State of Cinema Address
Sunday, April 29
4:00 pm
Sundance Cinemas Kabuki
1881 Post Street (at Fillmore)
Each year, the Film Society invites a leader of cinema and the arts to address issues facing the film world today. This year, the State of Cinema address will be delivered by the brilliant theater and artistic director Peter Sellars, whose work is motivated by, and encourages, a passionate commitment to globally relevant images and ideas that prompt social and moral action in an increasingly interdependent world.
Mozart Meets His Match
By Andy Bailey
As long as gleefully eclectic multimedia visionary Peter Sellars continues to transform theater and opera with his utterly unique vision, there will be no reason to write a requiem for art that surprises, challenges and transforms receptive audiences. His endlessly inventive stage designs and productions—now numbering more than 100—and his work with some of the world’s most adventurous creative forces have catapulted him to the first rank of contemporary American artists. He maintains a keen appreciation for cinema as well.
Having received a MacArthur Fellowship in 1983 at age 26, and following travels and studies in Japan, China and India, Sellars was appointed director and manager of the American National Theater in Washington, D.C. While working with the Boston Shakespeare Company, he collaborated with Emmanuel Music and its artistic director Craig Smith on a series of unconventional Mozart operas including Così Fan Tutte (set in a Cape Cod diner), The Marriage of Figaro (set in a luxury Trump Tower suite in New York City) and Don Giovanni (set in Spanish Harlem), which toured widely.
No stranger to the world of film and filmmaking, Sellars cowrote and costarred (as William Shaksper Junior the Fifth) in Jean-Luc Godard’s radical reimagining of King Lear (1986) before making his directorial debut with The Cabinet of Dr. Ramirez (1991), a silent color film starring Joan Cusack and Mikhail Baryshnikov.
At various points, Sellars has served as artistic director of the Los Angeles Festival, the Adelaide Festival of Arts, the Venice Biennale International Festival and the American National Theatre. Seemingly fueled by ever-enthusiastic creativity and inspiration, Sellars also has adapted Antonin Artaud’s radio play For an End to the Judgment of God/Kissing God Goodbye, coupling it with the poetry of June Jordan and staging it as a press conference on the war in Afghanistan; adapted Wagner’s Tristan and Isolde in collaboration with video artist Bill Viola; and staged a multimedia version of the classic Chinese opera Peony Pavilion at venues throughout Europe and in Berkeley. He continues to be a passionate proponent of eclectic cultural expression as professor of world arts and culture at the University of California, Los Angeles.
Sellars has collaborated several times with contemporary composer John Adams on the operas Nixon in China, The Death of Klinghoffer and El Niño. Perhaps their most ambitious work thus far is Doctor Atomic, produced for San Francisco Opera in 2005 (a production documented in Jon Else’s documentary Wonders Are Many, showing at this year’s Festival).
After staging a production of Mozart’s unfinished opera Zaide as part of the 2006 Mostly Mozart Festival at Lincoln Center in New York, Sellars decamped for Vienna, where he was artistic director of the New Crowned Hope Festival celebrating Mozart’s 250th birthday. Two of the seven films that Sellars commissioned for New Crowned Hope are screening in this year’s SFIFF: Garin Nugroho’s Opera Jawa and Mahamat-Saleh Haroun’s Daratt.
Praising the maverick composer for his prescient thematic instincts and his commitment to the transformational properties of pleasure, Sellars concluded his opening New Crowned Hope remarks with this astute coda: “Where Mozart ended is where we begin.”
Indeed, it is iconoclasts like Sellars who continue in the masterful, multifaceted, modernist path of Mozart. We are pleased to welcome Peter Sellars as the presenter of this year’s State of Cinema address.
Andy Bailey is the San Francisco-based author of the forthcoming Taschen volume Cinema Now.
Festival Screenings
Daratt
Opera Jawa
Wonders Are Many
Previous Addresses
Tilda Swinton 2006
Brad Bird 2005
B. Ruby Rich 2004
Michel Ciment 2003