This week I went along to the Australian Chamber Orchestra performing The Crowd and I. Although I’m a little sceptical of concerts combined with film shows (because one’s concentration keeps wavering between music and image), this event felt like a success. The crowd is a phenomenon that has generated some remarkable writing, from authors such as Gustav Le Bon, Charles Mackay and Elias Canetti. There’s a wonderful old King Vidor movie called The Crowd(1928), not to mention the unforgettable crowd scenes in Eisenstein’s films.
Music is full of crowd scenes, with notes pressing close together, hurtling along in unstable groups. Richard Tognetti and the ACO, with film footage by Jon Frank, direction by Nigel Jamieson, and a contribution by the Song Company, set out to explore the many different aspects of the crowd, from riot to celebration. The music was wildly eclectic – from Schubert, Beethoven, Chopin and Sibelius to Morton Feldman and John Luther Adams. Tognetti himself composed seven of the segments.
The audience absorbed a torrent of images, from football fans acting out their agonies and ecstasies, to pilgrims gathering by the Ganges or in Mecca. We saw the world from the sky, in the form of thousands of interlinked pinpricks of light. There were the Cronulla riots, and the Black Lives Matter protests that followed the killing of George Floyd. At one moment the crowds swarm and surge dangerously, next comes a moment of sheer pleasure as thousands of people float together on a wave.
Musically, it was an adventurous, somewhat bizarre affair, but I was conscious that this was an Australian ensemble attempting to do something original and ambitious. It could only be the ACO, who are streets ahead of any local musical group when it comes to taking on projects that would win praise in any of the great cities of the world. I’m not proficient enough with music to write critically about it, but I’m happy to register my appreciation as a fan.
The art column is devoted to the National Aborginal and Torres Strait Islander Art Awards and other events held last week in Darwin. This year the main prize went to a weaving, which was a surprise of sorts, but it proved to be a very impressive work. Overall, there was so much going on, I couldn’t begin to describe it in one article. The truly eye-opening stuff was at the Charles Darwin University Gallery and Coconut Studios, where a group of artists called Tennant Creek Brio displayed large-scale expressionist and abstract works painted with ferocious energy. It was the last thing one expects to find during NATSIAA week, but Darwin has a habit of throwing up surprises.
There was only one film that could be reviewed this week: Nope, by boom director, Jordan Peel. This is partly because my editor at the AFR is a big Jordan Peel fan, but mostly because there’s nothing quite like the films he makes. They are African American horror movies, full of intricate ideas and metaphors. They can also be confusing, and Nope – a tale of a flying saucer – is a baffling sort of film. There is, however, the bafflement that comes from a badly constructed narrative, and that which keeps you closely engaged, like a puzzle. There’s nothing wrong with being lost in art, so long as you feel there’s ultimately something to be gained from the experience.