Billy Shebar wouldn’t have embarked on telling the story of Meredith Monk if he hadn’t been enamored with her work, marveling at how she harnessed human voices as if they were instruments on a grand orchestra for her musical compositions and sought out artists of different disciplines to bend the form towards unexpected but similarly pleasing ends. However, with the end goal of spurring on a new appreciation of Monk’s ingenuity, he found his own only deepened exponentially when attempting to honor her approach in “Monk in Pieces,” which true to its title presents her life in fragments and the collision of various elements yield revelation.
Often returning to the loft in New York that Monk has kept in the city since the 1970s when artists flooded the Flatiron District when rents were low as the artist goes about her quiet daily routine of preparing a cup of Joe for herself in the morning and feeding her pet turtle, the film exuberantly shows all the noise Monk has made elsewhere – in a literal sense with operas such as “Quarry” and “Atlas,” but also the commotion they created as complete reinventions of how such productions could be staged. Blending contemporary dance and musical arrangements, Monk developed an inimitable style that wasn’t even to be repeated by herself, and Shebar takes on the daunting task of replicating the strong emotions that the artist could induce unconsciously while unpacking all the influences that led to shaping such singular experiences.
While “Monk in Pieces” finds a foundation in Monk’s domestic life, a proper portrait starts to come into focus from chapters built around individual pieces of music she’s written where the rhythm holds you before the logic and rational thought behind it does. Grabbing attention as an artist is seized by imagination, the film may only be able to explain so much about a creative process where the end result defies easy articulation, but it finds tension in both the sparks of imagination that Monk is able to turn into performance and the lack of it amongst critics who hold her to standards of centuries past as she dares to do something new, clearly not helped by the fact that she’s a woman. Still, when no less than Björk and David Byrne are around to speak to her innovation, it is clear that Monk has found her people and between her work and her playful personality, the film is bound to make many new fans. Following the film’s festival run this spring starting with a celebrated bow at Berlinale, “Monk in Pieces” is set to turn arthouses across the country into lively concert halls and Shebar graciously took the time to talk about matching Monk’s creativity in profiling her, unearthing archival material that could speak to the present and the personal connection he has to the story he ended up telling.
How did this come about?
It actually starts with my wife Katie Geissinger, who in 1990 got cast by Meredith in the original production of “Atlas.” At that point, I started hearing fragments of her music as they were developing the work for “Atlas” and that led me to explore her other work I just found it mind-blowing, and and then Katie’s been in every major work of Meredith’s [since] over the last 30 years, so I’ve had this like front-row seat to her continued evolution as an artist and also gotten to know her a lot better and realized this would be a really interesting story to tell, but maybe using Meredith’s own mosaic approach rather than try to do a A-B-C-D biopic narrative.
Was she immediately receptive? It can be dicey prospect putting your life in someone else’s hands, no matter how close you are.
That is so true because anybody who agrees to be the subject of a documentary is making an enormous leap of faith. It just you just makes you so vulnerable and I was very aware of that, even with having known her for 30 years before we started making the film. [Katie and I’s] one-year-old son was on tour with her in Macedonia and even with that kind of basis of trust, it was it still like a dance, so [we discussed] what are the things that she’s she’s comfortable doing on camera or talking about in interview and over time we got enough really interesting material to tell the story.
Those scenes of her in her loft, simply going apart from her daily routine apart from music, become a really interesting part of the film. How did that become a frame for this?
Part of the way those came about [was because] I was randomly reading a Guardian list of the greatest films of the century at one point and they said the best film of all time is Chantal Akerman’s “Jeanne Dielman.” I’d never seen Chantal Ackerman’s work, but I was mesmerized and if you know her work, she does these long scenes with a camera is just locked off for a beautiful composition and you might be behind a woman doing the dishes for four minutes and it’s completely mesmerizing. That was the stylistic inspiration, and I had been editing a lot by myself or doing a piecemeal with some editors I pulled in and I got to the place where I had a 50-minute cut [of the film] and I knew there had to be a feature-length version here, but I wasn’t sure how to go on.
I had been courting Sabine Krayenbühl, this editor who I love who did “My Architect” and all these other great films and she agreed to come on and spend seven months really working with me to finish it. One of her early suggestions was to go back and do at least another day of those kinds of scenes with Meredith In the loft alone, and then thread them throughout the film. She gave me the confidence to push that idea further and I had Jeff Hutchins, a great cinematographer who actually has a background as a still photographer, doing those scenes with me, so he really helped me find these gorgeous compositions of Meredith alone, doing her dishes or watering her plants. In an odd way, things started to fall into place [in the larger structure] with each of those activities. We had this section where Bjork talks about Meredith’s profound influence on her and mentions the loft in the interview and said it’s a refuge from this toxic world, and [we could cut to her] watering the plants in her loft. So you start to make all these little connections.
When you do have this mosaic structure rather than something chronological, was there something you could organize the material around?
That was a decision made really early on to use the mosaic approach that she uses in her own theater works and films and that freed me up to pick my most my favorite pieces of music and the best of the archival material because there’s a vast amount of it. Having that freedom was great and Meredith gave me that freedom because I was putting pieces of music with visual material that she never thought of putting together, so that was the thing I was the most nervous about because Meredith did not look at rough cuts along the way, but I hinted that I’d take these kind of liberties and I got the sense it was going to be okay, and in fact, she loved that aspect of the film.
