Brutalised
Maybe you saw Daniel Blumberg’s acceptance speech for the best soundtrack award during the Academy Awards ceremony at the weekend. Honoured for his work on The Brutalist, he finishes off with a mention of Cafe Oto, which is less of a surprise when you’ve noticed, among the musical credits, the names of such Oto-adjacent improvisers as the saxophonists Seymour Wright and Evan Parker, the pianist John Tilbury and the trumpeter Axel Dörner.
After seeing Brady Corbet’s ambitious film at the IMAX in London today, I came away with mixed feelings. Sometimes it feels like three different and much shorter films, maybe four, trapped together in a very large sack and left to fight it out for three and a half hours.
But the real reason I went was to find out what use Blumberg had made of Evan Parker’s unique qualities. The saxophonist is featured in a sequence filmed amid the marble quarries at Carrara, in the hills above the Tuscan coast, the source of the material from which Michelangelo’s David was wrought, along with Rome’s Pantheon and London’s Marble Arch.
As a camera hovers over the spectacularly gorgeous hewn terraces of white stone, the air is filled with the sound of Parker’s soprano saxophone. Unbroken skeins of squiggling multiphonic sound are shaped with a sound-sculptor’s skill and imagination, soaring like birds above a sombre low-brass chorale.
Given the film’s narrative requirements, it’s a moment of audio-visual magic that can’t last long. But I could happily have taken three and a half hours of that alone, without all the plot-driven drama that surrounds it. Right there, perhaps, was yet another film struggling to escape: a potential classic of slow cinema.
thebluemoment.com 