Category Archives: Film

Film, General, Humor, Laura Grimes

All’s quiet on the Scatter front

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Engraving by H. Humphrey of

By Laura Grimes

Dear Mr. Scatter,

Everything’s fine. Really. No need to hurry home.

Both Large Smelly Boys are making noises about wanting to be an only child, but I’m sure it’s nothing.

The Large LSB has a Judy Garland film on the telly. The Small LSB does not want the Judy Garland film on the telly.

The giant moth you tried to whack with a broom and some choice words is toast. I found it on the stove. It was near the little black skillet.

Don’t worry, I cleaned it — the skillet, not the moth — even though you’re the only one who had eggs for breakfast and it’s etched in the marriage contract that scouring it is your job.

Judy Garland is throwing statues across a room and trashing it. I didn’t know she was left-handed.

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Bob Hicks, Film, General, Television, Theater

Most assuredly, a vote for entertainment

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By Bob Hicks

The late lamented Charlie Snowden, Mr. Scatter’s boss at the old Oregon Journal (a newspaper that died when the industry was healthy), was a man who appreciated a good joke but also had unyielding standards.

Simon Russell Beale as Sir Harcourt Courtly in the National Theatre's filmed version of "London Assurance." Photo: Catherine AshmoreAt his perch on the news desk, Charlie was known to lightly mock certain passages of flowery writing as he slashed through copy with his big black pencil. Sometimes he’d sigh or giggle and choose to overlook a phrase that not so privately drove him crazy: He knew which writers had permission to roam and which did not. But that didn’t stop him from pulling out his inkpad and his favorite stamp and branding the hard copy with his own gleeful judgment. The type was in a florid, immediately post-Gutenberg, barely readable old gothic. “WRETCHED EXCESS,” it said.

Ah, but what if the excess isn’t wretched?

That’s the sort of excess that courses through Dion Boucicault‘s ramshackle 1841 comedy London Assurance, which recently enjoyed a sold-out revival at the National Theatre. That production was filmed live in London on June 28, before the show closed, and it was screened for Portland audiences twice on Saturday by Third Rail Repertory, which has an agreement with the National to show its filmed productions.

Mr. Scatter will argue that it is precisely the excesses in this calculated crowd-pleaser that make London Assurance work — and the firm command of excess on the part of the performers that steers it clear of wretchedness.

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Bob Hicks, Dance, Film, General, Music, Theater, Visual Art

39 steps to a new and better Mr. Scatter

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Leif Norby on the lam in "Alfred Hitchcock's 'The 39 Steps'" at Portland Center Stage. Photo: OWEN CAREY

It’s been a busy few days around Scattertown.

First, on Thursday night, Mr. and Mrs. Scatter took a break from the gala festivities of Science Night at Irvington Elementary School to scoot up the hill to Talisman Gallery on Alberta, where their friend Cibyl Shinju Kavan was having an opening of new assemblages. Scrolls, bamboo, feathers and rocks figure into the work, which is quite pleasing.

Cibyl Shinju Kavan at Talisman GalleryThen, at midday Friday, the Scatter duo showed up at the Gerding Theater in the Armory to see dancer Linda Austin and her cohort J.P. Jenkins tear up the joint with a fascinating visual, musical and movement response to Mark Applebaum‘s elegant series of notational panels, The Metaphysics of Notation, which has been ringing the mezzanine railings above the Gerding lobby for the past month. Every Friday at noon someone has been interpreting this extremely open-ended score, and this was the final exploration. California composer Applebaum will be one of the featured artists this Friday at the Hollywood Theatre in the latest concert by Third Angle New Music Ensemble, the band of contemporary-music upstarts for whom Mrs. Scatter toils ceaselessly.

Austin and Jenkins began by racing around the mezzanine and literally playing the hollow-steel guard rail, which was quite fun. They moved from pre-plotted base to pre-plotted base, always coming up with surprises, as the small crowd followed like Hamelin rats mesmerized by a piper’s tune. Mr. Scatter enjoyed the red fuzzy bargain-store microphone and the Sneezing Chorus and especially the shower of discarded clothing items floating down from the mezzanine into the path of the startled flower-delivery guy in the lobby below. Mr. Scatter took no photos, partly because the little camera doohickey on his cellular telephone is pretty much useless for anything more complicated than an extreme closeup snapshot of an extremely still object, and partly because he was just having too much fun to bother. But Lisa Radon of ultra was more disciplined and took some fine shots which you can ogle on her site.

