The Love Song of R. Buckminster Fuller

On September 12 in Portland, Oregon, filmmaker Sam Green will be performing the "live documentary" The Love Song of R. Buckminster Fuller, accompanied by one of my favorite bands, Yo La Tengo. The performance premiered in May at SFMOMA and will be on the road throughout parts of 2012 and 2013. The Portland date, presented by PICA and Northwest Film Center, is the only one I know about right now. I'm hoping they make their way to the east coast.

While the title of the documentary recalls T.S. Eliot's "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock," I'm reminded of Yo La Tengo's live soundtracks for Jean Painlevé's underwater, "utterly unclassifiable science films." To date, I've only heard the music Yo La Tengo composed to accompany the visuals of undersea creatures, but the synthesis of music and visuals is certainly the point, something the band is branching into with more and more movie soundtracks and now Sam Green's quasi-film. I can only wonder what the music going with "Fuller’s utopian vision" will sound like.


[Photo of R. Buckminster Fuller by Dennis Magnum | image source]

The description via PICA:

Can one person change the world? Architect, inventor, and twentieth-century futurist Buckminster Fuller experimented tirelessly for fifty years trying to answer this question. Drawing equal inspiration from TEDtalks and Benshi film narration, The Love Song of R. Buckminster Fuller is a new “live documentary” from filmmaker Sam Green. Accompanied by a score performed live by Yo La Tengo, Green will cue images and narrate the film, exploring Fuller’s utopian vision that a design revolution could usher in radical social change.

Green is a documentary filmmaker based in New York and San Francisco. His film The Weather Underground was nominated for an Academy Award, broadcast nationally on PBS, and included in the 2004 Whitney Biennial. He has received grants from the Guggenheim Foundation, the Rockefeller Foundation, Creative Capital, and the NEA. Yo La Tengo is a critically acclaimed indie rock band from Hoboken, New Jersey. They’ve recorded twelve studio albums, written soundtracks to the films Junebug, Shortbus, and Old Joy, and provided a score for the surrealist aquatic films of Jean Painlevé.