Arthur Rubinstein – The Love of Life (1969 Documentary) アルトゥール・ルービンシュタイン　「愛すべき人生」

L’amour de la Vie (The Love of Life,1969). Documentary about Polish-American pianist, Arthur Rubinstein.

An Oscar winning look at the life of Albert Rubinstein shortly after he turned 70. It contains some home movies of him and his family, but is primarily him talking and demonstrating his great skill as a pianist.

• Directors
  • Gérard Patris
  • François Reichenbach
• Stars
  • Artur Rubinstein
  • Eliahu Inbal
  • Paul Kletzki

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Arthur Rubinstein: The Love of Life

L’Amour de la vie – Artur Rubinstein

“You must never touch any piece of music that isn’t yours…that doesn’t talk to you.”

Arthur (or Artur) Rubinstein (1887–1982) was the most fêted classical concert pianist of the 20th century, with a career that spanned almost the entirety of it. At age four he was identified as a prodigy, and in spite of poverty that prevented him from studying under the best teachers, he was already the toast of Europe when he made his Paris debut at age 17 and world-famous by the age of 19, when he debuted at Carnegie Hall.

This loose and lazy biographical documentary made when he was 81, near the end of his life, Arthur Rubinstein, L’amour de la Vie, or, Arthur Rubinstein, The Love of Life was produced for French TV and later altered slightly for an American release. It’s a valuable, if scattershot, impressionistic record of reminiscences and views of his daily life, travels and concert rehearsals and performances.

It was a “safe” winner of the best documentary Oscar in 1970, going up against Emile de Antonio’s better, blistering screed on American colonialism and Vietnam incursion, In the Year of the Pig, which must have been deemed too volatile. (By 1974 when Hearts and Minds won the prize, it had become OK for the Academy to recognize movies critiquing the war.)

Rubinstein was fluent in eight languages and a cosmopolitan who probably traveled more than anyone who ever lived, and the movie jumps around from Spain (the primary place he lived at the time), India, Israel, Turkey, France, and maybe some other places, without usually identifying them, and I found myself quite often taking small clues from the movie and hitting Google/Google images trying to figure out where the movie was at any given time. I consider this failure to identify its locations to be a great flaw in a film that’s presenting Rubinstein as a sort of artistic and cultural ambassador.

There’s a scene, for instance, where Rubinstein is playing a dusty but beautifully tuned piano in an open-air amphitheater amid ancient ruins without saying where he was, and after some digging I ascertained the location was the ancient ruins at Ephesus in Turkey.

Although I’d hesitate to call the movie hagiographic, it definitely operates in the “life-affirming” category, letting Rubinstein criticize himself mainly about his youthful indiscretions while glossing over other stuff. His wife, Nela, who he so lovingly trots about with throughout the film, would be thrown aside for a much younger than when he turned 90 (he died at 95).

The film is a slow burner, never innovative or surprising, but the charm of its subject wins you over, though a basic love of classical music and of Rubinstein’s artistry are pretty much essential for full enjoyment. I possess those passions and loved the movie as much as possible given its limitations.

Interestingly, according to Harvey Sachs’ biography, Rubinstein, A Life, the pianist himself did not like the film very much, calling it “haphazard,” and the musical performances captured in it too improvised. Being a perfectionist, he didn’t like being seen at less than his best.

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