Titus Leber

Titus Leber
File:Titus-with-red-schal.jpg
Born	(1951-03-02) March 2, 1951 Zell am See, Salzburg Austria
Occupation	Film director, screenwriter
Website	http://titusleber.com

Titus Leber (born March 2, 1951) is a writer and director of films based on classical music.

Biography

Titus Leber was born in Zell am See, Austria. He studied at the Lycée Français de Vienne, where he received a baccalaureate degree in 1969 and a Ph.D in mass media communication in 1975. His doctoral thesis, "The Multilayer Method," explored the history and cultural use of superimposed images.

During his graduate studies, Leber worked on documentaries and became head of the film department of the Institut für Neurovegetative Endoskopie in Düsseldorf. He collaborated with the founder of the Institute, Dr. Raimund Wittmoser, on the endoscopy documentaries Hyperhidrosis and Neue Coelome.

Leber's first fictional 16mm short film, 1976's Kindertotenlieder ("Songs of dead children”) won awards at the Valladolid International Film Festival, the Cannes Film Festival, and was Austria's nominee for best short film for the Academy Awards. In 1978, he wrote and directed Schubert- Fremd bin ich eingezogen (“Schubert- A Stranger I came”), for which he won the Austrian National Award for filmmaking.

After a year at the American Film Institute, from where he graduated with a director's diploma in 1979, Leber returned to Austria to write and direct. His first feature film, Anima-Symphonie Fantastique (1981) was shown in out of competition at the 1981 Cannes Film Festival.

From 1983 to 1984 Leber took a research fellowship at MIT's Center for Advanced Visual Studies. His project, the “Image Reactor”, explored interactive image permutation. He returned to Europe fascinated by the possibility of making the audience participate in what happened on the screen, and began work on interactive multimedia.

In 1987 he produced “Vienna Interactive”, an interactive touchscreen laserdisc, followed by “Mozart Interactive” in 1991. Between 1992 and 1997 Leber worked with the Louvre Museum, IBM, the Pasteur Institute and the Centro Nacional de Cultura, Lisboa on interactive multimedia projects. He also served on the advisory board of Corbis and the executive board of La Fémis, the French cinema school.

In the late 1990s Leber moved to Bangkok, where he worked with the Mae Fah Luang Foundation on multimedia, notably What Did the Buddha Teach?, an interactive installation about the life and teaching of Lord Buddha.

From 2009- 2013 creation of the project " Borobudur- Paths to Enlightenment- a comprehensive interactive exploration of the Borobudur Temple in Central Java for Taman Wisata Candi Borobudur/ the Government of Indonesia and of the 90 min TV film " Lalitavistara- The Life of Lord Buddha as shown on the Borobudur Temple. Publication of two books: " Lalitavistara" and "Decoding Borobudur for Cyberspace".

Filmography

• Anima - Symphonie phantastique
• Fremd bin ich eingezogen at IMDb
• Kindertotenlieder at IMDb

TV Productions and Documentaries

• Sangharadja-Thailands Supreme patriarch
• Symphony from the New World ( Based on A. Dvorák's 9th Symphony, in collaboration with NASA).
• Nuclear requiem: For ORF/Austrian Television
• Neue Coelome: Introducing new methods of endoscopy.
• Hyperhidrosis: Award for best Film by German Endoscopic Society

Multimedia

• Borobudur- Paths to Enlightenment- 65GB fully interactive exploration of Borobudur Temple in Indonesia
• What Did the Buddha Teach? CD DVD /DVD triptych about the life and teaching of Lord Buddha
• Mozart Interactive
• Vienna Interactive: Mercuriale Award for best Cultural Heritage CD ROM/ Besançon:
• Le monde de Pasteur:Award IAMS for best Scientific CD ROM 1995
• The Great Louvre in HDTV/3D coproduced with UNESO and Beta System, Japan
• Eight Historical cities of Portugal, for the Centro Nacional de Cultura, Lisboa.
• Das Wiener Theatermuseum.
• Endoskopie Interaktiv

External links

• http://titusleber.com
• http://mozartinteractive.com