An Evening With Lisa Gerrard

I met Lisa Gerrard once. When I heard that she was going to make an appearance at a major bookstore down the street from my work, I hopped on over as early as I could to catch a glimpse of the legendary singer for Dead Can Dance. For some reason I was under the strange assumption she might actually sing a little, right there in the bookstore. But she was just there to sign cds, so I promptly bought another copy of her album, The Mirror Pool, just to have it signed. As I walked up to her, clutching my cd, I felt really weird. First, I'm not a big autograph person, but second, her presence was entirely overpowering. I muttered something about how I liked her version of Persian Love Song and she responded and said she was uncertain how the strings would play out in it and glad that it was well received. I walked away still feeling very strange. Her voice was so soft and she was so poised, it was almost like an act like she was playing the typical angel role in some movie. Later, I saw her perform and even her clothing looked angelic.

I saw her perform again last night at the Moore Theatre, and then again tonight before viewing the new documentary Sanctuary - Lisa Gerrard. The best part about her pre-movie talk was that she got up and began giving mini vocal lessons. Her passion for music runs very deep as is evidenced by her music and its style, and she is both inspirational to listen to as well as very well spoken when it comes to communicating abstractly or emotionally. It's a little strange though -- for all the emotion that she delivers through her voice and on stage, her body language in even the most relaxed state appears very formal and closed, yet she has an amazing ability to mesmerize an audience through just talking.

I felt a similar way about this movie that I did about the Leonard Cohen documentary from last year's SIFF: it tries too hard to convey in images what the music expresses, and notably fails at doing so. Much of the film's sequences are covered with massive amounts of abstract b-roll, such as fog or drifting clouds, images of natural forest, and the frequent image of hands moving slowly obstructed by layers of color and visual texture. There are a lot of questionable editing decisions (as in, overdone or overuse of effects and poor distracting cuts), and the entire film could have probably been compressed very nicely into a half hour or even shorter while still retaining what makes it interesting. The actual footage is at times pretty and at other times either very poor or completely unoriginal (for example, using the exact same close-up headshot background for more than one interviewee). There is an interesting few bits about Lisa singing next to highway traffic and talking about it, and these add a nice dimension to the movie, but the sound quality is fairly horrible (on-camera mic) and does a big disservice to these sequences. Lastly, I feel a lot of what detracted from the documentary actually has a lot to do with Gerrard herself. We hear her talk of things that are meaningful to her (e.g., kids, relationship with Brendan Perry of Dead Can Dance, her studio), but none of these things are really explored and though they may not hold much significance to pushing the dialogue along, they may have helped bring the viewer closer to Gerrard's world. Of course this notable deficiency may actually tell us more about her too, or perhaps it is entirely an oversight of the one-man crew.

So what makes this documentary interesting? Through conversations with many people who have interacted with Gerrard (directors she has worked with, a photographer, her parents), we come to know more about who she is, where she came from, and what motivates her. She talks about a lot of things from her life's past and present, and we see glimpses into her sense of humor as well as the stressors of her career. The soundtrack is heavy with samples of her music as well as large clips of samples from her film scoring work, and includes some great footage of her early days with Dead Can Dance -- wacky 80's hair and all. It's these nuggets of uniqueness that bring this documentary into an interesting light.

Unfortunately much of the good is also layered further with more repetitive abstract sequences, causing the film as a whole to be stilted with an unorganized feel that screams for it to go through another serious edit, but even then I'm not sure if that would completely save it.