APPLETON, WIS. — In honor of the centennial of the birth of French composer and organist Olivier Messiaen, Lawrence University will host a screening of the award-winning film “Apparition of the Eternal Church” Tuesday, Nov. 11 at 8 p.m. in the Lawrence Memorial Chapel.
The film’s director, Paul Festa, will be on hand to introduce the film and answer questions afterward. The event is free and open to the public.
Hailed by The New Yorker as “mesmerizing…remarkable…intensely personal,” the hour-long “Apparition of the Eternal Church” examines the contradictory reactions of 31 mostly nonreligious artists who listen through headphones to a 10-minute piece of Messiaen’s monumental organ work of the same name, which he wrote in 1931 at the age of 24.
In interviews with the director, the listeners describe what they’ve heard, putting the violent contradictions of Messiaen’s music into words. For some, the music produces spiritual and erotic ecstasy, for others a trip through Dante’s inferno. The music and its interpreters produce something akin to what William Blake once called “the marriage of heaven and hell.”
The screening, which is co-sponsored by the American Guild of Organists, will feature live organ performances by Dan O’Connor and Susanna Valleau playing Lawrence’s Brombaugh organ.
The film, which had its premiere showing at the Library of Congress this past Halloween and will make its debut in the United Kingdom at the Barbican Centre in London on Dec. 8, was named the Best North American Independent Feature Film at the 2006 Indianapolis International Film Festival and earned the Special Director’s Award at the Santa Cruz Film Festival that same year.
Lawrence has been celebrating the centennial of Messiaen’s birth with a variety of events this fall. The composer’s “Quartet for the End of Time” is one of the works on this year’s Freshman Studies list.
