Introduction
In his book Real Presences, the literary philosopher George Steiner prophetically described contemporary humanity as living between Good Friday and Easter Sunday.Footnote 1 Steiner implies that humanity is in a wintry, contingent state of expectancy, and he wagers that divine presence qua the sacred underpins worldly manifestations of art.Footnote 2 Although he does not put it this way, art therefore becomes a metonymic, promissory, and revelatory form of presence that is a way of understanding the absolute, conceived as coextensive with the sacred.
This article explores that possibility through an analysis of a short section of Cantus in Memory of Benjamin Britten [Cantus Benjamin Britteni mälestuseks] (1977; rev. 1980) for bell and string orchestra by the Estonian composer Arvo Pärt (1935–) that appears near the beginning of Fahrenheit 9/11 (2004).Footnote 3 This is a documentary written and directed by, and featuring, the American political activist Michael Moore (1954–); his film uses a wide variety of music for satirical, ironic, and ideological purposes.Footnote 4 Pärt’s Cantus was an audacious choice — it is fragile and tender (see the Appendix for a discussion of other possible choices). It is the only piece of western art music in the film, thus subtly underlining the singularity of Moore’s depiction of the aftermath of the felling of the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center (WTC) with commercial airliners in a terrorist attack that took place on 11 September 2001. Through Moore’s use of Cantus in Fahrenheit 9/11, I argue that the film dilates the sacral meanings of Pärt’s music, enhancing the implicit Christian iconography and meanings connected to the WTC event. I claim that this juxtaposition of music and images does not merely illustrate a traumatic moment but opens up a wordless, sacred space of mourning — a site in which the viewer encounters the sacred and the absolute through absence.
Pärt’s tintinnabuli music (post 1976), a term evoking the pealing of bells, employs a network of ideas that define its meaning: bells, staticism, silence, death, mourning.Footnote 5 These concepts enable Cantus to function as a form of topical absolute music that carries religious and spiritual meanings that are amplified through Moore’s cinematic portrayal of the aftermath of 9/11. Although formally abstract and symbolically rich, Pärt’s composition resists being read solely as autonomous art, but instead becomes a lens through which the experience of the sacred can be understood.
Scholarship on Pärt’s tintinnabuli music has discussed these topics and examined their complementary expression through film.Footnote 6 This study moves beyond questions of how music configures film and vice versa, or the ‘illusion of direct unity’ as T. W. Adorno and Hanns Eisler put it, and it extends scholarship on music in documentary film as well as 9/11 studies.Footnote 7 Film and music become more than the sum of their parts; Pärt’s music, I argue, allows an insight into the religious presuppositions of 9/11, concerning its symbolism and implications. It affords the listener/viewer a place to understand the traumatic implications of the divine guarantee that Steiner believes underpins the absolute.
To build this argument, this study contextualizes and problematizes Cantus through the theological and aesthetic concepts that underlie absolute music, discusses Pärt’s compositional aesthetics and the structuring of Cantus, details the political background and intent of Moore’s film, and describes the sequence of images in the film with relation to Cantus. Moore’s use of Cantus in Fahrenheit 9/11 is then examined in a number of ways. The Christian presuppositions of the WTC event are investigated through Crucifixion imagery and the idea of absence to show the ways Pärt’s music helps to draw out the sacred potential in the event and images. This is connected to a discussion of the occlusion of the central WTC event in the film (the aeroplanes crashing into the Twin Towers) and the cinematic recalibration of meaning through slowed-down images of the aftermath conjoined to Cantus. Finally, the work of mourning is detailed through an examination of the idea of the icon and the gaze, showing how absolute music is afforded a form of contingent vision through Moore’s images and Pärt’s music that allows the listener/viewer a new form of understanding the WTC event.
The Sacred and the Concept of Absolute Music
Absolute (wordless) music has been understood as hermetic, sublime, liminal, ineffable, and as a harbinger of the numinous, ideals that construct this music and that are compatible with the ways in which it addresses multimodal, sensorial human beings who search for design and agency in the world.Footnote 8 Absolute music was a term first used by Richard Wagner in 1846, who described it as ‘infinite and indeterminate expression’. Wagner attempted to resolve the issue of the sung text in the last movement of Beethoven’s Symphony no. 9 (1823–24): for him it ‘abandons […] pure instrumental music’ and its ‘confines’ to decisively articulate the poetic substance implicit in the first three movements.Footnote 9 Wagner regarded absolute music as a sacral talisman of a venerated idealist philosophical tradition that was later subsumed into his mature Gesamtkunstwerke. Footnote 10 In his hands, the sacral aesthetics of the absolute were therefore elevated through and subsumed within his operas in a way that was not, as the musicologist Mark Evan Bonds states of absolute music, ‘autonomous, self-contained, and wholly self-referential’.Footnote 11 In Der Ring des Nibelungen, for instance, the ‘absoluteness’ of absolute music was both compromised and reconfigured, but its sacral essence remained as a ‘deep truth’ that provided an underlying continuum flowing through the work, allowing the sacred to be revealed through sound and the symbols of art.Footnote 12
This process can be understood more precisely through Aristotelian entelechy, associated with hylomorphism (the combination of form and matter that creates a substance), which is fundamental to the Catholic idea of transubstantiation in which the substance of the bread (as species or accident, i.e. its particular worldly appearance) becomes the substance of the body of Christ. Entelechy is the dilation of potential energy from form and matter, in which the real presence of Christ is affirmed (hence the title of Steiner’s book).Footnote 13 The symbolic nature of music can therefore exist in a particular way in the world (a Wagner opera, for example) but contain within itself the sacred attributes of absolute music that are dilated and revealed through the opera to the listener/viewer.
