Product Description

"Struggle for Hope" (55 min.) features Bach's Suite No. 5 for Unaccompanied Cello. Master Kabuki actor Tamasaburo Bando sets out on a journey to discover, through traditional Japanese dance, the universality and emotion of Bach's Fifth Suite. The result is this revelatory, cross-cultural and trans-oceanic collaboration with Yo-Yo Ma, sensitively documented by filmmaker Niv Fichman. "Six Gestures" (53 min.) features Bach's Suite No. 6 for Unaccompanied Cello. Bach and ice dance? Yo-Yo Ma believes that world champion ice dancers Jayne Torvill and Christopher Dean have done for their sport what Bach did for the cello--that is, to dramatically redefine the artistic possibilities and to shatter all preconceptions. This mesmerizing film by Patricia Rozema (Mansfield Park) explores the outcome of this unlikely collaboration, with Bach himself as the dramatic counterpoint.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #77697 in DVD
• Released on: 2000-11-21
• Rating: NR (Not Rated)
• Aspect ratio: 1.33:1
• Formats: Color, DVD, NTSC
• Original language: English
• Subtitled in: French
• Number of discs: 1
• Running time: 108 minutes

Customer Reviews

Perfect primer for Bach at any age!!!!!
Of all the films in this series by Yo-Yo Ma, this is the one I think that is the most watchable and listenable. It is a history lesson, a tour de force of solo acting, ice skating, and cello artistry...all under one elegant roof crafted by director Patricia Rozema. And it all works poetically in a sublime and sophisticated manner. It is handsomely done. It is as creative as the latest MTV video...treating this great music as being approachable and setting Bach's music in several contexts. This is a free flowing, thoughtful, ironic, humorous, and vital masterpiece. Not being an ice skating enthusiast, except for a few days during the Winter Olympics every four years, I have watched this film with wall-to-wall ice skating over and over again. I never realized that ice skating can be more than the conventional acrobatic sporting event that we are used to seeing on ABC when there are no other traditional team sporting events available. Plus, there is no idiot jock-skate commentator to interfere with you and the skaters, trying to convince everybody that .3 should be deducted for the bad execution of some esoteric manuver. Not this time. It's just you, Jayne Torvill, Christopher Dean and J.S. Bach. What a concept!!!!!!!! You are permitted to leave the convention and commercialization of all that ice skating competition stuff out on Madison Avenue somewhere. So, I play Six Gestures while I am working on my computer...over and over again. It is a friendly sound and picture that fills my office in the evenings from time to time. This specific video in the series is the one to buy!!! You will never be disappointed in this film. Also, an elementary school teacher would have an extraordinary and engaging 45 minutes or so if you showed this film. This film will inform, mesmerize, relax, inspire, educate plus lure you back..again and again. YOU MUST purchase Six Gestures!!!!

Perfection Combination of Music and Movement
No one could have thought that figure skating routines could go so well with a solo instrumental piece, especially when skaters prefer to skate nowadays to songs. The lost artistry is revived by Torvill and Dean in this video, and ice skating has never been so graceful.

Art as Rorschach Test of an Artist
I came to this after seeing Bando in Seijun Suzuki's YUMEJI (1991.) If the great filmmaker adores kabuki enough to get its biggest onnagata (male performer in female roles) star into a male role, what's Bando like in his natural habitat?

After the mutual admiration/love-fest in the beginning, Yo-yo ma and Bando get down to work. Ma has a personal agenda of reliving the tie he had with his deceased father through the Bach piece, with another prestigious artist. Bando wants to personalize the collaboration only as far as it frees him from the usual narrative constraints of his kabuki plays (this is apparent when Ma tries to link Bando's adoption by the prestigious kabuki community to loss of his own father, and Bando saw it -- like his collaboration with Ma -- as fulfilling his destiny of kabuki actor, not a family tragedy.)

Even though director Fichman sets it up as another divisive "East vs. West", "Male vs. Woman" piece of "art", soon we see the real show is in Bando translating Bach through his emotive movements that use gender as expression, not as a set biological fact. Meanwhile, Ma is suspended in his own intact world of cello-playing, ending his interaction with Bando (including eye contact!) at the development stage.

This is fascinating for anyone interested in the creative process: Ma seizes on a set idea and doesn't let go; he even interprets Bando's "performing for the heavens" not as the idea of human-universe unity, but as the Greco-Roman concept of Dionysian. At that point Bando "snaps" back "Don't think too much", and we see artists retreating back to their individual corners, out of their initial love affair-through-interpreter!

Bando truly is a fearless artist, unafraid to use what he already knows walking into unfamiliar territory of solo performance to someone else's emotional objectives. He comes up with a basic, technical pattern of movements for each piece in the 6-part suite, but goes above them to add the instinctive, emotional qualities of each theme. The most brilliant accomplishments of the 6 are the Bresson/Tarkovsky-like intensity of piece #4, "Prayer", and the amusing & lively #5 "Dream" -- which Dali & the Surrealists could learn from. Bando's "Dream" is neither a good one, nor a nightmare. It's just dreaming itself as rollicking, delicate motions like striking memories without control over the direction & speed of its consciousness. Brilliant stuff that pushes an art form beyond the usual level.