On Friday evening it was back to the Gerding for opening night of Portland Center Stage‘s comedy Alfred Hitchcock’s ‘The 39 Steps,’ which takes the 1935 movie thriller and blows it to preposterous proportions.

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Dance, Film, General, Martha Ullman West

I love Paris at the Opera Ballet (but not the movies)

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Martha Ullman West, Art Scatter’s chief international dance correspondent, took in “La Danse,” Frederick Wiseman’s documentary film about the legendary Paris Opera Ballet. How does it go wrong? Let her count the ways:

From "La Danse." Paris Opera Ballet

Last night I took a friend to Cinema 21 to see a benefit screening of La Danse, documentary filmmaker Frederick Wiseman’s take on the Paris Opera Ballet. Before I scatter a little venom about this highly uneven film, I would like to express my profound gratitude to Cinema 21 for supporting Oregon Ballet Theatre, the beneficiary of the screening.

Wiseman likes to be a fly on the wall with a camera (conjuring interesting visions of Vincent Price, come to think of it) at various kinds of institutions, from high schools to juvenile courts. And he’s no stranger to ballet: In 1993 he did a similar film on American Ballet Theatre, Ballet.

A scene from Frederick Wiseman's LA DANSE: THE PARIS OPERA BALLEThat one was OK, but just OK, though I quite loved the scene of then artistic director Jane Hermann losing her temper on the phone with the Lincoln Center administration, using language she did not learn at tea in the James Room at Barnard College.

La Danse isn’t quite the worst dance film I’ve ever seen — Robert Altman’s The Company, not quite a documentary but not quite a feature film either, is probably worse.

But what these two directors seem to me to share is really lousy taste in choreography.

In The Company, which is about the Joffrey Ballet, all the revelations of the inner workings of the company culminate in a performance of the ghastly The Blue Snake, choreographed by Robert Desrosiers.

In La Danse, we see a lot of rehearsals and a pretty lengthy slice of performance of Angelin Preljocaj’s Medea, which culminates in the murder of her two children and the gorgeous ballerina Delphine Moussin covered in fake blood. There are literally buckets of the stuff on the stage, and post-infanticide, she carries a large piece of red fabric in her mouth.

Scatterers who are familiar with Martha Graham’s Cave of the Heart, which has no fake blood on a stage defined by Isamu Noguchi’s extraordinary set pieces and props, surely will feel as outraged as I was by this cheap knock-off.

In Graham’s masterpiece, Medea seems to pull out her own guts, which are represented by a red velvet rope: It’s a brilliant piece of theater that makes me shudder every time I see it. Preljocaj’s buckets of blood would have given me the giggles if I hadn’t remembered Melina Mercouri laughing her way through a performance of Medea in Jules Dassin’s movie Never On Sunday.

The rehearsals recorded in La Danse are quite interesting, especially when Preljocaj, having set the ballet, tells Moussin that it is now up to her, giving her a good deal of freedom to interpret the role.

Moussin is hardly the only perfectly gorgeous dancer we see in the film. All the dancers he films are lovely to look at, with extraordinary technique, and he shows them working in studios with raked floors, high up in the Palais Garnier, the arched windows overlooking the Paris rooftops. (Those shots, as well as exterior shots from the roof of the building, made me want to jump on the next plane to Paris).

We see them taking a break, eating in their own cafeteria (in which the food looks neither healthy nor like haute cuisine), getting on the elevator, walking down long corridors, being made up.

A scene from "La Danse"/Paris Opera BalletWe also see them being coached by long-retired dancers, in one session a man and a woman (unidentified; typical Wiseman) arguing with each other about whether a leg should be raised or lowered. It’s all very amusing and quite lovable, like the old dancers in that most excellent of ballet films, Ballets Russes, by Dayna Goldfine and Dan Geller.

But that seems to be Wiseman’s only real bow to tradition. He completely omits the Paris Opera Ballet School, which is where those poor murdered children in Medea, forced to huddle with buckets over their heads, came from. For a good look at the ethos of the Paris Opera Ballet, and how students rise from the ranks, through a fixed hierarchy, there is an old, black-and-white French film called in English Ballerina that tells you a lot more about it than La Danse.

