∞ “The Physicality of Thinking” – Sandra Binion (2020)
Synopsis: The Physicality of Thinking documents a two-week tour in February 2019 throughout France by the French/American improvised music quartet Antichamber Music: Claudia Solal (voice), Benoît Delbecq (piano and prepared piano), Katherine Young (bassoon and electronics), and Lou Mallozzi (turntables and CDs). The Physicality of Thinking takes the viewer intimately behind the scenes—on the road, at dinner, backstage conversations, workshops with students—as well as capturing the quartet’s many moods and dynamics in performance.
Improvised music is a special blend of subtle interaction, unanticipated surprise, and virtuosity. Spending intimate time with improvisers on the road intensifies and unmasks that multi-layered experience. The four members of Antichamber Music generously allowed me to document their two-week tour crisscrossing France in February 2019. Not knowing what to expect, what I’d see and hear, and what I’d feel, my shooting was also a form of improvisation and, in that way, consonant with the music itself. But my intent, from the start, was to concentrate less on documenting the concerts and instead to concentrate on the rest of the musicians’ tour experience — the landscape whisking by on the highway, the conversations at the dinner table, the humor and camaraderie of the musicians, their reflections on their craft, on the audience, on who they miss and what they anticipate. (Sandra Binion)
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