PASSIO
The Adelaide Film Festival in association with the Adelaide Symphony Orchestra present Paolo Cherchi Usai’s
PASSIO
A remarkable world premiere screening and performance by The Theatre of Voices and Adelaide Chamber Singers conducted by Paul Hillier, with organist Christopher Bowers Broadbent and members of the Adelaide Symphony Orchestra, made possible by the generous support of Maureen Ritchie
Friday 23 February_8.00pm_Adelaide Town Hall
Tickets on sale from
www.adelaidefilmfestival.org or Adelaide Film Festival booking line on 1300727432
In the 1970’s, an engraved disc was sent out on one of the Voyager missions which left the solar system, and is headed for deep space since then. The disc contains our human existence in shorthand: a man and a woman saluting the aliens out there, a schematic depiction of our solar system, and Beethoven’s Ode to Joy. After having seen Cherchi Usai’s Passio, I think the experiment must now be repeated. If a similar mission is planned for the future, I propose that NASA launches this masterpiece into outer space.
Werner Herzog, Film Director
The Adelaide Film Festival is delighted to present the exclusive World Premiere screening of Passio, Paolo Cherchi Usai’s extraordinary experimental silent film, accompanied by a live performance by the internationally acclaimed Paul Hillier and the Theatre of Voices of Arvo Pärt’s Passio. It was this masterpiece of 20th-century music based on the Gospel of John which inspired the film, a dramatic meditation on the act of seeing and this is the very first time that the film and music will be experienced together.
Passio is a masterwork of the first order, a stunning and revelatory film of surprising emotional and narrative power, that explores the impending crisis of visual culture and its reflection in politics and society. Its unsettling images, drawn from a century of filmmaking, are woven into a tapestry of mysterious beauty and violence.
In 1895, about forty minutes of moving images were produced. Most of this still survives. In 2004, more than two billion viewing hours of moving images were made. This translates into 228,000 viewing years of films, video and television programs, advertising shorts, videogames, news broadcasts, security videos, home movies and the like. Over 95 percent of these moving images produced each year are lost forever, and the rate of oblivion is bound to further increase.
What is the urge to create visions all about? Are there such things as the art and ethics of viewing? What is the difference between looking at the fragment of an obscure film, at the video footage of a surveillance camera, at the home movie of a family we know nothing about, or at the torn papyrus of an ancient illustrated manuscript?
The images for this work have been chosen from the countless manifestations of our neglected or repressed collective memory, ranging from documents of political and racial oppression to scientific experiments, depictions of human suffering turned into mass spectacle, and the deliberate destruction of moving images.
Passio is nothing you are quite prepared to see when the lights go out – or talk about when they return. It is not your conventional movie of course, but neither is it an unconventional movie in a conventional sense. It includes shots from cinema’s early days, but none of the kind which could possibly cause nostalgia for those days; Passio is a film born in a film archive, yet it is not an autumnal elegy about image decay. It includes written words that refuse to be read, it is made to music which is not part of the film, and, unlike any other movie I have seen, it offers space not only for visuals but also for visual echoes which opticians call “afterimages.” We have standards for everything, including – let’s face it – a standard for novelty. Passio does not fit there; it’s a new kind of cinema in a new kind of sense.
Yuri Tsivian, Professor of Film, University of Chicago
More than an accompanied silent film of our lost visual memory, more than a music concert supplemented by cinema, Passio is a meditation, a ritual where hearing and seeing become a unified entity, an emotionally powerful and striking oratorio for moving image and sound.
Director PAOLO CHERCHI USAI is a film curator, critic and writer. He is Director of the National Film and Sound Archive of Australia, co-founder of the Pordenone Silent Film Festival and of the L. Jeffrey Selznick School of Film Preservation at George Eastman House in Rochester, New York. He is the author of books and essays on film history, digital culture, and moving image preservation. Among his published works are “Before Caligari“ (co-editor, 1990); “Burning Passions: An Introduction to the Study of Silent Cinema” (revised edition, 2000); “The Death of Cinema” (2001); D.W. Griffith (forthcoming). Among the musicians he has worked with in silent film music productions are John Cale for The Unknown (Tod Browning, 1927), Wim Mertens for La Femme de nulle part (Louis Delluc, 1921) and the Alloy Orchestra for Lonesome (Paul Fejós, 1928) and The Man with the Movie Camera (Dziga Vertov, 1929).
Musical director Paul Hillier is one of the world’s foremost choral conductors. He is Artistic Director and Principal Conductor of the Estonian Philharmonic Chamber Choir (EPCC), Founder and Director of Theatre of Voices and Chief Conductor of Ars Nova Copenhagen. He co-founded The Hilliard Ensemble and during his tenure as musical director the group rose to international prominence. Hillier enjoys close creative relationships with many living composers, most notably Steve Reich and Arvo Pärt, both of whom have written works for him to perform with his various ensembles. Alongside projects with his own ensembles, he enjoys guest conducting with many of the world’s finest choirs. Recent recordings include Rachmaninov’s Vespers with the EPCC on Harmonia Mundi, which has already been welcomed with critical praise.
Calligrapher Brody Neuenschwander discovered his love of calligraphy very early. It pursued him through his years at Princeton University and the Courtauld Institute in London, where he received a doctorate in art history in 1986. Given the choice between the life of an academic and that of a craftsman, he chose the latter. But his calligraphy refused to stay within the limits imposed on it by western culture. He studied the principles of Chinese and Arabic calligraphy and began to apply these to the Latin alphabet. The work of Cy Twombly and Jenny Holzer pointed to new possibilities. It was Neuenschwander’s work with Peter Greenaway that pulled all these strands together. In 1991 he created the live calligraphy for the film «Prospero’s Books». This was followed by «The Pillow Book», «Flying Over Water»(exhibition, Malmo, Sweden), «Columbus» (opera, Berlin), «Writing to Vermeer» (opera, Amsterdam and New York), «Bologna Towers 2000» (sound and light installation, Bologna) and many other projects.
