A Stravinsky Portrait represents the philosophy of Cinema Direct in its most basic form and is the purest expression of Richard Leacock’s original and pioneering work of the American version of cinéma vérité. Leacock says the crew became “…almost a family. We swam a lot and listened to music, we ate together, we had a good time sending the film to hell. Making the film was almost secondary, and this helped us reach a higher level of intimacy than normal”. The prolonged and unmanipulated images, which have the beauty and rhythm of a dance, and the synchronism that Leacock finds are still striking after four decades. Better small talk probably has never been heard on screen before. Stravinsky mixes every language possible (“I adore dissonance, consonance ist viel schwerer”.), but only his Russian sounds impeccable. We meet fellow artists: composer Pierre Boulez (who finds a mistake in the score of Les Noces), writers Vladimir Nabokov (with whom Stravinsky expresses his astonishment at the scarce understanding of young avant-garde idiots) and Christopher Isherwood, and George Balanchine, the great dancer, choreographer and ballet instructor. Even the most banal scenes are fascinating. We learn that in Stravinsky’s opinion Beethoven’s best symphonies are symphonies 2, 4, 8 and 7. We learn of the idea of ordering a “very banal libretto” based on a work by Cocteau. The composer says of himself that he prefers composing music to listening to it. The film is suffused with moving nostalgia, the solemnity of Eliot’s or Huxley’s elegies.
A Stravinsky Portrait is “profoundly, extremely, quintessentially, I would dare say, a Mallarmé like work, a poetic reflection on art and creation and at the same time significant testimony of the character Stravinsky”. Louis Marcorelles, who deeply understood the essence of this work, wrote: “Leacock’s camera has just one objective, to capture the constant quiver of artistic creation”. “Stravinsky lives not only for art but also in it”.

Peter von Bagh