In the Orthodox Catholic religious tradition a parallel understanding exists in which a difference is understood between the potential within matter (entelecheia) and the full actuality or divine energeia of God’s presence.Footnote 14 This concept of energeia is associated in Orthodox theology with the way in which the interior light of icons (the real presence of God) overflows the image itself, radiating divine presence to the viewer.Footnote 15 This is an idea germane to the effect of absolute music (its insufflation of the listener). It is important to the functioning of Pärt’s music, which the conductor and writer Paul Hillier has called a ‘sounding icon’, and it is connected to the prayerful ascetic traditions of hesychasm admired by Pärt.Footnote 16 Energeia can also be understood in relation to the oneiric effects and temporal qualities of film for the listener/viewer that are exploited through Moore’s use of Cantus. Footnote 17 In all these cases meaning can be understood as dilated from a hidden or occluded source or locus that in religious thought is attributed to God.Footnote 18
Entelechy was an idea entertained with reference to religion and art by the early nineteenth-century Catholic theologian Johann Michael Sailer (1751–1832), as Carl Dahlhaus has shown.Footnote 19 It is also fundamental to the dialogue between interiority and exteriority that informs the understanding of absolute music, and indeed music in film.Footnote 20 In his Kalligone (1800), for example, Johann Gottfried Herder underlined the problem in quasi-religious terms: ‘What cannot be made visible to man — the world of the invisible — becomes communicable to him in its [music’s] manner, and its manner alone.’Footnote 21 More than 150 years later, the great Austrian pianist and composer Artur Schnabel (1882–1951) defined the revelation of absolute music in terms of interiority, as ‘the most exclusive medium for the spiritual exaltation of the active individual in an intimate, private sphere of personal experience’.Footnote 22
For Herder, the form and matter of the absolute becomes ‘visible’ through the qualities (species or accident) of the substance, while for Schnabel, the substance provides insight into the absolute and the way the worldly configuration of art both affects subjectivity and comes to structure interiority. Their observations point to a recognizable but unknown locus or source within art that resonates with the thought of St Augustine, who described God in his Confessions as ‘more inward to me than my most inward part’.Footnote 23 This dialogue between the sacred (interior) and the exterior (symbolization) is a process fundamental to Wagner’s mature operas, but it is a conceptual framework that can be imaginatively transferred beyond nineteenth-century musical repertoires to the relationship between music and imagery in film.Footnote 24
Traditionally scholarship has understood music as being integrated with film, but I argue that film further transforms existing imprinted meanings into its substance — bells, staticism, silence, death, and mourning. Ritual should be added to this list; stylized elements of repetition and process are enacted through the rhythms and tintinnabular structuring of Cantus and are features crucial to many forms of religious and artistic expression.Footnote 25 Pärt’s employment of these aesthetic precepts allows his music to be understood as a topical form of absolute music, which attempts to evoke, embody, and dramatize these topics, inscribing them as its core meaning.Footnote 26 Pärt’s music facilitates this extension of the properties of absolute music; his conceptual meanings in fact enable his music to be repurposed in ways (through film, for example) that are far from the concept of ‘neutrality’ he espouses, an idea that is in itself consonant with the ‘autonomous, self-contained, and wholly self-referential’ nature of absolute music.Footnote 27
This tendentious concept of the ‘neutral’ accords with the self-effacing renunciation of Orthodox hesychasm. It implies that his music is extrinsic to music history and therefore not subject to traditional aesthetic judgements concerned with time, place, or tradition.Footnote 28 Yet such neutrality is both refigured and compromised when the topical meanings of Pärt’s music are connected to a specific time, place, and event in Moore’s film. Pärt’s topical and aesthetic markers are dilated and amplified through Moore’s images, affording it a contingent means of vision beyond Adorno’s designation of pieces of absolute music as ‘windowless monads’.Footnote 29 Moore’s use of Cantus provides a sacred space where these concepts are infused into the substance of the film, dilating a form of entelechy or energeia that enables the listener/viewer to gain a new understanding of the absolute in the aftermath of the WTC event.
Pärt’s Cantus in Memory of Benjamin Britten
Cantus in Memory of Benjamin Britten was described by Pärt as ‘a personal threnody, an ultimate closing chord, a mystical, threshold experience’.Footnote 30 The composer has been a member of the Russian Orthodox Catholic church since 1972,Footnote 31 but some of his works (Cantus included) use allusive titles commensurate with spirituality that allow them to be accessible to religious and non-religious listeners alike.Footnote 32 These include Pärt’s early tintinnabuli works such as Für Alina [Aliinale] (1976) for piano, Fratres [Vennad] (1977) for small ensemble (and also for violin and piano and other instrumental groups), Tabula Rasa (1977) for two violins, string orchestra, and prepared piano, and Spiegel im Spiegel [Peegel peeglis] (1978) for violin and piano, as well as Cantus. Although imbued with his faith, the titles reflect the necessity to abjure from public religious statements in Soviet Estonia (independence was restored on 20 August 1991). There is therefore also no consistent connection with these works, as there is with the French composer Olivier Messiaen (1908–92) between his personal Catholic faith and the titles of some of his pieces (Et exspecto resurrectionem mortuorum (1964) or ‘La résurrection du Christ’ (Livre du Saint-Sacrement) (1984)).Footnote 33 However, there are aesthetic affinities for both composers between sound and musical techniques — colour, different chord types, and revelation for Messiaen, and resonance, tintinnabuli, and expiation for Pärt, for example — connections that are relevant to their religious modernism. It is important to note that Pärt is open to new ways of understanding his works, and that his own religious background, while important, does not place limits on interpretation.Footnote 34
In Pärt’s tintinnabuli music, a dialogue of consonance and dissonance exists between two basic types of superimposed line: an M-voice, which moves by conjunct motion, and a T-voice, which arpeggiates a ‘tonic’ triad.Footnote 35 Pärt’s description of this process underlines the spiritual asceticism and hermeticism of his aesthetics.Footnote 36 Hillier has paraphrased the composer’s understanding, with Pärt’s endorsement:
The M-voice always signifies the subjective world, the daily egoistic life of sin and suffering; the T-voice, meanwhile, is the objective realm of forgiveness […] This can be likened to the eternal dualism of body and spirit, earth and heaven; but the two voices are in reality one voice, a twofold single entity. This can be neatly though enigmatically represented by the following equation: 1 + 1 = 1.Footnote 37
The composer affirmed later that ‘in tintinnabuli, two different worlds blend together and become one. One plus one is One.’Footnote 38 Pärt’s own descriptions of his music reveal a sense of self-searching and an enigmaticness that could perhaps be thought of as an ironic re-freighting of early nineteenth-century constructions of heroism, overcoming, withdrawal from the world, and communion with the noumenal that are seminal constructions for Beethoven’s music, for example.Footnote 39 Yet Pärt’s music does not conform to the dramatic, progress-orientated, teleological, Austro-German musical tradition of tonal mediation, and as such it has been the subject of a number of critiques.Footnote 40
Pärt’s process of tintinnabulation unfolds in Cantus through a prolation canon — the same melody moving at different speeds — a technique notably employed in Johannes Ockeghem’s (c. 1410–97) Missa prolationum (late fifteenth century). Such early Renaissance music was an important influence on Pärt’s music.Footnote 41 In Cantus the strings begin at bar 7, and nine voices are gradually introduced (Violin 1: M- and T-voices; Violin 2: M- and T-voices; Viola: M-voice; Cello: M- and T-voices; Double bass: M- and T-voices). The five M-voices and four T-voices are in canon at various octaves and at various related durational proportions, where each of the five string groups, entering from highest to lowest, doubles the metrical values of the previous voice. The number of voices is extended to eleven parts at bar 53 (not heard in Moore’s film; see below) and then progressively reduced, to ten at bar 65, seven at bar 75, and six at bar 85, but as the number of parts reduces so too does the register, and fewer real parts effect a greater density of sound. All the parts move slowly from a high register to a low one (with some internal repetition), without tonal mediation, tonicization, or any other chord (such as the dominant) that would suggest tonal hierarchy. Each part moves towards a goal pitch (the first such pitch, c4, is reached by Violin 1 at bar 65, approximately at the golden section), which, once attained, remains static until the end of the piece.Footnote 42 On page 4 of the earliest completed manuscript of the work, held in the Estonian Theatre and Music Museum, Pärt writes the word ‘KULMINATSIOON⟶’ [‘CULMINATION⟶’] at this point.Footnote 43 The conclusion of Cantus is created through a series of descending plateaus and the way these merge towards stasis (on an A-minor chord).
