Sydney Pollack, Alan Elliott (2018)

In January 1972, Aretha Franklin recorded Amazing Grace, an album of live gospel music, at the New Temple Missionary Baptist Church in Los Angeles.  Warner Bros engaged Sydney Pollack, who was soon to start shooting The Way We Were, to make a film of the recording.  The movie didn’t materialise:  according to Wikipedia, Pollack ‘had not used a clapperboard to synchronize the picture and sound at the beginning of each take’.  The footage, consigned to the Warner Bros vault, was acquired in 2007 (the year before Pollack’s death) by producer Alan Elliott, who worked successfully to sync sound and image.  Elliott planned to release the film in 2011 but Aretha Franklin sued him for ‘appropriating her likeness without permission’.  He tried again and she sued again four years later.  After Franklin’s death in August 2018, her family agreed to the film’s release.  Forty-seven years on, it’s seeing the light of day.

This note is going be sacrilegious and not because the album was recorded in a church.  The first time I heard Aretha Franklin was when ‘I Say a Little Prayer’ was a hit in the British singles chart – in the second half of 1968, when I was twelve.  I loved the song all the way through until the high-volume repetition of ‘Answer my prayer’ near the end.  I thought that spoiled things a bit.  It’s still the same today whenever I hear the number – a reaction that, I now know, illustrates a vast musical prejudice.  I don’t like virtuoso voices that (as it seems to me) overwhelm the song they’re singing.  I wish they’d just stick to the nice tune.  This is an especially ludicrous response to certain kinds of vocal music – among them jazz, R&B and gospel.  But I’m not going to develop a more intelligent ear now.  I went to Amazing Grace knowing I wouldn’t enjoy what I heard but that I ought to.  The pressure to enjoy made itself felt in a surprising way.

The recording of the album took place in two sessions, on consecutive evenings.  Franklin was accompanied by the Southern California Community Choir, conducted by Alexander Hamilton, and three musicians – bass guitarist Chuck Rainey, drummer Bernard Purdie and the versatile Reverend James Cleveland.  He plays piano, occasionally sings and acts as master of ceremonies.  An ordained Baptist minister, Cleveland was already a big name in the popularisation of the modern gospel sound.  At the start of proceedings, he enjoins the audience to engage with the music but to remember they’re in church.  The spirit (gin?) moved a couple in the audience at Curzon Richmond to give voice throughout Amazing Grace, forgetting they were in a cinema.  About halfway through the film, a woman a row or two ahead bravely and politely asked the pair to keep their voices down.  They nodded contrite assent but didn’t quieten much.  When the brave woman disappeared to the ladies for a minute, their normal volume was restored.  The talkers were just a few seats away from mine.  It should have been me who asked them to stop but I didn’t, not only because I’m a coward but also because the annoying prattle made me unusually grateful for Aretha Franklin’s enormous sound, which drowned them out.

The film has been greeted by reviewers with near-universal enthusiasm.  Donald Clarke in the Irish Times praises it as ‘one of the greatest concert films ever’.  This fairly typical term of acclaim goes to show that the merits of a concert film have next to nothing to do with film-making, everything to do with musical content.  Very many people consider Aretha Franklin an all-time great; I can’t appreciate her as they do but I get that, for those who love her music, she confers greatness on Sydney Pollack’s footage.  The recording itself is formally unimaginative – it’s the expected combination of close-ups of the star in the intense heat of performance, audience reactions, regular shots of the choir and supporting musicians.  Perhaps showcasing an extraordinary talent is all a director of this kind of material should be doing but, in that case, ‘concert film’ seems a misnomer – ‘filmed concert performance’, more like.

Richard Brody in the New Yorker calls Amazing Grace ‘a triumph of timeless artistry over transitory obstacles; its very existence is a secular miracle’.  Brody’s characteristic hyperbole would be easier to take if this excavation had given posterity a performance that didn’t exist in any other form.  Since the album of Amazing Grace has always been available, that’s obviously not the case, and other recordings of Franklin performing live aren’t exactly thin on the ground.  More important, the phrase ‘secular miracle’ points up another difficulty I have with the film and the critical response to it.   The origins of black gospel music in African-American slave communities give it a cultural and moral gravitas that transcends its religious basis.  That suits modern-day educated liberal sensibilities very well.  It allows a blind eye to be turned to the otherwise embarrassing Christian aspect of gospel (although I doubt Richard Brody would have used the word ‘miracle’ if Franklin had been recording an R&B rather than a gospel album).

Yet the performers in this film believe what they’re singing.  At one point, Aretha Franklin ad-libs ‘I’m so glad I got religion!’  A cut to James Cleveland during her rendition of the title track makes powerfully clear what it means to him spiritually.  The songs also include ‘What a Friend We Have in Jesus’, whose sentimental lyrics are, for me, sticky whether white or black people are voicing them.  It worries me that white audiences who embrace the music of this film without finding its childish aspect at all tricky are indulging a kind of inadvertent racial discrimination.  They think it’s fine for black gospel to have a simple-minded side because it’s an African-American art form.

The bits of the film I found most engaging were the shots of Aretha Franklin preparing for or between songs – quiet, professional, appealingly un-diva-ish.  The worst part was the title song, which comes late on the first night of recording.  James Cleveland, after telling the audience the number ‘needs no introduction’, proceeds to give it a long one.  Then the famous hymn proceeds, at a rate of what seems like a line a minute.  (It runs 10 minutes 45 seconds, according to the album’s track listing on Wikipedia.)  It needed an audience member on the second night – a young white man standing at the back of the church – to make me realise how much worse things could have been.   It’s Mick Jagger and Sydney Pollack’s camera finds its way towards him too often, as if hungry for someone famous to recognise (someone white, at that).  I was glad of this, though.  Mick Jagger kept reminding me that watching a Rolling Stones performance would be far more punitive than Amazing Grace.

23 May 2019