THOMAS BALL AND THE FILMAKER'S ART

Dear friends,
This weekend I have been completely absorbed with the work of Thomas Ball. He is a film maker, and has a blog, in which he reflects with great insight about the work he does. The issues of sound within film, and peripheral vision, and design itself, are part of his interests. He did a marvelous film about Frank Gehry, the architect, called "A Creative Madness". I loved how this movie showed the progression of Gehry's thought, and the architectural work, and architectonics. One of the most fascinating parts of it was the use of the Bach Goldberg variations for piano. The film shows how the melody is contained in the bass, not the treble line, and how it comes out in the variations within the fugue. I have loved Gehry's work, and it was interesting to find out he is really a Goldberg, so it is resonant with the Bach!! In one of the photos on the blog by Mr. Ball, there is a man playing a harp in an all-stone courtyard in Barcelona, in front of a church with an arched doorway, and surrounded by stone buildings. The harpist has a harp which looks like a Paraguayan harp, and when Mr. Ball was kind enough to send me the recording of the music he was playing, it sounded like Paraguayan harp music! Today I have been thinking all day about the amazing serendipity of how the Paraguayan musician is playing it in Barcelona, in front of a medieval church, such as may already have existed when the first world-travellers came back from the new world, bringing exotic birds, and gold, and Native Americans, for the Europeans to gawk at. My friend Charles B. Mosher, who was in Paraguay with me as the doctor, from 1972-74, wrote a book a few years ago, in which the opening scene takes place in such a courtyard, with these sorts of characters, to celebrate the arrival from the New World of the sailors. The story which is couched in the book is about syphilis, which spreads from the sailors and dock-folk, to the French army which was marching to Naples, to fight the king there. The main character, an ebullient girl who is in love with one of the young knights in the army, is quite wonderful. I am not sure whether Chuck's book has acquired much of a following, but it was fascinating to me, to see this Paraguayan man playing the harp in that courtyard, and thinking about the way the old world and the new world have interacted, interwoven, over all these centuries, since. And, how the Latin Americans have needed to see and grow from the relationship with Spain. I hope that Paraguayan harpist is happy to be there!
Last night, my husband had me watch the movie "Bottle Shock" which was about a contest between French wine connoisseurs and Napa Valley California's wines, pretty much unknown outside of California until that time, in the late 60's and early 70's when the California wines won the contest. Since then, many wineries have taken off, both here, and in Chile, and Australia, and so many other places. Today in the paper, I read that some unknown filmmakers were winning the film awards in Berlin-- one was a Chilean woman. Her film was about the daughter of a woman who had been "disappeared" and killed, after breastfeeding her baby on her tears and sadness. The daughter tries to bury the mother, and tell her story.
If you are interested in film, it is certainly worth watching the movie "Creative Madness", and thinking about Frank Gehry's development in architecture, as it is portrayed in this film. I am so wanting to go see the new Guggenheim museum in Bilbao. It is also interesting to me that my great-great grandmother came from Bilbao. I have been wanting to walk the Camino de Santiago de Compostela for several years now, and this path goes through Bilbao. If you are interested in the art of film-making, I highly recommend reading Mr. Ball's blog.