\u201cWhen you record a moment, you\u2019re recording the death of a moment.\u201d Canadian actor Les Carlson, in the role of \u201cActor\u201d in David Cronenberg\u2019s heartbreaking 2000 short film \u201cCamera,\u201d states that with at least a small amount of rancor. The sentiment is not incorrect and has been kicking around in some form or another since, I reckon, well before Andr\u00e9 Bazin published the first volume of \u201cWhat is Cinema\u201d in 1958. The converse of that sentiment is of course that the recording of a moment preserves a moment. For how long, we can\u2019t ourselves say. But I reckon that it was in this moderately optimistic spirit that Ryuichi Sakamoto, about six months before he would die in 2023 of oropharyngeal cancer, mustered the strength he had and sat in a recording studio for a film crew, playing his best and best-known compositions on a Yamaha grand piano.<\/p>\n
\u201cRyuichi Sakamoto: Opus\u201d is an hour and forty minutes of just that: Sakamoto playing. There is no introduction. There are no interviews. Sakamoto does not instruct the director, Neo Sora, on how to play the pool variant \u201cCutthroat\u201d as Rick Danko did for Martin Scorsese in another farewell concert film, \u201cThe Last Waltz.\u201d It\u2019s just Sakamoto and the piano. An out-of-focus blur at one point suggests a crew member adjusting something. The composer and pianist mutters something after he loses the thread of one piece. We don\u2019t see who he\u2019s talking to, or maybe we do, because he\u2019s likely chastising himself. At one point Sakamoto gets up and puts alligator clips on certain piano strings to create a desired effect. John Cage coined the term \u201cprepared piano\u201d for this sort of thing. Sakamoto was a modern musician, but he wasn\u2019t quite a postmodern one even if he did dip into postmodern technique every now and then. <\/p>\n
There\u2019s a certain amount of repetition in his work and watching him play\u2014the camera often shoots him from the side, in a medium shot, so you see his facial profile and his hands working the keyboard\u2014you appreciate how he built his compositions. A theme will be stated with the left hand, and it will be stated for a while\u2014eight bars, maybe more\u2014after which the right hand will add harmonic complexity to said theme. Then the right hand will stroll off on a melodic journey. The mantra-like power of the theme will stay put. <\/p>\n
These themes are often dreamy, romantic. They recall Debussy, sometimes Satie. Sometimes during this film you think that Sakamoto was surely Japan\u2019s greatest early 20th<\/sup> century French composer. But that\u2019s glib. The man\u2019s music was open and tender, and his playing here has a vulnerability that comes from a place that\u2019s all too real. His silver fringed hair, parted in the middle, sometimes falls on his face as he plays, flopping in front of his round tortoise-shell spectacles. Sakamoto was a pop star with the Yellow Magic Orchestra in the early 80s; he worked not infrequently as an actor, appearing in Bertolucci\u2019s \u201cThe Last Emperor\u201d and Oshima\u2019s \u201cMerry Christmas, Mr. Lawrence,\u201d films for which he also wrote the music (he plays their themes here). He was always an immaculate looking man and here he is literally in the process of becoming an icon for real. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" \u201cWhen you record a moment, you\u2019re recording the death of a moment.\u201d Canadian actor Les Carlson, in the role of \u201cActor\u201d in David Cronenberg\u2019s heartbreaking 2000 short film \u201cCamera,\u201d states that with at least a small amount of rancor. The sentiment is not incorrect and has been kicking around in some form or another since, …<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[26],"tags":[43,40],"class_list":["post-1284","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-documentary-movies","tag-documentary","tag-music"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/us.celebrity2000.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1284","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/us.celebrity2000.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/us.celebrity2000.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/us.celebrity2000.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/us.celebrity2000.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1284"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/us.celebrity2000.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1284\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/us.celebrity2000.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1284"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/us.celebrity2000.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1284"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/us.celebrity2000.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1284"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}