Japanese film: Ryuichi Sakamoto: CODA

Post-Fukushima: Sakamoto is playing on a beaten-up piano…

Playing on the corpse of
a drowned piano...

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Sakamoto: It’s the corpse of a drowned piano. A black wall of water came over the pine trees. The room was flooded, the piano drowned. But some sound still comes out of it.

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Narrator: Then there was the MRI.

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Sakamoto: Stage 3, throat cancer. The treatment has extended my life. I don’t know how many years I have left, 20 or 10, or maybe there’ll be a relapse, but I want to be able to work.

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Narrator: Music.

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Sakamoto: And incorporate natural sounds too: leaves, rain, birdsong. Beginning on the piano, then recording using all these objects here, windows, bottles, buckets, cymbals, violin and computer.

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Voice-over

A coda is a concluding movement. We hope that this documentary CODA, is not a finale for Ryuichi Sakamoto, that he will give us more memorable music. None of us know how long we have. But Sakamoto is an inspiration when he is determined to produce “meaningful work I’m not ashamed to leave behind.”

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French film: Lumière!

A paean to the genius of the Lumières…

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Marguerite: A collection of 108 remastered 50 second-films.

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Auguste and Louis

Jeanne: They were inventors and directors, not just inventors, like Edison. He shut the moving pictures in a box, in his kinetoscope. The Lumières showed the moving pictures using their cinematograph, so many people could see at once.

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Marguerite: The cinema was born.

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Jeanne: Edison’s invention was like seeing pictures on a smartphone. The Lumières created cinema. A distinction that exists today.

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A star is born...

Marguerite: They formed a, what you say, a disciplage of directors who went out and shot exotic places and activities. Collaborative power.

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Jeanne: And their actualités are really the first documentaries. Apt naming too. Their name means “light”.

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Marguerite: And what a body of work they left. Produced 1500 films between 1895 and 1905, then just quit. Went on to other things.

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Voice-over

Brothers, Auguste and Louis Lumière, inventors, producers, directors. In a sense, they founded the movie business. Kudos to Director Thierry Frémaux for his 4K montage of 108 films: Lumière!

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Spanish film: Sad Hill Unearthed

Documentary about the location of The Good, the Bad and the Ugly (GBU)

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Lee: Opens at a massive rock concert, close-up of lead singer.

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Eli: What did that have to do with a spaghetti western film set?

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Lee: You’ll see. Stay with me. The original location was in Spain, though it was about the American Civil War. An artificial graveyard was being restored by a group of enthusiasts who went on social media, attracted volunteers to scrape and dig to unearth the original site, crowd-funded it too.

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Eli: The power of the group.

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Lee: And they also interviewed the composer, Ennio Moricone, had to use archive footage of the director, Sergio Leone, because he’d died years ago. There were interviews with Clint Eastwood, and biographer Christopher Frayling, and with film critic Stephen Leigh.

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Eli: So they mixed the authentic original people with those who captured the historical cinematographic aspects?

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Lee: Stunning 4K clarity in 16:9 mixed with archive footage in 4:3 cinéma vérité.  Droneswoops over the site and circling back to an interview with Metallica’s lead singer, James Hetfield.

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Eli: And the relevance of that?

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Lee: Metallica have used the theme of GBU in gigs for 30 years. That Moricone score, basically only four notes, guitars then Mariachi trumpets. One of the most haunting movie melodies.

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Voice-over

A documentary that is a celebration of a memorable movie (Il Buono, il Brutto, il Cattivo), a tribute to how it was made, and a record of the location restoration. A double reflexive-mode (see Bill Nichols) documentary; the recording of the making of the movie itself within a recording of the making of the documentary. A nested narrative.

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