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99 MINUTES | KENDALL SQUARE

From Thomas Riedelsheimer, director of the sublime Rivers and Tides, comes another impressionistic meditation on ephemeral art. This time he sojourns with Evelyn Glennie, a world-class percussionist who happens to be deaf. The result is worlds apart from the soppy 60 Minutes report on Glennie that you may have seen. More like Godfrey Reggio on Quaaludes than Mike Wallace, Riedelsheimer delivers a poetic rendering of an artist who proclaims that "hearing is a form of touch." The film reveals a semiotic playground within our ordinary world as it follows Glennie strolling through a Japanese shopping mall; jamming on a rooftop in New York, backed up by construction din; and fondling a walkie-talkie antenna in a Scottish castle for aural gratification. Each scene establishes Glennie’s unique musical perception of everyday noise. Like an afternoon with your free-spirit cousin, this orgy of rhythm and texture both tests one’s patience and lingers in the mind.