A new infatuation
Peter Phillips explains how he has become doubly obsessed: with film as well as music
Have you ever rubbed shoulders with musicians and thought them dull — because they are obsessed with one thing, which doesn't include you and which is all they think about? Ever noticed how musicians don't really talk to each other in a properly communicative way — let alone to you — but just recycle old stories and gossip until the next session is due to start, when they can escape to that inner world which is all that matters to them? Yes, well, I have found a whole new way of deepening and intensifying that affront to humanity which I so artlessly convey by being a musician: I have taken to watching DVD films on my laptop when touring. Now I am doubly unavailable and doubly obsessed. I wouldn't be married to me; but then in a sense I suppose I am.
My infatuation with film started on a journey to the Birmingham Symphony Hall. I must have been ripe for some sort of conversion, because I found myself listening with unaccustomed attention to what my colleague was saying about Hitchcock. He was interested in all the aspects of film-making including the music, which in the case of Hitch's Bernard Herrmann scores is very distinguished; but I wasn't and never have been interested in the music. It was something else, not to do with music, that held me, and enough had been said for me to consider finding out about Hitchcock. Just Hitchcock. I watched as many of his movies as I could find, and nothing else. It was only when I had seen 45 of the 53 films he made (the remaining eight not being available for love or money) that I considered watching anybody else's work.
It was then that I came across Derek Malcolm's A Century of Films. I was fortunate because, although many critics have published their '100 best' compilations, Malcolm's book has a slightly more demanding starting-point than most. He allows only one film per director, which both admits some rare birds and leaves out quite a bit of the obvious, like Citizen Kane. Above all, his list is genuinely international, which, as it turned out, was just what I needed. This eclecticism also meant that few of his choices were going to be available at my local video library. I began to discover the almost unlimited delights of Amazon.com (not so much .co.uk because the .com selection is more extensive and I've trained my DVD attachment to play region one) and began to pay for my pleasures.
My DVD holding from Malcolm's list advanced in leaps and bounds one sweltering free day in Japan in June 2001. At that time expensive Japanese hotels hadn't yet worked out how to block people like me from dialling up a free local number and staying online all day. While my colleagues were sweating it out visiting temples in Nara. I sat in my room checking every single film on the list and ordering the ones that were available. Many were not, either on DVD or video, which I soon also started ordering and watching at home faute de mieux. I also spent rather a lot of money that day: costs have recently been made more manageable by the weakness of the dollar, and a friend in Roanoke, Virginia, to whom I send everything in the first instance. Say no more.
If I've gone slowly through Malcolm's list it is not only because some of his choices — like Lino Brocka's Manila: In the Claws of Darkness and Chris Marker's Cuba Si! — have remained elusive, but also that one thing has led to another and I've been delayed by following hunches. For example, my fascination with Fritz Lang began with his early movies M and Metropolis, though Malcolm actually recommends Beyond a Reasonable Doubt. It took me a long time to find that one — I've only just seen it — but the byways had already caused me to watch Jean-Luc Godard's Le Mepris, which Lang appears in as an actor (OK, I was watching it primarily for Brigitte Bardot); and the DVD had as an extra item an interview between Godard and Lang in French, which was very rare footage indeed. The same basic pattern came into play with Erich von Stroheim, who is listed by Malcolm in his role as director of the colossal film Greed, but who made his first appearance to me as an actor in Renoir's La Grande Illusion. Obviously, this led on to Billy Wilder's Sunset Boulevard, in which Stroheim plays Gloria Swanson's butler. Greed itself was so mutilated by unsympathetic people at the time it was released that it was unreconstructable for many decades and I couldn't find it at all until very recently, in a new version using some recently discovered storyboards and stills of the time to replace some of what was lost in the original. The result, which even now is four hours long, is not only silent but also in considerable part not a 'movie'. Nonetheless the last ten minutes, at least, are unbeatable cinema.
The last piece in the jigsaw which has made me a collector of films was a chance conversation in Portland, Oregon. I had just given a masterclass at the university, and was being driven back to my hotel. As usual I was desperate not to talk about music, and so was only half-listening to the woman at the wheel when she suddenly announced that something had reminded her of a scene in Krzysztof Kieslowski's Killing. I don't know whether she expected any reasonably welleducated person to get the reference, or whether she made a habit of parading her knowledge, but I sat bolt upright.
This was one of the Malcolm films which I could not find anywhere. It transpired that she and her husband were the ultimate buffs, with knowledge of arcane editions, publishing houses and websites it might have taken me a lifetime to pin down and which were duly vouchsafed to me: gold-dust like www.imdb.com; www.asianfilms.org; www.rottentomatoes.pricegrabber.com, and SO On.
So what was it about film that has so taken my fancy? The answer is in the way film depicts and subtly exaggerates national characteristics which, as a peripatetic musician, have become of great interest to me; the sort of things a traveller might miss in the rush of the day yet appreciate in the hands of a persuasive director. As a result I've made a minor speciality of collecting the work of the 'smaller' countries; and of them all I would recommend the Iranians. For once Malcolm was not my starting-point, since he doesn't mention them. Instead someone had tipped me off about a most extraordinary recent issue, called Lumiere and Company, which had been compiled to celebrate the centenary of the Lumiere brothers' first moving picture of 19 March 1895. Forty contemporary directors had been asked to make a film using the Lumieres' original camera, whose equipment restricted them to features of 80 seconds each. Only two of these films have stuck in my mind — by David Lynch and Abbas Kiarostami — and of the two it was the Iranian who for me most completely realised what could be done in such a short time-span. His full-length films are just as good, as are those of his colleague Mohsen Makhmalbaf. They have a view of life which is quite unlike any other. Even the sound of a language I do not understand adds to an experience which, as with other more familiar foreign-language films, soon retreats into a kind of sound picture. By comparison with that picture — visual and aural, descriptive of things I know or have sensed, and yet abstract — music by itself can seem twodimensional. But neither makes me sociable.
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