inaugural post

After three years of my laboring on it in isolation and obscurity, this movie is finally getting enough action in the wider world that I'm feeling the urge to blog about its progress. Particularly because of the twin absurdities that book-ended the day.

A brief history: I began the project in the spring of 2003 after hearing a recording of "Apparition of the Eternal Church" for the first time (Olivier Latry's 2002 recording on Deutsche Grammophon of the complete works played at Notre Dame). Listening to the piece then--precisely three years ago, because it was James's birthday weekend and we were spending the night at Sierra Hot Springs--I felt the succession of ascending chord clusters alternating with the flat planes of open intervals as a stairway to heaven that I was being forced in a rapture to climb. Each massive step upward, louder and higher, sent a new, stronger wave of chills through my body and when all the alternation of dissonance and emptiness yielded to the massive, seemingly endless, blinding white light of the C major climax in the middle of the piece, I thought I would turn into a pillar of salt. My next thought was I have to play this for Albert Fuller.

So I played it for Albert, and videotaped his response, and then I played it for Manoel, and Eisa, and John Mitchell, and now I've played it for well over 100 people and edited down the responses of 31 of them into the movie now gaining a toehold on the fringes of the festival circuit. I'm sparing you a lot of iMovie and Final Cut Pro bloodshed. Suffice it to say I learned on the job.

Once I had a forty-minute movie, I had the good luck and pleasure of meeting Michael Warner at a spring gathering of the Radical Faeries last year. After I interviewed him and his boyfriend Sean Belman, they hosted a screening of the movie at their Chelsea loft, where I interviewd a few others. Then I started submitting it to festivals. About a dozen rejections later, I was approaching the hopelessness zones of demoralization when I got email from the Asheville Film Festival, the one that didn't say the dreaded "thank you" in the subject header, but said "Congratulations."

The Asheville screening, in late October, went fine. They programmed it for four in the afternoon on the first day of the festival, a Thursday, but this turned out to be a scheduling blessing in disguise because unlike movies that showed on Saturday night, while there were four movies and two events going on at the same time, mine had no competition and got a respectable 70-person, very receptive crowd.

After another round of interviews in New York right after Asheville, I re-edited the film and in December submitted it to forty more festivals. Forty. Four-oh. Anyone familiar with the process knows how time-consuming and shockingly expensive that is. In January, the rejection emails started coming. They continued through February. I'm not the most mentally well person to begin with, and have a particularly difficult time keeping it together when it comes to rejection of any kind, much less daily repudiation of my artistic vision and craft. So I comforted myself with vivid, glorious fantasies of taking my computer and the external hard drive and all the MiniDV tapes and DVDs and videocameras and mikes and flinging them and myself after them with great relish off the Golden Gate Bridge, but then I thought how badly that would pollute the bay and I decided I would live and endure the remaining two dozen rejections that were still outstanding.

Then I got an acceptance, from the Echotrope experimental art series at the University of Nebraska at Omaha. Nebraska. Why was it, I wondered, that my half queer and vaguely sacrilegious movie was only playing in the Bible Belt, in states that voted for the "president" by double-digit margins in both elections? I was troubled by this, but when you're as desperate and depressed a filmmaker as I was in the dead of this past winter, you'll screen your movie in Myanmar if they ask (they haven't).

Then, in a matter of days, the movie got picked up by festivals in Aarhus, Denmark's second largest city (I'll have you know); in Indianapolis (Red State #3!); and in Santa Cruz. Granted, it's not Sundance, Telluride and Tribeca, but it's something, and I prayed as hard as a secular Jewish-Italian atheist can pray for exactly that: something. Anything. So I was happy, and that's putting it mildly. I still am.

Then, today, James's birthday. Our plans to go out of town fell through before noon after a difficult telephone call. Then email popped into my box from Echotrope (Nebraska!) informing me that my screening, scheduled for this evening, was being put off until autumn because they hadn't gotten around to promoting it and they wanted to assure it the audience it deserved. Hey, no problem--it will keep my screenings page fresh through the fall.

Another recent development, which leads me to the day's other absurdity (I'm getting there, I'm working on it) is the Web site I just linked to in the last sentence. I could never figure out how to use Dreamweaver, and it was only when Manoel's fans started quizzing him about this movie he was supposedly in, and he asked me if there were a Web site he could point them to, and there wasn't, that I was shamed into spending four all-nighters of brute-force application learning and Web authoring that produced the handsome brochureware otherwise known as apparitionfilm.com.

Now the most important question for a new site is whether and when Google notices, and therefore confers upon it, its existence. So before James and I went out for his (disaster-prone) birthday dinner, I asked him to search on "Paul Festa" and "Apparition" and see what came up. The Web site didn't, but one unfamiliar result did:

Films on Music Subjects
Apparition of the Eternal Church 57:13m Dir: Paul Festa What if music were visible? In their collective hallucination under the influence of Olivier ...
www.parkcityfilmmusicfestival.org/MusicDocs.html - 9k - Cached - Similar pages

Park City Film Music Festival dot org? Red State #4? I remembered submitting my movie to these guys but I'd never heard back from them. I assumed it was one of those places that (rudely, and that means you, Silver Lake) only notifies in case of acceptances. Actually, that's not true--I'd completely forgotten about Park City. And they'd taken the movie. And they'd screened it, on Saturday, January 28, at the curiously precise time of 4:14 PM, in Room 1, “The Blue Room.” And I didn't know a fucking thing about it.

So cheered, befuddled, and annoyed by this news, we went to James's disaster-prone birthday dinner (we waited an hour at our favorite sushi restaurant for our big plate of nigiri, and they started closing up before we realized they'd completely forgotten about it and us). When we came back here after our meager dinner, I started nosing around the Park City festival site, wondering what I'd missed and double-checking to see if it hadn't won any prizes. I chastised myself for having such a vain thought--my movie is "little," "no-budget," "out-there," "experimental," "technically challenged"--it's not a prize-winner.

In fact, it won Gold Medal for Excellence - Director's Choice for Best Film Musical, Performance Film or Experimental Film.

All I can say is that my little movie had a much better time in January than I did.