MEXICO CITY – A “Live cinema piece” is how director Sam Green describes his film The Love Song of R. Buckminster Fuller, presented with live accompaniment by the band Yo La Tengo, Friday night, April 15 at the Teatro de la Ciudad Esperanza Iris in Mexico City.
The “live documentary” is an homage to the career of architect, engineer, inventor, and futurist R. Buckminster Fuller. An intellectual known for many aspects from his early stewardship for the environment, sustainable design in architecture, and extensive lectures, often referred to as “Thinking out loud” because of their quite improvised nature, carried an informed view of a utopian future.
The film is narrated live by the director Green, something between the Japanese tradition of benshi and a TED talk, while esteemed indie rock band Yo La Tengo provides the live soundtrack, at times improvising and taking cues from the director. Green has presented this film performance in different countries all around the world over the last four years, but this is its first showing in Mexico.
Sam Green, of San Francisco, California, has experimented before with live documentary in a piece Utopia in Four Movements (2010), and received an Oscar nomination for the more conventional documentary, The Weather Underground (2004), featuring the 1960’s radicals.
In a conference, Green said that although nowadays cinema is often consumed through personal computers and devices, vulnerable to the distraction of emails and social media, he sees the live cinema experience as a unique performance, an immersive experience with the audience that will never be duplicated.
Four years running, touring with the performance Green sees in the continuity of the project, and the enthusiastically favorable response from audiences as proof that people’s desire to explore cinema in a more dynamic way.
The film is presented by Museo Tamayo, Ambulante and Proyecta; under the framework of the project Dymaxion México, a series of events, lectures, screenings shown in parallel with Ambulante, a documentary film festival showing in Mexico City, Oaxaca and Puebla.
The screening takes place Friday, April 15 at 8:30 p.m. at the beautiful Teatro de la Ciudad Esperanza Iris, in Mexico City’s historical downtown district. Some tickets are still available at the box office or via Ticketmaster.
