Films For The Earth

A Symphony of Films on Music

For me, filmmaking has always been a way of listening. I listen with my eyes, with my camera, with the rhythm of editing. Sound—especially music—is at the heart of how I experience the world. My films are extensions of this way of perceiving. What fascinates me is perception itself: how sound, time, and image shape our inner landscape. Music has always pulled me in, not just for its beauty or emotion, but for its architecture, its logic, its mystery. It lives in time, invisible yet deeply moving. I wanted my films to live that way too. Like Gustav Mahler said that a symphony should include all life.

When I started working with composers—some of the most radical thinkers and creators of the 20th and 21st centuries—I didn’t approach them as subjects. I approached them as collaborators, sometimes even as guides. I wasn’t interested in just documenting their lives. I wanted to enter their way of thinking, to allow the film to evolve with their spirit. With composers like Gustav Mahler, Edgard Varèse, John Cage, Elliott Carter, Karlheinz Stockhausen, Luciano Berio, Pierre Boulez, Louis Ansriessen or Frank Zappa a.m., I was searching for a way to not only understand but also feel what they were trying to express—through silence, through chaos, through repetition, through structure. Each composer opened a door to a different universe.

Varèse once wrote: “The present-day composer refuses to die.” That line, printed on a Zappa album I discovered at thirteen, lit a fire in me. It led to more than fifty films on music, each a meditation on the deep ties between sound and cinema. After graduating from the Dutch Film Academy in 1982, I read Kandinsky’s The Spiritual in Art and I was struck by his idea that music, being the most abstract art form, gives the artist the greatest freedom to express. Kandinsky’s pointed out that the principles of music can be transformed to other art forms. I decided to devote my work to music that enlightens. Influenced by opposite film directors like Eisenstein and Tarkovsky, I approached film as a form of composition, using musical principles to guide cinematic structure. Both are time-based art forms, sharing structural elements like rhythm, space, and memory.

Luciano Berio once said that modernism began spiritually with Mahler. My relationship with the music of Gustav Mahler is one of deep recognition and emotional surrender. His symphonies feel like inner landscapes—raw, expansive, and unafraid of contradiction—where beauty and terror coexist, just like in life. Equally two shots in a film, placed side by side, they don’t merely create a supplement of each other—they awaken a new entity (Eisenstein, Lessons in editing) . From this idea I developed a deep fascination for juxtaposing opposites. I started with the juxtaposition of two great American composers, John Cage and Elliott Carter. Their working methods are the opposite of each other. John Cage taught me to embrace chance and the unintentional. He was one of the first to change my perspective completely. Marina Abramovic introduced me to John saying that the encounter would be worthwhile. In spending time with him, filming him, listening to him speak about silence, about chance, about non-intention, I began to realize that making a film could itself be an act of listening. He helped me understand that absence can be as powerful as presence. That silence is not empty. Carter, by contrast, showed me music as a field of layered times. Each instrument a consciousness, each rhythm a separate pulse. His complexity wasn’t cold—it was alive. Between Cage and Carter, I felt a new vision of being.

In all my films, I try to approach the edit like a musical composition. The cut is a note. The rhythm is in the pacing of the shots. Sometimes I’ll keep a long take because it holds tension, like a sustained chord. Other times, I’ll cut quickly to echo a staccato phrase or a burst of improvisation. I don’t use music simply as a background or a score. Music is the subject—but it also becomes the form.

In 2006, I believed I was finishing my cycle on modern music with Zappa and Varèse. But then I met Nader Mashayekhi, an Iranian composer and conductor. He expanded my horizon. He reminded me that the 21st-century soundscape extends beyond the West. Music from the rest of the world had to enter my films. What truly fascinates me now is not just modernity, but how it resonates with deep-rooted traditions. I believe the real avant-garde today lies in juxtaposition: when cultures meet, not to merge, but to speak, side by side. That insight became the foundation for my tetralogy.

In part 1 Gozaran: Time Passing, Mashayekhi places Persian music next to contemporary textures—both distinct, yet deeply engaged. In Inner Landscape, Guo Wenjing, a Chinese composer, surrounds fading Sichuan opera with Western instruments, preserving the core while gently supporting it. In Half Moon, Syrian clarinetist Kinan Azmeh, trained at Juilliard, bridges Arabic tradition with jazz and classical form, creating a sound rooted in Damascus and New York alike.

Each of these films became a space of listening, a space of meeting. And I, behind the camera, was there to witness the breath between traditions.

Now, in Timeless Breath, I journey into the soul of Indian classical music. Guided by sarangi master Dhruba Ghosh, I follow the voice of his instrument, bowed into silence and sound. Through this film, I hope to understand why music has always been my way into the world—and my way back to myself.

With every film, I ask: how can I shape silence, motion, rhythm, to reflect a polyphonic world? Whether the subject is Mahler, Stockhausen, Cage, or Mashayekhi, Azmeh or Ghosh, each demands a new language. I don't believe in imposing a fixed style. I believe in listening. To the music, to the maker, to the moment. My goal is not to illustrate, but to translate—to create a parallel form in cinema that breathes with the music it reflects.

I hope my films invite people to listen more deeply. Not just to music, but to time, to silence, to each other. I don't want to offer conclusions. I want to open spaces—for resonance, for curiosity, for transformation. Films for the earth is part of a visionary project initiated by Marina Mahler, inspired by the spirit of Gustav Mahler’s composition Das Lied von der Erde (Song of the Earth).

For me, filmmaking is not about capturing the past. It's about opening new ways of hearing, of seeing, of feeling. That is what music has always given me. And through film, I try to return the gift.

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Frank Scheffer

Amsterdam, 11 May 2025