Pärt has referred to the ‘clear ordering [of] the material […] to do with the vibrations of the instruments that set up a sort of resonance’.Footnote 44 This resonance, partly created by the consonance and dissonance of tintinnabulation, increases as more plateaus are reached after bar 65, and the music becomes more intense as a gradually greater intensification of A minor is attained and this key becomes a clearer focus.Footnote 45 Therefore entropy and intensification are simultaneously achieved through the internal structuring and processes of Cantus. The piece ends with the sound of the bell in the final bar (unheard in the film) returning the music to the opening (as if the piece might begin again and never finish).Footnote 46
Pärt’s musical narrative is achieved through the flux of information density and intensity (through texture, register, timbre, and gradation of dissonance) and, as Andrew Shenton has shown, a quasi-tonal sense of tension and release at micro and macro levels.Footnote 47 Occasional chromaticism occurs in Pärt’s music but not in Cantus, which employs the Aeolian mode, refiguring archaism and the ‘neutral’ as part of its modernism. The global effect of Cantus can be likened to a drone or a pedal point, where emergent forms of instability above it spiral or move centripetally towards a form of stability or synthesis (but not resolution) through linear time.
Moore’s Cinematic Aesthetic and his Political Context
Michael Moore’s Fahrenheit 9/11 is both documentary and polemic. Its title echoes Ray Bradbury’s novel Fahrenheit 451 (1953).Footnote 48 Although the film had a somewhat difficult path to release, it won the 2004 Palme d’Or, and was also the highest-grossing documentary film worldwide for many years.Footnote 49 Moore’s film critiques both the US government’s response to the 11 September attacks and the subsequent wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.Footnote 50 Combining satirical narration with emotionally charged footage, the film deploys Moore’s signature style: populist, ironic, and politically explicit. Moore is a staunch Democrat and an anti-Republican activist, and Fahrenheit 9/11 can be considered as part of a mediatized ‘abreaction to the event [of 9/11] itself’ and understood in the tradition of innumerable Hollywood disaster films.Footnote 51 In hindsight, these familiar fantasies (with their inevitable resolutions) appear to be forms of psychic repression that are returned as something excessive and grotesque (defining characteristics of the Freudian Unheimliche) and as a breakthrough of the traumatic Lacanian Real in the WTC events.Footnote 52
Fahrenheit 9/11 tendentiously examines the Republican President George W. Bush’s accession to power in the January before the 9/11 attacks. Moore attempts to show that Bush’s administration ignored warnings of possible strikes by al-Qaeda in the wake of the first Gulf War (1990–91).Footnote 53 His film focuses on the reactions to 9/11: the war in Afghanistan and policies on homeland security, including the Patriot Act 2001, that ensued from 9/11 and that led to the second Iraq War (2003–11). It concentrates especially on Moore’s perception of the administration’s misuse of power (their connection to the Saudi royal family, and Bush’s and Vice President Dick Cheney’s connections to the oil industry) and on the exploitation of American service personnel and their families.
The implication of Moore’s film is that a political ecology of complicity and complacency existed in which tolerance for terrorism (leading to the events of 11 September 2001) necessitated military spending. This in turn exploited disadvantaged working-class people who, through their service and sacrifice, helped uphold a precious and tendentious American master narrative of freedom and international moral rectitude allied to a continually invoked slogan of divine imprimatur: ‘this nation, under God’, as Abraham Lincoln stated in his Gettysburg Address in 1865.Footnote 54 One of the central tenets of Moore’s film (although not made explicit) is that the death and sacrifice (fundamental to the idea of the sacred) that occurred at ‘Ground Zero’ (a moniker originally chosen by J. Robert Oppenheimer for the site of the first atomic explosion on 16 July 1945 at Alamogordo, New Mexico) provoked other costs, and that in this process the American master narrative was also exposed as illusory.Footnote 55
The central event of 9/11 at the WTC functions for Moore as a singularity, and as a scission in which this dystopian political ecology is rendered untenable and therefore must be exposed. Moore’s narrative voice in the film is both cynical and comedic; he is the self-appointed ‘regular working-class guy’ (and the faux-reluctant movie star) — an oversized clown-like figure (without make-up) in shabby clothes (contrasting with his political opponents in suits), and a David against the Goliath of the American political establishment.Footnote 56 His jeremiads throughout simulate omniscient ‘truth-telling’ but also belie his own ideological prejudice that concerns a national tragedy, harnessing this trauma and redirecting it through his soft-spoken narrative of incredulity. Fahrenheit 9/11 can be considered as part ‘whodunnit’, part coping mechanism (Moore speaks eloquently to an imagined collective who are supposedly in agreement with his perspectives), and part subversive conspiracy theory.Footnote 57 Moore’s film derives its jouissance from its deliberately antagonistic critical stance against a perceived burgeoning kleptocracy.Footnote 58
The 9/11 Sequence: Darkness, Sound, and Sacral Space
The attacks on the WTC, not the only targets on 11 September 2001, are the catalyst of Moore’s story. Following the opening credits, the screen goes black and the music fades, an effect that, to follow Neil J. Smelser’s observations, allows the ‘traumatic ingredients’ of the event to become ‘fused, telescoped, and undifferentiated’.Footnote 59 Following the screen blackout at 13:24 in the film, the planes are heard coming towards and hitting the buildings, and the juxtaposed sounds of screams, sirens, helicopters, and voices ensue. Soon after, vision is slowly restored (14:30), and a low D pedal is clearly perceivable (14:31). This is not part of Cantus but a sound that has been added as an undercurrent to the black screen and is sporadically heard from 13:50. Pärt’s music begins at 14:37.
