Once in a great while, a film score really grabs me from the inside out: It’s not just the beauty of the suite or piece of music alone, but when the sounds are perfectly matched with the mood, look, and feel of the story being told on screen and the elements combine to make one extraordinary whole, the inextricable links between music and movie become entwined with the soul, as if we’ve heard these strains somewhere before. The Last Black Man in San Francisco, directed by Joe Talbot with music by Emile Mosseri, is the ideal marriage of sound and image for The City right now. It’s melancholy but not maudlin; it’s shimmering but not overwhelmingly bright and it surprises with its subtlety. I have much to say about the film, and its operatic dimensions cut from indie cloth, but I’m not yet done formulating my thoughts (I’m a little stuck in the real life tragedy of it all). For those of us living here, thinking about the state of our city comes second to surviving it. Living in a place of such extreme, rapid and frankly terrifying gentrification is a job in itself; for those of us born here, we live everyday with the specter of something we love being taken from us — again, and again — rendering our home unrecognizable. The grief is ongoing and it feels like it will never end. It’s a daily discipline simply to get up and out of bed to ready one’s self for the day ahead: Who or what will we lose next? At least now we have a soundtrack to accompany the loss.
Full interview with Emile Mosseri in this month’s Tourworthy.
Filed under: Arts and Culture, film, gentrification, San Francisco News, Emile Mosseri, film score, Joe Talbot, movie music, music for film, soundtrack, The Last Black Man in San Francisco
Denise Sullivan 