Samuel Barber: Absolute Beauty
Known for his mournful "Adagio for Strings," Samuel Barber was never quite fashionable. This acclaimed film is a probing exploration of his music and melancholia. Performance, oral history, musicology, and biography combine to explore the life and music of one of America’s greatest composers. Featuring Thomas Hampson, Leonard Slatkin, Marin Alsop and many more of the world's leading experts on Barber's music, with tributes from composers Leonard Bernstein, Aaron Copland, Virgil Thomson and William Schuman.
The Philadelphia Inquirer acclaimed the film's "great visual polish," adding that the "extremely impressive array of...so much visual evidence is astounding." Composition:Today called it a "remarkable success that rewrites the rules of documentary filmmaking," and MusicWeb International wrote: "This lavishly illustrated documentary...proclaims the meticulous labour, inspiration and persuasive powers of H. Paul Moon and his subject: the life and music of Samuel Barber. This a bejewelled production…that steers a rewarding course between moving things along yet staying still long enough to inform, surprise and please."
"Samuel Barber: Absolute Beauty" has screened in several film festivals worldwide, and received its limited broadcast premiere on WHYY-TV (Philadelphia PBS) on July 15, 2017.
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H. Paul MoonDirector
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Barbara HeymanConsulting Producer
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Pierre BrévignonConsulting Producer
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Thomas HampsonKey Cast
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Leonard SlatkinKey Cast
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Marin AlsopKey Cast
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John CoriglianoKey Cast
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Samuel BarberComposer
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Project Type:Documentary
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Genres:Classical Music, Biography
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Runtime:1 hour 42 minutes
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Completion Date:March 23, 2017
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Production Budget:50,000 USD
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Country of Origin:United States
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Country of Filming:France, United States
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Language:English, Samoan
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Shooting Format:Digital
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Aspect Ratio:16:9
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Film Color:Color
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First-time Filmmaker:No
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Student Project:No
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SEE THE SOUND Film FestivalCologne
Germany
August 27, 2016
World Premiere
Official Selection -
Muvi International Music Film FestivalLisbon
Portugal
December 3, 2016
Portugal Premiere
Official Selection -
Classical Arts Film FestivalNapa, California
United States
February 10, 2017
North American Premiere
Official Selection -
The Phillips CollectionWashington, D.C.
United States
March 23, 2017
East Coast Premiere
Official Selection -
Frederick Film FestivalFrederick, Maryland
United States
June 25, 2017
Maryland Premiere
Official Selection -
WHYY-TV (PBS)Philadelphia, Pennsylvania
United States
July 15, 2017
World Broadcast Premiere
Official Selection -
Eau Claire World Film FestivalEau Claire, Wisconsin
United States
October 1, 2017
Wisconsin Premiere
Official Selection -
Queen City Film FestivalCumberland, Maryland
United States
October 8, 2017
Cumberland Premiere
Best Music Film -
Royal Starr Film FestivalRoyal Oak, Michigan
United States
October 14, 2017
Michigan Premiere
Best Director -
Cape Town International Film FestivalCape Town
South Africa
October 21, 2017
Africa Premiere
Official Selection -
Plebeian International Film FestivalSan Diego, California
United States
November 5, 2017
Southern California Premiere
Best Documentary Feature -
ReadingFilmFESTReading, Pennsylvania
United States
November 3, 2018
Pennsylvania
Official Selection -
Nederland Film FestivalNederland, Colorado
United States
November 18, 2018
Colorado Premiere
Official Selection -
Festival of Time Des HistoiresEdmonton, Alberta
Canada
January 5, 2019
Canada Premiere
Official Selection -
KETC-TV (PBS)St. Louis, Missouri
United States
February 24, 2019
Midwest Broadcast Premiere
H. Paul Moon (zenviolence.com) is a filmmaker based in Washington, D.C. focusing on music and visual art profiles. He also creates experimental films of cities, landscapes and contemporary dance. He teaches documentary editing at George Mason University, and manages a network of online communities at focuspulling.com that keeps pace with new camera technologies. His body of work includes short and feature-length documentaries, dance films, and experimental cinema, regularly featured at film festivals worldwide. He worked as a small camera specialist for a Paramount feature film starring Will Ferrell and Mark Wahlberg, and as cinematographer for director Josephine Decker’s film in "collective:unconscious" that debuted at the South by Southwest Festival. Recent films include "Sitka: A Piano Documentary" (sitkadoc.com) about the craftsmanship of Steinway pianos, and "Quartet for the End of Time" (quatuor.xyz) about Olivier Messiaen’s transcendent composition, that premiered on the commemorative date and at the place where the imprisoned composer debuted his work. Moon's latest film, a feature-length documentary about the life and music of American composer Samuel Barber (samuelbarberfilm.com), recently premiered on PBS, and he is currently finishing another documentary feature about Western folklife, cowboy poetry, and the American frontier (westdocumentary.com).
Samuel Barber has always been my favorite composer. It starts there, but the bigger reason for this film is to make up for neglect. Independent cinema has a scarcity of documentaries about classical music, and the audience’s hunger for them is underestimated. Also, Barber’s oeuvre has been overshadowed by his Adagio for Strings, popularized widely by Oliver Stone’s relentless use of it in Platoon. The Adagio has also served as a memorial work at historic moments of grieving, from the deaths of FDR and JFK, to the tragedy of 9/11. But Barber wrote so much more, ranging from innocence to violence. Thinking about his whole life and music, major 20th Century themes converge: loss of faith, modernism battling emotionality and tradition in music, and a gay underground of classical musicians and composers whose sexuality could never attach to their public identities.
Documentaries about popular music can be accused of navel-gazing, but when we immerse into a performance of classical music, it is usually formal and from a distance. My artistic objective firstly was to celebrate the physicality of classical musicians when they perform the music of Barber. Meticulous, complex, and absorbed into the melancholy, a great performance communicates more than words. Resisting a narrator, I structured the film from Barber’s opuses in strict chronological order, finding biographical clues in the music to tell the story of his life in a non-linear narrative. While committing mainly to be a work of art, this film’s core is research and biographical accuracy, up to the standards of academic dissertation. Barber’s family estate, his biographers, his alma mater, and his famous advocates, have been enthusiastic supporters of the project. Now that it’s ready, I invite you to join this first-ever documentary celebration of the life and music of Samuel Barber.