Paolo Cherchi Usai’s modern silent film Passio, comprising found footage put to a score by Arvo Pärt, continues to make a considerable impact with the few screenings that it has had so far. It has now received its American premiere at the the Cathedral Church of St. John the Divine in Manhattan, as part of the Tribeca Film Festival. This is the blurb from the festival programme:

Arvo Pärt’s 1982 “Passio,” based on the Passion in St. John’s Gospel, has been called one of the last masterpieces of 20th-century Music. Now it has inspired a silent film by Paolo Cherchi Usai. Together, they comprise a profoundly moving, unforgettable “oratorio for moving image and sound,” and a dramatic, often unsettling meditation on the very act of seeing.

The poet Rika Lesser once wrote to Pärt, “Yours is the only music I’ve ever wanted to live inside. Sometimes I wish that the music would stop, congeal, erect a lasting structure around me, one that would silently vibrate and, resonating, enclose me.” We are honored to be presenting this extraordinary work in two of our own city’s most magnificent “lasting structures,” the Cathedral Church of St. John the Divine (Friday, April 27 and Saturday, April 28) and Trinity Church, Wall Street (Sunday, April 29). This will be only the second time—the first was in Adelaide, Australia in February of this year—the work has been presented accompanied by live music.

Paolo Cherchi Usai is one of the world’s most respected film historians and scholars. With Passio, he has drawn on his immense knowledge of world cinema to create a stunning and revelatory film of surprising emotional and narrative power, one that explores the impending crisis of visual culture and its reflection in politics and society. Its disturbing images, drawn from a century of filmmaking, are woven into a tapestry of mysterious beauty and violence. This not a pleasing or easy film to watch. It is an impossible film to forget.

“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

Cherchi Usai does not want the film to be distributed conventionally in cinemas, nor to have a DVD release. He has also destroyed the negative. Just seven prints exist, for screening with live orchestra and chorus. Catch it when you can. Maybe in outer space.

The silent film continues as a valid art form, particularly in the hands of the Canadian Guy Maddin, who has made silent film his natural mode of expression. His latest film is Brand upon the Brain, which is playing (with live music ensemble) at the San Francisco International Film Festival on May 7. The festival site describes it:

The semiautobiographical Brand upon the Brain! mines the rich territories of director Guy Maddin’s youth and spins them into a delirious fantasy of familial discontent. At the edge of the sea stands a lighthouse, once the location of an orphanage. There, some years ago, lived Guy and Sis, a brother and sister under the constant observation of their mother yet entirely ignored by their father, an ingenious inventor. When Wendy Hale, amateur harpist and half of twin detective team the Lightbulb Kids, arrives to investigate a mysterious regenerative nectar harvested from the orphans, things grow ever more complicated. A love triangle becomes a quadrangle when Wendy masquerades as her brother Chance and goes in search of clues. A fever dream of Freudian impulses and horror show theatrics, Maddin devours 100 years of film history whole and, like the ersatz Guy’s painting of the lighthouse, covers the screen with a 12-chapter outpouring of his various obsessions.

There’s a trailer for the film on the festival site which gives a good flavour of Maddin’s distinctive style and take on cinema history.