Contemporary Color
I'm shocked I hadn't heard of this project, either the <PERSON>-produced stage show or the <PERSON> brothers' ambitious rendering of it, until the film popped up on Mubi seven years after it was (barely) released. It's possibly the closest any live concert film has ever come to the ideal of pure cinema. Approximately one zillion cinematographers are credited, all evidently with an eye toward fresh and unconventional shooting angles, so that the standard shots we're used to seeing in every recorded performance are never used here. Nothing looks ordinary. 306
They use the tool of editing far more cinematically than other concert films do, as well.
It's cool, but sometimes you want the camera to just fucking sit still for a second so you can watch and appreciate the carefully choreographed "color guard" routines, this weird form of pageantry that's basically dance but with the added demand of spinning rifles(!) and flags while doing the steps. The camerawork is so striking that it often upstages its own subject, which many viewers are surely encountering for the first time and quickly becoming curious about. It also cuts away from the color guarders a few too many times, either to the musicians (who are of tertiary interest here—the pit orchestra isn't what you come to see at the ballet) or to backstage or to some random separately filmed mood footage. On one level I'm as awed by the <PERSON>' cinematic contribution as I am by the performance, but on another, more immediate level, I don't need the ideal of pure cinema when I'm trying to enjoy a spectacular novelty.
It doesn't take long to divine that color guard has military origins, but if this project is at all representative of the activity (sometimes referred to in the film, confusingly, as a sport), it has clearly transcended those origins. Ban guns for everyone except the color guard. 862