Netflix Nights

"But maybe music was not intended to satisfy the curious definiteness of man. Maybe it is better to hope that music may always be transcendental language in the most extravagant sense." - Charles Ives

How can you capture the process of creation? How do you transmit the ineffable?

More to the point, how do you make a damn good movie about music? Previous posts have looked at musical biographies, parodies, and melodramas. Here are seven films that use classical music and the musical world in extraordinary ways. Each is a little miracle of success.

Unfaithfully Yours (1948, Dir: Preston Sturges) No, not the crap 1984 remake! Sturges was a comic genius, and despite his resolutely unpretentious take on things, he knew his Mahler from his Mozart.

Here he outlines the vengeful fantasies of a husband who suspects his wife is cheating on him.

That the husband is a world-famous conductor gives the great writer/director a chance to choreograph three hilarious scenes to peculiarly appropriate classical pieces. Here's a wonderful video essay on the film from the outstanding web site, "Shooting Down Pictures":

Orchestra Rehearsal (1978, Dir: Federico Fellini) The master uses the orchestra as a metaphor for society . . . but it's not boring! This hilarious film thrives through its attention to detail, even as it swings into the usual Felliniesque territory of absurdities. The orchestra gathers, its members are interviewed by a TV crew, even as it begins to fight with its conductor while the hall crumbles under the wrecking ball. High art, slapstick, satire and the comedy of manners unite perfectly here. This was Fellini's final collaboration with the composer Nino Rota, and it's just as wonderful as all their prior collaborations.

The Basileus Quartet (1983, Dir: Fabio Carpi) When a member of an internationally famous string quartet dies, the other three musicians are ready to hang it up - until a wild and wildly talented newcomer steps in to take the dead man's place. What could have been just another Eurosnoozer about life's regrets becomes a fascinating meditation on art and life, with a number of unexpected twists to boot.

Meeting Venus (1991, Dir: Istvan Szabo) This backstage drama/farce concerns an international production of the opera "Tannhauser," and like "Orchestra Rehearsal," it confronts the absurd conflicts that all too often plague collaborative effort. It zeroes in, though, on the illicit romance between the conductor (Niels Arestrup) and the diva (Glenn Close), and draws powerful parallels between their struggles and those in the piece they're performing.

Three Colors: Blue (1993, Dir: Krzysztof Kieslowski) When the wife of a famous composer loses him and their only child in a car accident, she despairs and tries to sever all connections with the past. Life keeps pulling her back, though, and through the medium of her husband's unfinished final composition, she is led to new discoveries and a renewed commitment to living. Zbigniew Preisner's score is out of this world.

The Piano (1993, Dir: Jane Campion) This crazy fable set on the New Zealand frontier makes the titular instrument a heavy and unwieldy symbol, but uses to trigger an amazing, ambitious and resonant story about love and art and a million other things. The film won multiple Oscars, and like a well-played chord, it contains overtones that still hang in the air every time you watch it.

Thirty Two Short Films about Glenn Gould (1994, Dir: Francois Girard) It's a documentary, but it's not. Girard mimics the structure of Gould's most famous recording, that of Bach's "Goldberg Variations," to provide 32 slices of observation and documentation about the revelatory and eccentric Canadian pianist. Combining reenactments, interviews, animations and more, the film draws no conclusions, makes no judgments, and gives a truer portrait of Gould than any other biographical effort. In that sense, it comes closest to being a piece of music itself of all these entries.

And finally: Next time, a cartoon coda!

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