A Necessary Music (movie)

A Necessary Music (movie)

  • Production country: US
  • Producer: Beatrice Gibson
  • Release date: 9/18/2009
  • Run time: 30 min.

Movie description

A collaboration between artist Beatrice Gibson and composer Alex Waterman, A Necessary Music is a science fiction film about modernist social housing. A musically conceived piece, referencing the video operas of Robert Ashley, the film explores the social imaginary of a utopian landscape through directed attention to the voices that inhabit it.Treating the medium of film as both a musical proposition and a proposal for collective production, A Necessary Music employs the resident of New York’s Roosevelt Island as its authors and actors, gathering together texts written by them and using them to construct a script for the film. Framed by a fictional narration taken from Adolfo Bioy Casares’ 1941 science fiction novel ‘The invention of Morel’, the film self-consciously dissolves from attempted realism to imagined narrative; what begins as a enthnographic study becomes instead an imagined fiction and an investigation into the mechanics of representation itself.