In 1992, Olivier Messiaen's epic opera "Saint François d'Assise" was brought to the Salzburg Festival in a staging by Peter Sellars. The distinct visual appearance that Sellars lent to the opera, where video monitors with powerful images are used as a sort of high-tech metaphor for a cathedral's stained glass, drew critical acclaim and is still talked about as a watershed moment in opera to this day.
This film here is a 75-minute documentary on the 1992 staging. Jean-Pierre Gorin filmed Sellars, baritone José van Dam (St. Francis) soprano Dawn Upshaw (The Angel), and the LA Philharmonic and conductor Esa-Pekka Salonen as they rehearsed for the big day. There are interviews with these artists, though Sellars gets most of the screen time. The documentary is very much about Sellars' vision for Messiaen's theatrical drama. Very little is said about Messiaen's music.
In spite of directing a few of his own films in later years, Jean-Pierre Gorin is still best known for his collaboration with Jean-Luc Godard in the late 1960s and early 1970s that made some in-your-face political films of vaguely Maoist inspiration. Don't expect anything like that here, this is a straightforward "making-of" of this 1992 staging.
