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«Mozart's imagination of opera is so incredibly cinematic. So it seemed the art form that Mozart would love the most if he
were alive today and that has all the dynamics that you can see him hungry for.»
Peter Sellars about Mozart, cinema and the seven films commissioned for the New Crowned Hope Festival
What inspired you to consider film to be an essential part of a Mozart-dedicated festival?
PETER SELLARS: When Mozart was working, opera was the biggest high-tech, big budget, spectacular and popular art form. He himself was very
much part of the democratization process. Trying to create in his lifetime an opera not just for the court, but for a popular
audience. In Mozart's lifetime, people could go to the opera two, three nights a week. Like people go to movies. Most operas
were bad like most movies are bad, but it's fun, you see your friends, you gossip and you had a night out. That's the way
most of the people go to movies, without big expectations. In the middle of that there are films that have another aspiration,
something that is trying to be more ambitious, look deeper and farther. And Mozart was making those operas. The operas that
were not just the charming pieces of nothing that were playing most nights. Mozart made operas that were much more challenging
than any opera written in his lifetime. After a while that got him into trouble: already to announce that the Marriage of Figaro could be the subject for his next opera for the court, when this was a text officially banned by censorship, that was throwing
down the gauntlet. They really shut down his work on the stage in Vienna, but of course he was so obviously brilliant that
they couldn't not invite him to work, so they gave him a completely trivial piece of subject matter with Così fan tutte and he made an opera that is more terrifying than all the others put together and then they said, that's enough.
You can see Mozart's cinematic aspirations, what's so fantastic about his cross cutting and incredible musical close-ups,
sudden landscape shots, Mozart's imagination of opera is so much more dynamic - spatially and visually - and there is his
sense of a soundtrack, of when the microphone is up close and when you're hearing distant sound. It's incredibly cinematic.
So it seemed the art form that Mozart would love the most if he were alive today and that has all the dynamics that you can
see him hungry for.
That means you see very much of a parallel between the innovative potential of cinema and that of Mozart's work.
PETER SELLARS: Exactly. And also it's something that touches all the senses. Mozart was obsessed with that total work of art. Not in the
sense of Wagnerian Gesamtkunstwerk but even more in the Greek sense and his incredible sensuality - the power of color, the
power of movement, the power of poetry and the power of sound. How do those come together, and cinema was another answer.
Of course in the 20th century cinema became normalized – how movement, sound, color and poetry fit together, that became a
kind of standard, rather formulaic notion of reality. What I love is early cinema, silent cinema, where the music was live,
or 19th century cinema where you have these strange disembodied images. Before a commercial language of film was organized,
and where film could be anything, where it had its more magical, shamanistic side that was not a simple documentation of material
reality. One of the most wonderful things about the 21st century is that technology has now evolved to the place where, e.g.
indigenous peoples are making cinema and we're able to have cinema not just represent a kind of statement made by big capitalism
because so much money is tied up with cinema. We are in a wonderful period. What you're looking at is not just money. You
can make a film for less money than ever before and the medium itself has become flexible because of the technology. How poetry,
music, movement and sound come together has a new set of possibilities. That's what you feel with Opera Jawa or with Hei Yan Quan, is that all these things can be recombined in new ways and that's culturally understood. We are beginning to have the emergence
of a very new cinema, a cinema that doesn't just base itself on a Western approach to storytelling. You feel pure cinema again,
in a very exciting way from a lot of these New Crowned Hope films.
Let's go back to the beginning of the project, when did Simon Field enter the project?
PETER SELLARS: I had been a guest at the Rotterdam film festival because for me it was the festival that was the most connected to the global
development filmmaking. The Rotterdam film festival was not just a place where you saw films from all over the world but also
where they helped produce film and supported films in countries where it was very difficult to make a film. Simon Field was
right in the middle of that, played an instrumental role in new Chinese cinema, in a whole range of cinemas that in the last
15 years had a kind of surprising new flowering. So I very much admired Simon's role in developing these other cinemas and
when it was clear that New Crowned Hope should be a global project he was the first person I tried to convince.
There is a focus on Asian cinema, there is no Western filmmaker. How did you set the criteria, first of all from geographical
point of view?
PETER SELLARS: Two things are going on: one is that the city of Vienna had a complete Mozart Year project and the way it was divided was
in thirds. Two thirds of the money and the activity stayed in Vienna under the direction of Peter Marboe. My brief from the
city of Vienna was to make the international component, it meant automatically that I should look elsewhere. My feeling as
a programmer, as an artist is to go for what I feel is underrepresented. It's nothing anti-Western, it's just what is represented
everyday and it doesn't need a special occasion to be represented. For me, when you have a special occasion, you say, what
can we show that people don't usually see, that would be a surprise? The other thing for me is, I am quite obsessed with the
imbalance of the image world that we live in. This year we have been inundated with images of Iran and Iraq, with the rioting
in the Congo, the Sudanese army invading Chad. They are on television every day as a report from the crisis centre. These
are parts of the world that are in the global consciousness, but culturally what do we know about any of these places? Nothing.
