For Charles Amirkhanian, artistic director of San Francisco's Other Minds Festival of New and Unusual Music, it is a sad irony that contemporary American music is well documented on films made in Europe — but never shown in the U.S. "Documentaries and features about contemporary composers just don't exist in America," he says. "They do throughout Europe, and often the subjects are Americans."
To combat this imbalance, Amirkhanian launched Eyes & Ears: The Other Minds Film Festival, the first U.S. avant-garde music festival devoted mainly to film, which opens today at San Francisco's Castro Theater. The three-day festival intersperses screenings — half of them American premieres — with live performances, filmmaker and composer appearances, and the world premiere of a medley of organ works by Australian-born American composer Percy Grainger, arranged for the Castro's gargantuan Wurlitzer by David Hegarty. Grainger is also the subject of the 1999 big-budget Australian feature Passion, which receives its American premiere and was an impetus for the creation of the festival.
"The last straw for me was Passion, which tells the story of one of our great forgotten geniuses," Amirkhanian says. The film has never been shown in American theaters or on television, he points out, despite such extramusical themes as Grainger's unorthodox sexual life. "I began to ask myself, just what do composers have to do to whip American movie houses and public television into shape?" The answer was to rent his own theater.
Other films making their U.S. premieres include George Antheil: Bad Boy of Music, funded by West German National Television; Percy Grainger: The Noble Savage, funded by Birmingham's Central Independent Television; and Frank Zappa: Phase II — The Big Note, a 2002 video-in-progress, funded by Dutch Television VPRO, which intersperses rare performance footage with interviews with Zappa, Pierre Boulez, Edgar Varèse, Captain Beefheart and other Zappa colleagues and collaborators. Also on the program is West Coast Story, a 1986 documentary on California composers that includes live footage of the mavericks Lou Harrison, John Cage and Terry Riley.
In another highlight, DJ. Spooky, a.k.a. Paul Miller, performs a live
multimedia "remix" of D. W. Griffith's famed silent Birth of a Nation,
examining its extraordinary impact on 20th-century film and
culture.