Moore employed the ECM recording of the 1980 revised version of Cantus; it begins with three regular strokes of the bell that announces the ‘tonic’ A, an emblem of ‘warning’, possibly imported from Benjamin Britten’s War Requiem (1961–62) and in that work related to Wilfred Owen’s poetry concerning ‘the pity of War’.Footnote 60 The voices gradually fade as a montage of images of the aftermath is presented. Pärt’s music soon becomes the quilting point of the images, and when the strings come in (bar 7 of Cantus) at 14:52 there is no other sound but this non-diegetic music. Cantus only fades (from bar 39), and Moore’s own moralizing voiceover begins, at 16:20 (bar 40 of the score).Footnote 61 Pärt’s music is eclipsed by Moore’s voice at bar 51. The viola is particularly prominent in the ECM recording; it is the only string part that is not divisi and forms an internal backbone.Footnote 62
Pärt remarked on a form of ‘purity’ both in Britten’s works and in Guillaume de Machaut’s (c. 1300–77) ballades.Footnote 63 The viola part in Cantus could therefore be understood to be like the ‘Cantus’ (texted) part (the second line down) in Machaut’s Ballade 31, ‘Baladelle: En amer a douce vie’, from Le Remède de fortune, which the composer copied out in Moscow in 1970; this is the only texted line of the ballade and forms its musical spine, around which the harmonic tracery is formed as two sets of two voices. This feature mirrors procedures in tintinnabuli music, such as in the four-part piece Pari intervallo (1976), which achieved its definitive form as an organ piece in a modally inflected E♭ minor, but was originally written, without instrumental designation, in open score in E minor.Footnote 64 The viola part in Cantus reaches its first statement of a full descending octave (a4–a3) in bar 44; this a3 is an important structural staging post in the piece and is heard in the film slightly after Moore’s vocal narrative commences.Footnote 65
In Fahrenheit 9/11 the WTC event effects a visible break with the ‘old’ world and an aperture onto the ‘new’ world. Moore’s use of Pärt’s Cantus and its sacral topoi comes to shape this ‘opening’ of a new cinematic vision, dramatizing it as a sacred space. The cultural theorist Sarah Senk notes that through its global reach, 9/11 has become a virtual and prosthetic event that encouraged witnessing as a form of mourning for people who were not there. She critiques the notion that this mourning has become a form of cultural capital blurring personal and public memory.Footnote 66 Pärt’s topical form of absolute music, addressing the universal and the particular, ‘the time of the personal’ as Senk puts it, can be understood as aiding this form of transference, ideologically shaping the meaning and effect of the WTC event.Footnote 67
The footage of 9/11, of different qualities, has already dated the event, and Moore’s film is one significant source (if not the most reliable) for understanding it. Most viewers of his film will not have experienced the event at first hand and are therefore reliant on audiovisual media, which creates what the cultural theorist Alison Landsberg has called ‘prosthetic memory’.Footnote 68 In the portrayal of the immediate aftermath of the attack, Pärt’s music therefore helps inform the listener/viewer through a hypostatization of memory and of the absolute. It enables a cinematic form of mourning and contingency, not just depiction. While it affords the listener/viewer a means to understand the sacral meaning of the absolute (that remains unconstitutable and resists reification), its particular construction and affect (its species or accident) participates in Moore’s ideological construction of the event.
The Cross, Occlusion, and the Real, and the Christian Presuppositions of 9/11
The theologian Jeremy S. Begbie has contrasted the ‘highly contemplative ambience […] often labelled “spiritual”’ of the music by the English composer John Tavener (1944–2013) and by Arvo Pärt with real suffering; he has stated that in this music, ‘God’s cross-centred involvement with humanity is marginalized’.Footnote 69 Essential to this ‘involvement’ is the act of reviving God’s absence through a belief in his abiding presence. This somewhat paradoxical position is essential to Christianity. Pace Begbie, Pärt’s music might be better understood as reconfiguring rather than denying temporal experience, attempting to redeem suffering and allowing the listener/viewer to have a personal meeting with God through the cross on their own terms.
In a serendipitous incident, a cross-shaped steel beam was found amid the wreckage of 9/11. This two-tonne, six-metre-high T-beam was effectively made into a religious relic when it was later lowered twenty-one metres down into the bowels of where the Twin Towers once stood; it has become part of the National September 11 Memorial and Museum (see Figure 1). As an empty cross, this discovery could have denoted that Christ was absent in the event of 9/11, and that suffering in the Crucifixion and at 9/11 is unrepresentable. Yet this sign is understood by Christians as a symbol of the resurrected Christ whose presence remains in the community of believers. One worker on the site, Frank Silecchia, understood this relic well. Confronted with this impressive object, he recalled the revelation of this moment after the event: ‘I saw Calvary in the midst of all the wreckage, the disaster […] It was a sign […] that God didn’t desert us.’Footnote 70
Cross-shaped beam at the National September 11 Memorial and Museum, New York. Photographer: James Tourtellotte (2001). Wikimedia Commons. Creative Commons CC0 License. Public domain.
