The Life and Legacy of Danijela Kulezic-Wilson

I first met Danijela Kulezic-Wilson through her article titled “A Musical Approach to Filmmaking: Hip-hop and Techno Composing Techniques and Models of Structuring in Darren Aronofsky’s π.” This article appeared in the very first issue of Music and the Moving Image and it was a transformative experience for me—not only because it made me hear the sonic logic of the film better, but because it made me understand how meaningful a musical approach to cinema could be. I met Danijela a few months later, at my first Music and the Moving Image conference in 2009 at New York University. Little did I know that she would become one of the most important presences in my personal as well as scholarly life. Danijela’s writing about the π soundtrack is a fine balance between discipline and freedom of expression, tautness and energy, meticulous form and creative willfulness. To my surprise, she embodied these rarely combined qualities. It is common to be inspired by another scholar’s work, but it is unusual to be just as inspired by who they are. Danijela was a completely unified person: her approach to cinema and music was representative of her approach to all forms of life. She met films, people, and unforeseeable challenges with open-mindedness and worked hard to understand them without ever imposing her own will on them too much. She was an extraordinary survivor of many adversities and a revolutionary scholar of film soundtracks. She turned her struggles into beautiful writings, redirecting what she knew of tragedies into hearing music everywhere. The impact of her presence in the world, and especially the conversations she created through her writing, will not end. Danijela died on April 15, 2021. Her death was a deep shock to the entire international community of soundtrack scholars. This article is a transcript of the tributes paid to Danijela at a keynote for the Music and the Moving Image conference on May 27, 2022. Those readers who knew Danijela will recognize that the references and the reflections of these speeches paint a suitably multidimensional portrait of a beloved colleague and friend. We hope that those in mourning for her will feel heartened and uplifted by this loving act of remembrance. Those readers who did not have Keynote Panel Presentation, Music and the Moving Image XVIII, 2022