Glass: A Portrait of Philip in Twelve Parts (Scott Hicks, 2007)
Posted: Sat Apr 19, 2008 12:45 am
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Glass: A Portrait of Philip in Twelve Parts (Scott Hicks, 2007)
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Posted: Thu Apr 24, 2008 1:23 am
It looks interesting, I've been a Glass fan ever since I saw Mishima: A Life in Four Chapters, he remains my favorite composer.
Posted: Thu Apr 24, 2008 10:21 pm
I love the film "Philip Glass: Looking Glass," which is not nearly as expansive as this film seems to be. In that movie, we get to see Glass' working process more than his private life, and it's like pornography for a Philip Glass fan to see him pop in a videotape of clips from Errol Morris' Fog of War, then call him on the phone and say "so what're we going to do, the usual?" We also see him learning stuff from The Hours so he can perform it later, and a visit to his studio, which he avoids in general ("they don't need me" or something like that).
I will watch any and every documentary about Philip Glass; to see a human being create eternal music like Mad Rush is like putting a microscope on Heaven.
I will watch any and every documentary about Philip Glass; to see a human being create eternal music like Mad Rush is like putting a microscope on Heaven.
Posted: Fri Apr 25, 2008 4:49 am
This doc, which aired on PBS as part of the "American Masters" series, is quite excellent and worth tracking down:
Too bad the only legit copies for sale are going for $95. Hell, in 1992 it cost me less than that to see the actual production.
Too bad the only legit copies for sale are going for $95. Hell, in 1992 it cost me less than that to see the actual production.
Posted: Sat Apr 26, 2008 7:58 am
That's a holy grail film for me; someone who has a copy needs to youtube it asap.
Posted: Sun Apr 27, 2008 1:05 am
Peter Greenaway's take on Philip Glass is certainly worth checking out as well, along with the rest of the 4 American Composers series. I think the Glass episode is second only to the one on John Cage.
Posted: Sat May 03, 2008 7:40 pm
I just got to see Satyagraha at the Met on Thursday - utter incredibleness (for lack of a better word). I will be tracking down as many of these docs as I can find.
Re: Glass: A Portrait of Philip in Twelve Parts (S. Hicks, 2007)
Posted: Sat May 02, 2009 1:05 pm
Saw this last night and was a little disappointed. The film suffers from an odd problem for a documentary; director Scott Hicks simply has too much access to Philip Glass. I recall reading that he spent something like three years with Glass in making the film, but unfortunately, he develops such a chumminess with the composer that he fails to really delve deeply. Anyone looking into the working life of Glass would do best to look elsewhere as here, it only concerns a few portions of the film and really fails to deliver anything concrete. The questions are either vague, that they allow Glass to ramble on abstractly or just plain stupid ("Do you ever wake up in the middle of the night and have to write something down?").
However, most disappointing, is that the excerpts of the interviews with the likes of Woody Allen, Martin Scorsese and Chuck Close in the trailer are pretty much how long they are in the film. We get a bit more time with Errol Morris and some with Godfrey Reggio, but they speak largely about their history of Glass rather than delving specifically into how the films and music came together. Hell, Hicks even manages to get Ravi Shankar on film but doesn't bother asking him one thing about working with Glass (or any questions at all).
There are some intriguing bits about Glass' personal life, but ultimately very little is revealed about his methodology, inspirations, likes, dislikes etc. Instead the film just feels like hanging around with Philip Glass but never talking about music.
However, most disappointing, is that the excerpts of the interviews with the likes of Woody Allen, Martin Scorsese and Chuck Close in the trailer are pretty much how long they are in the film. We get a bit more time with Errol Morris and some with Godfrey Reggio, but they speak largely about their history of Glass rather than delving specifically into how the films and music came together. Hell, Hicks even manages to get Ravi Shankar on film but doesn't bother asking him one thing about working with Glass (or any questions at all).
There are some intriguing bits about Glass' personal life, but ultimately very little is revealed about his methodology, inspirations, likes, dislikes etc. Instead the film just feels like hanging around with Philip Glass but never talking about music.
Re: Glass: A Portrait of Philip in Twelve Parts (S. Hicks, 2007)
Posted: Sat May 02, 2009 5:53 pm
"My Friend Philip Glass", then?
