I met filmmaker Sam Green three years ago. He was passing through town and our mutual friend Dave Anderson -- the photographer and filmmaker who, among other things, shoots and reports the SoLost video series under the auspices of the Oxford American -- arranged for us to have lunch together at a local barbecue place.
At the time, I was familiar with some of Green's work. I'd written about his impressive Academy Award-nominated documentary The Weather Underground, and I'd loved his 1997 short The Rainbow Man/John 3:16 -- about Rollen Frederick Stewart, who became famous as a ubiquitous rainbow-wigged figure holding up signs reading "John 3:16" in the crowds of televised sporting events in the 1970s and 1980s. We spent a lot of that lunch talking about the death of Meredith Hunter during the Rolling Stones' set at the Altamont Free Concert in 1969. Over the years I had talked to a number of the Hells Angels who were on the scene that night, and Green had made a short film -- Lot 63, Grave C -- about the last day of Hunter's life.
We also talked a little bit about the challenges facing independent filmmakers. Green had recently realized a project called Utopia in Four Movements that I'll admit I had a little trouble wrapping my head around. It was a "live documentary," a multimedia lecture narrated by Green, who controlled the footage via Keynote (the Apple alternative to Power Point) with live music provided by the Quavers (a Brooklyn-based band that features Little Rock native Catherine McCrae on vocals and violin). As the title suggests, the film is about would-be utopian movements, including Esperanto (I remember telling Green about Fayetteville-based poet Miller Williams' interest in the subject) and Cuba. While I haven't experienced the project (I almost wrote "seen the film") I have watched some of the haunting footage Green shot in the South China Mall, a nearly empty 7.1 million-square-foot white elephant that holds the the dubious title of world's largest shopping mall.
That distinction would make it eligible for inclusion in Green's latest project, The Measure of All Things, which is loosely based on the Guinness World Records and grows out of our collective fascination with the book. Green traveled the world to interview about a dozen record holders, some of whom are just briefly touched upon, for the 90-minute presentation, which will be shown at Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art in Bentonville at 7:30 p.m. Wednesday. Admission is $7.50; to learn more call (479) 418-5700. The show -- maybe that's the word we've been looking for -- also features music by the Quavers' McRae and T. Griffin accompanied by Fugazi drummer Brendan Canty.
"Performing with a live film is unlike any other kind of performance I've done," McRae writes. "The piece is a sum of its (moving) parts -- film, narration, and music -- and it's an intricate dance between those parts, requiring a fairly intense and constant focus. No getting carried away with some fancy guitar solo. With the visual element, most of the audience's focus is on the film and on following the narrative arc. The music is not the center, so we have to be extremely sensitive to what's going on in the film and the narration so that nothing gets lost."
She points out that "the piece is scored (not improvised) so while there is a definite structure to the thing, the timing is never the same from one performance to another. The variables could be Sam's timing in the narrative, audience reaction, and the timing of musical phrases. There are many times when the music needs to land with a specific cue or cut, and we have to know exactly when those cues happen. We may have to collectively decide in the moment to shorten or lengthen a piece of music ...
"There's a fairly wide instrumentation -- violin, guitar, drums, vibraphone, glockenspiel, drums and electronics -- and the three of us are playing several of these. There is a pretty constant migration happening on our little section of the stage from one instrument to the other.
"So, while most of the time I might be thinking about starting to play exactly when the oldest man in the world bows, or hoping that Brendan doesn't step on my violin cable while he's moving to the vibraphone, there are also the moments when I just enjoy flashes of the film, like the biggest cat in the world. I never get tired of seeing that cat. Also, I haven't mentioned probably the most important part of the piece: the audience. I'm always surprised and delighted to hear audience reactions to different sections. The liveness of it makes the whole thing new every time."
That same liveness removes the "live documentary" from the realm of cinema, even as it retains cinema as an element. Each performance is slightly different, with Green making choices in his editing and the musicians responding to cues from the narrator and the audience. It's something closer to a concert -- or a TED (Technology, Entertainment and Design) talk -- than a movie. And it's an interesting strategy for a filmmaker to employ for a couple of reasons.
First of all, the primary experience can't be reduced to a DVD or a broadcast. While you could make a documentary of the performance, you'd have only a record of that performance, not the event itself. And it puts the filmmaker in the position of performing -- of connecting directly with an audience -- whenever the piece is presented.
Digitalization has changed most things. It turns out a lot of art is reducible to ones and zeros. Museums can be compressed into files. A hard drive can harbor a universe. This is wonderful, and it is not.
Some of us still think of a movie as arrangements of light and sound projected on a wall in a dark room as we sit among strangers -- as a communal experience. But more and more that is not the case. I watch most films these days on a computer screen or an iPad via links provided by a distributor or studio. Maybe you catch most of yours on Netflix or DVD. Maybe you watch them only in the company of your closest friends, or maybe alone. Maybe you collect them on your shelves, or store them in a cloud.
You can't do that with a "live documentary." It is necessarily a communal experience, a return to the ancient idea of theater as ritual, as something performed by priests and shamans for an engaged audience.
While at Crystal Bridges, Green will deliver a free 45-minute lecture titled "Bringing Portraiture to Life" at 1 p.m. Thursday in the museum's main lobby, and at 7 p.m. July 18 he'll present an illustrated lecture titled "The Love Song of R. Buckminster Fuller." Admission to the lecture, a version of a show he has presented with the rock band Yo La Tengo, is $5.
He can't send me a review link; to get this to work, you have to be there.
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MovieStyle on 07/11/2014