How did you work with the text and music in creating the videos for Tristan und Isolde?
Wagner used music not to illustrate action, but to describe the movement of human consciousness. He does illustrate some actions literally, but most other times, the movement of the music is the movement of the inner lives of the characters. We take that for granted today—every time you see a horror movie and you hear the creepy music when a guy is walking down a hallway in the dark, that’s Richard Wagner. All these years using a camera, I’ve never really felt that it was solely a visual instrument capturing light from the outside world. For me it was always dealing with invisible things, like Cézanne’s fleeting moment. So I’ve felt connected to Wagner since I began listening to his music. If you are going to present images with music—two time-based forms—they have to dance together, interact in interesting ways. That’s why, in terms of guideposts, the music came in last in the creative process, when I was editing. The genesis of it was the libretto, which I was very comfortable with b