Silecchia’s observations reveal the sacred, staurological, and soteriological presuppositions that underlie the absolute nature of the event; his statement links 9/11 with a profound tenet of Christianity. For Christians, the answers to the age-old questions of fate and destiny and the reasons for suffering in the world are answered in the empty cross.Footnote 71 This sign, through its presentation of absence, replaces and resounds the divinity. It ironically denotes that human means (the humiliating and torturous death of a man) were not God’s end. The theologian Alister E. McGrath has described Christ’s absence as part of ‘the enigma of the cross’, and he acknowledges ‘the resistance of the cross to interpretation’.Footnote 72
This sign, signifying yet distancing itself from a deeper reality, instantiates an absence and a desire for presence; it reveals an ontological breach through which human beings search for God.Footnote 73 This search, as evidenced by the discussion of Steiner’s, Herder’s, and Schnabel’s thought above, is entirely germane to absolute music, in which a wager is enacted on the sacral essence that guarantees the sign and is dilated to the listener/viewer through entelechy and energeia. So if the Twin Towers of the WTC on 9/11 can be understood as a surrogate cross, what would it then mean not to see this cross burning and then imploding?Footnote 74
In Moore’s Fahrenheit 9/11, as noted above, the screen goes black at the moment the planes impact, making the sound of the destruction of the Twin Towers into an acousmatic event.Footnote 75 Moore allows each individual to understand and to attempt to integrate the event using their own internal resources (narratives, images, sounds). This occlusion enables the entelechy or energeia of the sacred and absolute to break through via the medium of Cantus. Footnote 76 This does not provide a ‘breakthrough towards the beyond’, as Messiaen described the synaesthetic effect of his coloured music on the listener, but rather a breakthrough in the film from the past to the present for the listener/viewer that attempts to evoke a form of mourning.Footnote 77
Occlusion, as the neuroscientist Lawrence W. Barsalou and his colleagues have shown with respect to the creation of religious knowledge, promotes the creation of feelings, meanings, and the enaction of memories.Footnote 78 For anyone who saw Moore’s film in a cinema, the occlusion at this point was profound.Footnote 79 Moore’s blinding of the listener/viewer signals what the psychoanalytic philosopher Slavoj Žižek has identified as an inability to integrate the excessive and traumatic imprint of the event. Žižek’s thought employs the psychoanalytic philosopher Jacques Lacan’s register of the Real, in which that which is repressed, impossible, and/or unsymbolizable becomes possible.Footnote 80 While this repression or blindness may indeed also entrain the listener/viewer’s desire for jouissance (understood in Lacan’s thought as surplus meaning or enjoyment, formed by but beyond language or ideology), it also underlines the sacral, sublime nature of the event that is perceivable yet overwhelms the imagination.Footnote 81
If the Twin Towers can be identified with reference to the cross, then Moore’s occlusion of their collapse could further be understood as attempting to help the listener/viewer resist the trauma implicit in traditional Crucifixion imagery. In the aftermath, trauma is placed into memory, which arguably makes it more potent. Crucifixion imagery provides sources of this collective memory that cannot be resisted. In Matthias Grünewald’s Crucifixion panel of the Isenheim Altarpiece, for example, Christ’s body is emaciated, the torsion of muscles drawn out to breaking beneath his own weight (and that of the sins of humanity) (see Figure 2). Christ’s body is covered in sores; he is willingly suffering as a symbol of universal consolation and redemption. Beneath him, the most striking figure is John the Baptist, who points to what he could not become, accompanied by a lamb symbolizing the sacrifice of Jesus. Written in Latin next to John is ‘He must increase, but I must decrease’ (John 3. 30).
Matthias Grünewald’s Crucifixion panel, Isenheim Altarpiece (c. 1515). Unterlinden Museum, Colmar. Photographer: Gleb Gsimonov (2023). Wikimedia Commons. Creative Commons CC0 1.0. Universal Public Domain Dedication.
Figure 2. Long description
The central and largest panel depicts the crucifixion against a dark, nocturnal sky. Jesus hangs on a bowed wooden cross, his body covered in sores and thorns, with hands contorted upward. To the left, the Virgin Mary swoons in a white robe, supported by Saint John the Evangelist in red, while Mary Magdalene kneels in prayer below them. To the right, John the Baptist points toward Jesus while holding a book, accompanied by a small white lamb at his feet holding a cross.
Two narrow vertical panels flank the center. The left panel shows Saint Sebastian pierced by arrows, tied to a column. The right panel shows Saint Anthony the Abbot standing in a red and black cloak.
At the bottom is a wide, horizontal predella panel divided into two sections. It depicts the Lamentation and Entombment of Christ. His scarred body is laid out on a white shroud, mourned by the Virgin Mary, Saint John, and Mary Magdalene, with an open stone tomb visible to the left.
This aphorism reveals something of the respective positions of the victims and survivors in the aftermath of 9/11 in Moore’s film. Like Christ’s absence/presence signified in the cross, death profoundly increased the victims’ capital: the image of this absence gains a force because of its re-representation. John, looking up from below like the people in Moore’s film, also prefigures a syncretic use of three different voices saying the phrases ‘Oh my God’ and ‘Let’s go’ during the screen blackout from 14:08, and the woman in the crowd who speaks at 14:28 just before we see her as vision is restored, who laments, ‘Save their souls, Lord. Save their souls, Lord.’Footnote 82 Through these anonymous people, the listener/viewer is given to understand the ‘radically contingent’ and unique nature of the event.Footnote 83 Their reaction, looking up at the absent buildings (and people), reveals the magnitude and sublimity of the event. They are both exposed to and unable to resist the implication of the sacred — the realization of absence is traumatic. These unknown witnesses (including a couple seen praying together at 15:28) therefore figure an ontological gap, a void that signifies the absolute. This is a space then taken up by Moore’s ideologically configured images in the film (as a form of memory), aided by Pärt’s topical absolute music, in the immediate aftermath of the WTC event.
The neurologist and psychologist Patrick McNamara has proposed that religious experience and personal transformation are premised on a ‘decentering mechanism’, a process that begins with a removal or minimization of the ‘self-concept’ (our current understanding of ourselves or our reduced agency), and a building-back through cultural exposure, challenging and repatterning belief patterns (habit) to instantiate a new concept of self (integration).Footnote 84 McNamara also states that ‘decentering is triggered by a certain kind of [intense or salient] “surprise” — a surprise signal that cannot be handled by simple updating of beliefs’.Footnote 85 It is from this point, including surprises that may be unreasonable and traumatic, that belief, for instance in what McNamara calls ‘supernatural agents’ (God, for example), can be entertained.Footnote 86 This process appositely describes Moore’s occlusion of the Twin Towers: a spiritual space is opened that decentres the subject. This is followed by images of the aftermath that employ Pärt’s music as a form of recentring.
Moore’s recalibration of images after the event situates humanity in the wintry, contingent state envisaged by Steiner: a constructed vacuum where an event beyond control, description, or comprehension has occurred.Footnote 87 Humanity is depicted as paralysed, looking up in quasi-devotional wonder, ‘shock and awe’, and in an iconography of expectation.Footnote 88 As at the end of Wagner’s Der Ring des Nibelungen, when Valhalla has fallen in flames, humanity is left to create its own destiny.Footnote 89
Certainly the occluded event seems to defeat our already image-saturated imagination. Like the Crucifixion, it resists knowledge and vision. Žižek, following Alain Badiou, has pointed out that:
the ultimate and defining experience of the twentieth century was the direct experience of the Real as opposed to social reality — the Real in its extreme violence as the price to be paid for peeling off the deceiving layers of reality.Footnote 90
But surely what Moore’s occlusion of the towers shows is that there is an ‘ultimate and defining’ resistance to seeing this traumatic Real, conceived as the absolute, tempered with a desire to see it and to find a cogent explanation.Footnote 91 This resistance in fact makes the traumatic aspects of the Real more potent, and contributes to the complex spiritual experience of this moment in Moore’s film.
