See the music, hear the film

In Philadelphia, where civic pride and overt misanthropy can create a bewildering equation for daily living, Chamber Music Now's enterprising program,

Four Ways to View a City

, was bound to have a tough time saying something important and honest without creating an angry mob Saturday at the Annenberg Center.

No wonder, then, that half of the program's four short experimental films, created in conjunction with new music for unaccompanied cellist Ovidiu Marinescu, didn't work out, often because they didn't try hard.

Benjamin Franklin is a safe subject that rarely fails to yield something worthwhile: In Dante Microludes, Franklin was depicted on screen wandering through modern Philadelphia, from graffiti-decorated walls to his namesake bridge, with periodic quotations from Dante.

Those different elements had fits of welcome artistic friction but most often felt like meaningless juxtaposition. From the outset, trusting a piece whose on-screen Franklin is less convincingly colonial than Old City carriage drivers was tough. The wrong kind of wonder arose, as in, "What bill of goods is this?"

Not so with David Ludwig's 12-movement Dante score, influenced by the explosive miniatures of Gyorgy Kurtag but less dense and unafraid of prettiness. The seemingly unending scale ascent in the 10th movement, for one, was thoroughly entrancing. Often, I wanted to shield my eyes and focus on the score.

Such shortcomings were nothing compared to Philly Bar Hop with music by Richard Belcastro and film by Can Yegen. It embraced the we're-crude-and-proud-of-it mentality with woozy videos of local bars, ending with a stream of urine creating a wet pyramid on a back-alley wall. With a disjointed score that made Marinescu play strenuously to little effect, the piece was so mundane as to not be worth the audience's time.

On the plus side was Sonic Curcuits, which had sensors hooked up to Marinescu that influenced the hundreds of possible images on the screen. Andrea Clearfield's music was a suite of sorts, not all from her top drawer, but even the most modernistic moments (all appropriate to the urban landscapes) drew in the ear with points of symmetry.

The Chris Garvin film similarly had visual leitmotifs, from flowers to street maps, and any number of other images so beguiling that you wanted to look at them far longer than you were allowed. Particularly near the end, visuals sprinted ahead of the rest, with reflective musical moments in counterpoint to a hectic flood of images.

The piece that best showed what's possible in this audio-visual fusion was Bending Light, filmed and composed by Paul Geissinger. The first part, "reflections," was full of familiar cityscapes seen in reflection (often in water), all with positive transformations. Other sections included an Atom Egoyan-style, effectively stilted dramatization of a famous author reading to a class, oblique in purpose but worth contemplating because "reflections" gained your trust. Somebody earnest and thoughtful was definitely behind that camera.