Le Sacre du Printemps: A Silent Movie to the Music of Igor Stravinsky

A friend of mine recently recommended this short film, directed by the late Oliver Herrmann. In short, it is a story of three people:

1) an apparently successful yet mysophobic brain surgeon in his mid-40s,
2) a 20-something girl, a survivor of parental sexual abuse who still lives with her predatory father and torpid mother, sleeps in her childhood bed and now spends the bulk of her time seducing and having sex with anonymous strangers, and
3) a woman in her late thirties so obsessed with the death of her husband that she keeps all of their possessions covered in white sheets, undisturbed, and sleeps in what appears to be a coffin.

God, played here by a portly black woman, spends her time fashioning creatures out of bread dough in her kitchen, some of which go to the Earth below and some of which remain in her kitchen—strange, colorful prototypes never considered for mass production. She places our three characters in an unnamed, impersonal metropolis and watches as their lives intersect in a grand human experiment. As Stravinsky’s score plays out, we see the development and manifestation of the characters’ neuroses. As the characters reach an emotional snapping point, there is a solar eclipse, and they find themselves on a tropical island, where Santeria orishas take them to a place where all of the world's religions are practiced side by side, peacefully. Here, the characters undergo an ancient Santeria ritual that is meant to heal them of their emotional scars.

Visually, Sacre is a fantastic film--Herrmann, initially a photographer by trade, had a particularly poignant sense of intense color and drama without dialogue. His broad palette of vivid colors is as striking in this film as is Stravinsky’s revolutionary orchestral colors and use of rhythm. The characters are played very expressively, without speaking a word. Each is entirely believable and heartbreaking in her obsessions. The music is as true to Stravinsky's jarring vision as I can imagine it, as performed by the Berliner Philharmoniker under Simon Rattle. Sadly, Herrmann did not live long enough to see the final screening of the film, as he died two days before its release from complications arising from diabetes. I fully recommend seeing it if you get a chance. This is a genre of filmmaking that has thus far been sadly overlooked, and I feel it deserves more attention from music and film lovers alike. Stravinsky himself is quoted in the film’s production notes:

“…I have always had a loathing for those who listen to music with their eyes closed, without their eyes playing an active role. When you want to understand music in its whole meaning, it is necessary to see the movements and gestures of the human body, through these you learn…”

Personally, I look forward to seeing Herrmann's other silent films, set to Schoenberg's Pierrot lunaire and Schumann's Dichterliebe. Hopefully, after Herrmann’s death, other filmmakers will take up his mantle and continue to bring these great works of music to new audiences through the use of film.

Hermann, Oliver. Le Sacre du Printemps: A Silent Movie to the Music of Igor Stravinsky. eins54 Film, 2003. Music by Berliner Philharmoniker, Simon Rattle, cond. www.eins54film.com.