Moore’s use of Pärt’s Cantus therefore allows the trauma of the absolute to be experienced and, somewhat perversely, to be kept in abeyance.Footnote 92 Cantus begins with the sound of a tolling bell, but Moore gives it a new beginning: the sound of aeroplanes crashing into buildings. Only after this incursion does the bell toll.Footnote 93 The registral descent of the ensuing prolation canon, with its flux of densities and intensities of sound, inexorably falls, like (the absent images of) the buildings themselves, to the bedrock of a single fortissimo ‘tonic’ chord (unheard in the film) at the end of the piece.
This process can be understood as a form of kenosis (self-emptying), a theological term applied to Christ’s Crucifixion. In this thought Christ emptied himself into the remaining community (the working of the Holy Spirit), who memorialize his presence through the Mass. It is also identified, in the thought of John of the Cross (1542–91), as a process of becoming entirely receptive to God and divine will through purging the self of worldly matters.Footnote 94 The ‘sounding icon’ of Cantus does not decay (like the sound of the bell at the start and end of the piece), but becomes more intense through this kenosis, which merges with memorialization.Footnote 95 Cantus allows the listener/viewer to experience the real presence and sacral significance of the disappearance of people, essential to ‘God’s cross-centred involvement with humanity’ (Begbie). As topical absolute music, Pärt’s work dilates the entelechy and energeia of sacral absence/presence through film in way that is liminal, memorializing, and possibly also deeply reassuring.
The Cinematic Recalibration of Meaning
Moore’s use of Pärt’s Cantus creates an archaeology of the WTC event. The absolute music of Cantus, with its inherent religious meanings, becomes a powerful means of entelechy and energeia, and of vision and insight into the event. To help the listener/viewer understand the event, at 15:28 Moore slows his images down to the music’s altered metabolic rate, in a manner consonant with Smelser’s observations above, first to show a praying couple and then the grey, wintry aftermath of falling objects and papers. These images, somewhat obscenely, conjoin the sacral aspect of human sacrifice in the event to the ashes of the contractual world (both hidden and globalized) eviscerated by it.Footnote 96
If trauma can be defined as ‘an intense stimulus overwhelming neurocognitive capacities to form narrative memory’, then Moore’s use of Cantus here could be interpreted as allowing a space for memory to be created, but also as aestheticizing or reifying memory, and even deliberately falsifying it.Footnote 97 The use of Pärt’s music, with its topoi of hermeticism, asceticism, and self-knowledge (interiority), as a form of memorialization in the immediate aftermath of the event can also be understood as focusing and enhancing the pathos of Moore’s message (political incredulity), slowing down the impact of the Real (occluded) to allow for it be processed by the listener/viewer.Footnote 98 The images with Pärt’s music provide a space for recentring, but they also delay an objective understanding of the event that might lead to forms of healing.
Moore makes his images approximate the metabolic rate of Pärt’s music, informed by its slow harmonic rhythm and the tintinnabular flux of consonance and dissonance. Time appears to slow down.Footnote 99 If, as Chess Stetson, Matthew P. Fiesta, and David M. Eagleman have conjectured, time does not slow down during a frightening event but is merely ‘a function of recollection, not perception: a richer encoding of memory [that] may cause a salient event to appear, retrospectively, as though it lasted longer’, then Moore’s imposition of memory onto perception memorializes the aftermath of 9/11.Footnote 100
This interpretation is consonant with and extends Timotheus Vermeulen and Robin van den Akker’s concept of the ‘meta-modern’, discussed by Andrew Shenton with reference to Pärt’s Passio Domini nostri Jesu Christi secundum Joannem (begun in March 1977 and completed after its first performance on 27 November 1982).Footnote 101 The slowing of the images with the music in Moore’s film creates a ‘specific alterity’, as Shenton states, and a personal ‘affinity’ linked to three concerns: ‘a deliberate being out of time, an intentional being out of place, and the pretence that desired atemporality and displacement are actually possible even though they are not’.Footnote 102 These features, together with the ageing of the event through the contemporaneous technology used in the film, create an empathetic imago of mourning. Yet it can equally be argued that, because of the juxtaposition of this music in this film, which as concert music is associated with the Pärtian categories of bells, staticism, death, mourning, and ritual, it now creates a form of what the composer and film theorist Michel Chion describes as ‘anempathetic music’, where music is deliberately mismatched to a film scene to create a particular effect or is used in a way that supplements the scene. This supplement can arguably be understood as a new level of viewer empathy that is created by the combination of these images with Cantus. Footnote 103
Through the agency of Pärt’s music, Moore makes this time into an ideologically constructed memory vial. Cantus is therefore used in Fahrenheit 9/11 to focus empathy, accentuate an alienation from the event, embody memory (through the slow-motion sequence), and to shape (pace Cizmic) ‘a narrative of cultural trauma’ that universalizes ‘the victims and the nature of their pain’.Footnote 104 The slow-motion images reveal the ideological quality of entelechy and energeia, the dilation of the absolute event through film and music. Moore’s slowing of the images with Pärt’s music helps to reveal the sacred and the absolute, mythologize the event, and titrate memory into mourning.Footnote 105
Music as Vision: Icon, Gaze, and the Work of Mourning
In the Orthodox Catholic church, religious icons are made for many reasons, but principally they are objects of contemplation; the image is not merely a surrogate of the divine but a via Dei. Footnote 106 This idea is supported by the neuroscientific hypothesis that situated and embodied knowledge is generated through participation in religious actions, rituals, metaphors, and memories that entrain and entrench religious belief.Footnote 107 Icons therefore are not only, as Lacan states, ‘intended to please God’, who is also looking at the icon, but are to be understood as two-way telescopes through which God meets the viewer’s gaze and thus creates meaning and belief, an idea essential to the Orthodox theological conception of the icon.Footnote 108
This idea of the icon as active can be extended through Daniel Chua’s ‘mimetic’ ideal of absolute music, in which what he calls the ‘temporal gaze’ of absolute music is able to become ‘human’.Footnote 109 For music to see, writes Chua, it ‘must imitate love (agape), the condition for an unconditional gift’, as a ‘gaze’ that ‘counters the coldness of modern reason’, despite the Adornian idea that love in ‘a post-Christian society’ has ‘exhausted its historical potential’.Footnote 110 To take this a little further, what Chua intimates is that the entelechy or ‘gaze’ of music carries within itself the form of divine love (even as imitation), a love that can be returned like the icon/telescope described above.
