MODULATIONS
Reviewed by Harvey Karten, Ph.D. Strand Releasing/Capirinha Productions Director: Iara Lee Writer: Peter Shapiro Cast: Scores of talking heads
One dictionary goes so far as to say that "all sound is music." "I can accept that," you said with your broad, liberal mind, "but I don't have to listen to the noise." If you're over 25 years of age, you're probably even less likely to listen and dig electronic music than you are to groove on rap or acid rock. Or are you? Electronic music is with us and most of us eavesdrop on it consciously or not. This is just one of the fascinating things we learn in a highly varied short film called "Modulations." Now, then, what was the last time you heard the stuff? If you're a movie buff, you listened to strains of an electronic composition by the fictional character Vinh Schuman, in the movie "Bad Manners." In that picture, Sol Rubinek plays a musicologist who discovers that a 20th century Vietnamese composer included a segment of a five- hundred year old work by Martin Luther in his electronic essay; a segment he could not possibly have ever heard before. If you haven't seen that particular picture, you've heard it as background, ambient music. It creates a mood. But what if you never go to movies, do not have a tape recorder, TV, CD player or radio? You still hear electronic music. You get it when you open the refrigerator, turn on the fax machine, shoot videos of your family. Remember: ALL sound is music. This is central to "Modulations."
How good is this film? If an education is your goal, it's OK for a start. If structure is important, it's a flop. As Alvin Toffler, author of "Future Shock" and one of the few older chaps in the movie states, "We in the West are good at taking things apart: what we're not so good at is putting things together." Granted: as one of the younger talking heads in the film brings out, "The world is chaos, not a series of one's and zero's." But the way to portray this chaos is with order, and unfortunately Iara Lee, the Brazilian-born, U.S. documentary maker, exhausts us almost as much in this work as she did with her previous "Synthetic Pleasures." From the older generation, she presents sound bites in interviews with John Cage, who is perhaps the father of it all and also with Robert Moog, the inventor of the ubiquitous synthesizer that bears his name. We hear from representatives in Berlin, London, Detroit, Tokyo, and Mount Fuji, each putting in his or her two cents, yen, marks or tuppence about scores of minutely distinct types of electronic music: tri-hop, acid house, drum-and-bass, and ambient music are just some kinds of new music, with ambient the type almost everyone in the audience can accept. Groups with names as exotic as Throbbing Gristle and Kraftwerk sound off and hip-hop advocates demonstrate scratchmusic--which, as the name implies, can be created by scratching the vinyl and coming up with combinations of tones. About the most scientific statement made is that we like to dance 133 beats to the minute.
"All music is inately psychedelic" is one of the great thought-provokers here and, come to think of it our minds do tend to construct images from the sounds we hear from Bach to Rock to Scratch. Music and images go together, as one young and hip artist suggests, and director Lee has no problem with that, as she throws an MTV-quick succession of visual impressions at us in the style of Godfrey Reggio's 1983 groundbreaking film "Koyaanisquatsi," which uses time-lapse photography to detail a good deal of Americana.
The movie could have been much improved if Iara Lee would have slowed down, knocked out some of the verbally inarticulate commentators (like, I mean, you know), and given a conventially topical arrangement to this frenzied m‚lange of sound, light, and imagery.
Not Rated. Running time: 73 minutes. (C) Harvey Karten 1998
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