Magazine:
OPERA NEWS, JULY 1997
Poussieres d'Amour (Love's Debris) Film by Werner Schroeter, 122 m
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In
1964, then a teen, German film and opera director Werner Schroeter
was captivated by a recording of Anita Cerquetti singing "Casta
Diva." His new film, Poussieres d'Amour, while often arch
and eccentric when it isn't dealing with Cerquetti, is worth seeking
out for anyone interested in the mysteries of vocal expression.
To guide us through his operatic fantasies, Schroeter attempts
to answer the French philosopher Roland Barthes' question "How
do singers find their emotions in their voices?" Inviting
a number of contemporary singers -- including Katherine and Kristine
Ciesinski, Laurence Dale, Jenny Drivala, Gail Gilmore and Sergei
Latin, plus the photogenic pianist Elizabeth Cooper -to France's
thirteenth-century abbey of Royaumont,
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Schroeter conducts a freeform seminar in which the artists not only
sing arias and duets in full costume but also discuss love, death
and the voice.
This precious attitudinizing works with the younger artists -- they
are game even for Schroeter's questionable homoerotic high jinks
-- but two elder divas, Martha Modl and Rita Gorr, are too coolly
dignified for this approach. Both sing, splendidly, the Gretry aria
from Tchaikovsky's The Queen of Spades, but the down-to-earth Modl
makes mincemeat of the pretentious grilling she receives about singing.
Laughing uproariously in the interlocutor's face, Modl claims she
could hardly teach singing when she hasn't a clue how she does it
herself. Schroeter's film does not really come into focus until
Cerquetti appears. They share an awkward embrace, and he is shown
resting his head in her lap and kneeling at her feet during a playback
of "Vissi d'arte." Cerquetti accepts this extravagant
homage with kittenish irony. A half-hour documentary focusing directly
on Cerquetti would have made all of Schroeter's points about the
triumph of music over age, disappointment and pain. Questioned about
the gossip that attended her abrupt retirement in 1961, Cerquetti,
a large, handsome woman with a Roman nose and tortured eyes, says,
"In life there isn't only singing." She barely sings in
this film, yet she is more powerfully "expressive" than
any of the others. Schroeter plays her recording of "Casta
Diva" and focuses his camera on her face; the scene proves
that expression exists not in how you sing but in who you are. For
that moment alone, Poussieres d'Amour is magnificently operatic.
By STEPHANIE VON BUCHAU
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