Lacan’s thought might further constructively enhance my creative reading of Chua’s delightful proposition. Lacan states:
When I love, I solicit a look, what is profoundly unsatisfying and always missing is that — [God] never look(s) at me from the place from which I see [God]. Conversely, what I look at is never what I wish to see. Footnote 111
Herder’s and Schnabel’s ‘vision’ of absolute music described earlier, and indeed Wagner’s symbolization and translation of the sacred through opera, is subject to exactly this misrecognition (méconnaisance): the absolute resists being seen or understood by the listener/viewer in its ‘absoluteness’ (its full traumatic quality), and this is a source of both jouissance and fascination.Footnote 112
The ‘misrecognition’ that Lacan points to is founded in desire, and the inability of this desire to be entirely fulfilled or rewarded.Footnote 113 Pärt’s topical absolute music, if understood as a ‘sounding icon’, attempts to overcome this misrecognition and allow the community of believers (and indeed non-believers) who live in the aftermath of 9/11 (awaiting fulfilment) to understand something of the absolute. Moore’s film enhances this position with exquisite poignancy. The cinematic blindness (the occlusion of the WTC event) figures both an ideal of the absolute and an inability to apprehend the absolute and abyssal nature of the event. This is followed by a cinematic and musical opening of the listener/viewer’s eyes that instantiates Moore’s own politically tendentious raison d’être for his entire film — ‘eyes have they, but they see not’ (Ps. 135. 16) — and creates a space for mourning.Footnote 114 Through this aperture the listener/viewer is invited to see back through the dilation of the event to its sacred source, but a full understanding of the sacred and of the absolute and traumatic nature of 9/11 remains occluded.
Pärt’s music helps the listener/viewer participate in this contingent vision. In the cinema, the entelechy or energeia of the images and music is aided by the way the falling, swirling musical lines in Cantus become associated with the papers falling from the buildings, seen from below in the film (from 15:58). Through the synergy of music and image, Pärt’s music aids the allusive sense that, as Todd McGowan states of the Lacanian ‘gaze’, ‘the object [the aftermath] looks back’ at the listener/viewer.Footnote 115 What appears to be rather beautiful, perhaps promoting a desire for transcendence, is in fact a form of horror (papers as metaphors for bodies) that cannot easily be integrated.Footnote 116 The conjunction of music and images — the sense of floating — allows the illusion that ‘we are in the film we watch in the form of a distortion of the visual field’ by desire.Footnote 117
This property of the Lacanian ‘gaze’, together with the slow-motion calibration of music and imagery, therefore seems to exacerbate Chua’s/Adorno’s ‘coldness of modern reason’. The apparent beauty and transcendent quality of Pärt’s music in Moore’s film provides a form of tendentious understanding of and access to the absolute, but also functions as a form of protection from the trauma of the event. The listener/viewer can, in Adorno’s words, be ‘no longer aware of any conflict’, and is able to ‘enjoy their own dehumanization as something human, as the joy of warmth’.Footnote 118 The ritualistic aspect of tintinnabulation, its repetition of internal cycles with minimal variation, and its slowly emergent processes contribute to this sensibility. Through Cantus, Moore allows a space of attunement to the new world for the listener/viewer after the occlusion and ‘decentring’ caused by the traumatic event, which can be understood as offering the possibility of spiritually conditioned reintegration.
The (unseen) downward gaze of Christ’s love from the cross, which haunts the Greek slave Demetrius (Victor Mature) in Henry Koster’s film The Robe (1953), in Moore’s film metaphorically becomes the camera aperture (from below) from which we see this benediction of falling papers.Footnote 119 Demetrius’s gaze of confusion, pathos, wonder, and horror reflects the gaze from the cross. Confronted with the absolute, he provides a modern image of the flash of recognition and realization that possibly played across the face of the centurion who stood at the foot of the cross (Mark 15. 39).Footnote 120 He is given the privilege to understand and marvel at the pathos of what he sees, but the three women, who appear as the visual is restored in Moore’s film (situated like the women at the foot of the cross in Figure 2), do not.
In Moore’s film, the event is figured as absent, and the slow-motion effect of the seemingly disembodied papers allows the haunting imagery to linger on in the memory as the ‘imitation of love’.Footnote 121 The inability to concretize the absolute therefore engenders a form of mourning that stretches into a contingent and unknown future. Pärt’s music attempts to counter ‘cold modern reason’ (the ashes of the absolute), creating a space for mourning in the immediate aftermath. Mourning here signifies a traumatic inability to reconstitute what is lost, and this inability, exemplified in the ‘eternal dualism’ (Pärt) of non-resolution in the composer’s ritualistic tintinnabulation technique, empowers the jouissance of Pärt’s topical absolute music.Footnote 122
This mourning, as the ‘imitation of love’ (Chua), is freighted in Pärt’s Cantus as what Bannister calls ‘a more promising revival of apophatic theology’.Footnote 123 Apophaticism situates the inadequateness of our own human apperception of God as a means to arrive at an awareness of his transcendent glory, but Bannister constructs it as an ‘affirmative blind spot’. This is in effect the default and necessary position created through Moore’s occlusion of the Twin Towers. Pärt’s music entrains the gaze of the listener/viewer searching through this occlusion, and later through the dust and ashes, for a form of recentring and meaning. It helps to understand the empty cross as a symbol of absence but not yet of the Resurrection — there is no hope afforded by Moore’s images or Pärt’s music here. The slow-motion aftermath prolongs a state of surprised awakening to an absolute that had been translated, as the Swiss theologian Hans Urs von Balthasar states, into terms that are ‘relative and transitory’ but that resist being fully constituted.Footnote 124
Moore’s cinematic frieze assimilates the topoi of Pärt’s music — bells, staticism, death, mourning, and indeed ritual — to iconize trauma in a way that is far from the composer’s ideal of the ‘neutral’.Footnote 125 Yet the use of Pärt’s music could arguably signal a ‘sublime’, as the Dutch intellectual historian Frank Ankersmit puts it, that ‘provokes a movement of de-realization by which reality is robbed of its threatening potentialities’, and that resonates with Begbie’s critique of Pärt’s disengagement from ‘realities […] on the streets’.Footnote 126 The sublime is not disembodied or made into sensible abstraction through the slow-motion falling papers — the Real is made more potent.Footnote 127 The descending lines of Cantus speak almost onomatopoeically for the papers falling from the sky, dust and documents that act as metaphors of falling people. These images certainly therefore instantiate and empower a fear that we might bring such images to life, as W. J. T. Mitchell opines, but they also signal an existential dread that such images register the erasure of human presence and the sacredness of personhood altogether.Footnote 128
Such a perspective was present at the inception of cinematic experience. In 1896 the writer Maxim Gorky enunciated the terror implicit in viewing silent film; he saw spectral figures in ‘the movement of shadows, only of shadows’.Footnote 129 If, as Christianity maintains, human beings are made in the likeness of God (the imago Dei), then Pärt’s music takes on the labour of mourning with the possibility of providing solace to those who remain. His music allows the living to mediate and appreciate finitude and, through Moore’s film, to understand the sacred through the essential human contingency taught by Christianity. Seen from below, then, these papers remind us of our own sense of physical transcendence: ‘For dust thou art, and unto dust shalt thou return’ (Genesis 3. 19).
