"Making film is making music"

Director Frangois Girard on the art of making art.

By Michael Sragow

Jul 1, 1999 | Sweeping is the word for "The Red Violin." It swept both sets of Canadian film awards (winning eight of Canada's Oscars, the Genies, and nine of Quebec's Jutras), sent cheering audiences to their feet at festivals in Asia, Europe and South and North America (it was voted second audience favorite at Seattle), and rose to No. 12 at the U.S. box office last week while playing at a mere 252 theaters. The movie itself hurtles across five countries and four centuries. In five or six languages and as many dramatic modes, it chronicles the odyssey of the sweetest-sounding set of strings in the world.

Reviewers have either embraced the picture's audiovisual seductions or berated the extravagance (or "vulgarity") of its showmanship. I'm on the side of the seduced. When critics complain of the gaudiness of having one of the unifying characters be a 17th century Tarot card reader and the other an obsessed latter-day art dick, they deny the fun of the romantic tradition, which derives not merely from virtuosity and lushness, but also from pagan alchemy and pantheism and unbridled longing. The same criticisms aimed at "The Red Violin" have been leveled at its near-namesake, "The Red Shoes," for more than 50 years -- which hasn't kept the prima ballerina of dance critics, Arlene Croce, from saying, "There really is no other ballet film."

As Frangois Girard showed during a recent stop in San Francisco, he's a persuasive advocate of cinema as "the seventh art that draws on all the others." A Quebec native who speaks fluent, French-accented English, Girard said, "Between my feature films I always go into different experimental projects that are connected with the other arts, and these feed into my feature film work." Culturally savvy and inventive movie director/writer teams -- like Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger in "The Red Shoes" and Girard and Don McKellar in "The Red Violin" -- have always been intent on bringing older arts to wider audiences while prodding viewers to respond in novel ways, educated prejudice be damned. In 1993, Girard and McKellar collaborated on a smaller-scale milestone called "Thirty-Two Short Films About Glenn Gould" -- a movie that, like "Citizen Kane," caught an enigmatic character in a prismatic laser.

"The Red Violin" is more lavish and engulfing -- an epic with a violin as hero. Just as "The Red Shoes" combined wizardly ballet excerpts with intertwining stories about fateful toe shoes and a demonic impresario, "The Red Violin" makes unparalleled use of an original score for violin and orchestra to vivify the tale of a fateful fiddle and the archetypal figures who fall under its spell. (John Corigliano composed the music; Joshua Bell plays it with supreme passion.) In the 1600s, a Cremona master brings the red violin to opulent, supernal life. In 1792, an Austrian boy prodigy and French music teacher take it to the Viennese court, with disastrous results. In 1893, a traveling troupe of gypsies introduce it to an English composer/violinist, who uses it as a libidinous muse. And in 1965, Chinese music lovers protect it from the anti-Western ravages of the Cultural Revolution. But not until the late 1990s does an instrument appraiser, Charles Morritz (Samuel L. Jackson), uncover the staggering secrets of its sublime look and tone -- right before a scheduled auction in Montreal.

All the while, Girard cuts rhythmically from the individual episodes to the Tarot card-reader's predictions and Morritz's efforts to grasp the reasons for the violin's perfection. The result justifies Girard's belief that "making a film is making music, and painting and also writing -- it's all those things together."

You like to collaborate with Don McKellar on screenplays that zigzag and double back on themselves. Are you the Quentin Tarantino of high art?

This is the first time anyone has made connection between me and Tarantino, but I think that he has real skill at structural writing -- in fact, he's brilliant that way. Both of us like to expose the structure of a film to the audience. It invites the audience to contribute to films creatively, imaginatively. It's in the act of viewing that a film is really finished; it finds its final form in the minds of the people who are watching it.

I find it silly to try to pretend to the audience that everything in a movie is all one continuous flow. The audience is very smart, and has seen a couple of thousand films and I don't know how many hours of television. So everybody's a film expert, everybody's an editing expert, everybody knows what it means to add sound and music to scenes and connect fragments. To deny that awareness on the part of the audience is to cut yourself off from huge opportunities. The films that deny those possibilities drive me crazy -- I hate those films.

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