Diary

Capelle on Composers

By Marc Capelle

For the San Francisco International’s 51st edition, SF360.org has asked Marc Capelle to blog his thoughts on movies, music, and the Festival. Below are his first two entries, in reverse order. For more Capelle and other local writers on films, visit SF360.org’s blogs page

Marc Capelle is a native San Franciscan composer and musician. He writes music for films, television, commercials, web spots, toys, and billboards. He has most recently worked with Tommy Guerrero, American Music Club, Tipsy, and Virgil Shaw. He also performs monthly as musical timekeeper at the Porch Light story telling series.

Errol Morris has a giant brain. Anybody who wants to argue against that thesis does not have a giant brain. So let’s move on.

When Morris spoke with B. Ruby Rich Tuesday at the SF premiere screening of Standard Operating Procedure, he also has some very nice casual khaki pants and olive, drab, immaculate low-top lace-up Keds. He also makes a very good living making commercials and, when not doing that, manages to consistently make distinctly American films that are unrivaled in their quality of cinematography, sound, sound editing, musical composition and music editing.

So you got hundreds of commercials, pretty much the invention of the non-fictional renactment doc style with "Thin Blue Line."

But even more mind-roasting is that Morris is also is reportedly a pretty nimble and accomplished cellist. He and Yo-Yo Ma shared a teacher growing up. He also studied composition in France with Nadia Boulanger, who counted among her pupils Aaron Copland, Quincy Jones, Elliot Carter and Philip Glass.

In an recent interview on the film with the Chicago Sun Times, Morris talks about his close friendship with Philip Glass and his decision to do something different with the score of Standard Operating Procedure.

This something—or someone—different was Danny Elfman. One of Hollywood’s most prolific and accomplished composers, Elman (of ’80s rock band Oingo Boingo) is perhaps best known for his work on the Batman films, Spiderman, and recently Charlie and Chocolate Factory.

And then there is the very powerful movie and score from this collaboration. with young American soldiers and NGO’s trying their best to explain what was happening in a Hussein torture compound that is now being run as a house of torture by the U.S. As the stories unfold in Standard Operating Procedure, and the pictures and the videos are shown, you have Elfman’s score with a range of orchestration that covers everything from almost fairytale-like sections of celeste, vibraphone and bells, to less surprising dogged pulsing cello ostinatos, and flurried woodwind patterns that flutter gorgeously like birds trying to break free. It makes me thinks of T.S. Eliot’s "Burnt Norton" in the Four Quartets, where he talks about the bird calling back to the unheard music in the shrubbery.

That unheard music is heard in the stories and images in this film. And thank God for the music, because it does what really great scores do: It keeps us in the cinematic moment. And gets us through a reality that is pretty hard to bear.

"Go,go,go said the bird: human kind
Cannot bear very much reality
Time past and time future
What might have been and what has been
Point to one end, which is always present."

DAY ONE
Director Scott Hicks’ (Shine, No Reservations, Snow Falling on Cedars) documentary Glass: A Portrait of Philip in Twelve Parts is a very close-quartered and loving documentary, a visit into a year in the life of (arguably) America’s best known classical and film composer. In the course of the 115-minute doc, we watch Glass, his wife, siblings, kids, bohemian cohorts, directors (Woody Allen, Errol Morris, Martin Scorsese, Godfrey Reggio and his musical and score-production team, including, indie-fox wunderkid and noted composer on his own, assistant Nico Muhly, who is well profiled here) work on film scores, orchestras, operas, as well as some nice domestic scenes of Glass making pizzas from scratch and horse-playing and giving his two young kids belly farts.

Percussionist and Mills College lecturer William Winant, who has had music composed for him by everyone from John Cage to Sonic Youth, describes a composer as someone who gets up each day and writes music. At one point in "Glass," Hicks asks Philip Glass if he has any secrets. His response is as simple and true as Winant’s composer definition. "Secrets: I have one secret. You get up early in the morning and you work all day."

Taking that too literally you could jump to the conclusion that all you would need is a good alarm clock and a strong constitution to be a composer. While both do help, along with a sharp pencil a decent sense of pitch and some notation paper, Glass delves into something deeper in the film—where all those melodies rhythms and harmonies come from. He repeats and repeats again, (as a good minimalist should), the idea of an underground river of music that always flows. This, he says, is where he draws his music from.

Despite this methodical tapping into subterranean music-making water, Glass comes across as very matter of fact, blunt and clear-eyed on his role as an artist, composer, human—and indeed spiritual being. Not once, but twice in the film director Hicks focuses briefly on a messaged T-shirt resting against a chair in glass’s home. The words on the shirt are the final stanza from Allen Ginsberg’s "Memory Gardens," an elegy for Jack Keruoac written the week after Keruoac’s death in 1969.

"Well, while I’m here I’ll
do the work-
and what’s the work?
to ease the pain of living.
Everything else, drunken
dumbshow."

One other big hook in the film are the opening shots of Glass screaming and laughing his head off while riding in the front car of Coney Island’s Cyclone roller coaster. (Go drunken dumbshow!) As we watch him weave and holler we get his voiceover advice to those don’t care for his work—-"There’s a lot of music in the world, there’s Mozart, there’s the Beatles. You have my blessings go listen to something else, I don’t care." And then he screams again as the cyclone dips down once more.

P.S. the film also features one of the worst hoariest music knock knock jokes ever, as told by artist Chuck Close:

"Knock knock
Who’s there?
Knock knock
Who’s there?
Knock knock
Who’s there?
Knock knock…
Philip Glass."

topics: bay area, documentary, music, san francisco international film festival

05.02.2008