Touch of Glass
Composer brings film scores to life with Philip on Film series
The synchronized performance of live music to film is one of the rarest and most sublime pleasures in the contemporary film going experience, offered only occasionally by silent film societies and college screening rooms. It is a pleasure soon available on an epic scale when Philip Glass and the Philip Glass Ensemble perform alongside a host of silent films, contemporary works and short films conceived especially for the touring program, Philip on Film, at Atlanta’s Woodruff Arts Center and Fox Theatre.
Like Bernard Herrmann, whose work as a composer is inseparable from his collaborations with Orson Welles and Alfred Hitchcock, Philip Glass has become famous for imprinting the contemporary cinema with his music. For Glass, the work of the film composer is, naturally, monumental; “as important as the writers and therefore almost as important as directors,” he has said. Film is a collaborative art, and the composer’s work with directors like Paul Schrader (Mishima), Godfrey Reggio (the Qatsi trio) and Errol Morris (The Thin Blue Line) has borne out his faith in a unified film assault.
Glass has more in common with the Julliard-educated Herrmann than just a talent for creating vivid compositions to complement visionary screen narratives. From Herrmann, Glass also has borrowed comparable musical tropes of throaty bass drums, urgent strings and the vortical fall — a whirlpool of music that pulls the viewer into the film as effectively as the directors’ visuals. In both composers’ music of immersion, the power of film scores is revealed as a seductive, hypnotic tool. There is a sense of mysticism and conspiracy in Glass’ musical “voice” that has immeasurably enriched projects like Koyaanisqatsi’s brutal, dark rhapsody about the mad dystopian swirl of modern life.
One of the highlights of the Philip on Film program is without a doubt the collection of short works created especially for this festival that has already traveled to Singapore, Massachusetts, New York and has slated stops ahead in Paris, Mexico and London among others. The directors of the shorts were chosen by Glass to create silent films to be scored by the composer.
Featuring some of independent cinema’s real visionaries, the evening of shorts includes films by Atom Egoyan, Peter Greenaway, Iranian art world superstar Shirin Neshat and video artist Michal Rovner, whose career will be charted in a 2002 retrospective at the Whitney Museum in New York. The program also features two works by Reggio: “Evidence,” about the effect of television on children, and “Anima Mundi,” a work celebrating the remarkable variety of the animal world from the most elemental to the most complex.
The mesmerizing, chanting patterns and repetitions of Glass’ compositions find their match in the short films’ abstract, almost mathematical use of repeated musical imagery, which harks back to Glass’ own initial training in mathematics and philosophy at the University of Chicago.
The most striking in the series of short films is Neshat’s exquisitely haunting “Passage,” which inhabits the same edge-of-the-earth precipice as Koyaanisqatsi (1983). The element of time — a continual feature of Glass’ hypnotically circular compositions — is rendered not only in the titular journey made by a group of men across a barren beach and desert landscape, but in Neshat’s repeated use of the circle. The bleak, otherworldly terrain, made up of only sand and a field of rock, draws out all of the funereal qualities of Glass’ compositions. Apocalyptic and mesmerizing, the work manages to convey the enormity of death.
Neshat’s cinematic hourglass of sand is answered in Greenaway’s symphony for water in which a single drop into a pool unfurls a Busby Berkeley ballet of swirling, dancing droplets. “The Man in the Bath” continues Greenaway’s interest in using text, numbers and frames to rupture the film fiction, and it boasts one of Glass’ most whimsical compositions. A joyously loopy arrangement of castanets, snare drum, wooden blocks and a woman’s trilling voice, it is a rare diversion from the dark, brooding synthetic currents of much of Glass’ work.
Collaborating with a composer seems to have inspired a musical bent to the visuals in this collection of shorts, as in Tel Aviv-born artist Michal Rovner’s translation of human forms into abstract, shifting musical notes, or Egoyan’s meditation on violence and flight, “Diaspora,” which uses a flock of sheep as a flowing musical river that is then broken down into individual fragments.
Also on the Philip on Film bill are two of Glass’ most famous film compositions for former monk and activist Godfrey Reggio’s eco-cinema Qatsi trilogy: Koyaanisqatsi and Powaqqatsi (to be completed with Naqoyqatsi: Life in War). The imagery of these first two films is recycled constantly in music videos and commercials, but their original power has not depleted. The thrilling, mesmerizing gloom of Reggio’s prognosis of the natural world’s destruction in the films is enhanced by Glass’ haunting, gleaming, golden compositions, which glide across the landscape like Reggio’s helicopter shots and then reiterate the frenzied mania of city and human intervention.
Showing alongside such modern composer/ filmmaker collaborations are Glass’ musical interpretations of two pre-existing works: Jean Cocteau’s La Belle et la Bete (The Beauty and the Beast) and Tod Browning’s consummate 1931 vampire tale Dracula. Poet/artist/writer Cocteau’s 1946 adaptation of the children’s fairy tale of a beautiful princess whose love transforms a furry beast into a prince is treated with confectionery set design and theatrical devices in keeping with the director’s interest in “the realism of the unreal.” The sense of mortality and doom that infects some of the short films and Reggio’s Qatsi trilogy also underpins Glass’ interest in Belle et la Bete with its idyllic rendition of death.
The Kronos Quartet will join Glass in providing the music for Dracula, a horror masterwork featuring the cinema’s definitive vampire, Bela Lugosi, and lenswork by German Expressionist Karl Freund. Dracula is equally important for its folklore of the living and the undead. Glass has said this macabre film is about “the inability or unwillingness to accept our own death,” and that idea, of grappling with our own extinction recurs throughout the Philip on Film program. Glass’ tremulous, haunting film music is a reminder that it is often in artistry that humankind most fundamentally cheats death.