In a piece of directorial self-indulgence that makes this 158-minute film much, much too long, you do become extremely familiar with the corridors of the upper floors and the subterranean passages of the Palais Garnier. I did quite like the fish who, in the words of a colleague, had set up housekeeping in a flooded passage, and the metaphor of the beekeeper on the roof of the building was not lost on me: With providers of food, costumiers, set builders, accompanists, janitors, cleaners, ballet masters and Brigitte LeFevre, the queen bee who is the artistic director of the company, the building is indeed a hive of activity.

And it was a pleasure, a profound pleasure, to see these dancers performing some bits of Paquita in the grand tradition — and what a contrast to the rehearsals of Rudolf Nureyev’s unspeakable staging of The Nutcracker, which would appear to be completely free of children.

Wiseman does know how to film dancers: He isn’t obsessed with their feet, and he does show the whole body. On the other hand, a lot of the time, in the studio, he filmed them from the back so we saw their reflections in the mirrors — somewhat distorted, at that.

In the end, La Danse provides a pretty distorted view of a company that is one of the best in the world, and that’s a pity. It deserves better, and so do we.

Bob Hicks, Film, General, Music, Theater

Scatter happy holidays edition: puzzling out the season

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Santa Claus jigsaw puzzle (detail)

Here at Art Scatter World Headquarters we’re used to friends and associates grumping about Christmas and the holidays. “Bah,” they say. And again, “Humbug.” A seasonal deficit disorder afflicts our closest circles of civilization, and we’ve learned to grump along with the chorus, just to keep things running smoothly.

But the truth is, we sort of like the holiday season. Yesterday afternoon the Scatter Inner Circle brought home its Christmas tree and got the lights and some of the ornaments artfully arranged before settling in to watch Christmas in the Clouds, an affable, low-key romantic comedy about life at an American Indian-operated resort lodge, with terrific wintry scenery from the grounds of the Sundance Institute in Utah. Graham Greene plays a vegetarian chef who tries to scare all of his customers out of ordering meat, and M. Emmett Walsh plays a foul-tempered drunk who has a change of heart, and the DVD arrived from friends in New Mexico who sent it just because they’d enjoyed it and wanted to share it, and that’s kind of what the holidays are about, isn’t it?

Of course Mr. Scatter is way behind on shopping (and several things need to be sent, which requires the sort of logistical hoop-jumping that often ties Mr. Scatter’s brain, if not his stomach, into knots). And many dozen cookies remain to be baked: The Small Large Smelly Boy insists. Never mind. It’ll all get done. Holiday CDs are pretty much in continual loop here at AS world headquarters (we’ve been listening to 16th and 17th century carols from the Baltimore Consort) and some members of the inner brain trust have been doing serious damage to the national eggnog supply.

The picture of Santa Claus above is a detail from a jigsaw puzzle assembled over Thanksgiving weekend in Port Angeles, Washington, mainly by a junior member of the Scatter clan. The corporate brain trust discovered a shop in downtown P.A. that specializes in mostly used jigsaw puzzles — and actually assembles every puzzle before offering it for sale, to make sure no pieces are missing. It’s apparently an obsession. This particular puzzle comes from a little artisanal outfit in Kansas City called Hallmark. If our records show that you’ve been good, we’ll run a photo of the whole completed puzzle before the season ends.

***************

Among other things, December is a month of beautiful music, and in Portland there is far more of it than a person can hope to take in. We regret, for instance, missing the medieval caroling of the women’s ensemble In Mulieribus, Portland’s answer to the Anonymous 4, and London’s Tallis Scholars, who know how to put the pedal to the pedagogy and make it soar.

On Friday night the Scatter clan braved the threat of ice and trekked to the Aladdin Theatre for Holidays with the Trail Band. It was well worth it. We hadn’t seen the Trail Band in a few years, and it was worth making the reacquaintance. The Trail Band is the baby of Marv and Rindy Ross, who back in the 1980s had a shot of national success as leaders of the pop group Quarterflash, and earlier were the core of the terrific bar band Seafood Mama. Since starting the Trail Band 16 years ago to commemorate the 150th anniversary of the Oregon Trail, they’ve been digging deeper and wider into the roots of popular music, and the result is a smart brand of musical eclecticism that is what it is and doesn’t really care what the tastemakers think.

