The Twilight Zone
“SCHUMER’S WORKS on Rod Serling and The Twilight Zone are a cut above the rest, full of passion and erudition.”
— Mark Burman, Producer, BBC Radio
“SCHUMER’S THESIS on The Twilight Zonetranscends pop culture and brushes the underbelly of high art.”
—“The Synergy of Art and The Twilight Zone,” The New York Times
THE 60th ANNIVERSARY OF THE TWILIGHT ZONE live multimedia presentation by Arlen Schumer
Pop culture historian Arlen Schumer (author/designer, Visions from The Twilight Zone and The Silver Age of Comic Book Art) traces The Twilight Zone’s roots in 20th Century surrealism, and its influence on psychedelia, television, film, modern art and popular culture, in a unique multimedia presentation that combines the words, images, and music of the legendary television series.
Filmed at The Triad Theater, New York, October 2, 2019.
Arlen Schumer’s “Sound & Vision” is a 45-minute mashup of The Twilight Zone’s dialogue, narration and music soundtracks.
TWILIGHT ZONE NOIR multimedia webinar by Arlen Schumer
The French word “noir” means “black,” used by post-World War II French film critics to describe a burgeoning genre of (mostly) American films, all shot in high-contrast black and white, that dealt with a dark and unstable universe of crime, brutality, femmes fatale, existential despair, and the ultimately doomed struggle to escape one’s tragic past and/or future fate.
That description of film noir could also be applied to most episodes of the legendary black and white American television anthology series The Twilight Zone (1959-64), since series creator and chief writer Rod Serling described his conceptual creation in similar words (that could equally define film noir) as “…the middle ground between light and shadow, between science and superstition, and it lies between the pit of man’s fears and the summit of his knowledge.”
In this webinar, Twilight Zone historian Schumer takes you through a trenchant tour of the Zone’s most noirish episodes, via clips and interstitial still images that deal with the very noirish themes of isolation, death, paranoia, identity, and the nature of dreams versus reality.
You’ll see these classic Twilight Zone episodes through a film noir lens that will make you see them as if for the first time!
Video of TWILIGHT ZONE NOIR webinar part 2: https://vimeo.com/650904461
“The Twilight Zone: Sight, Sound & Mind” is a 12-minute montage of the legendary TV series’ words (dialogue & narration), music & images based on Arlen Schumer’s coffeetable art book, Visions from The Twilight Zone, and narrated by the author.
CLICK on the graphics below to go to Arlen’s articles on The Twilight Zone:
