Sofia Bohdanowicz has always been a filmmaker unafraid to mine the uncomfortable depths of her own, and her family’s, history. Across 10 years of shorts and features, her intimate portraits of Audrey Benac, an alter-ego of sorts portrayed in each film by Deragh Campbell, have revealed a filmmaker of immense emotional intelligence. Bohdanowicz’s films give concrete reality to abstractions, like grief, frustration, and isolation, without ever losing the mystery of their forms. In their newest film, Measures for a Funeral, Bohdanowicz and Campell take the once intimate scale of their collaborations and blow it up to global proportions to tell the story of the once-forgotten Canadian violinist Kathleen Parlow, whose connections to Bohdanowicz’s own family history represents something of a climax in the story of Audrey Benac.
In some ways, Measures for a Funeral is a major departure from Bohdanowicz’s previous work. But admirers of her deft manipulation of the tethers between the past and the present, and her insight into the ways art allows us to tip-toe across them, will feel immediately welcome, despite the markedly different packaging.
It was a pleasure to catch up with Bohdanowicz after the film’s poignant World Premiere at the Toronto International Film Festival. We discussed everything from our admiration of Deragh Campbell to the grievous loss of orchestral performance as a viable occupation to the many sources of inspiration that guided this portrait of a woman unmoored from her own life.
Chris Cassingham: As someone who played violin for eight years, I need some assurance that that was a prop violin that you cremated, because it made my heart stop.
Sofia Bohdanowicz: [laughs] Definitely. I’ve gotten a lot of emails and also folks coming up to me at the end of the screening asking if it was a real violin, and I really love the reaction to that sequence. I love that folks were able to suspend their disbelief, and that that sequence was as effective as we intended. We did get a prop violin for that, but the violin that Audrey has throughout the film was actually provided by Rick Heinl of Heinl & Co., whose father actually knew Kathleen Parlow. But I think the gesture of Audrey burning the violin in the film was important for us to experiment with.
CC: When I was big enough for a full-size violin as a teenager I got a fairly old one, and I remember feeling that added pressure of taking care of it.
SB: It’s really great that you understand the preciousness of the object and that the reaction was so visceral. I think it was important for us to go there to talk a little bit about how Audrey is literally this instrument of retribution. She’s there as a tragic heroine to set things straight, and it seems as though this object was something that caused a great amount of pain for her mother in her life. So, with the reality being explored, what could Audrey’s mother’s life have looked like had Audrey not been born? Or, what does the violin do, ultimately? Is the mother’s death ultimately avenged as if Audrey actually burned the violin, or is it a fantasy?
And a very interesting fact is that we actually did burn the violin in a cremation oven. We did it in Oslo on the last day of our shoot because we couldn’t find any places in Toronto that were actually open to it. We had been carrying several violins around: two that were of lesser value; one from Rick Heinl that resembled a Guarnerius del Gesù that had a low value, that was decent, that we use as a prop; and then also my cousin’s violin. And right before we put the violin in the oven, because I was so tired and delusional, for a moment I freaked out and thought it was my cousin’s. But going back to your reaction, it is a very painful image to watch, even with a violin that’s cheaper and poorly constructed. It really hurts, but maybe that was the same amount or a similar kind of pain that Audrey’s mother carried. I think it’s important for the audience to feel that in some way.
CC: You mentioned the preciousness of objects, and that’s such a resonant theme throughout this film, and really all your films. And while I was watching Measures I was really curious about what it means to lose and rediscover a concerto, and its relation to, for instance, a lost film. In some ways, you have to go through similar processes to revive them. The orchestra is the projector for a lost concerto, and this lost concerto, as this piece of music written down on paper, is the reel of film.
SB: That’s a beautiful metaphor.
CC: Can you talk a little bit about your awareness of the Halverson Concerto, Opus 28, at the time it was rediscovered? Did it have a legend in your own life compared to its public perception?
