The Sound of the Bells
(O som dos sinos)
Brazil, 2017, DCP, color, 70 min.
Portuguese with English subtitles.
DCP source: Documentary Educational Resources
Helping to preserve a sonorous language that is steadily disappearing, this film is part of a larger multimedia project exploring the tradition of church bell ringing throughout cities in the state of Minas Gerais, Brazil. In its tender, drifting exploration of the art and meaning of the bells, the film patiently reveals the quieter, inconspicuous details and tangential stories of those within resonant range. This percussive melody swells and reverberates outward, conversing with the environment and culture of a region shaped by the richness of both its religion and its mineral deposits. As the disaffected din of capitalism and mining takes a different kind of toll, the bell ringers’ descriptions of the significance of minute differentiations in the types of rings do sound like echoes from another time that have somehow survived—assiduous markers of danger, euphoria, reverence and loss.
PRECEDED BY
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Buckdancer
Directed by Bess Lomax Hawes.
US, 1965, digital video, black & white, 6 min.
A folklore film in the romanticized, half-staged style of Robert Flaherty, Buckdancer features Mississippi fife player Ed Young discussing and then playing his instrument. His music and dance are accompanied—thanks to Hawes and co-producer Edmund Carpenter—by the Georgia Sea Island Singers, who happened to be in Los Angeles, where the film was made.