What balances this image of permanent emergency? Obviously people are living there, they live day to day. Something lets them
go through this permanent emergency and you can't see what. So could we culturally begin to balance what we see on the evening
news? Could we move beyond and behind the crisis into a richer relationship with this part of the world?
To invite artists working exactly in those parts of the world was a very high priority.
On the one hand you chose with Tsai Ming-Liang a filmmaker who is very well known, on the other hand someone like Paz Encina,
who did her first film.
PETER SELLARS: We wanted to have a balance. At the time we were making the proposals to the filmmakers, Tsai Ming-Liang had won several
prizes but still, he was still not exactly a household name. What’s wonderful now is that he is now the famous filmmaker we
are working with. We wanted of course people who had some recognition but who also had a body of work as artists. An artist
is someone who has a recognizable fingerprint, language, style and vocabulary that is unique to them. Tsai Ming-Liang has
an extraordinary imprint as an artist.
What was immediately striking and powerful about Paz Encina's plan and preparation for Hamaca Paraguaya was her seriousness.
The advantage of being able to invite somebody who the world does not yet know, is quite wonderful. With Paz Encina's work
we were of course dealing with the idea of Requiem, the idea of ceremonies for the dead. In Latin America, particularly that
area in Latin America coming through the dictatorships, coming through the generations of disappeared, this question of requiem
is so charged and Paz Encina had an approach to it that was so utterly an individual voice and also, if I may say, it's a
film that only could have been made by a woman. This 21st century will be different from other centuries because women are
artists and we know their names. This is a very major new step for the world and in fact the movement in all fields is what
makes the 21st century different from the centuries that came before. Paz Encina's arrival as a filmmaker is absolutely emblematic
of this movement.
You defined three major themes...
PETER SELLARS: ... the magic from transformation in the Magic Flute, the truth in reconciliation and response to terrorism in breaking the
cycle of violence from Clemenza di Tito and then the question of ceremonies for the dead from the Requiem.
Why did you choose these last works of Mozart as a thematic basis for the commissioned films?
PETER SELLARS: Remembering Mozart's life, the story that Vienna has to tell, is his death. I think the most overwhelming story about Mozart
is the end of his life, when working was politically too dangerous for the time. His work was of course visionary and the
next generation made his political aspirations a reality. The next political reality has to first be imagined by artists and
then, when it's introduced as a possibility, it can be realized in the world of the following generations. Art is able to
prepare people's imaginations for what is possible. In art we're always working on this edge of possibility and impossibility.
People have to see that as an image, they have to taste it, for their own minds to be opened, to the impossible becoming now
possible. So many things have to first be introduced and that's why they first have to be introduced as art. People can attack
it, they can have whatever reaction they have, but it's only art. In a strange way, it's a way to hold the debate without
violence, even though it's actually frequently violent, as in Mozart's case: performances are shut down and there is no income.
For me, that is a very important part of his story. He was part of the Masonic movement with these political meetings that
he was going to several nights a week. He was part of the discussions of the people who were creating the American and the
French revolutions and were creating the next Europe, he was right in the middle, talking. The works that he made in his last
years are such distillations of this. Particularly after Don Giovanni, to put your political convictions right out in front of everybody becomes really dangerous, and the French Revolution at
the same time is a deep disappointment for democracy. You have to rethink everything - all these ideals of freedom, you have
to remove the poison after the French Revolution and so Magic Flute is an attempt to remove the poison, La Clemenza di Tito is an attempt to hope for enlightened leadership again and Requiem is to deal with the reality of the massacres and the reality of the limited amount of time we have on Earth.
The Enlightenment thinkers were so proud of not being part of the church and being antireligious. Their utopias were just
a little artificial because they didn't know how to cope with darkness. The nightmare of the 20th century were all those totalitarian
systems based on Enlightenment plans, where you see how dangerous this Enlightenment thinking is, that doesn't admit that
darkness exists. What it means to bring back the dark to the Enlightenment and then let light be in some balance. Requiem is very important because so many societies have gone through these enlightened dictatorships, have left requiems at the
end of these experiments in human perfection.
The artists didn't have to deal with Mozart's music, still music plays a crucial role in most of the stories.
PETER SELLARS: I really didn't want the artists to deal with Mozart's music because anything that repeats Mozart is kitschy and turns into
kitsch, intentionally or unintentionally, so you have to stay away from it. That's why I asked people to focus on Mozart's
subject matter, because Mozart's style you can't imitate, but Mozart's content you can engage with dialog. To most of the
artists I said, please, don't even think about Mozart, think about this subject matter, do nothing about Mozart and every
one of them investigated Mozart anyway and took it very seriously.
Taking a look at the results now, are you satisfied?
