The ProjectorFrank Scheffer’s lifelong fascination with China finds expression in latest film
- The Dutch filmmaker returns to his favourite subject, this time with the documentary Inner Landscape, which shows a Chinese composer’s struggle to save a dying musical tradition
It was the 1960s and Dutch filmmaker Frank Scheffer, then a schoolboy living in Venlo, in the Netherlands, had received a letter from a seafaring uncle in China.
“It had an enormous stamp on it and I proudly showed it to my friends in school,” he recalls.
That letter, Scheffer says, was the beginning of a “long-standing fascination” with the country, an obsession vividly illustrated in the 62-year-old director and video artist’s four-decade career. Through collaborations with artists from China, the filmmaker has sought to juxtapose Chinese philosophy and aesthetics with those of the West.
For instance, Scheffer has explored the Chinese classic I Ching in a collaboration with American composer John Cage, and contemplated Taoist teachings in The Road (1997), a documentary about Dutch composer Louis Andriessen’s adaptation of sixth-century BC sage Laozi’s Dao De Jing into a chamber piece. Scheffer has also provided video projections for Tan Dun’s opera Tea, and invited Chou Wen-chung – a Shandong-born composer known for his combination of Western and Chinese musical aesthetics – to participate in a film about modernist composer Edgard Varèse.
The film begins with Guo’s life as a composer and professor at the Central Conservatory of Music, in Beijing, with him musing about his multicultural oeuvre and how he seeks to produce something new from the fusion of artistic canons. It then skips to Chengdu, in Sichuan province, where Guo meets Nieuw Ensemble’s principal conductor, Ed Spanjaard, from whom the composer received his first commission (the chamber opera Wolf Cub Village, an adaptation of Lu Xun’s Diary of a Madman), in the early 1990s. Later, Guo, his musicians and Sichuan opera singer Shen Tiemei are shown visiting Amsterdam in the run-up to the premiere of Si Fan at the Holland Festival, in June 2015.
“I like the juxtaposition of things because it has the potential to create something new that is more than just the [sum] of the parts,” says Scheffer, who compares Guo’s work with early-20th-century Austrian composer Alban Berg’s “beautiful lyrical music”.