k.364 A Journey by Train

These two films, from significant crossmedia artists and thinkers, explore the relationship between musicians, audiences and the camera. Legendary composer Michael Nyman (The Piano) has been making “cine operas” – basically filmed fragments from his global travels – for years now. Moscow 11:19:31 sees him chronicle a particularly vexing interview where snippets of his music (“La Debarcadère” from La Traversée de Paris) have been inserted to take the place of his answers. Gifted visual artist Douglas Gordon – his work will be featured in TIFF Bell Lightbox’s Essential Cinema exhibition this year – deconstructs the on-and-off-stage relationship between two Israeli musicians in k.364 A Journey by Train. They are introduced in casual, fragmented conversation, their faces reflected in the windows of a train as they make their way along the very rail lines that carried family members to their death during the Holocaust. Fragments of rehearsals follow, then the screen splits in two and we watch the masters perform Mozart’s “Sinfonia Concertante in E Flat Major.” Gordon shoots them as a pair, from a multiplicity of angles, capturing those elegiac moments between solos when the two seem to pass their love of music back and forth. Many will recall Gordon’s film Zidane:A 21st Century Portrait, which used a similarly isolative technique on the soccer player to extraordinarily poetic ends.