“You are the subject of this film.” – Godfrey Reggio
First came Koyaanisqatsi, on which filmmaker Godfrey Reggio and composer Philip Glass began working in the late 1970s. (It was released in 1983; its “life out of balance” theme resonated with an audience eager for anything not Reagan or Thatcher). Glass’ idiosyncratic variegated arpeggios and rhythmic repetitions riveted a public for whom the musician was mostly unknown.
Two more qatsi films followed over the next two decades, neither reaching the popular heights of the first. Reggio stuck to his unique vision and Glass extended his reach beyond the opera house and the concert hall into the mainstream by scoring commercials and Hollywood movies.
A new film by these two longtime collaborators is cause for celebration under normal circumstances but the world premiere of Visitors at the Toronto International Film Festival, September 8, 2013 at a sold-out Elgin Theatre, was anything but normal, since the film’s soundtrack was performed live by 64 members of the TSO, supplying an additional layer of energy to the event. Led by longtime Glass associate Michael Riesman, the musicians responded prodigiously, playing continuously for more than 87 minutes as they underpinned the enhanced images that filled the large venue. The TIFF screening also afforded a rare insight into the creative process since it was followed by a discussion, led by the notable film director Steven Soderbergh, that included Reggio, Glass and Visitors’ associate director/editor and technical co-ordinator Jon Kane.
Soderbergh asked Glass how it all started, giving the audience an inkling of their collaboration. “I think he [Reggio] showed me the first reel played with some of my music and then with an electronic score,” Glass replied. “Yours works better he said.”
Asked about the function of the music, Glass continued: “The music gathers the spectators’ attention to watch the film and vice versa.” And the process? “There is a back and forth the whole time between film and music. The real word [for it] is collaborative effort.”
Reggio interjected that he “feels like a deaf person working through the ears of Philip.”
In answer to Soderbergh’s question of how daunting it is to do something different, Glass pointed out that the score for Visitors was written directly for the orchestra – a first – a decision which he himself made, noting that it took 35 years for Reggio to have a premiere with a live orchestra. “It’s very different than a sync soundtrack,” he went on. “You can feel it. We have taken the film world and put it into the world of live performance, which is a huge transformation in how we experience it.” It all goes back to the live score to Abel Gance’s silent film Napoleon which was revived at Radio City Music Hall in January of 1981, screenings which both Glass and Reggio had attended. (I was fortunate to have been in the audience then and personally experienced first hand the revelation of viewing a film in such transformative circumstances.)
Glass aptly described the flow of the music in these special circumstances as “an organic flow right from the orchestra pit [that] seals the attention of the viewer.”
This latest collaboration,Visitors, is a sensory rich, meditative experience, self-reflexive and mysterious. Filmed in an intense, rich black and white, much of it shot in infrared, and processed digitally at the maximum pixel density of 4K, Visitors consists of just 74 images (73 cuts). Among them: a beguiling if inscrutable female lowland gorilla, the cold beauty of the Atchafalaya Basin, a New Orleans retirement home and many of its residents who are among the 80 people looking out at the audience face to face in what Reggio dubs “the reciprocal gaze.” The director calls his films “a visceral form of cinema,” comparing them to poetry: “Once you write it, it has a voice of its own.”
I thought the score started very romantically becoming elegiac towards the end yet grounded in a calm centre reflective of everyday life.
The day after the premiere I had a few moments with Glass, Kane and Reggio.
My mention of hearing a Mahler horn early on and later a Brahmsian string and brass passage prompted Glass to bring up Wagner which he hears reflected in the tremolo and the arpeggios at the beginning of the score. He was excited about what he heard and curious about what conductor Dennis Russell Davies’ reaction to it would be when the soundtrack was recorded in Austria with the Bruckner Orchestra Linz.
“I was laughing to myself,” Glass recalled. “What did you think of the Wagner? He said, ‘What Wagner?’” Glass smiled: “My best plans are unnoticed.” When associate director/editor Kane asked why he was trying to tip the hat to Wagner, Glass simply replied: “Oh, I don’t know. I just was looking for something, looking at the moon, looking at the gorilla, the atmosphere of epic space.”
The harp and the tremolo were key to Glass feeling comfortable with his writing: “Before the bass, a little snare drum and the harp coming through that – once I had that opening sound I knew I was home. When I got the right one, you know right away.”
