Director Cam Christiansen’s new documentary Echo of Everything will get its world premiere as part of the Hot Docs Film Festival in Toronto. After the premiere on April 29, there will be a second screening on May 5.
Music is a mysterious force that everyone feels, and no philosopher has explained….
Christiansen’s journey into the essence of music, and what it means to humanity, began as a personal one, and viewing the first few moments of the film, you’d be forgiven for assuming it was about to tell an individual’s story about working through grief.
But, that’s just the starting point for this imaginative and though provoking film, which journeys across the globe, and into the fields of science, history and sociology, and performance. Visually, it’s a striking film. He uses a kaleidoscope of elements, dance performance, archival material and animation, along with artistic dramatic segments performed by actor Andy Curtis. Interviews with people like Jules Evans, policy director at the Centre for the History of Emotions at Queen Mary, University of London, Brooklyn pianist/composer/coder Dan Tepfer, and social anthropologist Helene Neveu Kringelbach add context from various angles.
The film tackles big themes and ideas, from the dual nature of music to be both redemptive and violent, and the very nature of what it means to be human. Christiansen filmed the documentary during the pandemic in far-flung locations, including Spain, Senegal, Paris, New York, Minneapolis, Calgary and the UK. In each location, he looks at music and performance through a different lens.
The film took many turns before its final version emerged. “It evolved,” Christiansen says. “When I started this film, I was really just doing a very conventional documentary.” Cam comes from an animation background, including films he made with the NFB. “This film was totally new territory,” he says.
He began by interviewing scientists, and getting material on how music affects the brain. “About halfway through the film, I kind of had a crisis,” he says.
During a period of grieving, Cam was strongly moved by a friend’s musical performance around a backyard fire. That’s the spark that started his three-year journey, and the documentary that took him across the globe. “In real time, while he played this, my body understood all that stuff. Intellectually, it took me three years.”
Music was there to help him deal with his emotions, and it changed the direction of his film. “I was really trying to understand why music was so powerful for me. I realized at a certain point that if you put something you love and put it under a microscope, you get all these details you love, but is it really the answer?”
Certainly, science seems unable to explain the very real emotional effects of music on its listeners, even if it can measure it in certain ways. “Why does it give people this ecstatic thing?” he wondered. Feedback to his initial forays into the subject echoed his own observations. Emotional honesty is what connects with an audience, he notes, and emotional truth. Music, on the other hand, has a much deeper connection to humanity than the bare scientific observations. “It’s kind of pushing all these buttons that you really aren’t prepared for,” he says.
He reached out to Calgary actor Andy Curtis. He says he thought of an actor as someone who could bring out the human element of the story. “Actors are on the front line of the barrier between audience and performance,” he says. Andy advised him to add his own story to the mix.
“He convinced of that, but the big problem is that I didn’t want to go on camera,” Cam says. Hence, the idea of stylized dramatization over narrated segments that represent his story. Cam’s narration serves as a kind of guide through the more esoteric topics and explorations.
“I looked to scientists initially to look at what makes music so powerful,” Cam says. It was a Spanish poet, however, who brought out the real question he wanted to probe. “Poets distill life into these tiny little sentences,” he says.
In Spain, he came upon the ideas of poet Federico García Lorca, who wrote about the concept of duende in flamenco music. Audiences as well as performers can be swept up in this almost magical quality, which connects with human emotions in a way that goes well beyond technique and talent.
“I fell in love with him and the whole concept of duende.” He describes it as a kind of fickle demon spirit who can bestow ecstasy, or violence. Or, not appear at all, leaving a performance flat. “When it works, it’s so magical. Through that, I was finally getting to the core of what music is.”
The science is still in the film, mixed with ecstatic dancers from Senegal, and many more observations on the nature of music and its connection to emotions. Surrealistic imagery is used to capture its unconscious effects.
The film points out that early Christianity, until the Middle Ages or so, incorporated ecstatic dance. Medieval peasants participated in two-week long festivals of music, booze, and dance. Many religions, over the centuries, have recognized the potentially dangerous and uncontrollable nature of that ecstatic reaction to music. Our current, more Puritan ideas about music, art, and sex have come about much more recently.
The documentary screens on April 29 (World Premiere) and May 5 as part of Hot Docs. More information and tickets [HERE].
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