The holiday show featured a great lineup including the highly talented guitarist Cal Scott (who’s also blowing a mean cornet these days); Phil and Gayle Neuman of the Oregon Renaissance Band, who bring the likes of pennywhistles and flageolets to the party; fine fiddler Skip Parente; the subtle and attentive drummer/percusussionist Dan Stueber; and Mick Doherty, who rescues the hammered dulcimer from the yellowing pages of history and revives it as an exciting contemporary instrument. Plus, guest shots from actor/comedian Scott Parker, who gives the nativity story a hilarious spin; flash guitarist Doug Fraser, the Rosses’ old Quarterflash sidekick, who rocks and roars through a funky little ditty called Mustang Santa; and the hugely talented Michele Mariana, whose warm, deeply measured Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas brought pulses in the house to a halt.

Try as we might, we just can’t grump about a show like that.

***************

On Saturday night Mr. Scatter and his younger lad went to Northwest Children’s Theater and School to see the company’s musical play Narnia, based on C.S. Lewis’s children’s fantasy The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe. A small review ran in Monday morning’s Oregonian; here’s the link to my much longer online review on Oregon Live, in which I touch lightly on the phenomenon of Christian parable in 20th/21st century kids’ lit, from Tolkien to Lewis to L’Engle to Rowling.

How, you might wonder if you followed the link, did Robert Frost get into the mix of the longer essay? Credit goes to the book group with which I’m loosely associated, an erudite and genial collection of lawyers, writers, classical musicians and even an actor who gather once a month to eat, drink and do lit talk. One member happens to be a noted Morris dancer; a couple have been getting their jollies recently by writing dueling sonnets based on rousing biblical tales.

December in this group is poetry month, and this year’s reading choice was Frost. So the ice man was fresh in my mind when I sat down to write about Lewis’s ice queen, and I discovered that Frost fit the discussion neatly. Fire and ice, baby. You can’t get much more Narnian than that.

And, oh yes: Father Christmas puts in an appearance in Lewis’s tale. He’s very welcome, thank you.

Bob Hicks, Film, General, Music, Theater

Friday Night Live from the Keller: ‘Orphee,’ Part 4

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Philip Glass in Florence, 1993. Photo: Pasquale Salerno/Wikimedia Commons10:10 p.m., this joint is emptying out.

I think they want to kick us out.

A couple of things first:

In the film that Glass adapted, Cocteau was revitalizing the “fairy tale,” which even in the 1940s and 1950s had been relegated to the children’s shelf, and giving it back its spirituality and wonder. He was after the source of power in the universe. And, yes, it seems to have something to do with love. Maybe the Beatles were right. Or Jesus. Or whoever. Why is it these questions are usually left to “kids” tales?

No rock ‘n’ roll Glass in Orphee. This is beautifully crafted, and beautifully orchestrated, music, with some gorgeous vocal lines, and the singers’ volume got better as the evening progressed.

And it was ACTED — no Fat Lady planting her feet and belting here. Lisa Saffer as the Princess and Philip Cutlip as Orphee lead a truly good cast.

There’s mysticism here, folks: After a reference to “the one who gives the orders,” we’re told:

“Some believe he thinks of us. Others that we imagine him.”

And, of course, dry humor, as in this exchange between Orphee and a friend:

“The public loves me.”

“They are alone.”

This has been an odd way to write — fleetingly, conjecturally, without time to contemplate or shape. There’s much more to say, and quite a bit I did say that truly belongs on the cutting room floor. Well, too late. And too bad.

That’s all, folks, except for the bonus tracks below.

*****

PHILIP GLASS BONUS TRACK #8

On NOT introducing himself to Cocteau in Paris in 1954, when the poet was living there and Glass had moved there for the first time. This was shortly after Cocteau and director Jean-Pierre Melville had collaborated on the movie version of Cocteau’s 1929 novel Les Enfants Terribles:

“I don’t think I could have. I think I would have been terrified of meeting him.”

*****

PHILIP GLASS BONUS TRACK #9

On today’s multimillion-dollar special effects and the way Cocteau did it in his films:

“I suppose Cocteau probably had a budget of five dollars and thirty-five cents for special effects. Yet those effects are magical.”

*****

xxxxxxx

Photo: Philip Glass in Florence, 1993. Pasquale Salerno/Wikimedia Commons

Bob Hicks, Film, General, Music, Theater

Friday Night Live from the Keller: ‘Orphee,’ Part 3

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"Orpheus in the Wilderness," anonymous woodblock

9:53 p.m.: After the show, after the applause, after the standing ovation.

“I actually liked it a lot,” Mrs. Scatter said. “I found it surprisingly moving.”

