{"id":48,"date":"2006-06-18T02:19:23","date_gmt":"2006-06-18T06:19:23","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/deeperintomovies.net\/journal\/archives\/48"},"modified":"2009-05-18T17:42:59","modified_gmt":"2009-05-18T21:42:59","slug":"touch-the-sound-2004-thomas-riedelsheimer","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/deeperintomovies.net\/journal\/archives\/48","title":{"rendered":"Touch the Sound (2004, Thomas Riedelsheimer)"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><img decoding=\"async\" src=\"http:\/\/deeperintomovies.net\/journal\/images\/touchthesound3.jpg\" alt=\"03\" \/><\/p>\n<p>I see why reviewers complained that this movie was too long.  We learn little about Evelyn Glennie in the way of facts, background, future, profession.  There&#8217;s little dialogue.  There&#8217;s little character development!  And the director takes that little bit, what very little he has, and stretches it out to 100 minutes, what could have been a 60, or hey, 30 minute featurette.  The nerve of that self-important German to make a theatrical feature without enough support!<\/p>\n<p>Actually that&#8217;s how I feel about <em>Control Room<\/em> and <em>The Yes Men<\/em>&#8230; movies that tried to tell a story without enough support.  These reviewers would love <em>Touching The Void<\/em>, to name another creative documentary with a similar title&#8230; that one has a long story to tell, full of suspense, and the movie lasts as long as the story.  <em>Touch The Sound<\/em> isn&#8217;t narratively driven, and is meant to be enjoyed through sound and vision.  If you can&#8217;t enjoy such a gorgeous movie as this, why are you watching movies?  And if the story has stopped moving forward and you&#8217;ve learned all you need to know (&#8220;she&#8217;s a talented musician who is nearly deaf&#8221;), why not leave the theater early?  Because you&#8217;re a newspaper reviewer being forced to watch this as a job, I guess.  My point just being that the reason I don&#8217;t let newspaper reviewers determine what movies I see is that they so often seem to be watching movies as a job and not enjoying what they see.  A person who can&#8217;t appreciate movies as art can write no film criticism that matters.<\/p>\n<p><img decoding=\"async\" src=\"http:\/\/deeperintomovies.net\/journal\/images\/touchthesound2.jpg\" alt=\"02\" \/><\/p>\n<p>I oughtta be talking about the film though, a perfect-ten picture.  Amazing sound, amazing story, unbelievable photography and editing.  &#8220;Visual poetry&#8221;, says the trailer.  I could tell it was shot on film, somehow, even watching on DVD.  It was &#8220;Super 16mm&#8221;, whatever that is.  He switches to different angles while the soundtrack is constant, notably during the CD recording scenes&#8230; multiple cameras, or editing trickery?  I was conscious of the movie as a movie, of the making-of, but not distractingly so.  Lots of close-ups of waves in lakes, oceans, one exquisite shot of a long white line reflected in a pool when the waves start from one end, rippling along the line, forming &#8220;sound waves&#8221; to match the audio on the soundtrack.  Another moment when Evelyn narrates about people having their own sound, and being able to play different people like an instrument&#8230; while Riedelscheimer shoots a sort of ski-lift with people in individual cars crisscrossing on suspended wires&#8230; notes on a staff!  Clever man.  This movie and <em>Rivers And Tides<\/em> should be watched annually.  Hope Thomas doesn&#8217;t make too many more movies, or I&#8217;ll run out of time to watch anything else.<\/p>\n<p><img decoding=\"async\" src=\"http:\/\/deeperintomovies.net\/journal\/images\/touchthesound4.jpg\" alt=\"04\" \/><\/p>\n<p>Fred Frith seems like a pretty cool guy, too.  I&#8217;ll have to see him if he ever plays around here.<\/p>\n<p><img decoding=\"async\" src=\"http:\/\/deeperintomovies.net\/journal\/images\/touchthesound1.jpg\" alt=\"01\" \/><\/p>\n<p>In the making-of, while they show Thomas completely fabricating shots in the Cologne airport, he says &#8220;I think reality exists only in the moment of perception.  It&#8217;s a live, first-hand experience.  One cannot reproduce or film it.  It&#8217;s a personal experience, which is nontransferable.  And I think it&#8217;s wrong to say that documentaries are objective.  They are as much an expression of a very personal view as any other creative work.&#8221;  Funny, I was just writing about that two days ago.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>I see why reviewers complained that this movie was too long. We learn little about Evelyn Glennie in the way of facts, background, future, profession. There&#8217;s little dialogue. There&#8217;s little character development! And the director takes that little bit, what very little he has, and stretches it out to 100 minutes, what could have been [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[93,80,1540],"class_list":["post-48","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-movie","tag-documentary","tag-musical","tag-thomas-riedelsheimer"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/deeperintomovies.net\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/48","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/deeperintomovies.net\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/deeperintomovies.net\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/deeperintomovies.net\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/deeperintomovies.net\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=48"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/deeperintomovies.net\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/48\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2434,"href":"https:\/\/deeperintomovies.net\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/48\/revisions\/2434"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/deeperintomovies.net\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=48"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/deeperintomovies.net\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=48"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/deeperintomovies.net\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=48"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}