Sunday, April 7, 2013

Movies with live soundtracks and narration - leavening film with serendipity and accident

The New York Times writer Dennis Lim wrote about an emerging arts phenomenon, movies with live narration and soundtrack music. Here's a description of how one director, Sam Green, stumbled upon the format:

The San Francisco filmmaker Sam Green introduced what he called the “live documentary” with “Utopia in Four Movements” (2010). In what amounted to a lavishly illustrated lecture-performance Mr. Green, a director of the Oscar-nominated documentary “The Weather Underground” (2003), stood before the audience, narrating and cuing images and clips while a band played live. The format proved such a success — he booked about 50 shows over two years — that he is repeating it for a second project, “The Love Song of R. Buckminster Fuller,” which will be performed at the Kitchen in Chelsea four times this week with a live score by Yo La Tengo.

As Mr. Green tells it, he discovered the form by accident. He was making a documentary on the concept of utopia and wanted to avoid a talking-head approach. He shot a few vignettes — a history of the universal language Esperanto, a portrait of an American exile in Havana — that each said something about idealism in an anti-utopian age.

“The connections were too oblique,” Mr. Green said in a recent interview. “I begrudgingly realized I had to explain more.” A friend suggested fine-tuning the material by showing it to an audience while narrating. What he considered a work in progress resonated so strongly with early viewers that it became the thing itself.

Again, as with live music, one of the appeals of this art form is the possibility for mistakes, accidents and serendipity:

Each performance of Mr. Green’s live documentaries — which he does not plan to adapt for conventional screenings or home viewing — is a singular experience, and a collective one, with the potential for human connection and human error. He said there have been occasional flubs but no major blunders, although one viewer was apparently so soothed by Mr. Green’s congenial tone that he interrupted the performance to ask a question.

Related posts:
Great music is perfected imperfection
When something goes wrong in music, the mistake is "not reacting to the opportunity"

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