"Premiering at this year's New York Film Festival, the newly restored version (from a surviving 16mm print) is a deft interweaving of clips of Wilson's outsized stage works with up-close interviews with both collaborators and the surprisingly transparent theater titan himself, sometimes in laidback settings, such as squeezed between former neighbors on a couch in his childhood hometown of Waco, Texas."
"While many (likely most) maverick artists have at least one unrealized moonshot project, few have a record of the high stakes drama of development behind the scenes of that lost dream. And even fewer have a record that's as cinematically riveting as Howard Brookner's Robert Wilson and the Civil Wars, a fascinating look at the titular theater legend as he goes about crafting - artistically, managerially, financially - the CIVIL warS: a tree is best measured when it is down,"
The restored 16mm footage interweaves clips of Robert Wilson's outsized stage works with up-close interviews of collaborators and Wilson himself in informal settings. Intimate access to Wilson, including scenes with former neighbors in Waco, Texas, reveals an unfiltered, human side to avant-garde theater. The film chronicles the conception and challenges of CIVIL warS: a tree is best measured when it is down, a massive, multinational, 12-hour opera created for the 1984 Summer Olympics. Philip Glass reflects that works like Einstein on the Beach resist verbal description, while Heiner Müller frames theater as a "theater of experience" that one might understand only weeks later.
Read at Filmmaker Magazine
Unable to calculate read time
Collection
[
|
...
]