featuring the film THE RIFLEMAN’S VIOLIN – a Special Film, Performance and Multimedia Project
The Rifleman’s Violin (directed by Citizen Film’s Sam Ball, produced by Hoover Institution Senior Fellow Abraham D. Sofaer) is a short documentary film that revisits an extraordinary intersection of history and music that took place in July 1945 as Harry Truman, Winston Churchill and Josef Stalin prepared to negotiate the post-WWII fate of the world.
The Rifleman’s Violin is the centerpiece of an ongoing multimedia collaboration between Citizen Film and the Hoover Institution Archives at Stanford University to create a physical and online multimedia archive entitled Potsdam Revisited: Overture to the Cold War preserving Canin’s extraordinary story and the rare artifacts and memories he collected during his tour of duty. Included in the archive at
http://www.potsdamrevisited.org/ are dozens of photos Canin took with his Leica as he walked amid the ruins of Berlin between concerts. (Canin performed at Potsdam three times throughout the conference in July 1945.)
The film is followed by a discussion with the filmmakers and a live performance by Mr. Canin, still a virtuoso violinist at 89 years old. He will reprise the private concert he gave the Big Three 70 years ago.