SB: That’s a fantastic question, and I feel like the metaphor really stands, because it’s as Melanie [Melanie Scheiner] says in the film: the instruction still exists, and maybe you can actually put this thing into motion. But in some ways it’s a little different than a film reel or a lost recording that’s found and restored, because you actually need players in place to resurrect and reanimate it; therefore, it kind of becomes this very interesting experiment, which is what I see the film as. But Opus 28 actually wasn’t at all in my purview as a child. Kathleen Parlow was, she was very much known to me as the legend and incredible artist and human being who mentored my grandfather, who had a very interesting career and was able to raise four children on a violinist salary.
CC: It’s hard to imagine that being a possibility today.
SB: No, it’s not possible!
CC: I always think of this fact of life whenever I watch a film from the mid-20th century — I thought about it last night when I rewatched Gentlemen Prefer Blondes for the millionth time — that you could make a living being, like, a second violin in the 20th Century Fox orchestra back then.
SB: My grandmother still gets royalty checks from the soundtrack of Moonstruck because my grandfather played on that soundtrack.
CC: That’s amazing.
SB: It’s so funny! But we don’t have the same appreciation for artistry now, nor are we paying people enough for their skills and talents. And it certainly was disintegrating in Kathleen Parlow’s time.
Coming back to the concerto, it was discovered in the University of Toronto archive in 2016, and it was my uncle, actually, who pointed me to a Toronto Star article about the discovery. There was something inside of me, intuitively, that was so excited by it, and I was really hoping that the Toronto Symphony might perform it. And then I think about six to eight months passed, and it didn’t seem like anything was really happening, so I decided to go to the archive. And it was in January of 2017 that I started my Master’s at York University, and thought that Measures for a Funeral was going to be my thesis. So I went to the archive preliminarily to look at the score. What’s really incredible about the Edward Johnson Music Library is that this article pops up, then I go to the library, and I ask to see the concerto, and then it’s right there in front of my face. This precious, 120-year-old piece of music was suddenly in my hands. I can’t even tell you how much of a beautiful object it is, because it has Halvorson’s handwritten score, but also Kathleen Parlow’s markings in it. So there’s a real conversation happening in that score between two artists.
And what was sad, but also ended up working to our benefit, is that nobody in Toronto saw the cultural value of restaging this piece. People thought it would be too hard to get people to come out to hear it, they didn’t know who would be the soloist. The shame is that the piece of music was first performed in Norway with the Malmø Symphony Orchestra, with Henning Kraggerud, and it’s an amazing recording, they did a fantastic job. But I think the point of this discovery is that it’s a piece of Canadian history. The score reflects Kathleen Parlow’s artistry, her skill; it demonstrates what an advanced musician she was, because Halvorson heard her play and was so moved and shaken by the way that she was playing that he pulled out this concerto that he had been struggling with for years and dedicated it to this 17-year-old.
CC: And he composed it to her strengths as a violinist, right?
SB: Yeah, totally, and you hear it demonstrated in the piece of music. Even María Dueñas herself, who’s one of the most talented soloists in the world right now, was like, “Yeah, this is a beast of a piece.” But that’s ultimately why she wanted to play it, because she’s up for those kinds of challenges. It was a huge shame that cultural institutions in Canada didn’t see the value in playing this piece of music because it was tied to commerce. With a concert like this, what I learned, alongside my music producer Amanda Abdel Hadi, is that you kind of have to have an Oreo cookie kind of program, where you pair it with very well-known pieces of music. So when we performed it, we had Yannick Nézet-Séguin conduct it with Orchestre Métropolitain in Montréal, which ended up being a very fruitful partnership, because he actually has a mandate, in and of himself, to bring pieces of music out of the archive. So he saw the value in it, and then paired it up with a piece by Shostakovich. I think that, in combination with María Dueñas and Shostakovich, helped us get a sold-out house. But I can tell you that even though María was signed on to our project from an early stage, we struggled to figure out who would play it in Ontario, where we originally wanted to stage the performance. I think that speaks to a lot of issues of commerce and culture and how our history is valued. It was a struggle, but ultimately I think the Concerto ended up in the right place in Montréal, with an orchestra that really cared and saw its value, and with an incredible conductor who performs with such an open heart. At the end of the performance, a lot of the musicians were in tears because they were so moved by María‘s performance. If you watch a lot of the musicians on stage, watching her, a lot of them are crying.
