Two Music Docs at 49th New York Film Festival Are Moving Portraits

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Parent Category: Film Festivals

Category: Reviews

Published on Tuesday, 07 August 2012 03:09

Written by Jack Angstreich

Two films showcased at this year's New York Film Festival offer very different approaches at investigating or celebrating their seminal subjects -- the late Beatle George Harrison and the late great writer/singer of the Brazilian popular song, bossa nova, Antonio Carlos Jobim. 

For four decades one of the most significant Hollywood directors, Martin Scorsese is generally more of a craftsman than an artist in making his many documentaries, as is the case with his latest one, George Harrison: Living in the Material World. It is constructed very much along the lines of his equally impressive Bob Dylan opus, Crossroads. As in the Dylan film, Scorsese's assemblage manages to be consistently engrossing and ultimately quite moving across a span of three and a half hours of fascinating footage, presented in a handsome, high quality digital format.

Another luminary, Nelson Pereira dos Santos, one of the legendary figures of cinema novo, also comes to the festival with a powerful music documentary, The Music according to Antonio Carlos Jobim, devoted to one of the greatest composers within the realm of the popular song.

The film is essentially a compilation of classic performances of Jobim's songs by an extraordinary gallery of artists including Gal Costa, Henri Salvador, Dizzy Gillespie, Gerry Mulligan, Ella Fitzgerald, Sammy Davis, Jr., Judy Garland, Errol Garner, Mina, Diana Krall, Oscar Peterson, Sarah Vaughan, Jane Monheit, and Stacey Kent. And there's a highlight -- in two outstanding duets with the composer himself Frank Sinatra is heard and seen.

With the film's admirable abstraction, Pereira comes closer than Scorsese does in approaching true artistry, remarkably conveying the sheer timelessness of Jobim's achievement; the filmmaker is hampered, however, by the inferior visual quality of most of the original footage, obstructing the creation of a satisfying imagistic poem.

George Harrison: Living in the Material World

The Music according to Antonio Carlos Jobim

Walter Reade Theater
165 West 65th Street
New York, NY  10023

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