And although the mosaic structure frees you up, it also creates a big challenge, which is [it leaves you] without the crutch of a linear narrative, so [how] do you pull a viewer through it. Sabine Krayenbühl [encouraged me] to look for connective, almost sometimes metaphorical connections between chapters or finding a theme that we could seed throughout the turtle [that Meredith has as a pet]. That has a beginning, middle and end and then the bad reviews that turn at a certain point and become glowing reviews, all those things are on your mind and you have to use them as the ways of driving somebody through the experience of watching the film.
When you mention putting together the music and the visual material, were there any collisions you could create that were really exciting discoveries?
That was going on throughout the whole making of the film because the music had to reflect the particular mood of what was going on in the footage. For example, in the middle of the pandemic, Meredith’s talking about how people tend to scapegoat other people and then you start to see the footage from [here 1988 film] “Book of Days,” which was a response to the AIDS crisis and the way that people were being scapegoated then, so it’s about disease and the plague and the music choice had to be something where you felt that ugly side of human nature. Another example, and one of my favorite all-time pieces “Do You Be” – and I’m not alone, this is the one that Jean-Luc Godard used in this film “Notre Musique” — it’s so powerful, but also in some ways may be hard to listen to, so I saved that for the very end when you see her alone eating breakfast in her kitchen. It’s actually the only one of those loft scenes that I used music — the others are all without music [as a] respite from from all the music, so it was always thinking about what piece of music captured the mood and often it was about a personal thing.
Was there anything in the archival material that was particularly revelatory?
Yeah, the process of discovering footage… some of it Meredith didn’t even know existed and then thinking, “Wow, I’ve got to find a place for this.” There was this really kooky interview that she did on a public access show with this guy in a three-piece suit who’s just completely befuddled by her music, but he still wanted to have her on because she just won some award and you see him trying to figure her out. It’s hard to watch in some ways because you just want to cringe, but then other times it’s just very funny. “Juice” [her 1969 performance] was a really important work of hers — the first work actually ever performed in the Guggenheim Rotunda and they gave Meredith as a 28-year-old artist permission to do this big theater event with music in the middle of the [museum]. I had seen some footage and the quality wasn’t great, but I pushed Peter Sciscioli, who’s been this fantastic guide through Meredith’s archive for us, to dig into his logs. We found this box that was in deep storage. It actually had the original 16 millimeter film reel, so we took those out and made a proper digitization of it and we were able to make a whole chapter out “Juice” very early on in the [film], using voiceover that we got from Meredith’s journal and that was another discovery — getting some access to Meredith’s journals and finding their dreams and being able to make chapters out of those.
I wonder with “Atlas” in particular when that was your own personal entry point into her work, and it becomes such a dazzling sequence, what was it like to put together?
Yeah, the great thing about “Atlas” was that Michael Blackwood, one of the great American documentarians, especially in the topic of the arts, had filmed rehearsals in Meredith’s loft for the original production and it was one of these discoveries because we were never going to get permission to use the BAM footage of the 1992 production [where it was performed] without paying a zillion dollars. But we found that Michael Blackwood had been given permission to shoot a rehearsal and it was this gorgeous 16 millimeter film. Then at the same time, Ryan [Ebright], one of our academic advisors who became more of a research consultant was writing a paper about “Atlas” and he was focused on the culture clash of Houston Grand Opera, which up to then had only done [classics such as] “Tosca” and suddenly they wanted to be more cutting edge, so they invite Meredith [for a production], but they were completely unprepared for the idea for working with somebody like Meredith and Ryan actually unearthed all these memos that were shooting around back and forth at Houston Grand Opera going like, “What’s going on? Does she really need all this time to rehearse and where’s the score?” And Meredith [generally] doesn’t do a score or maybe she does it at the very end to codify all the stuff that she’s kind of invented in the rehearsal process, so you just see these panicked memos and that became this great [element to] intercut with a rehearsal footage and then you could create [this sequence] where it’s like, “Is this going to really happen?” and then suddenly boom you open it up to one of my favorite Atlas musical tracks called “Airport and you start seeing footage of the actual production.” And it just blooms into this thing that after being dissed by the New York Times for 25 years, they finally later recognized it as a masterpiece and the “defining operatic experiment of the 20th century,” they call it [now].
What’s it been like to start getting this out into the world?
We had an amazing festival run, [starting] at the Berlin International Film Festival in February which was the perfect place because they adore her in Germany and people were so responsive to it and that launch resulted in a really nice festival run all really all over the world — Hong Kong, Thessaloniki, Barcelona. Some of the responses really make you want to tear up. There was a 21-year-old singer who came up to Katie after a screening in Lisbon and said my life is now divided between before seeing this film and after.” It’s really gratifying and I think Meredith has taken quite a while to process the film because there’s a lot of it. It’s just like seeing your whole life in front of you and maybe be a little retraumatized seeing some of those early reviews, which I thought were an essential part of the story, but I think she’s really [gotten] behind it.
“Monk in Pieces” opens on July 25th in New York at the IFC Center, August 1st in Los Angeles at the Laemmle Royal, and August 8th in San Francisco at the Roxie Theater and in Santa Fe at the CCA Santa Fe.