PassioAuthor(s): Linda WilliamsSource: Film Quarterly, Vol. 60, No. 3 (Spring 2007), pp. 16-18Published by: University of California PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1525/fq.2007.60.3.16 .Accessed: 14/06/2011 20:47

Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use, available at .http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp. JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use provides, in part, that unlessyou have obtained prior permission, you may not download an entire issue of a journal or multiple copies of articles, and youmay use content in the JSTOR archive only for your personal, non-commercial use.

Please contact the publisher regarding any further use of this work. Publisher contact information may be obtained at .http://www.jstor.org/action/showPublisher?publisherCode=ucal. .

Each copy of any part of a JSTOR transmission must contain the same copyright notice that appears on the screen or printedpage of such transmission.

JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range ofcontent in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new formsof scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org.

University of California Press is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to FilmQuarterly.

http://www.jstor.org

PassioDirector, writer: Paolo Cherchi Usai. Producers: Peter Limburg, LivioJacob. Editor: Raquel Satumalaij. Music: Arvo Pärt. Calligraphy andhandcoloring: Brody Neuenschwander. © 2006 Paolo Cherchi Usai.

I attended a special screening of scholar, archivist, andcurator Paolo Cherchi Usai’s Passio on 3 September2006 at the Telluride Film Festival. This was the onlyscreening in advance of its full Australian premiere on23 February 2007 at the Adelaide Film Festival. A sort ofpre-premier with recorded music rather than the re-quired live performance of Arvo Pärt’s 1982 “Passio,” itwas nevertheless, as silent film festival hounds like tosay, a revelation. But it was not the kind of revelation Ihad expected. No precious lament of the decay of themedium, this seventy-four-minute film is the hardest-hitting, cruelest, and most affecting collection of soundand image this side of Buñuel. And it contains not oneimage of nitrate decay.

The first image we see is of a dead body, probablyfrom a film of a concentration camp but, like every

other archival image in this film, it does not fit into fa-miliar paradigms. A skeletal, naked corpse of a man liesface up on the ground, arms and legs splayed out—thewhole cadaver fills the screen. At the center of the imageis the darkness that is the cadaver’s genitals. The horrorhits us squarely between the eyes as sustained organnotes from Pärt’s stark, minimalist piece of music be-gins. Image and sound proclaim the suffering of theflesh as the film’s sustained first theme. Where can wepossibly go from here?

The cadaver image fades, the title “Passio” remains,initiating a new motif—a thread of written text (thecalligrapher is Brody Neuenschwander, who collabo-rated with Peter Greenaway on Prospero’s Books [1991]and The Pillow Book [1996]), scrolling left to right, thatwill appear intermittently throughout the film. Thewords, which are the full title of Pärt’s music and theonly (barely) legible words in the film apart from the title, read: “Domini Nostri Jesu Christi secundumJohannem.” As the sound dies out, pure darkness andsilence follow. This, then, is where such a film can go:into spells of darkness, silence, and text abstracted into

16Film Quarterly, Vol. 60, Number 3, pps 16-18. ISSN 0015-1386, electronic ISSN 1533-8630. © 2007 by the Regents of the University of California. All rights reserved. Please direct all requests for permission

to photocopy or reproduce article content through the University of California Press’s Rights and Permissions website, http://www.ucpressjournals.com/reprintInfo.asp.

The opening title (left); white scientists measure a “native”

Isabella Rossellinipresents a PeterLimburg / LivioJacob Production,Passio

© 2

006

Pao

lo C

her

chi U

sai

pure visual design that at intervals runs vertically, frombottom to top of the frame, ornamenting the periodicspells of darkness. If we could turn our head to the sideand read Latin we might think we could follow the text.But the words go by too fast and are stylized to thepoint of illegibility. They punctuate the darkness andthe silence with bright bursts of light—providing nec-essary respite in a film that might otherwise be too dif-ficult to watch.

Calligraphy, Pärt’s music and its Latin singing,darkness, light, black-and-white or handcolored filmfootage—these are the elements of Passio. But the text isnot meant to be easily deciphered and the music doesnot accompany the images. Rather it seems to call themforth. Nor do these images tell a story in any conven-tional way. Cherchi Usai’s minimalist “press book” de-scribes the images as having “been chosen from thecountless manifestations of our neglected or repressedcollective memory, ranging from documents of politi-cal and racial oppression to scientific experiments, de-pictions of human suffering turned into mass spectacleand [to an archivist the greatest crime of all] the delib-erate destruction of moving images.”

The art of Passio lies primarily in the choice andspacing of these richly various images. Many of themare like the opening shot of the cadaver: a horrificimage of the suffering body in an unmistakable pose ofcrucifixion. Human suffering as spectacle for the im-passive eye of the camera does prove to be a majortheme. But, additionally, many images simply speak tothe enigma of phenomenal life: the hairy texture of aleaf, the wiggling random movements of organismsunder a microscope, a burst of handcolored red light ina night sky as two men walk toward the camera, a rep-tile and an inscrutable shadow, a woman who sits in aparlor reading a book as a nearly naked man wearing apenis sheath enters the room. There is no overarchingthematic beyond what Jean-Louis Comolli has called

the “frenzy of the visible” produced by myriad “ma-chines of the visible”: microscopes, telescopes, cameraswhich bring the phenomenal world closer and closer.The moving images viewed by these machines might beclear or scratched, black and white, tinted or in color;they might be microscopic or macroscopic, but they allinvite our fascinated or horrified stare.

