NZIFF: Portrait of the Artist/Music and Dance

Simon Zhou previews the Portrait of the Artist/Music and Dance sections at the 2010 NZ International Film Festival. See more previews here.

Oscar Wilde understood it perfectly; the art is as much about artist as the artist is about the art.

Music and Dance gives us films that inquire and celebrate the process and performance of these two art forms.  Immediately striking for its uninhibited look at the putting together of a ballet is Frederick Wiseman’s La Danse: The Paris Opera Ballet, which, aside from what will no doubt be splendid images of the final performance, intrigues in that it explores an inherent contradiction in art, and particularly ballet: the desperate, messy, and clumsy failure that goes into producing the final, perfect article.  

Included also in this section is Michael Powell’s 1948 classic The Red Shoes, the tale of a young ballerina who must choose between love and ballet; The Runaways (dir. Floria Sigismondi), the story of the band that launched Joan Jett to rock ‘n roll stardom, starring Twilight starlet Kristen Stewart (hopefully, doing more than looking morose) and Dakota Fanning; two fascinating films with the instrument of the piano at its centre, Genius Within: The Inner Life of Glenn Gould (dir. Michele Hozer, Peter Raymont) around piano prodigy Glenn Gould, and Pianomania, which turns its attentions to the oft-overlooked profession of the piano tuner; and two films following two wildly different bands: TrinityRoots, Music is Choice (dir. Sarah Hunter) and When You’re Strange (dir. Tom diCillo), an impressionistic collage of performance footage of The Doors haunting frontman Jim Morrison. 

The Portrait of the Artist section shifts its focus specifically to those who create the works of art; some who are already firmly ensconced in the public consciousness (Jean-Michel Basquait: The Radiant Child, dir. Tamra Davis; Joan Rivers: A Piece of Work, dir. Ricki Stern, Annie Sundberg); some who are revered in their respective artforms (Learning from Light: The Vision of I.M. Pei, dir. Bo Landin, Sterling Van Wagenen, which delves into the process of the Chinese-American architect most famous for the glass pyramid outside the Louvre; Two in the Wave, dir. Emmanuel Lauren, charting the intersecting lives of two names familiar to every film geek, Francois Truffaut and Jean-Luc Godard); and some who have yet to be discovered (The Woman with the 5 Elephants, dir. Vadim Jendreyko).