Last Thursday we were lucky enough to catch the New York premiere of Paul Festa’s fascinating film, Apparition of the Eternal Church at St. Bartholomew’s on Fifth Ave. As the brochure for the event states: “In this documentary Festa interviews over thirty artists listening and reacting to Messiaen’s rarely heard but powerfully provocative organ work Apparition of the Eternal Church. Their responses range from astonishment to fear, from repulsion to unfettered joy.” Sponsored by the Premiere Commission (founded by the Chelsea’s own Bruce Levingston) in conjunction with Rooftop Films, this documentary about the work of composer Olivier Messiaen was followed by a live performance of the Messiaen composition by organist William Trafka.
It was fun to watch the participant’s faces as they listened to the piece over headphones, and to hear their comments and try to figure out what they were listening to (Messiaen’s piece wasn’t audible to the film’s viewers). They were an eclectic bunch, apparently all people of some renown, though I had heard of only three of them, Harold Bloom, John Cameron Mitchell, and Kiki (Justin Bond). (The organist Albert Fuller, Festa’s inspiration for the project, was the most interesting and entertaining of the subjects.) There were a couple of drag queens, a bondage aficionado, a woman who wore flaming antlers, and a man who was dressed as a zombie. Many of them said the music was painful, discordant, a torture, that it evoked the flames of hell or an old horror movie, that if they heard it in a cathedral it would surely make them repent of their sins right away. One guy said it sounded like Bach on a really bad day. A couple of people had to remove their headphones because the sound was so intense.
It became clear pretty quickly that the film is about not only the Messiaen piece but also about how music in general affects us, and about how we can express it. It’s extremely difficult to talk about music, but the people Festa interviewed did it well, especially considering the fact that there were lights in their eyes and a cacophony blaring in their ears. But perhaps there’s a lesson to be learned from that; perhaps they were so distracted that they were able to open themselves up and let it flow to a degree they would not ordinarily have been able to do. The music seemed to transport them to another realm, a meditative state, a state of altered perception, where their tongues were loosed and they could express the ideas straight from their unconscious mind without the censorship of the ego, without worry of sounding stupid or being off the mark. The movie demonstrated, like no other I have seen (and in a truly original way), the primal power that music can exert on the human psyche.
I’ll say one thing for the movie: it really succeeded in making you want to hear the piece, that’s for sure. With a buildup like that I felt for sure the actual performance was sure to be a letdown. William Trafka played beautifully, and as far as I could tell flawlessly. Though I could understand the remark about Bach (it sounded like that Bach piece from the Phantom of the Opera), I’m afraid that I didn’t agree that the music was torture. Maybe it was the headphones, but in the setting of St. Bartholomew’s the piece was ethereal and lifting. True, it started out a bit eerily, but soon it began to build, soaring to the otherworldly heights of the cathedral’s vaulted ceiling. It transported me back to my childhood, listening to the--much more modest--organ in the little Catholic church in the town where I grew up, and reawakened in me the feeling of awe and mystery that I associate with my early religious experience. I think the fact that a number of the interviewees made similar remarks is significant as well: it took us back to a time and place of innocence where we could speak our minds without fear.
(In the same sense childhood can also be painful. And I have associations with Christianity that are painful as well—it does certainly have its dark side, as the director points out with his quotes on the torture of martyrs that follow the interviews—making the Messiaen piece, though rewarding, ultimately not my idea of easy listening.)
Anyway, for anyone interested in music, it’s a film not to be missed. Go see it if you can find it anywhere. If not, go see Borat (Ha Ha!—though actually Borat is pretty good too.) Ed Hamilton
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