violin.

The UCSD screenings of “Burgundy and the Language of Wine” are being sponsored by the UCSD Information Technology and Society Colloquium which is supported by the UCSD Division of Social Sciences, Division of Arts & Humanities, Jacobs School of Engineering, and the San Diego Supercomputer Center.