Oscar-winning French composer Maurice Jarre who wrote the rich, lyrical scores for films including Doctor Zhivago and Lawrence of Arabia, died last weekend in Los Angeles at the age of 84. I post here this prose-poem as a personal quasi-eulogy to this pioneer-traveller in the world of music composition for film.-Ron Price, Tasmania
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The shooting of the film Lawrence of Arabia was completed in the first two months of my own travel-pioneering life for the Canadian Bahá'í community, from 20 August to 20 October 1962. The film was released in North America on 16 December 1962 as I was finishing my matriculation exams in Ontario at the age of 18. Lawrence of Arabia has been ranked as the greatest film in the epic genre; it won seven Academy Awards that year and is today regarded as a masterpiece of world cinema. The film depicts the experiences of T.E. Lawrence, author of The Pillars of Wisdom, an autobiographical account penned in the aftermath of WWI. It tells of the experiences of British soldier T. E. Lawrence during WWI serving as a liaison officer with rebel forces during the Arab Revolt of 1916 to 1918 against the Ottoman Turks.-Ron Price with thanks to “Lawrence of Arabia(film),” in Wikipedia, 1 April 2009.
There are epics and epics, eh Lawrence?
Little did I know that I would come to
write one forty years later and they could
argue over whether I, too, was egotistical.
Your epic has many twists and turns, eh?
But that is the way life is, Lawrence. I’ve
found it so and I never even went to war,
but I must say, Lawrence, that my years
have seen a war of sorts, goodness, it has
never ended.1 It’s been an epic tale and
associated with what well may become
the greatest drama in the world’s religious
history, what Gibbon said was the most
aweful scene in the history of humankind
only he was out by at least 200 years!!!!!!
1 American writer Henry Miller described as "far more terrible than the destruction" of the first two wars, the destruction we are now witnessing with fires that "will rage until the very foundations of this present world crumble." –Henry Miller quoted in Geoffrey Nash, The Pheonix and the Ashes, George Ronald, Oxford, p.55.
Ron Price 1 April 2009