Beard of the Week LXVIII: Being in the Art

This week's beard belongs to filmmaker Daniel Anker. Here's a convenient biographical sketch (from the 2007 Florida Film Festival, also the source of the photo):

Filmmaker Daniel Anker has been a producer/director of independent feature documentaries for more than a decade. His credits include Scottsboro: An American Tragedy, for which he received an Oscar nomination and an Emmy Award, and Music from the Inside Out, which had a successful theatrical release and was named one of the best films of the year by International Documentary Association. His film Imaginary Witness: Hollywood and the Holocaust has been shown at more than 70 film festivals worldwide and will be released theatrically in the fall. Anker has also produced numerous PBS programs, including the Peabody Award-winning Marsalis on Music. Among his new projects is The Moral Lens, a film about legendary director Sidney Lumet.

We know Mr. Anker a bit better now because we watched his film Music from the Inside Out a week ago, and we enjoyed it very much. It is a well put together documentary featuring members of the Philadelphia Orchestra. (Here is the distributor's page about the film, which has more information, nicely organized; here is the film's official website, all done in that horrible Flash style so that nothing's linkable, but clicking "about the film" and then "music" will get you to a list of all the music played in the film–it's a good selection.)

The marketing for the film leads us to believe that the subject of the film is the question, "What is music?" Well, that's maybe good marketing but it's hardly what the film is really about. Some of the musicians take a stab at answering the question–none very well–but it's hardly central to the film.

In fact it's not a simple film "about" a subject really, but through the interviews and observations, juxtaposed with all the episodes of musicians making music in different venues, the theme that I think emerges is "what is it like to be a musician", a deep question with no simple answer. Being a musician is a complex, life-time commitment, although one can make simple observations like "musicians are people who like to make music". This film goes well beyond that simple and superficial analysis, largely in a nonverbal way, by showing, and I think it largely succeeded in giving a very good impression of what it is like to be a musician.

The concert master (i.e., the principle first violinist) of the Philadelphia Orchestra, David Kim, featured prominently. That was not surprising because he was articulate and had fascinating stories to tell.* The stories largely concerned his mother's great desire for him to become a famous violinist, and his own thwarted quest to be a touring soloist. I'd like to have dinner with Mr. Kim sometime, maybe even play that Schubert Quintet with him.

Speaking of the music, there was a great deal of it in this film. All of the musical pieces were performances by the musicians that were both part of the film and also some of the soundtrack underscoring. It worked well and the music was generally treated sensitively–I hate hearing familiar pieces of classical music mangled, truncated, or spliced randomly to provide soundtrack fodder–with two small exceptions.

At the end of the film the last movement of Brahms' First Symphony was used as the underscoring for the closing credits. I knew, just knew that they would fade out the music right in the middle of the coda, and they did, but I didn't really like it. Sure, the credits had ended but the music hadn't!

The other instance I found a bit jarring was the segment that used the Schubert C Major Quintet (2 violins, viola, 2 'cellos) for the underscoring, but also as a centerpiece featuring Kim playing with colleagues. Cuts were inevitable, but the segments of the music were not used in the order that they appear in the work, and that bothered me.

But please, those are tiny criticisms of a really very good film, a film about music and music making that I think will be very accessible even to classical neophytes, even to people who aren't so sure they like classical music. Although it's the Philadelphia Orchestra, and although "classical" music is what is heard most commonly† throughout the film, it is music making itself, regardless of the music, that is the subject, and that should reach a very wide audience.

One of the featured musicians, Judy Geist,‡ who was the principle viola at the time, is also an artist, a painter, and the connection between art, and color, and music was explored a bit. I didn't find that exploration terribly profound, but I was very moved by Ms. Giest's comment near the end of the film about how music is a performance art:

You're using living people as part of this sculpture of sound. There I am, playing in this mesh of sound, within the rhythm. In fact, all of us–we are in the art.

———-
* Before this became a BoW entry I was intending to write about Kim's stories and make my case that they were interesting–that he was interesting–because he dramatized events, meaning he created a dramatic narrative, a story, rather than simply relating the events in an expository fashion. I felt there was a lesson in there about story-telling, but I haven't pulled it out yet.

†There's also bluegrass and jazz, but my point is not to say "see, it's not all classical!"

‡ Alas, I couldn't find much internet presence for Ms. Geist at all, which irritated me because the few glimpses I got of her art left me wanting to see more.

Posted on January 27, 2009 at 16.46 by jns · Permalink
In: All, Beard of the Week, Music & Art

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  1. Written by Bill Morrison
    on Tuesday, 27 January 2009 at 18.22
    Permalink

    It's good to hear of a violist of principle, seeing what an unprincipled lot (as Garrison Keillor has revealed) they can be.

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