Peter Sellars: The Rule of Engagement
Two minutes listening to Peter Sellars address an audience is enough to know: If art had an army, this tousle-haired opera, theatre and festival director would be its best general. Sellars's conviction that art matters is galvanizing. On the syllabus of “Art as Moral Action,” a course he teaches at UCLA, the first requirement is “Total Engagement.” Whether we employ thumb, camera, palate, or simple attention, he insists, artist and audience together have the power to accomplish world-changing acts of compassionate imagination.
That conviction is on view in the seven films from seven nations commissioned by New Crowned Hope, the festival honoring Mozart which Sellars directed in Vienna at the close of 2006. The films feature languages seldom heard in movie theatres--Sotho, Guarani. Yet watching a lone rider approach a frontier settlement in Meokgo and the Stickfighter, we don't feel that far from home. With his black cowboy hat the rider's a familiar cinematic figure and we flinch as he reaches under his blanket and pulls out-a concertina! In this short which mixes tribal legends with the spaghetti westerns that director Teboho Mahlatsi watched in his South African boarding school, music turns out to be as powerful as a forcefully wielded stick.
Of course the films also reveal distant worlds. In Opera Jawa, a dazzling fusion of modern Indonesian politics and Sanskrit legend, a woman rides a bicycle to an illicit rendezvous along a silky red carpet unrolled through acres of emerald rice fields. The tone of the image is haunting not least because it's wholly non-western--like the gamelan orchestra that accompanies it. In Half Moon a man in a Biblical-looking village is called away from a cockfight to take a cell phone call. The effect is unsettling like a composer's sudden key change. Where exactly are we? The story, too, of a bus full of Kurdish musicians traveling to give a concert in Iraq, is a chimerical blend of comedy and tragedy.
Not surprisingly, given the filmmakers' countries of origin, war intrudes both on screen and off. Dry Season-a story of revenge pursued and reconsidered in the sunwashed courtyards of Chad-found its shooting schedule interrupted by an outbreak of fighting. Working on location, oftenwith non-professional actors, the filmmakers had little access to special effects. One result: the violence they refer to is more disturbing for being implied. An underground fire burns near Kuala Lumpur in I Don't Want to Sleep Alone. The radio recommends wearing facemasks, but the film's immigrant workers make do with white plastic shopping bags, their droopy shape a parody of military gear. From Thailand, Syndrome and a Century sets its dream-like exploration of memory in the halls and gardens of a hospital. Cheerful pop music plays, orchids hang in the trees, but the artificial legs piled on a conference table are an uncomfortable reminder of loss.
Opera Jawa, which concludes with spectacularly staged funerals, directly invokes Mozart's final unfinished work, the Requiem. On a more intimate scale, so does Paraguayan Hammock. Director Paz Encina creates a potent counterpart to the traditional funeral mass out of the conversation of a long-married couple. Through their ritual arguments, muttered asides, and fiery denials, we watch hope for their son who is fighting at the front shading to terror, grief, and back to hope, while night slowly falls in their jungle clearing.
This visionary power--the ability to uncover the glory in ordinary lives--is something all seven films share. A baker, a restaurant cashier, a singer, a potter, a dentist: despite the foreign settings the characters are people we recognize. Watching them, our world both shrinks and expands. Perhaps this is what Sellars means by total engagement. Attending as completely as we can to what's going on around us, we begin to mistake our neighbor for ourselves.