Re: Glass: A Portrait of Philip in Twelve Parts (S. Hicks, 2007)
Posted: Tue May 26, 2009 7:50 am
Saw this last night - concur with Antoine Doinel... It starts promisingly, but then starts to deteriorate, appearing eventually as quite a lazy, superficial engagement with its subject, too clearly comfortable in the company of the filmmaker, 'Scotty'... Latterly, when current younger wife Holly Glass speaks her mind to camera, and tearfully states Philip and her are moving in different directions and she doesn't know what's going to happen to them ('it's hard to live with someone who's composing 3 scores at the same time', or suchlike), Glass pops his head round the door asking for the password to her laptop. "Frankie", she compliantly replies, before laughingly realising she has revealed her security code to all and sundry... More slightly cringemaking domestic drama, than great artist at work... And that's the feeling I had at the end of the film - strangely earthbound - when I expected to be airborne... It leaves you quite cold towards the new opera 'The Barbarians', the genesis of which is charted across the course of the film... Glass half empty, rather than half full...
Re: Glass: A Portrait of Philip in Twelve Parts (S. Hicks, 2007)
Posted: Tue May 26, 2009 8:43 am
Actually, for me that was one of the few moments in the film where you saw a genuine insight into the downside of life with a driven and obssessive artist - and the fact that it clearly came as a surprise to Scott Hicks is confirmed by the initial revelation being delivered while the camera's still out of focus, and him later having to pull back, boom still in shot, when Glass himself appears (a retake presumably being out of the question). It's a rare moment of genuine spontaneity and emotional honesty in a film that was otherwise far too cool and controlled - not inappropriate to the subject, of course, but you didn't learn that much about the work either.ellipsis7 wrote:Latterly, when current younger wife Holly Glass speaks her mind to camera, and tearfully states Philip and her are moving in different directions and she doesn't know what's going to happen to them ('it's hard to live with someone who's composing 3 scores at the same time', or suchlike), Glass pops his head round the door asking for the password to her laptop. "Frankie", she compliantly replies, before laughingly realising she has revealed her security code to all and sundry... More slightly cringemaking domestic drama, than great artist at work...
Credit where it's due, the new Drake's Avenue DVD (which I believe is a clone of the Australian Madman release) does at least attempt to address some of the film's more glaring lacunae - Hicks' commentary is very useful in this respect, as are the nine deleted/extended (more, to the point, uninterrupted!) interviews and an hour of rehearsal/performance footage. But the film is definitely a missed opportunity, and I agree that it shows the drawbacks of having too much access to its subject.
Re: Glass: A Portrait of Philip in Twelve Parts (S. Hicks, 2007)
Posted: Tue May 26, 2009 9:34 am
I suppose for me it didn't comes as much of a surprise that revelation - what do you expect, I suppose, when you marry a workaholic 'genius' 30 years or so your senior, and then have a young family? - there's bound to be a downside... Otherwise she came across impressively... But then I find this, dated 22nd May 2009 - so the divergence was really serious, and breakup real, which the film doesn't make clear, like everything Hicks shies away from going into this issue in depth...
And then in Hicks' film, told over cartoons are these 2 anecdotes...Maybe it's an American thing. Americans, I say, are good at doing things like going to the gym before work. "My girlfriend does," he volunteers. "She runs and does pilates." Is his girlfriend Wendy Sutter? "Yeah," he says, "but she doesn't... she likes to be called my girlfriend, but she is also an artist in her own right." Wendy Sutter (whose date of birth is coyly absent from all her publicity material but who looks several decades younger than Glass) is indeed an artist in her own right. She is the cellist who inspired Glass's Songs and Poems for Solo Cello, some of which Glass will perform with her next week, in an evening of chamber music at the Barbican.
The Songs and Poems were hailed by The Washington Post as "not merely pleasant, but gripping" and by Bloomberg.com as "the first major solo cello work of the 21st century". And they are exquisite – plangent, fierce, passionate, full of yearning and aching with what could be joy or pain. They reminded the San Francisco Classical Voice (and me) of the Bach cello suites. Were they a conscious homage to Bach? "Oh yeah," says Glass. "The cello is often remarked as the instrument that's closest to the human voice, in that it's the instrument that mimics the range. It kind of plunges you into the interior of what an individual psyche must be like."
Well, if all that aching beauty has anything to do with spirituality, or personal pain, or his feelings about Sutter, Glass (who has been married four times) is clearly not about to give anything away.
Except Hicks spoils it by calling the renowned art critic Robert Hughes, 'John Hughes' in the film...Glass didn't earn a living from his music, in fact, until he was 42. Until then, he drove cabs, shifted furniture and worked as a plumber. "I was careful," he explains, "to take a job that couldn't have any possible meaning for me." Stories of famous-composer-actually-working-man-shock from that period abound. The art critic Robert Hughes was astonished to find the avant garde composer mending his dishwasher. On another occasion, a woman tapped on the side of his cab and told him that he had the same name as a "very famous composer".