Henning Lohner (born 17 July 1961) is a German-American composer and filmmaker. He is best known for his film scores written as a long-standing member of Hans ZimmerâÂÂs music cooperative Remote Control Productions.
Lohner has written scores to various international films, among them The Ring Two and Incident at Loch Ness. Additionally, he has authored documentaries and art films, and has gained international recognition as creator of the Active Images media art projects.
Born to German emigrant parents, Henning Lohner was raised near Palo Alto, California, where his father Edgar Lohner taught Comparative Literature at Stanford University and his mother Marlene Lohner taught German Literature. Lohner has one brother, Peter, who is a lawyer turned writer-producer for film and television.
Lohner returned to Germany to study musicology, art history, and Romanic languages at Frankfurt University, from which he graduated as Master of Arts in 1987. In 1982, he took a year at the Berklee College of Music in Boston, studying Jazz Improvisation with Gary Burton and Film Scoring with Jerry Goldsmith and David Raksin. In 1985, Lohner was awarded a grant for music composition at the Centre Acanthes to study with Greek composer Iannis Xenakis, who became his lifelong mentor.
Lohner became assistant to German composer Karlheinz Stockhausen in 1984; Lohner was introduced to the visual media working on StockhausenâÂÂs opera Licht at La Scala in Milan. Subsequently, he worked in France in 1989 as musical advisor and assistant director to Louis Malle on the film May Fools (1990). Apprenticeships on Steve ReichâÂÂs multi-media oratorio The Cave (1990) and with Giorgio Strehler on his theater project Goethes Faust I + II (1990âÂÂ1992) followed. Due to his commitment to contemporary music and avant-garde filmmaking, Frank Zappa became aware of Lohner; subsequently, Lohner collaborated with him until ZappaâÂÂs death in 1993, initializing and co-producing ZappaâÂÂs last albums The Yellow Shark (1992) and Civilization Phaze III (1993). He paid homage to Zappa with the biographical art film Peefeeyatko (1991), to which Zappa himself contributed the original score.
Lohner lives and works in Los Angeles, New York City and Berlin. He is a Visiting Professor at the Zurich University of the Arts in Switzerland. Lohner is a member of the European Film Academy and the German Film Academy.
In 1996, Lohner began his career as film composer in Los Angeles at Hans ZimmerâÂÂs film score company Remote Control Productions. Lohner contributed music to Broken Arrow, The Thin Red Line, and Gladiator, and provided additional composing on The Ring and Spanglish, which received a Golden Globe nomination for Best Original Score.
To date, Lohner has scored over 40 feature films, covering a variety of genres ranging from comedies such as Werner HerzogâÂÂs Incident at Loch Ness (2004), childrenâÂÂs animation films like Laura's Star (2004), to horror movies such as ' (2005), and family entertainment like ' (2009). Regarding his music for the drama Love Comes Lately (2007), which was shown at the Toronto International Film Festival and the Sundance Film Festival, Screen International wrote, âÂÂa pleasant score with befitting Central European echoes adds to the congeniality of the proceedings.âÂÂ
Often regarded as a âÂÂHollywood composerâ in the German media, Lohner does on occasion work in his home country, having scored movies by Bernd Eichinger and Til Schweiger among others. LohnerâÂÂs score for the silent film classic The Hands of Orlac premiered at the Ghent opera house in Belgium during the International Film Festival Ghent of 2001.
Lohner's music to The Ring Two received two BMI Music Awards and was nominated for the International Film Music Critics Association Awards as Best Horror Score. The Hollywood Reporter praised LohnerâÂÂs score, commenting, "An atmosphere of foreboding is aided by moody, insistent music.âÂÂ
In 2012, Lohner was commissioned to rearrange the theme tune of the oldest and most watched news program on German television, Tagesschau, which caused a stir in the German media; Lohner wrote new compositions for all newscasts of the German principal public television channel Das Erste. Premiering in 2014, LohnerâÂÂs compositions received unanimously positive reviews.
LohnerâÂÂs collaboration with cinematographer Van Carlson started in 1989 with Peefeeyatko. Their artistic partnership, known as Lohner Carlson, was influenced by their collaboration with composer John Cage, which includes the art film One<sup>11</sup> and 103 (1992) directed by Lohner, âÂÂa 90-minute black-and-white meditation on the waxing and waning of light.â Gramophone magazine called the production âÂÂa splendid project carried out with dedication by all concernedâ and noted the âÂÂremarkable quality of these uniquely pure visual images, studies in light ranging from total black to total white.â Lohner paid homage to Cage posthumously with the âÂÂcomposed filmâ The Revenge of the Dead Indians, featuring artists such as Dennis Hopper, Matt Groening and Yoko Ono.
Lohner and Carlson exhibited their audio-visual composition Raw Material, Vol. 1âÂÂ11 (1995) throughout Europe, for instance in The Hague, Rome and Berlin. Composed from their archive of hundreds of hours of footage, the installation was âÂÂa multi-facetted mosaic of films [â¦] focussing on humanistic issues;â it showed interviews as well as landscapes on eleven monitors, with an equal emphasis on speech, pictures and sounds âÂÂin a new, free form of presentation,â thus generating âÂÂa type of global talk.â Subsequently, Lohner and CarlsonâÂÂs Active Images developed, first shown at the Galerie Springer Berlin in 2006. According to Lohner himself, the idea âÂÂarose from our love of video photography and from our subsequent despair over the loss of these images when turning them into [an edited] film.â Presented on flat displays, the works bridge the recognizable gap between photography and narrative film and thus âÂÂblur the line between image and video.âÂÂ
LohnerâÂÂs media art has been exhibited at the Centre Pompidou, the Guggenheim Museum in New York, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Calouste Gulbenkian Museum in Lisbon, the National Visual Art Gallery of Malaysia in Kuala Lumpur and the Mira Art Collection in Tokyo.
German culture reviewer Detlef Wolff has called Lohner an âÂÂunceasingly curious artist capable of looking closely, continuously able to discover the extraordinary in the seemingly ordinary.â Of an exhibition at the Erik Thomsen Gallery in 2012, a review noted that Lohner and CarlsonâÂÂs work combined âÂÂthe best of moving images and photographic approaches. The images are shown on a series of high resolution video panels and provide a poetic and elegant glance at seemingly normal scenes. Yet they succeed in unframing our structured visual perception of reality and moving us out of that perception box, if we look closely enough embracing a meditative patience.âÂÂ
Lohner began producing and directing cultural reports for German Public Television in 1988. He has directed more than 100 short films and over 40 feature-length documentaries and teleplays, many of them portraits of influential contemporary artists such as Dennis Hopper, Benoit Mandelbrot, Gerhard Richter, Karl Lagerfeld, Brian Eno, and Abel Ferrara.
LohnerâÂÂs documentary Ninth November Night about painter Gottfried HelnweinâÂÂs installation commemorating the Reichskristallnacht, featuring Sean Penn and Maximilian Schell, premiered at the American Film Institute Festival and was shortlisted for the Academy Awards as Best Documentary Short Subject. The Malibu Times called LohnerâÂÂs film a âÂÂmoving portrayal,â and the Los Angeles Times commented, âÂÂA stirring meditation on art and remembrance, Ninth November Night documents Austrian artist Gottfried Helnwein's sprawling 1988 art installation recalling the horrors of the Holocaust.âÂÂ