Music video was to Gen-Xers what radio was to our grandparents--
a peripheral diversion that came
to define pop culture. Savvy then for a classical-music community ever worried
about the graying
of its audience to finally sidle up to the MTV generation in multimedia fashion
and adopt the music-video form.
For "Film-Harmonic," the Oregon Symphony continues its courtship of the thirtysomething
audience, collaborating with the Northwest Film Center and four
of Portland's finest filmmakers to
present video interpretations of reel music, symphony style. Prompted by Nerve
Endings founder Murry Sidlin, the Film Center's Bill Foster reeled in Hollywood
heavyweight Gus Van Sant, short-film master Chel White and animators Jim Blashfield
and Joan Gratz for four short commissions.
Of course, the idea isn't exactly new. Sixty years ago with Fantasia,
Disney managed a near seamless marriage of cutting-edge animation and symphonic
sound that still startles today. But though the pop world has created a mammoth
industry in MTV and VH1, the form's rarely been marketed specifically for classical-music
audiences.
According to Sidlin, the concept's genesis came from a collaboration called
3 x 2 = Imago, wherein classical pieces received mime interpretation
by the Imago troupe. The resultant marriage
of music and motion earned the Oregon Symphony a five-year Knight grant for
innovative programming that enabled Nerve Endings to explore the possibilities
of film.
The resultant films are more successful as cinematic shorts than as interpretive
accompaniment to the chosen music. Van Sant's Smoking Man, inspired by
John Adams' "The Chairman Dances," uses the thinnest of plots (a kids-don't-try-this-at-home,
chain-smoking Suit) to make an environmental statement about America's hedonistic
wastefulness. It plays like a public service announcement-cum-Disney nature
flick. 1999's Best of the Northwest Film and Video Fest winner White interprets
Gustav Holst's "Neptune" from The Planets in Passage, an eerily
beautiful rumination on the passage between birth and death.
The animated offerings by Will Vinton "claypainter" Joan C. Gratz and music-video
aficionado Jim Blashfield both use Berlioz's splashy "Dream of a Witch's Sabbath"
from Symphonie Fantastique. Berlioz's brash and brilliant symphonic poem
is alive with tonal color, percussive slaps and harmonic dashes. Both directors
create entirely different but thoroughly entertaining works.
Because there's no conventional narrative, Gratz's Innerplay comes closest
to a true illumination of the score. In claypaint splashes, she creates a bursting
kaleidoscope of textured color with electric reds, yellows and oranges battling
more somber blues, reminiscent of some of the action-painting techniques
of filmmaker Stan Brakhage.
Blashfield's meta-film Tasseled Loafers is undoubtedly the most lighthearted
of the bunch. A plumber enters a darkened apartment to mend a leaky pipe (with
fictional Berlioz Sealant) and, while waiting to apply a second coat, presses
a "Do Not Touch" button that sets a projector rolling. Everyday objects--ice
trays, pets, anvils, Post-it notes, alligators (?)--whirl by in synchronized
motion to the Fantastique score.
Whether any of this is brilliant or necessary is moot. But in the case of White,
Gratz and Blashfield, such multimedia usage is exuberant fun--and when was the
last time the symphony was that?
