Thursday, July 25, 2013
Notes from the Inside with James Rhodes, Channel 4, review
Television producers know we like to watch unlikely people making music. They have shown us Gareth Malone corralling atonal office workers to form a choir and then helping a group of military wives record a number one single. Notes from the Inside (Channel 4) set out to take music to a psychiatric unit.
James Rhodes, the classical pianist, was admitted for psychiatric treatment five years ago after being sexually abused as a child. He only began to recover after listening to Bach on his iPod in hospital. The film showed Rhode staking his Steinway grand piano to a different psychiatric unit to see if music could help other patients express their emotions.
It did well to show how tough Rhodes found the experience. He cut an intense figure, biting into a pencil and staring at the piano keys, sweeping his bedraggled hair from his face. He kept making a joke of his obvious unease, telling the receptionist: "I'm not staying, I promise you." He later admitted that the place scared the hell out of him.
The most poignant moments came when Rhodes and the patients swapped stories of their illnesses. Kelly, a 19-year-old who began hearing voices in her early teens, was obviously moved when Rhodes showed her his self-harming scars. She felt relaxed enough in his company to joke that Rachmaninov "sounds like the name of a pizza".
Rhodes claimed the unit's patients are "some of the most excluded people in the country", with no chance to encounter the outside world, let alone classical concerts. The film's insight into their day-to-day lives was almost unbearable. Krissy, a mother who suffers from a mood disorder with psychotic symptoms, wore a T-shirt emblazoned with "hope" surrounded by daisies, and talked about the guilt of going to the unit, leaving her son, her "little man", behind. She described her suicide attempt: "When I woke up and realised I was still there, I was devastated."
But despite Rhodes's attempts to make the patients interact with music, the film ended up oddly passive. Instead of making music themselves, the patients watched Rhodes play. Each part finished with one of them sitting in a chair in a huge hall, forming an audience of one while Rhodes performed a piece of classical music he had chosen for them. They remained emotionless during the performances and the film sometimes cut away to the advert break before they were given the chance to talk about whether or not the music had affected them.
For a film that claimed to illustrate the power of music, it lingered too long on Rhodes's journey and too little on its effect on the patients (apart from Nicky, a DJ who had already discovered his decks before Rhodes's trip). The viewer was left to reach the depressing conclusion, as Rhodes lugged his Steinway out of the unit, that this was because it did not have the transformative effect he had hoped.
Source : http://telegraph.feedsportal.com/c/32726/f/568414/s/2f1ede82/sc/9/l/0L0Stelegraph0O0Cculture0Ctvandradio0C10A20A0A8760CNotes0Efrom0Ethe0EInside0Ewith0EJames0ERhodes0EChannel0E40Ereview0Bhtml/story01.htm
