music is a sanctuary from modern life, get it?

[ironymaiden]

Sanctuary: Lisa Gerrard

it's called "a portrait", not a documentary. um, yeah.

it's no biopic. i enjoy Dead Can Dance and the soundtracks, but i didn't know much about Gerrard herself when i went into the film. afterward, i still know very little. okay, she lives in the woods somewhere (i'm not sure what country) and has two children (i do not know how she acquired them or when). i found out she had a sibling when they mentioned that his death upset her (i do not know how he died). she might have been dating the DCD guy? um, she has a studio in her house and i think she uses ProTools. the only coherent storytelling is from the people who hired her to do soundtracks. (i especially liked the Whale Rider director.)

for a movie about a musician, the sound is terrible. one-man studio Clive Collier can't ever let us just listen to Gerrard or any of the other interviewees without layering in some kind of background noise (like gunfire or city sounds). interviews without layered sound feature wind or other ambient noise. he also can't record a clean live performance. (this preview was held at the JBL theater at EMP, so i can't blame the sound system.) the best experience of the music was with clips from films she had scored...which i had already seen.

there are candle-flame images. and smoke tendril images. and water droplet images. and rustling trees. and dudes fighting in the middle east. and busy streets. and quotes from the Babel bible story. it's self-consciously arty.

maybe hardcore fans will get something more out of the film than i did. i learned about ten minutes' worth of information about the artist, saw little quality performance, and the ninety minutes felt like a good three hours. if watching someone sing (with intermittent audibility) under an overpass while traffic whizzes by intermingled with a discussion about how the cars are participants sounds interesting, then this is for you.

good luck to everyone attending An Evening With Lisa Gerrard.

Comments

I think hardcore fans may not - only the pretentious ones

[webcowgirl.livejournal.com]

I really like their music, but that just sounds so ungodly twee to me. So much better to have my OWN imagination fill in candles burning and water dripping when I listen to their music.

On the other hand, I'd now enjoy an anti-portrait, perhaps showing Ms. Gerrard sitting on the can, yelling at her kids, looking at a zit in the bathroom mirror, and tripping over her overly long skirts and swearing like a sailor.

Nowadays I like really good musicians doing their source music rather than DCDs watery remakes. Gah. I'll show you hardcore. X-P

[varina8.livejournal.com]

You make me feel much better about my decision to do nothing but work yesterday.

[steve98052.livejournal.com]

Although it sounds like a disappointing film, I still want to attend An Evening with Lisa Gerrard, because I like her musical work and I like personal appearances in general. It's good to know going in that the film may be the low point of An Evening; that will either avoid disappointment or allow for a pleasant surprise.

The fact that I was more interested in the personal appearance than the film is the reason I skipped the press screening. There were six other films this week that have press screenings scheduled (tentatively, as all are until the guests arrive), and although the personal appearances may not be more interesting than the film, film+appearance is almost always more interesting than film-only.

[ironymaiden]

i wouldn't skip seeing the artist if it were already on my schedule either. i almost always appreciate seeing the filmmaker (except for the one at secret festival last year, which was just embarrassing.)