Yes, it is. This is an opera that’s hardly been produced since its debut in 1993, and now it seems ready to join the repertoire. It stands up to the test of time.

And time, of course, is part of what Glass/Cocteau are talking about. A miracle occurs in this story, the miracle of moving time itself backwards after it’s already played out its events. The book of life and death is wiped clean — returned, if not to the beginning, to a point that allows a second chance. Wouldn’t we all love that? And why Orphee, who seems an ungrateful, selfish sort? Because. And “because” is enough.

Why isn’t this opera called Orpheus and Eurydice, as so many other versions of the myth have been? Because, although the two end up together (is it a “happy” ending? — in Ovid and most versions, Eurydice is lost forever when Orpheus glances back) this version isn’t really about Orpheus and his wife. It’s about Orpheus and Death, the Princess, who sets the whole thing in motion by falling in love with the poet.

This is a vigorously dramatic version of the myth, with fine stage direction by Sam Helfrich that is emotionally taut but not above a good sight gag. Once Orphee and Eurydice are returned to life under orders that he can never look at her, Eurydice pops behind chairs and crawls around the floor to avoid his glance: It has an I Love Lucy tinge to it.

*****

PHILIP GLASS BONUS TRACK #5

On the musical establishment and making it as a musician:

“You’re better off going out on your own than going through the establishment. The establishment, the price is too high.”

But he added that economic conditions make that much harder than when he was young, especially if you want to work in a place like New York, which is the sort of talent pool you want to immerse yourself in.

“In my business, anyone who makes a living, I say, ‘Hats off.'”

*****

PHILIP GLASS BONUS TRACK #6

On the pathfinders when he was building his career:

“The jazz world was the real avant-garde. These were people who didn’t make any money and lived for their art.”

He mentioned Ornette Coleman among the jazz geniuses. But there were many others the public never knew, he added, and there still are. He runs into them all the time on the streets of New York: black, white, Hispanic musicians who are doing genuinely exciting work but can’t get a break.

*****

PHILIP GLASS BONUS TRACK #7

On the business of music:

“I was never the kind of person who was going to write a work of music that would never be played. I never, in fact, have written a piece of music that I didn’t KNOW was going to be played. It just seems like too much work.”

*****

Photo: “Orpheus in the Wilderness,” anonymous woodblock print, 1500s

Bob Hicks, Film, General, Music, Theater

Friday Night Live from the Keller: ‘Orphee,’ Part 2

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Photo: French poster for Jean Cocteau’s film “Orphee,” the inspiration for Philip Glass’s opera. Wikimedia CommonsFrench poster for Jean Cocteau's film "Orphee," the inspiration for Philip Glass's opera. Wikimedia Commons

8:38 p.m., Intermission: No smoke yet, but lots of mirrors.

One of the coolest things about this opera is the way that it uses the image of the mirror. Very important to Cocteau, and Glass and the set designer, Andrew Lieberman, have picked up on it. The mirror has magical properties. It’s the doorway between worlds, the world of the living and the world of the dead. And that is the journey that Orphee and his put-upon wife, Eurydice, must take. As Death’s chauffeur, the dashing Huertebise (Ryan McPherson) tells Orphee: “You don’t have to understand, only believe.”

The music: Of course you know the Philip Glass joke:

“Knock knock.”

“Who’s there?”

“Knock knock.”

“Who’s there?”

“Knock knock.”

“Who’s there?”

“Philip Glass.”

Well, it’s not true. At least, not in this opera. Sure, he uses a background of repetitions. So did Bach. Listened to any of those organ-grinder Bach numbers lately? Here, that’s just the backdrop for a palette of impressionist sound that somehow seems very French to me — maybe because this is, after all, a French tale, at least in its Cocteau interpretation. I find the music very restrained but opening up at key times, and beautifully sung, although I’d like a little more oomph now and then from some of the voices. That’ll be all balanced out in the recording, and it should sound terrific. Lots of craft in this piece!

*****

PHILIP GLASS BONUS TRACK #3

On Cocteau’s reputation as a flighty man incapable of settling into one discipline:

“My view is that … he wasn’t a dilettante. … He in fact had one idea. His idea was that the transformation of the world comes through magic. And the magic comes through the artist.”

Or, he added, through anyone else who chooses to use it.

