San Francisco Classical Voice

Easily the most interesting and best of the shorts turned out to be Roner's Notes. Roner captured what looked like a standard five-note staff of music as her basic screen background. Be that literal or five dark lines of raised earth across a snowy field, I could not ascertain. Across the top of the five lines moved tiny human figures the size of ants, suggesting musical notes. The people did not seem to walk so much as mill about, coming and going in fairly large numbers.

What most held the attention was Roner's feeling for clarity of form, something almost recalling Kurosawa's handling of crowd scenes. Nothing suggesting the haphazard in her film. (And yes, Michael Roner is a woman.) Glass seems to have recognized this basic quality, adding a background of unobtrusive musical nodding.

If Roner's Notes impressed, then the greatest disappointment came with Greenaway's A Man in the Bath. He is, after all, a distinguished film director with a number of significant films to his credit — The Cook, The Thief, His Wife and Her Lover, or my own adored favorite, Prospero's Book. But Man in Bath turned out to look like no more than fooling around with a computer program.

One saw superimposed panels moving about, long shots of an elaborate palace bathroom and a naked man, sometimes seated and more often standing to one side, one hand demurely draped over his family sensibilities. From time to time, bits of writing in large letters moved across the screen, being written as the film progressed. Alas, the handwriting was so arch, the movement so fast, that I could make out little of its content. That being the case, why bother? Beautifully shot to be sure, Man in Bath appeared no more than a meaningless essay in camera technique

The charmer turned out to be Reggio's Evidence. It moved amid a series of small children, staring out at us in a state of quiet awe. It turned out that they were watching a television screen, which left one wondering if groups of kids under seven ever sit that still for that long. They were cute, and Reggio did build suspense into the film, as the viewers wondered what was up with these children who rarely fidgeted, smiled or scratched.

Sensationally beautiful color shots of many exotic animals and insects formed the basis for Reggio's 1992 Anima Mundi. One saw fast cut shots like a catalogue flashing by. But before fully absorbing one beauty, it was on to the next. It's the sort of thing that makes me avoid video orchestral concerts. The directors can never seem to light on any one thing. What Anima most strongly suggested, for all its beautiful colors, was a commercial for the Discovery Channel.

By extreme contrast Neshat's Passage was as gripping as it was morbid in depicting an Arab desert burial. A sizable ensemble of men solemnly walked across the desert, clad in black, a white shrouded corpse on their shoulders. A large circle of women in black Muslin dress were digging away at stones and sand by hand, fashioning a pit for the body. The trouble was that it went on and on and on. By comparison, one might almost consider Michelangelo Antonioni's films fast paced.

Egoyan's Diaspora struck me as a bore — a lot of distorted shots in reverse processing, largely of people running past buildings on fire. Besides that, there were long sequences of shorn sheep moving in herd along some road or path. It didn't add up to much. Other than toying with tragic subject in a banal way, Diaspora struck me as a disservice to its subject, the centuries of Jewish suffering and displacement.

Art and political statement make uneasy bed follows. It can succeed, but the architectural syntax has to be perfect. That means subtlety and a maximum of restraint. Clubbing the audience over the head with a parade of heavy-handed obvious images only deflects the audience's sympathy. Neither Passage nor Diaspora provided enough tasteful presentation.

No one likes everything. To paraphrase George Bernard Shaw: “You can't help yourself, because you were simply born with a natural aversion to that sort of thing.” But give the devil his due. Glass' newer music seems to be less obsessed with single patterns than of old. John Adams seems to have led the way in abandoning Minimalism's tape-loop syndrome.

The curious thing about Monday's music was Glass shifting into bits resembling rumba patterns. It happened often. When in doubt, rumba? Still, the music was rarely disruptive, and a good deal less of an affront to basic intelligence than in the past. Of course, having a visual distraction helped. But the result ultimately strikes one as essentially an art for those with a limited attention span.