Austria / Germany / France,
1992, 92 min
Shown in 1993
CREDITS
- dir
-
Jean-Pierre Gorin
- prod
-
Peter Oswald, Rainer Mockert
- cam
-
Wolfgang Reickert
- editor
-
Herbert Roseneder
- source
-
Jean-Pierre Gorin
- premiere
-
U.S. Premiere
-
COMMENTS
Jean-Pierre Gorin in person.
OTHER
In July and August, 1992, Jean-Pierre Gorin (My Crasy Life, SFIFF 1992) filmed the rehearsals and premiere of Saint Francis, Olivier Messiaen's monumental opera, directed for the Salzburg Music Festival by Peter Sellars, the American wunderkind whose staging of John Adams' The Death of Klinghoffer was recently seen at the San Francisco Opera. In the form of a letter, the first person documentary that resulted gives the sense of one friend speaking to another. Questioning and listening intelligently, Gorin leads us to a different way of considering this work in progress. He shares with us the sense of being witness to an exceptional event, providing analysis both of Peter Sellars' choices and of the structure of Messian's masterpiece. We discover Sellars' incredible humor, his acute intelligence, his love for music and especially for Messiaen: "I love Messiaen's work and I'm trying to do it justice. Staging just the plot synopsis is what makes opera intellectually inert and dull and expressively limited. Opera becomes incredibly expressive just as soon as you forget about the story and try and stage the music." Gorin harmoniously intercuts extracts from the opera, letting us see, feel, and hear the music's sensuality and spirituality. Rejecting the conventions of the "film about" genre, Letter to Peter reminds us of what happens when one friend questions another in the hope that, together, they may find answers.
—Marie-Pierre Macia
FACTOID #80
The globetrotting thespian Anthony Quinn attended the 1969 San Francisco International Film Festival in support of the Opening Night film The Secret of Santa Vittoria, in which he played the half-drunk mayor of an Italian hamlet, protecting his town’s wine collection from German soldiers.
