Other Minds survives through innovation and experimentation that are what this independent presenting institution is about. It is not afraid to make mistakes, to infuriate, to wander through deserts to find pure wells. It sheds its skin, takes new forms, rises and falls with the tide of its musical temper. In the latest of its shapes, the film festival entitled "Eyes & Ears" which graced the Castro Theater last weekend offered a fittingly offbeat and varied fare of composer-driven visuals. Terry Riley, Pandit Pran Nath, and Leon Theremin rubbed celluloid elbows grittily with George Antheil, Karlheinz Stockhausen, and Björk.

A documentary entitled Frontiers of New Music asked the somewhat unnecessary question, "Is there a West Coast aesthetic in American music?" and then answered it in interviews with footage featuring composers whose very names instantly evoke the affirmative - Cowell, Partch, Adams, Harrison, Subotnick, and the justly rediscovered Robert Erickson. A deserving look at Australian composer Percy Grainger showed to what extent he'd trod ground before the herd in the documentary The Noble Savage, followed by an exploration of his extramusical obsessions in the biopic Passions. In both films, and in an entr'acte medley played by David Hegarty on the theater's organ, Grainger's music won over in its splendid, energetic simplicities. In the latter film, the worn-out question of whether artists' perversities make any difference whatever to their creativity was more than compensated by the amazing ensemble performance of Grainger dead-ringer Richard Roxburgh and Barbara Hershey as the ultimate stage mother.

The centerpiece of the festival was Paul (DJ Spooky) Miller's Rebirth of a Nation, a contemporary revisiting of the classic 1915 film Birth of a Nation by director D.W. Griffith, whose portrayal of Southern blacks as ignorant, lecherous children is no less disturbing than his celebration of the Ku Klux Klan as the rescuers of the American national spirit. It is only fitting that this film's stereotypes and muddled racist history be addressed, and the creative arena of the multi-media conceptual artist would seem to present a fascinating opportunity.

It needs more work

And yet in some ways, Miller's remix represented an attack on more than a message. The structure, timing, technique, and energy of the footage, the elements for which the original film is deemed critically notable, were undermined by Miller's processes of re-synthesis. Presented as a work in progress, there is far to go indeed in this Rebirth. The great earsplitting washes of tone whic h dominated the soundtrack served more to slow the film's pace than to suggest alienation or inhumanity. Even worse, the constant intercutting of images of the Klan, a slave sale, and black subservience overemphasized the inherent hypocrisy to the point of being tiresome. In the end, the point of the exercise was lost in the corruption of form which it engendered, and it became something to get through rather than experience.

Probably the most successfully presented composer of the festival was Frank Zappa, revealed as an effective and potent musical thinker in two films, Phase II: The Big Note, and Baby Snakes. In Phase II, an ongoing biographical exploration by filmmaker Frank Scheffer, Zappa's exploits are presented with style and insight, albeit with a loose sense of organization. Perhaps the film's worshipful awe is well-merited. Fellow musicians, collaborators and commentators, such as George Duke, Pierre Boulez, and Haskell Wexler, weigh in with admiration and anecdote. But the most perceptive commentary comes from his wife Gail and son Dweezil, in describing both his creative process and his artistic significance.

The picture that emerges from Phase II and from the concert video/claymation spectacular Baby Snakes is anything but that of a mere rock musician with pretensions of being a serious composer. The reverse holds true, that Zappa was a highly skilled musical creator with masterful craft and matchless curiosity from the beginning of his career, and that rock music was but one of several vehicles for his expression. A charming appearance as a teen on Steve Allen's Tonight Show bears this out as a calm, assured (and beardless) Zappa directs Allen and his band in a performance on bicycle which produces results both amusing and profound.

As his career proceeds, Zappa seems to blend qualities of the best of the 20th Century's approaches to the role of composer and performer, with a bandleading virtuosity akin to Duke Ellington, a sense of sexual horseplay and social commentary as biting and clever as 20's Berlin Cabaret, and an uncompromising indulgence of his own creative will. He never wrote a note to please anyone but himself, and we can take it or leave it. We'll take it, thanks very much.

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