PETER SELLARS:I am very overwhelmed, it's much more beautiful than anything I could have ever imagined, the artists have made things that
are astonishing, I am totally humbled by the beauty and force of the work that people had made and how seriously they did
take this as an occasion and an opportunity. This was an invitation for people to work according to their own highest aspirations.
You had created very special working conditions for them.
PETER SELLARS: There was no film that we were able to finance completely, so inevitably there were other co-producers and other entities,
but I'd like to think that we were able to take some pressure off and again invite people into a realm where they are thinking
differently than from commercial considerations. But making film is never without pressure. Conditions are so different in
different parts of the world and different filmmakers have their own processes of working, so everything was tailored to the
individual situation.
Do you think this sort of initiative might be repeated as a "formula" for another festival?
PETER SELLARS: As always, there's nothing in art that can ever really become formulated. As soon as it does, you kill it. But it's a wonderful
possibility that we are opening, that film festivals can be a place for the creation of film, not just for the presentation
of film. One of the things that I am so moved by is that these seven films very deeply share common subject matters. So I
think in many film festivals one of the most astonishing parts of going through a festival is the sheer variety of what you're
seeing. The film you just saw is totally contrasted with the film you saw earlier this morning. What's interesting with those
New Crowned Hope films and what I think has made an impact in places like Toronto and Venice is the film you just saw actually is in dialog
with the film you saw earlier this morning. What's interesting are not just the contrast but the connections. There is a real
conversation. And we are at the beginning of a global conversation. It is time for us to begin to talk with each other and
share perspectives and recognize we have certain subjects matters in common and yet how we treat it is unique. That is very
powerful and I hope there will be more of that.
What do you think about...
Daratt (director: Mahamat-Saleh Haroun)
PETER SELLARS: Daratt has been in preparation for a long time. The film has been defined with a period of internal gestation, everything that is
external to the central idea has been removed. There's classic African storytelling, where you feel the story has moved down
across generations, like an old coin, all the edges have been worn. It feels so unique, that it could only be this way and
the process of storytelling itself unfolds with its own deep logic that you feel was preordained by generations before us,
at the same time it's so daring and shockingly contemporary. It has the quality of African art. The fact that there is no
comfort zone, the fact that every single day in Africa you have to confront reality and at the same time, culturally, things
are being handed down that have very deep and profound ancestors. With Haroun you feel classical African storytelling and
a kind of wisdom thing handed on and at the same time - this courage to face life raw as it is with no place to hide. So the
courage and honesty of the filmmaking gave it this power that you can't resist and you have to admire.
Hamaca Paraguaya (director: Paz Encina)
PETER SELLARS: Hamaca Paraguaya is a breakthrough in film history, it is someone from another cultural point of view, from another set of histories combined
with a profound feminist vision, asking what else could we do with cinema? What are other possibilities for this medium? Asking
not just questions about the history of cinema but also asking what do we need in our lives? Where is the space of meditation
and reflection and healing that needs to be created in a ravaged world where we are living so much loss? What kind of ceremony
can we create? For me that film is very, very powerful.
Hei Yan Quan (director: Tsai Ming-Liang)
PETER SELLARS: Hei Yan Quan is tender and unexpectedly deeply sincere, from a filmmaker who is more known for his ironies and violence. Tsai has been
exiled all this time and, like many people who are in exile, in order to survive you have to be the most brilliant to earn
your right to stay there. What is touching when Tsai goes home, making his first film in his own real country, all of the
brilliance is not needed. Instead you have to open your heart. The humility and tenderness of the film is what's overwhelming,
in the sense of vulnerability. I think, to feel how vulnerable, how unexpectedly honest and pure this film is. And he is able
to use music from his childhood. We all have that, a certain song takes you back to a certain time of your life, you have
a whole deep underground river of emotional connections to the music you grew up with. This film treats music in that way:
undercurrent to your whole life, it's some of the most astonishing approaches to Chinese opera, to Western opera.
Opera Jawa (director: Garin Nugroho)
PETER SELLARS: Opera Jawa is perhaps the film that people have the most difficulty in appreciating what was at stake for the filmmaker. It's not difficult
to appreciate the film, it is so ravishingly beautiful and hypnotic and takes you to worlds that are magical and compelling,
you go wherever the film takes you. But of course what Garin is doing is working with very intricate, complicated histories
of the Ramayana epic – storytelling with puppets, with shadow puppets, with classical dance, a whole history of cinema before
cinema in the case of the Javanese shadow puppets. And an amazing way of the depicting time and space in classical Javanese
culture. Integrating all that with contemporary cinema language is an overwhelming achievement. All over the world we are
in a situation where the traditional classical arts are dying out. What does it take to reinvest the classical arts with contemporary
energy and at the same time maintain and convey the deep sources of wisdom? Garin has done that in this film.
Interview: Karin Schiefer
2006
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