*****

I was worried about not having the film itself, because Cocteau is such an amazing poet of the moving picture, and his film of Orphee has some utterly ravishing, untranslatable moments. Glass’s adaptation of La Belle et la Bete uses the film itself — the musicians are below the screen, playing and singing — and there’s a ghostly effect to it. This one’s … different. And not at all in a bad way. The dialogue is word for word from the movie script, but this is a stage drama.

*****

PHILIP GLASS BONUS TRACK #4

Asked whether other composers influenced the music in Orphee, he brought up Gluck’s 1762 opera Orpheus ed Euridice:

“I came across a beautiful melody in that. I tried to write it from memory, and I failed. I ended up writing something that wasn’t like Gluck at all.”

*****

Bob Hicks, Film, General, Music, Theater

Friday Night Live from the Keller: ‘Orphee,’ Part 1

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Philip Glass in Florence, 1993. Photo: Pasquale Salerno/Wikimedia Commons6:14 p.m. Friday, Nov. 6, Keller Auditorium, in the lobby: One hour and 16 minutes to showtime, the show being the West Coast premiere of Philip Glass’s Orphee, by Portland Opera.

A crowd’s assembled outside the doors, early birds waiting to claim their spots.

I’m sitting between Byron Beck and Storm Large — rare company.

Time to stop and head for the stage. To be continued. Ha. Nobody’s stopping. Keyboards away!

You’ll find scattered through these posts several Philip Glass Bonus Tracks, outtakes from my Tuesday morning group interview with Glass and from his talk Tuesday night at the Portland Art Museum. They’re interesting, and they fill space nicely when I have nothing to say!

I’m quite looking forward to seeing this — I’ve heard the Paul Barnes solo piano version of some of the music, and I like it. I saw the first of Glass’s Cocteau operas, La Belle et La Bete, on a Halloween night in Eugene — perfect timing. David Stabler and I once went to Eugene to double-team a review of Glass’s A Thousand Airplanes on the Roof, a collaboration with playwright David Henry Hwang. David: Thumbs down. Me: Thumbs up. We had a great time disagreeing. And I remember vividly a solo piano concert by Glass when I realized, he’s a superb pianist, he really knows music history, and he respects the past.

Byron yells: “Cynthia, are you hash-tagging this thing?!” What in god’s name can he be talking about?

Tour time.

We go backstage. It’s a raked stage — one to twelve, as Cynthia Fuhrman says, which means a one-inch drop every foot. Not too bad when you’re standing around, but I wouldn’t want to have to find my mark on it while I was singing. It’s a very chic, uptown Manhattan-style, midcentury modern sort of set. Laura Hassell, the opera’s production manager, points out that there’s a ceiling — not a usual thing — which creates a sense of confinement but also acts as a shell that will help project the sound into the auditorium. It’s a single-set show — originated at Glimmerglass Opera in New York — and most of the action will be downstage. There’s a big mirror that’s crucial to the plot; it has a handprint on it. It’ll be polished shortly before curtain. Because all four performances are being recorded to make a CD of the show, a few small mikes are hidden discreetly around the stage. For the dialogue, mostly.

*****

PHILIP GLASS BONUS TRACK #1

On the appeal of Orphee and the Orpheus myth:

“Life, death, immortality and art. I mean, c’mon. That’s pretty heavy stuff.”

*****

7 p.m.: Friends keep dropping by, saying hi, shaking hands. “Pardon me, is it all right if a take a picture of some of you?” a nicely dressed gentleman asks. “Absolutely,” I reply. “Go ahead.” I suspect he’s going to be aiming at Storm, not me.

“Ladies and gentlemen, the auditorium is now open for seating,” that muffled voice over the microphone announces, but nobody seems to be paying much attention.

This is the lively time: the buzz, the happy rumble, the pre-show pump-up. I love this sound, this bright roar where only a rare word comes through intelligibly, but you can tell everyone’s pumped. This is the lively preamble to a live show, that human factor that only live performance — a play, a dance, an opera, a ballgame — brings out. Communal. I see composer David Schiff standing a few feet away. Love to hear what he has to say afterwards. Mark Mandel, too, who just dropped by. Mark knows more about opera than anyone I know. He should be doing this! Or David Stabler, who just stopped by with his wife Judy.

*****

PHILIP GLASS BONUS TRACK #2

On the parallels between Cocteau’s poet-hero in Orphee and his own life as an artist largely forgotten by the younger generation of artists:

“This film is the autobiographical film. This film is about Cocteau himself.”

