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Credits

Genres: Documentary, Music; With: Leon Theremin
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By Owen Gleiberman
Owen Gleiberman
Owen Gleiberman
Owen Gleiberman is a film critic for EW

THEREMIN: AN ELECTRONIC ODYSSEY (PG) Marvelously weird: a documentary about the life and career of Leon Theremin, the renegade Russian scientist who, in the 1920s, invented electronic music -- more specifically, a revolutionary instrument called the theremin, which turns out to be a lot more familiar than you think. Anyone who's ever seen a '50s sci-fi movie like The Day the Earth Stood Still knows the sound of the theremin: that eerie, futuristic ewww-eee-ewww that Hollywood used time and again to evoke a mood of otherworldly anxiety. The passion of Theremin and his devotees has the purity of religion. Yet the instrument itself sounds like a violin being played by a giant mosquito. As the movie goes on, Theremin emerges as an unlikely cross between Albert Einstein and Ed Wood -- a visionary of kitsch.


Posted Sep 29, 1995
 

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