k.364 A Journey by Train & Moscow 11:19:31

Toronto International Film Festival Program Book
2010

k.364 A Journey by Train
Douglas Gordon
UNITED KINGDOM/GERMANY/FRANCE. 2010
English
67 minutes Colour/HDCAM Production Company: ie found film limited/Love Streams agnés b. Productions
Executive Producer: Douglas Gordon
Producer: Zeynep Yiicel
Screenplay: Douglas Gordon
Cinematographer: Goerge Geddes
Editor: Sari Ezouz
Sound: Paul Oberle
Principal Cast: Avri Levitan, Roi Shiloah, Agnieszka Duczmal, Amadeus Chamber Orchestra of Polish Radio
Production: lost but found film limited

Preceded by:

MOSCOW 11:19:31
Michael Nyman
UNITED KINGDOM, 1997
English
6 minutes Colour/HDCAM
Production: Michael Nyman Limited

These two films, from significant cross-media artists and thinkers, explore the relationship between musicians, audiences and the camera.

Legendary composer Michael Nyman (The Piano) has been making “cine operas”—basically filmed fragments from his global travels—for years now. Moscow 11:19:31 sees him chronicle a particularly vexing interview where snippets of his music (“La Débarcadere” from La Traversée de Paris) have been inserted to take the place of his answers.

Gifted visual artist Douglas Gordon—his work will be featured in TIFF Bell Lightbox’s Essential Cinema exhibition this year—deconstructs the on- and off-stage relationship between two Israeli musicians in k.364 A Journey by Train. They are introduced in casual, fragmented conversation, their faces reflected in the windows of a train as they make their way along the very rail lines that carried family members to their death during the Holocaust. Fragments of rehearsals follow, then the screen splits in two and we watch the masters perform Mozart’s Sinfonia Concertante in E-Flat Major. Gordon shoots them as a pair, from a multiplicity of angles, capturing those elegiac moments between solos when the two seem to pass their love of music back and forth. Many will recall Gordon’s film Zidane: A 21st Century Portrait, which used a similarly isolative technique on the soccer player to extraordinarily poetic ends.
—Noah Cowan