CELESTIAL BODIES

Grant them eternal rest, o Lord,
and may perpetual light shine upon them

Hear my prayer,
unto Thee shall all flesh come.

A vulture hovers against a blue sky as an imposing forte unison D announces itself like a musical monolith, introducing the 'Introït Et Kyrie' from Faure's Requiem in D Minor. This ominous opening musical statement is then softened by a prayerful sounding choir incanting their mass for the dead, symbolically mirrored by a kettle of circling vultures in a sort of cinematic synesthesia, like an apocalyptic, non-animated version of Disney's 'Fantasia'.

The sympathetic use of movement, whether it be towards its sentient subjects, architectural structures or the ever moving observance of the camera in accord with Faure's sublime music in Mat Collishaw's 'Sky Burial' video installation, is essential in creating a harmonious symbiosis between two art forms, that of music and that of image. A waterfall flows like a vale of tears, a slow, propulsive circling of a foreboding tower block as well as wide shots of nature as if seen by a bird, or by God, all add to this visual requiem.

I certainly haven't enjoyed the marriage of music and image as much as this since Don Boyd's 1987 Opera film anthology 'Aria' where Nic Roeg and Derek Jarman's contributions were particularly notable. According to an interview with Collishaw in 'Good On Paper' (Issue 109), it was the Russian conductor and enfant terrible of the classical music world, Theodor Currentzis, who asked the artist if he would be interested in making a film to accompany his own live performance of Faure's requiem.

Watching a screening of 'Sky Burial' on Sunday afternoon at the Stroud Goods Shed as part of the SITE Festival, I found it complimented, and in some ways enhanced, what I already loved about the original Faure composition, that most luxurious and ethereal of all requiems, by providing an extra dimension of gravitas (including flesh and blood) to what the composer himself had self-deprecatingly referred to as being composed 'for nothing ... for fun'.

Dear Sir and friend,

My Requiem was composed for nothing … for fun, if I may be permitted to say so!
It was first performed at La Madeleine for the funeral of some parishioner or other around 1890. That’s all I can tell you!

Yours sincerely

Gabriel Fauré.

Collishaw's interpretation of Faure's requiem using the concept of a 'Sky Burial' as its structure is brilliantly effective, drawing on both the ritual practice of Tibetan Buddhists and Zoroastrians in disposing of the dead in accordance with their respective belief systems.

“The vulture’s mystical eye is believed to aid the soul’s cosmic transition, and offering one’s deceased body to the birds is regarded as the devout Zoroastrian’s ultimate act of charity.” - Shirin (a Karachi Parsi) from The Guardian (4th May, 2024)

Since time immemorial, Parsi communities have prepared the bodies of their dead on 'towers of silence' - structures otherwise known as Dakma where corpses are laid out on circular monuments with no direct connection to the earth and where they are finally then consumed by vultures. Tibetans also carry out similar sky or celestial burials for their dead which carry both a dual spiritual and practical function. Because of a pragmatism about the transient vehicle that is the human body, they believe that by destroying the carcass to become food for birds, it harmoniously recycles and does very little to disturb the land which is typically too cold in their climate to easily dig up for burials. It is also a belief of the Tibetans that in order to have an effective transition into the next life, it is far better to leave no trace of the mortal body behind. My late father (who was a Buddhist) often joked about having a sky burial himself but speculated it might be hard to get it approved by the local town council (not that that would have stopped him).

Of course, in the West we're often a little squeamish about such raw approaches to dealing with the practical matter of death. Nevertheless, since the 18th Century our love of requiems suggests that music, at least, allows us to confront some part of the reality of what faces us more easily than what we might regard as the grisly burial practices of the Zoroastrians and Tibetans. This is what makes Collishaw's 'Sky Burial' so fascinating in that it marries both Eastern tradition with Western classical music and finds a sort of sublime commonality in their union.

There is also something unerringly compelling about applying an art video approach to such epic music. It is the reason why the monolith scene in Stanley Kubrick's '2001: A Space Odyssey', accompanied by Strauss's 'Also Sprach Zarathustra', is so iconic as well as the helicopter attack scene set to Wagner's 'Ride Of The Valkyries' in Coppola's 'Apocalypse Now'. Collishaw appears to bring an inherent cinematic understanding to his 'Sky Burial' as well as demonstrating a profound empathy with Faure's music which may have something to do with the artist being raised in a Christadelphian household.

Circling a Kieslowskian-looking tower block (a visual metaphor for the constriction of the human bodies we inhabit?) we observe through various grimy windows (each framed like individual art works) group portraits like domestic 'pietàs' where either an elderly man or woman is dying, surrounded by their immediate family in claustrophobic apartments. As the camera tracks each time toward the deathly-looking individuals, Collishaw then hard cuts to beautiful wide shots of earth's most heavenly environments which one assumes are the dying subjects' own glimpses of heaven as they imagine it from their human experience.

Holy, holy, holy, Lord God of Sabaoth
heaven and earth are full of Thy glory

The beautifully composed high angle tracking shots of nature in 'Sky Burial' brought to mind Stanley Kubrick's sweeping helicopter shots for 'The Shining' (1980) title sequence as well as the serene elemental beauty of director Terrence Malick's work with such films of his as 'The Thin Red line', 'The Tree Of Life' and 'The New World'. Perhaps it's no coincidence that Malick also used Faure's requiem at the beginning of 'The Thin Red Line' where his deft deployment of 'In Paradisium' matches perfectly with his evocation of a hidden paradise on earth somewhere in the South Pacific Islands where Private Witt has escaped from the army.

When, finally in 'Sky Burial', all of the dying subjects have deceased, they are carried to the roof of the apartment block where vultures, that appear like feathered angels of death ('vultyries'), swoop down to feast on their butchered bodies. If this sounds unremittingly grim, I found it to be perfectly integral to the overall concept.

After the bodies of the dead have been devoured and the vultures fly away, we return to divine nature and the beauty of our planet in what appeared to be a sort of Malickian homage to Kubrick's closing scene of '2001 : A Space Odyssey' except there is no star child in frame.

Just our own celestial observance of totality.