CC: Correct me if I misheard, but it seems like even with María signed on to be in the film, the powers that be, in terms of the staging of the Concerto, weren’t as interested in having her be the soloist?
SB: No, it wasn’t a problem with María. The problem was with the music. How do we get people to listen to this? But I think there’s a different value for that in Quebec and Montréal. In Montréal there was no struggle. I was hoping that it might happen in Toronto because of my grandfather’s connection to the Toronto Symphony, but again, I think it’s all an experiment, and it’s all a process, and you have to go where you’re wanted; we were received in Montréal with so much love and care and attention, and ultimately it ended up working out for the better, because Yannick and María, as you can see in the film, have incredible chemistry that can’t be matched.
CC: Can you go into a little bit more detail about the organizing or the staging of the Concerto? In the film, Audrey’s sort of positioned as an instigator of the staging. I’m curious how much that reflects your role in getting the piece played.
SB: There were a lot of hands that actually made that happen, just in terms of things like the legality of hiring an entire Symphony for the film, and making sure that we had perpetual rights to the music, but also to folks’ image. We were very lucky that one of my producers, Andreas Mendritski, has a very lawyerly brain, is incredible with contracts, and was able to lay the foundation for this to happen, legally. And then we also had Amanda Abdel Hadi, who has a brain for organizing concerts and music; she was really fantastic at contacting different orchestras and pitching the possibility of playing the Concerto. It took a lot of pitching, a lot of Zooms. Also, the question of who will be the soloist was difficult. Tracking María Dueñas down during COVID was really difficult, because, while she continued to play during that time, her agent was really difficult to get a hold of. But when I finally pinned him down, he was like, “Well, you know, it would take me hours to go through your project. Why are you worth my time?” basically.
I explained Kathleen Parlow’s legacy, and the importance of this concerto; in terms of a biography, María and Kathleen’s experiences are very similar, especially at the beginning of their careers. María‘s mom travels with her a lot, and makes all of her dresses, and it was the same for Kathleen Parlow. Both women had their Symphony debut in San Francisco, and they both play Guarnerius del Gesùs. And María also had a composition dedicated to her at the age of 17 by a Mexican composer named Gabrielle Ortiz. So finally María’s agent was like, “Okay, I will let María listen to the composition and we’ll see.” And apparently she really connected with it, and that’s when her agent presented her with the project, and then she was on board. So, in terms of organizing the concert, her participation, her attachment to the project, and her enthusiasm to play was key to our pitch and unlocking all these doors.
We also had the backing of Deutsche Grammophon, who saw the cultural value of staging the piece. So that was like one part of support that we had. And then also we had Maison Symphonique, who also wanted to partner with us on the project.
CC: I was really glad to hear the Concerto in its entirety. That was really meaningful.
SB: Yeah. I think this is a film for musicians, for folks who have an appreciation for the music, and who have an understanding of the sacrifice that it takes to achieve that level. But also it’s really about listening to the music. And I think through the staging of the Concerto we can really hear Kathleen Parlow’s voice.
It’s really interesting to talk about this because in film, of course, you know, there’s the ideal run time of 90 minutes. Apichatpong says that we dream in 90-minute segments, so that’s the ideal runtime. So you’d be surprised that even though I had the best conductor in the world, the best violinist in the world, playing an incredible piece of music, I still had people suggesting we should cut the performance down. And I think, again, that’s a societal issue in how we value music and these huge moments. And it wasn’t just because we worked so hard and it was expensive that we needed to include the piece of music. It’s also a political gesture. If we’re going to talk about Kathleen Parlow for two hours, let’s hear her! It’s rare in a film that we’re afforded this kind of space. And for me, this film wasn’t about making something that had commercial value, it was about making something that would resurrect Kathleen’s spirit, and also set the balance straight in terms of this great injustice that had been done to her historically. I think the film accomplishes that.
CC: I think it did as well.