Conclusion
This study has examined the way in which film and a topical form of absolute music reciprocally configure each other through a vision of the absolute implied in the events of 9/11. Moore’s film and Pärt’s music open a contingent space that allows an appreciation of what Steiner describes in Real Presences as a ‘deficit of spirit’.Footnote 130 While Messiaen’s music fills this space between humanity and the unknown human endgame with faith, Pärt leaves an ecstatic but excruciating gap, which Cantus and Moore’s film remind us of. After the death of Christ, ‘the word [that] became flesh’ (John 1. 14) became a repetition of ‘the word’.
Here we sense the appeal of Pärt’s music as a tabula rasa, but it only appears to be so, for, as I have shown, the music comes with topical meanings to fill this ‘gap’; they are both repurposed and absorbed into this section of Moore’s film. For modern, self-substantiating humanity, what the theologian Jane Shaw describes as a ‘religion outside religion’, or what the religious philosopher Richard Kearney has described as ‘God after God’, may seem attractive.Footnote 131 Such perspectives offer the possibility of abstraction from history and the sacred, from the implications, obligations, solace, and vision of human life that it brings. The destruction of the Twin Towers was a reminder of the presence of the sacred that underpins worldly activity. Yet this moment can be regarded as a ‘knot’ or momentary hiatus in the progress of globalization that subsequently unravelled with greater force.Footnote 132 It is not difficult to trace the re-emergence of the American master narrative post 9/11 through the need for security, neo-liberalism, the rise of the Christian right, and now (again) a burgeoning kleptocracy (an ideological perversion of the sacred) and an ecology founded in deficiency (and the desire and inability to overcome it). In this light, this ‘knot’ was a moment of the Real and the ‘breakthrough’ of the sacred into the present that would then be subject to a form of mediatized jouissance and post-traumatic amnesia.
Pärt’s music enables modern humanity to understand the sacred in the immediate aftermath, dilated through a topical absolute music; resistance to the full trauma of the sacred (as an ideal of sufficiency) and its binding (ligere in religio) enables humanity to understand its own contingent state. The topical meanings of this music fuel a desire for, but the inability to fully constitute, the absolute and the sacred. When Steiner situates humanity as living between Good Friday and Easter Sunday, the unacknowledged reality of his position is that humanity can only conceive of the sacred and the absolute as wish fulfilment.Footnote 133 As at the end of J. S. Bach’s Matthäus-Passion, BWV 244 (‘Wir setzen uns mit Tränen nieder’), for instance, there can be no knowledge of the Resurrection, but perhaps only a focus and resting place for the eyes in the empty cross and in the continual making of mourning as a form of consolation.Footnote 134
Moore’s Fahrenheit 9/11 realizes this mourning first through the occlusion of vision and then by an opening of the eyes onto the aftermath of the event through a topical absolute music. Bonds’s regulative ideal of absolute music and Dahlhaus’s objective descriptors of the absolute as ‘concept, object and purpose’ seem to obviate the possibility of absolute music becoming performative of a specific site of embodied, cognitive, ideological, temporal, and cultural knowledge.Footnote 135 But this is precisely what film does for absolute music. Moore’s film enables the sacral form of absolute music to become appreciable through film via the concepts of entelechy and energeia, to open the eyes of absolute music and the listener/viewer’s eyes to a vision of 9/11 as a staurological event. Through film and Pärt’s music, the aftermath of 9/11 (captured, reified, and aged in a celluloid vial) offers the listener/viewer an emergent insight into the post-Enlightenment sacred that can be configured as the Absolute God .
Pärt’s music acts in Moore’s film to retroactively condition the event by pointing towards this index, but it also resists the trauma of the Real. Moore’s film therefore provides a means by which absolute music can be understood as escaping its own intrinsic blindness, its monadic qualities (Adorno), and the way in which Pärt’s music and Moore’s images enable a space of mourning. For a brief moment, then, Moore’s film reveals this contingent possibility before he begins to construct his own black, traumatic political tale.
APPENDIX
It is interesting to consider other musical possibilities for Moore’s images. None of the following would lead to the same transference of ideas that occurs with Pärt’s music, and they would in some cases lead to radically different meanings. Some alternatives to Pärt’s Cantus might include Krzysztof Penderecki’s (1933–2020) Tren (Threnody to the Victim of Hiroshima) (1960), George Crumb’s (1929–2022) Black Angels (1970), the ‘Crucifixus’ of J. S. Bach’s B-minor Mass, Morten Lauridsen’s (1943–) Ave Maria (1997), ‘La mamma morta’ from Umberto Giordano’s Andrea Chénier (1896) (used in the film Philadelphia (1993)) (‘I bring sorrow to those who love me’), or the last two verses of Hermann Hesse’s (1877–1962) ‘Beim Schlafengehen’ [‘Going to Sleep’] as used in Richard Strauss’s Vier letzte Lieder (1948). All these examples might provide a loss of introspection, created by Pärt’s Cantus in Moore’s film, or another continuation, as the Orthodox theologian David Bentley Hart might have it, of modernity’s obsession with nihilism, which implies an active rejoicing in the negative and (pace Vattimo) an ‘indefinite process of reduction, diminution, weakening’ as a legacy of the Crucifixion.Footnote 136 There are also many examples of popular music, jazz, or electronica that could have been used, which might, like the Pärt, at first seem anempathetic but may have added significance and meaning to the images. The choice of Pärt’s Cantus provides a rich archaeology of specifically sacred meanings that are explored in the present study.
