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Glass: A Portrait Of Phillip In Twelve Parts (Film)
Rating: PG
Running Time: 114
Country: Australia
Director: Scott Hicks
Cast: Phillip Glass
Distributor: Sharmill
Film Worth: $11.50
Release Date: November 13, 2009
an important cultural artefact.
Fluidly moving between documentary and fiction filmmaking, Aussie director Scott Hicks follows up No Reservations - his low-key remake of the German romantic comedy Mostly Martha - with GLASS: A Portrait of Philip in Twelve Parts, a comprehensive documentary of 18 months in the life of living legend composer Philip Glass. Shot on a tight budget and a tighter calendar, the film offers a cinematic style which borders on verite in approach and execution. A longstanding casual acquaintance of Glass', the director carries the camera himself, which allows the composer's sometimes hooky persona to percolate through his well-hewed public persona. In this way, the film is a rousing success, offering brilliant fly-on-the-wall moments as Glass composes his eighth symphony and prepares to stage his ambitious opera Waiting For The Barbarians. For film buffs, the most compelling elements of GLASS concern the composer's hagiographic status in Hollywood, with his interactions with filmmakers as renowned and brilliant as Errol Morris, Paul Schrader, Martin Scorsese and Woody Allen, which helps return the documentary from its high art status to more solid, populist ground. Elsewhere, the film occasionally falls over; appropriating its title from Glass' seminal 1974 work, Music In Twelve Parts, Hicks uses his subject's composing convention to structure his film into 12 parts as well, which unfortunately results in a chaptered piece lacking in cohesiveness. Bringing the movie back from its balkanised abyss are the self-referential, intimate conversations between the two, in which they speak about spirituality, celebrity and artistic composition. Both immediately draw parallels between their respective professions, and the common ground achieved drives their shared responsibilities to the film itself and help make it an important cultural artefact.