Frank Scheffer: "Music has an existential role, we exist because of vibration"

GironaThe Dutch filmmaker Frank Scheffer (1956) is one of the reference names in contemporary music documentary, with a career of more than four decades dedicated to exploring the relationship between music, the arts, and audiovisual creation. In his more than sixty works, he has portrayed figures such as Frank Zappa, John Cage, Elliott Carter, Francis Ford Coppola, Brian Eno, and Pierre Boulez, always from an introspective and experimental perspective that moves away from the explanatory forms of traditional documentary. This August, the music and film programming of In-Edit Empordà, within the Festival de Torroella de Montgrí, dedicates a retrospective to him which closes on Wednesday the 12th with Half moon, a work that addresses war, exile, and friendship through the music of Syrian clarinetist and composer Kinan Azmeh. The screening will be preceded by a concert by Azmeh himself and followed by a discussion with the director.

How did you come to the story of Half moon and why did you decide to make this documentary?

— I am a great admirer of Frank Zappa and, when I was 13 years old, I read on the cover of the album We’re only in it for the money a quote from Edgard Varèse: "Today's composers refuse to die". This led me to discover his music and make documentaries about Zappa and Varèse. Later, however, I wanted to expand my work to other cultures and I conceived four films about how composers from traditional cultures react to globalization. It was then that I found Kinan Azmeh, who represented this idea very well in the Middle East.

How does he manage to incorporate the Syrian conflict into the documentary from the perspective of a musician and composer?

— When I met Kinan, everything revolved around music and the popular uprising of 2011 had not yet occurred. Over the years, the conflict worsened, but my films are not politically oriented, even though they have a political commitment. Kinan Azmeh became a great friend of mine and I thought the film should talk about empathy, friendship, and the fractured world we live in. Through music, I am interested in provoking a change of mentality. Music is a precious transmitter.

Are the ideas of friendship and empathy in a context of war contained in Azmeh's music?

— Yes. I saw Kinan grow as a composer and one of the central pieces of the film is The fence, the rooftop and the distant sea, which he composed in Beirut for the cellist Yo-Yo Ma. It is a very personal work, linked to the sea and the fence that prevented him from going to his beloved Damascus. When he rehearsed it for the first time with Yo-Yo Ma at the Elbphilharmonie in Hamburg, it impressed me greatly. I am interested in revealing what the composer puts into his music, spiritually and intellectually. There are many films about the conflicts in Syria, so I make films about music.

And how is music filmed, which is an essentially ephemeral and immaterial thing?

— I don't like interpreting music with images, but rather putting them next to each other. I try to look at what is inside the music and transform it into the form, structure, and character of the film. I was greatly influenced by Concerning the Spiritual in Art, by Kandinsky, and his idea that other arts could learn from the freedom of music. I also believe that music plays an existential role: if we think about Stephen Hawking's string theory, we exist because of vibration, and music is what comes closest to it. I like to think that we are music, as suggested by The Big Note, my film about Frank Zappa. I was also impressed by the documentary The Cave of Forgotten Dreams, by Werner Herzog, because it shows art as an exploration of our imagination. Imagination is fundamental to our existence, and music is the art form that comes closest to it.

He mentioned Kandinsky, Hawking, and Herzog. What other figures from cinema and music have inspired you?

— I start from the idea of juxtaposition and, in the library of the Netherlands Film Museum, I read a book about Sergei Eisenstein's montage, which explained that when you put two shots together, the result is not one plus one equals two, but a new entity: one plus one is three. This idea marked me. I wanted to apply it first to cinema, with a documentary about Francis Ford Coppola and Wim Wenders, an American director who looks towards Europe and a European who looks towards the United States. Then I worked with Marina Abramović, Frank Zappa and Elliott Carter, whom I consider the Mozart of our time. In 1982, Abramović suggested I meet John Cage and that interview changed my life. Cage compared my idea of juxtaposition with James Joyce and Henry David Thoreau: complexity and simplification.

How do you currently see the landscape of music documentaries? Are there any contemporary filmmakers or documentarians you consider particularly interesting?

— The music documentary is a very broad field, but many approaches are anecdotal and emotional and not very intellectually stimulating. We continue to enjoy documentaries about the Beatles, the Rolling Stones, or other great pop musicians, but I often don't find the way they are made very interesting. I like to experiment and try new things, so I don't consider myself part of the music documentary scene, but rather I like to think of my films as independent works of art.

About which other artists will be their next works?

— Right now I am working on a project about India. I am particularly interested in the idea of raga [the melodic scheme of Indian classical music] as a living being that the musician activates. I am also interested in the legacy of John Cage and the operations of chance, which led me to discover the freedom of not making a decision, but simply formulating a question. Likewise, in recent times I have been working with the Vietnamese artist Danh Vo, the South African composer Neil Muganya, and with William Kentridge.