Events

Film: The Greater Circulation

Antero Alli, filmmaker

Friday, September 20, 7:30pm, $10 at the door
Filmmaker will be at the event

In The Greater Circulation we are enchanted and indeed haunted, not only by the profound trajectory of Rilke's life and work, but also by Alli's ability to tell stories within stories, to make the invisible visible, and to bring to earth what can only be truly grasped through spiritual vision. 
—Cedrus Monte, PhD, Jungian analyst, Zurich Switzerland

I have been living with Rilke's epic lament,“Requiem For a Friend” since 1990 when I adapted it as an experimental theatre work.  My 2005 film, The Greater Circulation, celebrates the fruition of my efforts to give Rilke's great work in a more textured narrative expression through the context of the poet's dreams. —Antero Alli

Over three fever-dream nights in the Hotel Biron, Paris 1908, poet Rainer Maria Rilke is visited by the ghost of his good friend, artist Paula Modersohn-Becker, who died shortly after birthing her first child. Grief-stricken, Rilke transforms his suffering into an epic lament, “Requiem for a Friend,” addressing the central drama of all women at the crossroads between art and motherhood. Meanwhile, a hundred years later, in Berkeley California, three women prepare to stage Rilke's “Requiem” as avant garde theatre in this multi-tiered story of love, death, and dream as a source of poetic inspiration. (2005; 93 min. USA)

… a deep, provocative and often disturbing drama which poses questions of love, art, mortality and grief with the grace and majesty of Rilke’s work. The poet himself figures in the film via flashbacks which recreate the physical and emotional circumstances behind “Requiem for a Friend.”
—Phil Hall (5 stars) filmthreat.com

Watch a 3-min. excerpt
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lLrM3ms2-Sg

The movie site (credits, pix, reviews)
http://www.verticalpool.com/tgc1.html

Antero Alli, filmography
http://www.verticalpool.com/filmography.html