*****

7:11 p.m.: I fear this is blather. I’m feeling a bit like Roland Hedley, the fatuous newsman in Doonesbury, who’s just published a book of Twitters. Jim Cox strolls by, dashing in a tux with a silvery Bret Maverick vest. Or is it Bart?

Mighty Toy Cannon is lurking about, mocking my two-finger typing technique. Marc Acito, who’s IN THE CAST, for crying out loud, is behind me hugging Storm. “Shouldn’t you be in makeup?” I ask. “I’m not on until the second act,” he replies.

And now writing guru Mead Hunter is making the rounds. And playwright/filmmaker Jan Baross. And here’s music writer Brett Campbell and his wife.

Oh my god: I’M BECOMING RONA BARRETT!

“I’m Flickering right now, Tweeting, I’m Flickering. I’m having a hard time!” That’s Byron, next to me. Again: What in blue blazes is he talking about?

7:24 p.m.: The opera’s Julia Sheridan comes over. “It’s almost curtain time. Time to wrap up and get to your seats.”

Huzzah!

Photo: Philip Glass in Florence, 1993. Pasquale Salerno/Wikimedia Commons

Bob Hicks, Film, General, Music

Movies into operas: the great Cocteau/Glass experiment

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“I’ve never been very interested in film,” Philip Glass said one morning this week at a long table set up in a rehearsal hall in the Portland Opera studios. “I don’t go to movies a lot.”

Jean Cocteau in his 20s. Wikimedia Commons

An odd confession from Glass, the 72-year-old composer who was in town for several days in conjunction with Friday night’s opening of the West Coast premiere of his 1993 opera Orphee at Portland Opera.

Orphee is, after all, one of a trilogy of operas that Glass has written based on the transcendent movies of Jean Cocteau (the others are La Belle et la Bete and Les Enfants Terribles).

And in a time when classical performers (Yo Yo Ma, Luciano Pavarotti, Andrea Bocelli) achieve celebrity but composers ordinarily don’t, Glass has become famous partly because of his forays into film, beginning with the hallucinatory Koyaanisqatsi in 1982.

Original poster for "La Belle et la Bete." Wikimedia Commons

Still, what he said made sense, especially when you consider the ways that he’s interacted with film — he’s hardly Hollywood-mainstreamed it — and the sentence he added immediately after his confession: “And yet film is an important aspect of the collaborative arts.”

Collaboration, he said, is one of the great attractions of the film world: It’s filled with extremely talented artists working toward a goal. The technology is amazing. And of course, compared to any of the performing arts, movies are seen: “The reach of film is extraordinary.”

How extraordinary? Glass recalled a story about the day Godfrey Reggio, the director of Koyaanisqatsi, called to tell him their movie was going to be shown on PBS:

Philip Glass in Florence, 1993. Pasquale Salerno/Wikimedia Commons

“I said, ‘What’s that mean?’

“He said, ‘It means 6 million people will see it that night.’

“I practically fainted. That is not a number that comes into my work very often.”

As it turns out, Reggio’s guess of 6 million viewers was off the mark. Twenty million tuned in.

And that’s how a composer becomes famous, minimalism or maximalism or any other ism aside. Who outside of the pop world is even better-known than Glass as a composer? John Williams, composer for the Star Wars, Indiana Jones, Superman and first three Harry Potter movies.

So. The movies, yes. Glass noted that he did a little work on film crews to pick up extra money when he was a young man living in Paris, and even acted — pretty badly, he said wryly — in a few bit parts.

But he noticed something about film: “It was not an interpretive art form, it was a definitive art form.”

By that he meant, once a film is finished it’s frozen. That’s its form forever and ever, world without end, amen, amen. You can remake with new stars, but then it’s a new work. You can even do virtual scene-for-scene homages like Werner Herzog’s ravishing remake of F.W. Murnau’s Nosferatu or Gus Van Sant’s frame-for-frame re-do of Psycho, which had all of Hollywood scratching its collective head. But those, too, become their own discrete objects.

A play or a symphony or an opera, on the other hand, is an elusive, transformational thing, taking on new shapes and layers of meaning with each successive performance: The idea of Carmen today, after thousands of performances, is somehow different from anything Bizet imagined, Glass suggested.

“And then,” he said, “it occurred to me that maybe I could look at film in a different way.”

Continue reading Movies into operas: the great Cocteau/Glass experiment →