Kane went on to explain that he and Reggio always saw the film as being in three movements. Over an 18-month period (during which Glass was working on at least two other major works, including The Perfect American, his opera on the last days of Walt Disney), the composer would work from montages of the movements that were not finely edited but enough to convey the sense of the filmmaker’s vision.
(As our brief encounter came to an end moments later, Glass tapped me on the knee and said: “Don’t forget, listen for that tremolo.”)
On the Soderbergh panel the previous day, Kane had set it up: “We shot first in New Orleans, trying to get a shared lexicon of what’s good and what’s bad, working on ways of making a new kind of cinema, before [adding] music. It would morph and Philip would come out and watch images.” They called it “marinating Philip.”
Glass had picked up the narrative. “I think the morph process description is good but it’s the element of trust that keeps you working together. Then all the other stuff can happen. Trust and respect are very much connected.”
“Deep admiration is at the heart of my relationship with Godfrey Reggio.”
-- Philip Glass
Later the next day Reggio spoke with me about the nature of his collaboration with Glass going back over 30 years to their landmark documentary Koyaanisqatsi. “That is his M.O. – collaboration. It’s one medium motivating the other,” he said in his calm, self-assured stentorian voice. “We usually think of all the forms, how many parts are in a piece, but in fact he just starts at the beginning as an emulator.”
The director described how he and Glass work. “I give Philip a metaphor and he responds. In the case of Visitors, it was more a matter of discovering a metaphor of stillness. He takes in what I lay on him and takes it from there. He doesn’t have to but in this case he took it. His job is to respond to it, it’s his sensibility that I’m looking for.”
When I pointed out that his films don’t have a narrative structure, that the music becomes the narrative, Reggio agreed. “The music is a communion to the soul of the listener, a manifesto – you’re controlling what people feel, you’re motivating them.”
The night before at the Elgin roundtable, Soderbergh had shed light on the role of the composer in mainstream movies: “In Hollywood, scores reinforce emotion or put it in when it’s not there.” Glass had then explained that he had chosen abstract music to back the scenes with people (which I felt in part as a series of rising breaths focusing on the flute and metamorphosing into a succession of signature Glassian broken triads) but chose romantic music to accompany the images of the swamp (where I heard the echoes of Brahms as strings set off a brass choir) and the garbage (where the score was at its most elegiac).
At a similar roundtable quoted in the film’s pressbook, Reggio pointed out that composers tend to write in the medium that they’re in at the time, the “period,” as they call it, of composition: “The period of composition that Philip’s in right now is orchestral, but it’s symphonic orchestral with big highs and lows. The first piece of music that came in was like that and it was gorgeous, but it would blow this film out of the water. So after a number of discussions and writing pieces – Philip is remarkable in that he wants criticism, he wants feedback – it finally came clear. He says, ‘Oh, I get it, Godfrey. You want me to write music for the attention of the audience, not in any way to illustrate this image.’ Now, he knows that already, but ‘for the attention of the audience’ was a breakthrough, so I got what I wanted.”
Glass continued: “There were a whole bunch of early pieces which never ended up in the movie. We were looking at some other music, and Godfrey and Jon were very kind. They never said, ‘This is terrible.’ Most film people would have said, “This is terrible,’ but they never did that. They said. ‘Well, let’s try something else.’ They’re very gentle. And, well actually, by the second week I had changed gears completely and I hit the tone of the film about ten days into the writing. I got it right away in the second week and I stayed with it to the end, and that was fortunate, because at a certain point, the production of the film is working hand-in-hand with the music.”
Reggio then brought the uniqueness of their collaboration home: “Philip’s looking for the criticism, I think, because in most of the films – I don’t want to speak for him, but – he’s done a lot of Hollywood films. He might get a disc of the film and speak to the director, maybe, and then everything goes to the sound or the image editor, and that’s the end of it. He writes cues but he’s not implicated in the process like this and, of course, there’s a difference. In this [Visitors] he’s co-equal with the image, he’s half the film, and it’s the fusion of those mediums that create the film. If one’s off, then the whole thing’s gone. So it’s much more demanding. That Philip took basically five months during his 75th year where he was literally all over the planet to do this is something I’m highly aware of and super thankful for.”
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Visitors (with Dennis Russell Davies and the Bruckner Orchestra Linz supplying the soundtrack) began its run in Toronto at TIFF Bell Lightbox on January 31, as well as in Montreal and Quebec City. It opens in London February 7, Ottawa on February 14 and in Edmonton, Saskatoon, Vancouver, Winnipeg and Regina later in February and March.
Paul Ennis is the managing editor of The WholeNote.
