ZAKIR AND HIS FRIENDS

Lutz Leonhardt's vibrant and exotic documentary, rightly subtitled "a rhythm experience", centers on the wide-ranging, transglobal activities of tablas virtuoso Zakir Hussain. Moving from Hussain's California home to such places as Brazil, Indonesia and Burkina Faso, the film records not only Hussain's collaboration with the countries' musicians, but also the sights and sounds that so clearly inform his musical vision. A percussionist himself, Leonhardt structures his film rhythmically, while echoing the shifting turn-on-a-dime dynamics of Indian percussion rather than the herky-jerky metronome of music video. Long shots of passing landscape are interspersed with accelerating locomotives, fungo bats hitting bass drums, cars rattling on manhole covers, fingers popping, machetes ringing, heads bobbing - Leonhardt constructs a world where the percolating dialogues between different rhythmic systems keep the Earth on its axis. As early as 1923, René Clair wrote, "We must learn to look at what we see. Too much importance is attached to words and we have had our fill of verbal association. Our eyes have stopped seeing". In just the same way, we have stopped listening in the cinema-and this is where Leonhardt comes to our aid.