Modern movie theaters are sometimes seen as today's cathedrals -- our living generations' place for our frequently chosen sort of spirutal reflection. But the special advantage of screening a film in an actual cathedral, Tribeca Film Festival's executive producer pointed out in his giddy introduction to Paolo Cherchi Usai's odd project, was that it eluded the common characteristics of today's movie theater that sometimes encumber our ability to fully focus on the film in question -- the kicking of one's seat, the unnecessarily lengthy handling of cellophane wrappers, popcorn ingestion, other things' ingestion, the gunfire from the movie in the theater next door. The screening/performance of Paolo Cherchi Usai's Passio in New Yorks massive Cathedral of St. John the Divine was refreshingly free of these disturbances, except for one new, unforeseen element: the periodic shuffle of the few selectively outraged cut-and-runners who ditched the cathedral in droves, with the most flurry of activity concentrating around a few key, climactic sections (see: "eyeball surgery," below). Score a point for the New York archdiocese in the tolerance column over whatever irritable segment of New Yorks film-festival-going public that was.
Accurately but mysteriously described as a "dramatic meditation on the very act of seeing," the screening cum performance of Usai's Passio in the massive cathedral was an an entirely original cinematic and musical experience. And yes, a bit graphic and jarring at times. But for a film whose vast majority of frames are actually blank its apparent offensiveness was the most shocking aspect of the evening.
Paolo Cherchi Usai's 74-minute film is technically a silent one, but was specifically created to be viewed against the live performance of Arvo Pärt's "Passio" -- itself inspired by the Gospel of St. John (yes, he of the cathedral in question -- a thoughtful and appreciated setting on the part of the Tribeca Film Festival). All the images and clips in the film were hand-selected not arbitrarily, but in specific relation to bars and sections of Pärt's dramatic score, in this case performed live by The Trinity Choir, the Caleb Burhans Ensemble and the Evangelist Quartet. Usai explains this six-year effort:
Everything in the film reflects Arvo Pärt's music. ... In many cases I knew what I wanted to show in relation to a specific bar of the score, but I couldn't find the right kind of match: the shot was either too grainy or too sharp, too realistic or too abstract, too elliptical or too obvious, its inner tempo was too leisurely or too abrupt. I discarded some truly wonderful shots I had hoped to insert in the final cut just because they were not long enough, or because their beauty would distract the viewer from the essence of the musical experience. It sometimes took a very long time before I could find exactly what I wanted for a given phrase of the libretto.
Perhaps for the dead-enders who added the cathedralized acoustics of their foot traffic to the wondrous mix of sound and image, the images themselves maybe gave the aura of a gratuitously explicit show and tell of a disturbed child's film footage hunt through archives the world over. But even then it was a captivating and poignant show and tell.
Usai's production provokes introspection on what images (varyingly evidentiary by their nature) say about humanity's curiosity and capability for violence and harm. The film seems intent on demonstrating that no images are created in a vacuum -- the lens captures only a fraction of that event's activity; that activity occurred before and after the camera was operating; the camera's subjects operated in unknown but estimable capacities in the absence of cameras; and the photographer, too, has a not insignificant role in the event at hand as well. All the clips work in accordance with the music at any given moment, and are a joy to see because of this dramatic effect, but they all primarily are posing profound questions about what led to their creation originally, and what happened after.
Century-old footage of mysterious seizures, cockroach-battling, researching eugenists', and eyeball surgery (the hands-down winner in inciting viewers' departures) can be hard to watch, but the whole of Passio, with its impressive live performance of Pärt's score and cathedral-enhanced atmospherics, provided an intense, spellbinding experience. -- Colin Sterling
Passio: [Tribeca Film Festival]
No theaters, no DVD for 'Passio,' a film experience meant to be unique: [Associated Press]
For more HuffPost coverage of the 2007 Tribeca Film Festival, go here.