Music on Film

The struggle of musicians to be heard is a recurrent theme in the Museum of Fine Arts' "Music on Film" series. Although rich in musical pleasures, these seven documentaries also offer uneasy reflections on a world that marginalizes and commodifies that art.

Paul Cohen's The Winners (1998; July 29 at 5:30 and 8:15 p.m., July 30 at 6 p.m., July 31 at noon, August 1 at 4 p.m., and August 8 at 5 p.m.) profiles four classical musicians who, early in their lives, won Brussels's prestigious Queen Elisabeth Competition. All four had distinguished careers, but because they failed to become international stars, Cohen sees them as studies in frustration. At one point, violinist Philipp Hirschhorn watches old footage of himself and tries to look skeptical about his youthful alter ego's virtuosity and Hammer-vampire glamor, but he can't help being mesmerized. His double attitude -- distance and fixation -- is emblematic of this gleaming, studied film.

The keynote of Kaylyn Thornal's Payoff (1998; August 12 at 8 p.m.), a look at Boston women rock musicians, is a grotesque, debasing emotion known to many artists: the longing for acceptance by a media establishment one despises. The most depressing movie I've seen in the past two months, Payoff rubs our noses in the monotonous awfulness of the overrated Boston rock "scene." At the end of the film, just before Thornal finally lets a sustained musical performance survive her overediting, the MC introducing Jen Trynin at T.T. the Bear's notes that Jen just got her picture in People and the audience cheers. It's unclear whether Thornal and Trynin realize how pathetic this moment is.

None of the musicians from Romania, Yugoslavia, Algeria, Mali, Zaire, Vietnam, and Argentina featured in Heddy Honigmann's The Underground Orchestra (1998; August 12 at 5:45 p.m., August 13 at 5:45 p.m., August 14 at 3:30 p.m., August 20 at 5:45 p.m., and August 21 at 4 p.m.) will ever get his or her picture in People. The quietest of music films, The Underground Orchestra uses a drifting style and great compositional inventiveness as it follows several exiles in Paris. Filming is forbidden in the Métro unless you pay off some bureaucrat, so the camera mostly remains above ground, gazing longingly down the entrance stairways from time to time. The musicians' viewpoints on history and power remain firmly underground, and some of the music is tremendous.

The perfect antidote to the late-millennium melancholy you'll get from watching The Underground Orchestra is Zakir and His Friends (1997; July 31 at 3:45 p.m., August 1 at 11 a.m., August 5 at 8 p.m., August 7 at 2:15 p.m., August 15 at 2 p.m., and August 22 at 2 p.m.), which centers on tabla master Zakir Hussain and is colored by his sybaritic air of constant enjoyment. Filmmaker Lutz Leonhardt's "rhythm experience" moves freely around the world, linking different kinds of percussion and various human activities imbued with rhythm: play, work, walking, or looking out the window of a moving vehicle. The point is not some arbitrary "pan-cultural" bullshit but a precise evocation of musical structurings of experience.

The MFA series also features Robert Mugge's wryly celebratory Hellhounds on My Trail: The Afterlife of Robert Johnson (1999; August 6 at 7:30 p.m.); Jem Cohen's Instrument (1999; August 26 at 7:45 p.m. and August 28 at 1:45 p.m.), a labor of love worthy of a subject more thrilling than DC rock band Fugazi; and Pratibha Parmar's The Righteous Babes (1998; August 19 at 8 p.m., August 21 at 12:30 p.m., and August 28 at noon), which is about feminism and popular music.

-- Chris Fujiwara