La Pathetique – Iossif Pasternak – France 2005, 52 mins. French, English, German, Russian, with French subtitles. Having just heard the Pathetique at the Montreal Symphony Orchestra in late February, conducted by Valery Gergiev, I thought it would be interesting to see a documentary about Tchaikovsky’s last work, but several things conspired to lessen my enjoyment. The *horrific* insistence of voice-over in French productions, coupled with awful sound quality, leads to narration that is near impossible to follow, even to a native speaker (says Jonathan). I do suffer from a particular difficulty in filtering out background noise and speech when someone is speaking, so it’s mentally exhausting for me to do for any length of time. The other lamentable point was the smallest of mentions of what many consider the probable major impetus for the work, namely Tchaikovsky’s death being a suicide engineered by his former schoolmates. The fact that he was gay and had a crush on an aristocrat’s nephew, and was probably facing a long Siberian prison sentence of hard labour that would be fatal at his age, is hurried spat out and then summarily dismissed by most of the “keepers” of his legend, both within and outside of Russia. Despite these shortcomings, it was interesting to see to what extent his musical forms both foreshadowed the coming experimentation with atonality, and reflected back to his predecessors.
Kent Nagano conducts Classical Masterpiece: Richard Strauss: An Alpine Symphony – Oliver Becker & Ellen Fellmann – Germany 2006, 52 mins. English with French subtitles. I rather much enjoyed hearing Nagano talk live about his conducting the MSO in an interview with a Radio-Canada announcer at Place-des-Arts, just before a concert last year. In this German TV documentary series, rather sombrely structured and lit, Nagono’s introspective and studied articulation on Strauss’s composition seemed dull and lifeless by comparison. The Berlin Symphony Orchestra performance of the Alpine Symphony, 22 parts without breaks, is interspersed with Nagano’s discussion, and more interestingly, rehearsal sessions where we see his particular technique of working with the orchestra, along with mini-interviews with various musicians. However, what was totally incongruous were the small animations of moments in Strauss’s life, with the dialogue “taken from letters written by him”, to provide and underline didactic explication about his musical intent. If the format is the same with the other six episodes in this series, I probably wouldn’t watch them.
Robert Mapplethorpe – Paul Tshinkel – U.S.A. 2006, 79 mins. In English. I won’t talk about Mapplethorpe’s fame (or infamy), you can just Google it. This documentary is notable for never-before-seen footage of Robert in his New York City Bond Street studio, done in 1983 by some hapless and unintentionally clueless (and at times funny) interviewer. Tschinkel’s film gives off a raw feeling from an editing standpoint, but the structure is there. I only wish I had bothered to attend the retrospective showing (this being the 25th FIFA) of Nigel Finch’s 1988 documentary on Mapplethorpe, which won Best Film for TV at the 8th FIFA. However, this documentary, made well *after* his death, chronicles his place in the annals of photography, art, and art transcending trite working-class sensibilities which reduce all sexuality, particularly non-mainstream, as obscenity. I wonder in today’s world, with the rise of the literal-minded, biblically-hobbled non-thinking religious conservatism, if his works would have been found to be, as a mostly blue-collar jury in Cincinnati did 1990: a) pandering to the prurient, b) obscene, but c) with artistic merit. Aside: punctuating sentences with "you know..." seems to be a very New York City thing...
Jonathan saw the next two films and did the reviews for them:
La Cafetière Conica – Anna-Celia Kendall – France 2006, 26 mins. French. This documentary explores the life and times of the iconic conical Conica coffee-maker, so named because of its shape, the cone. Not originally on my list, I was *really* there for the other film – I don't even like coffee! Rossi, the designer, used his knowledge as an architect to design the coffee-maker, or was it a building he was designing? You could've fooled me, with those buildings, I mean coffee-makers, set-up on a table, like tall buildings on an island, and people walking in between the buildings, I mean the coffee-makers, and shouting from the window, err... the spout. Even in that dry, French style, the documentary was excellent. The original Italian ads from the 50’s were worth seeing alone – when one is used to ads by Maxwell House or *gasp*, Folger’s – you realize that coffee is to Italians what croissants are to the French. So much so that the only thing I wanted after the film was a big cup of coffee!
Rem Koolhaas, Architecte XXL – Markus Heidingsfelder – Germany 2005, 52 mins. French. Rem Koolhaas (pronounced cool house!) is *the* reference in contemporary architecture. You can't pick up a book or a magazine on architecture without his name popping here and there. A self-described anti-star, he does not like to attract attention to himself. But good grief, did the director have to make him look so… dull? To be fair, it's not so much the topic, or the man, that was dull, but the whole technical aspect of the documentary. The colours were bland (Technicolor was obviously not a sponsor), a vestige of the PAL-to-SECAM transfer or was it just bad editing? The sound was lousy – let's be fair, his heavily Dutch-accented English was not *that* hard to understand – but must we insist on using that wretched voice-over technique? Not only was the original audio too loud, but the French voice-over was neither clear, nor lively. Now, the architecture. Oh yeah, there's architecture too. His Casa da musica,
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