Mas del cine que nunca veremos comercialmente....

MOVIES

Mankind's Appetite for Destruction in the 20th Century By STEPHEN HOLDEN Published: April 27, 2007

Julien Jourdes for The New York Times Paolo Cherchi Usai's silent film "Passio"will screen at the Tribeca Film Festival with a live performance from Trinity Choir.

The grainy black-and-white image of a man's emaciated corpse lying face up, his limbs splayed as in a crucifixion, is the first picture flashed in "Passio," an austere fusion of silent film and modern sacred music that has its debut New York performance this evening at the Cathedral Church of St. John the Divine. The music for this event, presented by the Tribeca Film Festival, is the 70-minute St. John Passion ("Passio") written by the Estonian minimalist composer Arvo Pärt in 1982 and sung by the Trinity Choir in voices so pure they suggest a seraphic chorus beyond the human sphere. The film, with which the music synergizes into a somber lament on humanity's destructive impulses, was assembled from found material by the Italian filmmaker and silent-film scholar and archivist Paolo Cherchi Usai. Much of it looks as if it came from the 1910s, 1920s and 1930s. As one unsettling image follows another, the film compiles a damning "secret" history of human cruelty retrieved from the cultural scrap heap of the 20th century. Connecting the images is the oratorio's Latin text in calligraphy, by Brody Neusenschwander, that scrolls up the screen sideways in lightninglike flashes that disappear almost in the blink of eye. Sight and sound, lightness and dark. "Passio" is a musical shadow play. A dress rehearsal of "Passio" at Trinity Church on Wednesday evening, which I attended, was the first full run-through of the work, some of which was sight-read by the musicians. But the coordination of film and live music proceeded with only minor glitches

Paolo Cherchi Usai A scene from "Passio."

The most remarkable quality of "Passio." ">"Passio" is its lack of grandiloquence. If great art can be made without a conspicuous display of ego, this is it. The score, written in Mr. Pärt's tintinnabular style, sounds almost disembodied, hovering somewhere between here and eternity. The voices of Peter, Pilate and Jesus are distinct but unemotional. The sorrow expressed is beyond tears. Only in the final moments does the music swell to a conclusive amen. Because its sources are anonymous, the film has a similarly egoless quality, although a grim humor creeps into some of its imagery. It is a movie highly conscious of the Surrealist tradition. One of the longest visual sequences, reminiscent of the notorious 1929 Buñuel-Dalí collaboration,"Un Chien Andalou,"is a close-up of an eye operation, the eyeball rolling back and forth as surgical instruments probe the cornea. Above all, "Passio." ">"Passio" is a film about sight and how history contrives to bury some images while elevating others. We see scientists peering through microscopes, doctors operating, X-rays of the skeleton beneath the flesh, photonegative images of faces, and pieces of film being cut and defaced. These images play into the story of Jesus as an object of examination, ridicule and torture. The movie evokes a theme that has increasingly surfaced in the contemporary world of media inundation. It suggests how our obsession with studying, multiplying and beautifying our images robs us of our humanity. Instead of contemplating paintings in a museum, visitors prefer to take pictures of them with their digital cameras. Reality television is unreality. And in the movies, violent, digitally enhanced spectacle is steadily subverting human drama. Studying life through a camera's lens turns us into detached observers reluctant to tear ourselves away from the role of clinical voyeur to take action against the very inhumanity we witness and record. The movie ends with its most confrontational scene: a baby's birth shown backward, so that the infant, having glimpsed the world, returns to the womb, having chosen not to be born. Because these images are silent, blurry and flickering, and most are black and white (there are some hand-colored kaleidoscopic abstractions), they have a ghostly quality. Mr. Usai has called them "manifestations of our neglected or repressed collective memory." I would describe them as lingering shadows from a 20th-century nightmare. "Passio." will be performed at the Cathedral Church of St. John the Divine, 1047 Amsterdam Avenue, at 112th Street, Morningside Heights, tonight at 8 and tomorrow night at 7 and 10, and at Trinity Church, Broadway at Wall Street, Lower Manhattan, Sunday at 3 and 5:30 p.m. $25; tribecafilmfestival .org.

Copyright by the New York Times 2007