Room to Move Amiel Courtin-Wilson’s The Silent Eye

The subject of the film, if there is one, is the recording of the most intangible and elemental stuff: movement, sound and interaction, the interplay between Taylor and Tanaka a kind of physically manifested call-and-response.

Amiel Courtin-Wilson is that most unclassifiable of Australian directors. Since completing his first film, the documentary Chasing Buddha (2000), at the age of nineteen, his subsequent works have straddled the boundaries between documentary, narrative filmmaking and the art world, while employing ever more intensive modes of collaboration. The Silent Eye (2016) represents an uncompromising distillation of these tendencies: it is a portrait of three improvised performances by free-jazz pianist Cecil Taylor and Japanese dancer Min Tanaka, held at the former’s Brooklyn home. Commissioned by New York’s Whitney Museum of American Art as part of a 2016 career retrospective on Taylor, The Silent Eye may find its most natural place in the world of installation art. However, this did not stop intrepid programmers from selecting the film for screenings at the Queensland Art Gallery | Gallery of Modern Art later that year, and at the International Film Festival Rotterdam (IFFR), Hobart’s Dark Mofo festival and the Melbourne International Film Festival in 2017.

There is a useful comparison to be made here between The Silent Eye and Courtin-Wilson’s other