When the normal way to watch a film is on a screen that fits in your pocket, is it possible for a filmmaker to engage an audience through methods that harken back to the earliest days of cinema? The team behind “The Love Song of R. Buckminster Fuller,” opening at the Kitchen in New York tonight, is attempting to capture the collective spirit of going to the movies before it disappears forever.
The production, a multimedia performance featuring live narration and musical accompaniment, is the result of experiments by the Academy Award-winning filmmaker Sam Green (“The Weather Underground”).
A few years ago, Green was working on a film project concerning the idea of utopia and was stuck trying to figure out what form the piece should take.
“I was just spinning my wheels,” Green told ARTINFO in a phone conversation. “Somebody asked me to do a presentation about the project, so I thought, OK, I’ll do a PowerPoint presentation, it will be like a fancy lecture. I was charmed by that format. It was informal, kind of like a movie. But not quite as stuffy.”
Right around the same time, Green went to a performance of Canadian filmmaker Guy Maddin’s film “Brand Upon the Brain!” which featured live sound effects, narration – by a rotating cast of fascinating characters such as actor Crispin Glover, poet John Ashbery, and musician Lou Reed, among many others – and a live, 11-piece orchestra.
“Something about the live-ness was fresh. It had a lot of energy,” Green said. “I like this form because it hangs on to that magic of cinema – you go sit in a dark room with strangers, you turn your phone off, the lights go down, and all that.”
In 2010, Green made “Utopia in Four Movements,” a globe-hopping “live documentary” collaboration with musician Dave Cerf that concerns “the utopian impulse.” The film (although to simply call it a film is reductive) – which involved Green controlling the narration and visuals, a combination of still and moving images – accompanied by live music, premiered at the Sundance Film Festival. When the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art was preparing their Buckminster Fuller exhibition last year, they commissioned Green, who is based out of San Francisco, to make a similar piece about the storied multihyphenate. Fuller’s visionary ideas about utopia, and optimistic outlook on the future, lined up with Green and his previous work.
Green immediately went to Stanford University, where Fuller’s papers are archived.
“His papers are this enormous collection of everything from hotel bills to telegrams to letters,” Green said. “I loved going through it. The more I went through it the more I realized his ideas were oddly resonant today.”
Fuller, best known for his Geodesic domes, worked across so many fields, for so many years, that digging through his work, and his many, many ideas, could prove daunting.
“He was one of those people, like Joseph Cornell, who was around for a long time and spanned a lot of different eras,” Green continued. “Basically, from the ’20s to the early ’80s, when he died, he was saying the same thing: If we could use resources in a smarter way, everybody on the planet could have a pretty good life. That’s a very striking message. It’s also striking that he was saying that from the beginning to the end of his career, over the course of about 50 years.”
Green had seen the indie-rock veterans Yo La Tengo perform a live score to the films of Jean Painlevé at the San Francisco Film Festival in 2001 (“It was one of the best film experiences I’ve ever had,” Green said) and instantly thought they would be right for the project.
“I knew they were good at making music for movies,” Green said. “Georgia Hubley,” drummer and vocalist for Yo La Tengo, “her parents were famous animators; I know Emily, her sister, who’s also an animator. So they know movies, which is great. A lot of bands are great bands, but they don’t know film or how to work with film.”
Green circumvented the traditional director-composer relationship, presenting the band with a number of visual sections of the piece that could be used as musical interludes, which they wrote music for. Later, they all worked together in the band’s rehearsal space, building the piece around those musical interludes. Green considers the group collaborators, not just hired guns. And because the piece is not fixed, and doesn’t need to be locked and printed and sent to a theater, it opened up the process to more ideas from everyone in the group.
“You can change things a lot and it’s much more malleable and much easier to work in that way,” Green said. “I found that fun and exciting.”
“The Love Song of R. Buckminster Fuller,” which has toured the United States since September, is custom tailored to each specific location. “In New York,” Green said, “this is a great place to do a show because he had several exhibitions at MoMA, there’s great photos of that; he built something for the 1964 World’s Fair, which is still around; he lived in New York for a while and had a studio there. So there’s a lot of that to work in.”
“Something about this form too that I like a lot is that you can hone things,” Green continued. “If you add some stuff and it doesn’t really work, you can cut it out. You know, it’s like a comedian, in a way – you fine tune it by doing it in front of an audience.”
In his experiments with live cinema and his impulse to look back to the medium’s earliest days, Green is opening up a road for the future, a way for filmmakers to present their work in a meaningful way outside the traditional structures of film distribution.
“So much of our cultural experiences now are through screens, or in a mediated context, that the idea of going to something that will never be the same twice, you have to be there to experience it, there’s not going to be a DVD to download later – it makes it special and infuses it with a heightened energy,” Green said. “There’s a thrill that comes with that.”