OCTOBER 2019 | The Australian Women’s Weekly 163
Amazing Grace
Starring Aretha Franklin,
Rev James Cleveland.
Directed by Alan Elliott
and Sydney Pollack.Film
review
An intimate look at the making
of a legendary live album, plus
a provocative TV series.With KATE RODGERTHE HANDMAID’S TALE
SEASON 3 (13 EPISODES)
LIGHTBOXMUST WATCH
Starring Elisabeth Moss,
Yvonne Strahovski
The incredibly compelling
narrative of The Handmaid’s
Ta l e so far is not exactly
something you should binge
watch. Watch it, but do
so sparingly; one maybe
two episodes at a time.
Season 3 is no exception.
In this not-so-futuristic
fictional land of Gilead,
women are the property of
men and those capable of
childbearing are kept as
slaves to do just that for the
elite. Actress Elisabeth Moss
has a handful of awards for
her role as June Osborne
and she deserves more for
Season 3. Compared with
the previous seasons, this
is a slow burner, although
it’s just as grim, just as
shocking and incredibly
provocative. This is the
resistance, and finding allies
will be June’s biggest
challenge yet. I am here for
her, and you should be too.A
n 87-minute-long film featuring
Aretha Franklin front and centre
and barely a spoken word from
her. This is Aretha in all her
gifted magnificence, and my
spine is tingling just thinking about how
it felt to sit in a dark cinema and watch
her, listen to her sing gospel as I’ve never
heard it sung; transported back in time
for every single one of those minutes, as
if by the magic of her voice alone.
It’s January 1972. Aretha Franklin is
at the New Temple Missionary Baptist
Church in Los Angeles. The soul queen
is already a number-one-selling artist and
she’s about to record her next album live
over two days with the Southern California
Community Choir. It will be called Amazing
Grace and will become her biggest-selling
album and the greatest gospel record of all
time, winning the Grammy for Best Soul
Gospel Performance.
At the time, Warner Bros thought
to themselves, “This would make a
wonderful film. Let’s get our cameras into
that church.” Now, almost five decades
later, Amazing Grace the film is finally
being released. And what a journey.
Shot by Oscar-winning director and
producer Sydney Pollack, this concert film
was set for release around the same time as
the 1972 motion picture Super Fly, scored
by Curtis Mayfield, but it never happened.
Pollack with his multi-camera shoot didn’t
use a clapper board to sync sound at thebeginning of each take, so the end result
was 2000 pieces of film with up to 20
different starting points on each. In the
’70s, this was an audio-syncing nightmare
of such magnitude it meant the entire
project was shelved; the footage sent to
gather dust in the Warner Bros vaults.
Shortly before his death in 2008, Sydney
signed over the footage to producer Alan
Elliott. With modern technology at his
disposal, it still took Alan two years in the
edit booth to sync the sound and pictures.
The result is electrifying; a remarkable,
glorious, life-affirming musical time capsule
which must be experienced in a dark
cinema with the best sound you can find.
The voice of Aretha and her choir are
the heart and soul of the experience, but
one of the unexpected bonuses of the
troubled production is watching Aretha
unguarded and raw back through time;
the footage we see far more revealing than
what would likely have been the edit at the
time. We watch the performances as they
were shot and from so many different
angles, many with Pollack and his crew
scrambling around the church in and
out of shot, capturing everything in the
moment, and it adds a real urgency and
excitement to the film.
As the final credits rolled, I could quite
easily have sat for another 87 minutes. This
film is phenomenal on the big screen and
should not be missed.On screen
★★★★★