Subtitled "A Sound Journey with Evelyn Glennie," German director Thomas Riedelsheimer's exquisite Touch the Sound
is nominally a portrait of the Scottish musician known as "the first
full-time solo percussionist." Glennie is certainly a fascinating
subject. Profoundly deaf since childhood, she disdains the use of
hearing aids and sign language, relying instead on lip reading and,
more crucially, on the use of all of her senses, especially touch, to
"hear" with her entire body.
The film reveals Glennie's extraordinary
skills in a variety of settings: playing a snare drum for bemused New
Yorkers in cavernous Grand Central Station; improvising with guitarist
Fred Frith in an empty warehouse in Cologne, Germany (their final
vibes-guitar duet is one of the film's musical highlights); working
with hearing-impaired students in her native Aberdeenshire; jamming
with taiko drummers in Japan, and later delighting customers in a Tokyo
bar with a spontaneous workout involving chopsticks, dishes, cans, and
glassware (the woman can make music with virtually anything). But
Riedelsheimer, who was also the film's editor and cinematographer, has
a broader agenda here--namely, to intensify our awareness of the sounds
that surround us everywhere, in every moment.
From the streets of New
York to the beaches of Santa Cruz, from the rocky Scottish coastline to
a tranquil Japanese rock garden, he links heightened audio, as clear
and natural as the best ECM recordings, to a succession of gorgeous
visual images to create a balance of complex detail and overall
sparseness, resulting in a kind of Zen feast. Even more of the same is
found in a "making of" featurette that's the highlight of the bonus
material, making Touch the Sound easily one of the most rewarding documentaries in recent years. --Sam Graham
From CNN