In the center sits a white-haired man gazing intently out at the harlequins, his chin buried in his hand like Rodin’s Thinker. On the far right, the cradled impartial snout of a Sony a7siii camera eavesdrops. On the far left, a woman reclines in her chair, pinky to chin, coolly appraising the bespectacled, anguished man kneeling a few feet away. He’s gripping the back of a chair, looking down at the floor at something obscured from view by a table on which glittering glassware and the remains of an Italian meal float on a tablecloth whose pristine whiteness is blemished by the pale stain of a spilt glass of red wine.
What Unseen Thing is he looking for? Why is he distraught? Standing behind and to the right of the Thinker, like a trio of angels in a Renaissance painting, two women flank a bearded man, their faces compassionate, filled with love as they witness from above the man’s distress. Between them and the kneeling man, seated at the table with the Thinker, a phlegmatic balding man presents his back to the kneeler; he looks purposefully towards the woman across the table from him who stares at the kneeling man with lips drawn in a line of what appears to be puzzled discomfort. Behind her sits a white-haired, bearded man in a tweed jacket who observes the scene with one hand set on the rail beside him as though about to strike a chord.
To his left a bald man and his wife share an unobstructed view of the cause of the kneeling man’s distress. She holds her menu and smiles sadly, gently, ruefully; he regards the kneeling man with the same seeming precognition and warm, clinical detachment a doctor does his patients. Someone with a bob of straight blonde hair entirely unaware of the scene unfolding behind her is seated very close to our point of view: her nearness causes our gaze to bounce to the mysterious blond woman furthest from us, standing directly behind and slightly to the left of the Thinker.
She is the last person we notice but in her familiar yet remote, otherworldly demeanor and in the placement of her hands she reveals the key to reading the tableaux: her hands are folded, indicating, as they do on Victorian gravestones, the relationship between the person who has died, and the loved ones left behind. She symbolizes loss, but also reunion in the next life.
The composition of this frame and the fact that it, like all the wide shots in 9/10: Love Before the Fall, can be read similarly, is a manifestation of how the thing was made. It was storyboarded, of course; so, when I blocked it I knew where people would be arrayed in the tableaus, what the cameras would see. But the magic emerged from knowingly taking the risk of placing specific audience members with varying degrees of comfort with live performance in a situation where they would be pulled between their spontaneous human response to guerilla theater and their knowledge that they would be captured on film. Beforehand, in my role as director, I gave them only the most rudimentary set of instructions about how to behave: “Don’t look at the cameras,” I advised them. “Feel free to eavesdrop but be discrete as you would in real life. Enjoy your meal.”
I only obliquely revealed to the extras (who, after having gone through the process, earned the sobriquet “Anime al Passaggio”) that the violinist was Charon, the bartender was Orpheus, the restaurant the bardo, and that the four singing characters would ultimately be called upon to confront their feelings about death: I wanted to capture each diner’s unpremeditated anxiety as they realized that they were not only witnessing, but party to, a tragedy.
I knew that, whatever their unscripted responses, I would protect them, the principle singers, and the narrative through compassionate editing. Over the course of nine months I memorized what each of the four stationary cameras, and what cinematographer had captured with his handheld camera. I was taught some hard truths during that time about how my work and the situation affected each person in the room.
That’s why the picture above is worth reading carefully. I will never be able to effectively describe how it felt to be in that restaurant, witnessing from within (I was the old gent in the tweed jacket) those fiercely committed actors live those difficult roles in real time before not just the souls in the room but the cameras. I will never have the language to describe how it felt to serve as author, director, and editor. I can attest only that the entire creative family built, with bravery, honesty, and commitment, the piece from the ground up. I will never be able to thank them all enough. We knew that the story we were telling was about four relatively ordinary New Yorkers out on the town on a night that we now see in retrospect was an epochal inflection point.
Each actor, each crew member, each production team member, everyone, gave their best knowing that that our project was a humble offering not only of remembrance, but a prayer for peace and an exhortation to love. For what the kneeling man in the tableau was looking for was incorporeal—evidence of that which cannot be seen. All four characters were striving, within the magic realist context in which they were placed, to connect with one another. They were searching for faith. It was what the kneeling man was looking for, and what he reconnected with as, moments later, he threw himself into his lover’s arms and, with his comrades, walked into what would come next.
“Even if we cannot remember the question,” I told the cast before the shoot, “we know that the answer must unequivocally be love, or we are doomed.” These thousand words about a picture are dedicated to everyone who helped bring 9/10: Love Before the Fall to life.