700 years of tradition in the making, this intimate short documentary portrait follows Venetian Maestro Gianni Toso, a lifelong student of glassblowing.
One-of-a-kind glassworks are only part of the maestro’s story, as he presents perspectives on life, learning, and passing the torch to the next generation of young American glassblowers.
"Time & Temperature" is an apt title from a director whose work is replete with patience and warm tones.
Justin's intimate tribute to a master artist and teacher is perfectly aligned with the gentle and joyful energy of his subject, Maestro Gianni Toso.
Time and Temperature is about much more than glass blowing, though that would be enough. This film lovingly sketches Toso's life, cultural and spiritual values, and the rigor of his hand.
Justin Foreman gives us a glimpse into the historical layers of a stunning craft and tradition which Toso embodies. Toso is a local treasure and thankfully Time & Temperature has framed him perfectly for the benefit of a global audience.
Twenty-two years ago I took a vacation with my family to Venice. We did all the touristy things - a ride in a gondola, a tour of the original Jewish ghetto, a trip to the island of Murano to buy the famous glass made there. I still have the glass objects I bought as souvenirs, but they mean much more to me now than ever. That’s because I’ve seen Justin Foreman’s luminous film Time and Temperature.
The film, on its surface, is a portrait of a maestro of glass blowing, the famous Gianni Toso. It is also a love story, not about romance, but about reverence for tradition, technique, and beauty. And it also about loss, not in the past, but the fear of loss in the future. Toso is aging and his children will not carry on the glass blowing tradition. Enter two young apprentices, Rachel Price and Chris Foreman, who become not only skilled craftspeople, but surrogate children for the maestro. Toso’s blessing of the glass blowing birthright on his acolytes carries biblical weight - this is a God-given gift and a burden of responsibility.
Most of the film is set in Toso’s workshop, which glows with the heat kilns and the shimmer of blown glass as it is shaped by the artists. Foreman uses archival industrial films, which explain the glassmaking process, to great effect, contrasting the monotone of the 1950s narration with the dancelike motions of Gianni Toso at work. The filmmaking challenge is to match the beauty of the glass with equally masterful cinematography, and Foreman not only meets that level but surpasses it.
There is a spiritual aspect to the film - Gianni Toso is an orthodox Jewish man and sees his work as devotional obligation. This philosophy elevates the production from portrait to exegesis, challenging the viewer to interpret the meaning of his life and therefore, one’s own.
It is a rare thing for a documentary film to be so transcendent, but Foreman achieves it in this short gem of a film.
"The main attraction of Time & Temperature, the remarkable short documentary film by Justin Foreman, is undoubtedly Giovanni Toso, the master Venetian glassblower living in Baltimore, whose voice and appearance make for one of the most striking and singular cinematic characters in recent memory.
The Maestro’s charm and charisma can be grasped as a series of surface effects: the graceful bodily movements, gestures, looks, facial expressions, all of which Foreman attentively captures with his camera. They are, however, also a sign that we are dealing with a figure who at once exists in our time and opens it toward temporal dimensions that by definition elude the present.
There is, first, the question of the past, or of many pasts: the formation of geological elements that are the raw material out of which glass is made, the cultural tradition of Venetian glassblowing, the history of Venice itself and of the Jewish people, the story of migrations and displacements, Toso’s personal biography.
Yet while clearly invested in the past and its transmission, the Maestro at some point in the film also exclaims: "It’s the past! I don’t live in the past!" This is the second temporal dimension that blows up the present: the new or the future, which belongs to artistic creation and to the making of forms which have not been made before.
In fact, one of the key ideas of Time & Temperature is that the present itself is an encounter between the various pasts and an unforeseen future. The pasts and the future meet not in harmony but, so to speak, in fire, in the glassblower’s furnace, in a precarious and discontinuous moment that, like the glassworks themselves, requires knowing "the right temperature" and the "right time" at which things are ready to be shaped."