Sanctuary: Lisa Gerrard
Studio: Milan
Rated: NONE
WorkNameSort: Sanctuary: Lisa Gerrard
As half of the creative core of Dead Can Dance and the haunting voice behind the scores of films such as Gladiator and Heat, Lisa Gerrard has achieved a unique brand of success. Gerrard approaches her art in a way that is holistic and philosophically elegant, and though she’s as ephemeral as her music, she is also quite serious about ensuring the integrity of her work. Clive Collier’s beautiful documentary eschews the typical timeline narrative that many artist-oriented docs take and instead focuses on providing an accordingly abstract approach to telling Gerrard’s story. All the important bases are hit ‘ her work with Dead Can Dance, her success in film music ‘ but the film’s goal is less to give a background history of the singer than to emphasize her thoughts on the purity and power of music. That DCD collaborator Brendan Perry only speaks through a decade-old interview is curious, but conversations with the likes of Graeme Revell, Russell Crowe, Michael Mann and Gerrard herself paint an engaging portrait.
This article appears in Apr 25 – May 1, 2007.