Opera Meets Film: Peter Sellars’ ‘this body is so impermanent’
Peter Sellars warned the crowd gathered in the Rubin Museum on a recent Friday night that the film would be long. “It’s only an hour and fifteen minutes,” he said. “But the beginning feels like several lifetimes.”
At first, the caution was unnecessary. “this body is so impermanent,” a new film Sellars directed at the height of the pandemic, explores health and illness through the “Vimalakirta Sutra,” a foundational Buddhist text. Opening in a rush of sensation, “this body” stirs the senses with scenes of nature, water gushing over rocks, and raven-black calligraphy ink scraped in a bowl, with a fast cut to a delightfully hexagonal, sunlit window. A man lays in bed but quietly.
This post is an excerpt. Read the full article on the Opera Wire website.
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