This machinic stare at the “frenzy of the visible” isoften augmented by a gesture, notably a redundantpointing. The second shot after the cadaver is of a fingerindicating the hieroglyphs of the Rosetta stone. A whitefinger points to a mystery of the past, the mystery of thescientifically isolatable “other.” Typically, white maleexperts point while women or people of color writhe,convulse, or just hold still to be examined or measured.In one sequence a black man’s skull is measured bythree white-coated scientists. Human fingers or metalimplements isolate the part of the image at which weare invited to stare. A pointer traces the outline of a scaron a human torso, on the areola of a woman’s breast,and the little penis of what looks like a skinned dog. Inanother, more theatrical kind of pointing a Méliès-likemagician enthusiastically dismembers a woman andpoints proudly to his work. One long sequence shows aturn-of-century medical professional manipulating thelimbs of a supine and naked epileptic man, the betterfor the camera to view his agonizing and seeminglyendless convulsions. Another shows two bearded Vic-torian doctors induce the hysterical convulsions of aclothed woman. Manipulation, measurement, point-ing, cutting open—these are the irreducible gestures ofa medium caught up in a medico-scientific relation tothe human and animal body.

The only touch that is not part of this medico-scientific manipulation and measuring occurs when aman and woman kiss. Later this image is viewed on astrip of film that is scraped and spliced. Film is handled,pointed to, and cut in ways analogous to an autopsy,

17

© 2

006

Pao

lo C

her

chi U

sai

Enigmas of phenomenal life: a hairy leaf, a reptile and an inscrutable shadow

open heart surgery, and an excruciating eye operationin which something is scraped out of a cornea and theincision is sutured. Film becomes body, body becomesfilm. A black spool of film is pulled from a can and dis-played in much the same way as vulnerable organs aredisplayed; emulsion is scraped from the image of thekiss so it can be spliced by the same kind of knife thatcuts the eye. A meditation on cinematic embodimentthat often seems to treat film stock more lovingly thanthe human body, Passio is Comolli’s “frenzy of the visible” rendered self-reflexive.

If the film’s first image is of death, its last is ofbirth. But it is not the familiar birth from Man with aMovie Camera (1929). Nor does this baby emerge fromthe womb as an obvious figure of hope and renewal asone might expect against the background of the “goodnews” of the gospel which inspires Pärt’s music.Rather, the action runs in reverse: the baby is tuckedback into the womb following the familiar numbers ofthe cinematic reverse countdown. This baby seems toknow what the film has revealed: this is not a worldinto which one would want to be born. In betweenthese bookends of death and life, destruction and cre-ation, cruel manipulation and simple wonder, arhythm of images pulses: beautiful, mysterious, horri-ble, and true.

Bruce Conner’s A Movie (1958) overwhelms uswith accumulated montages of fictional and real filmedcatastrophe, Godfrey Reggio’s “Quatsi” films (1982,1988, 2002) bludgeon us with apocalyptic portents,Peter Delpeut’s Lyrical Nitrate (1991) infuses us withnostalgia for the lost past, and Bill Morrison’s Decasia(2002) connects its images of impending doom andnitrate decay to psychedelic abstractions. Cherchi Usai’sPassio joins the tradition of these earlier works most ofwhich were created out of pre-existing footage. But italso differs from them. Its celebration–accusation of the“machines of the visible” goes deeper, its connection to

its music is more profound, with Pärt’s stark and simpleoratorio prompting the images rather than underscor-ing them. Nor is this a statement constructed out of anarbitrary grouping of images just found in some attic.These are images treasured and cared for by a knowingarchivist who “plays” them like the notes of Pärt’s ora-torio. We are neither bludgeoned by sensory overload,nor offered an easy nostalgia. Though we are compelledto give the film our rapt attention, this attention paysoff; it has breathing space built into it. We are giventime to assimilate what we have seen and to anticipate(or dread) what may come next. Darkness, silence, andthe beautiful abstract lines of the stark white calligra-phy provide time for both reflection and affection.

Cherchi Usai has set a high bar for the exhibition ofhis film. Unless other venues beyond Adelaide can pro-vide not only baritone and tenor soloists, but also aquartet of soprano, alto, tenor, and bass together with achoir of 12–15 other singers, plus the organist, violinist,oboist, cellist, bassoonist, and conductor required byPärt’s score, and unless they can provide 35mm pro-jectors equipped with silent-sized aperture, the filmmay not be shown elsewhere. Cherchi Usai insists thathereafter the film be screened with live orchestralmusic. Like every other silent film, only more so, musicgives it a special liveness. Passio is a work of convulsivebeauty. It richly deserves more than one day in the sun.

LINDA WILLIAMS teaches in Film Studies and Rhetoric at the Univer-sity of California, Berkeley.

ABSTRACT A rare, sometimes horrific 74-minute assemblage ofarchival footage, Paolo Cherchi Usai’s Passio encompasses themes ofhuman suffering, wonder, and cruelty. The film captures the “frenzyof the visible” of life from the microscopic to the macroscopic ascalled for by the stark, minimalist music of Arvo Pärt.

KEYWORDS Cherchi Usai, archival footage, live music, visual cruelty,Arvo Pärt

18

© 2

006

Pao

lo C

her

chi U

sai

Fingers point at fingers and film is displayed