As far as I know, there’s nothing in my family history that carries the cultural significance that Kathleen Parlow has, even if you’re not related to her. How have you personally carried that significance with you?
SB: Yeah, that’s really great to think about. And I would push back in that I think you do have interesting stories in your family. I think everyone does, and that’s part of the reason why I love making films about family history. I think if everyone looked around the folks in their family, if they want to, they’ll always find something compelling and interesting. And as far as Kathleen Parlow goes, and the weight of her legacy, it’s kind of in the same way that Audrey is carrying this violin on her back. She’s literally carrying her mother, and her pain, and her family’s history on her shoulders. My grandfather gifted me a violin when I was younger — I was about three or four years old — but he died five years later, and the wound of that event in my life was so deep that I couldn’t find it in myself to play the instrument. So, I always felt a tremendous guilt that was juxtaposed with all this pride that I had in growing up going to the Toronto Symphony, watching my grandfather play; and then having a kind of hope projected on me as well, that I might be that kind of musician one day. It’s a really interesting thing to talk about, because if you look at Audrey’s mother and the pain and the weight that she’s carried her entire life, you realize the projections that our parents or grandparents have on us, however innocent, can also turn into something very painful.
And it relates back to the question of, what is a good life? And I don’t think that there’s a right or wrong way, but we see a lot of different fates explored in the film, which was important to me. For example, it looks like María plays the violin very effortlessly, and that she has this very glamorous life, but in actuality she’s a punk. She doesn’t party, but I think the punk gesture comes through the fact that she practices four to six hours a day, sometimes in the middle of the night, when someone her age could be out partying with their friends. She has sacrificed so much, and so has her family, for this life and career to be a reality, and now she has something very precious and very beautiful. But that amount of sacrifice toward a certain goal is never guaranteed.
CC: In terms of scale, Measures for a Funeral is a big departure from your previous films, particularly your other features. Watching it you get the sense that the form is following the thematic scope. Was the intention to kind of meet the moment, in a way?
SB: I think meeting the moment is a perfect description of what we were embarking upon. For us, the shooting format was always dependent on what the most important moment in the film was, which was this wide shot of the concert. We had to think about the variables. If you’re shooting on film, you’re limited to 10-minute mags; and we had a conductor who hates noise while he’s working, and it was an incredible gift that he allowed us to be in the space to film live. So it was about working backward from that moment, which is the wide of the orchestra playing. That was captured by one of our Montréal camera operators, Simran. I love the zoom out that he did, which was at the perfect point in the concert. But that was the most elevated and important moment to capture because it showed all the people who are interested in hearing Kathleen but also this incredible piece of music finally being performed after all the efforts of folks on my team had invested to make this moment happen.
So if you work back, obviously it can’t be on film, and the Cinemascope aspect ratio was the perfect one to capture all the performers. So from there it was easy to determine how we were going to make that happen. Shooting in 4k on the Alexa 35 made sense, because suddenly we had a camera that had a lot of dynamic range, but we made sure to honor this vintage tradition of how I was originally shooting the Audrey films, which were on 16mm and bolex cameras. We chose Cooke Speed Panchro lenses, which Kieslowski used on Blue and The Double life of Veronique, and Preminger used on Bunny Lake is Missing. These lenses have this amazing bokeh which really gives a swirling effect in the frame, which always centers Audrey. Because she’s always confronting something, this effect helped us make a film where she self-actualizes and finally comes into herself and into her own voice.
CC: How much knowledge of the piece did all your DPs and camera operators have, because you mentioned a very well-timed zoom. What things were they looking out for on the big day of the performance?
SB: Basically we achieved that through two very thorough technical scouts of Maison Symphonique with Nikolay and our co-producer Pricilla Galvez. We had Artemis on our phones, and we emulated the different lenses that different cameras would have, and then we were able to determine the best positions for each camera in the space. We filmed the live concert, but we also filmed one rehearsal of the piece of music during the day. So we had seven positions during the day and then seven different ones at night. And we were very lucky in that we had DP’s shooting the film. So they weren’t just camera operators, we had some of the best DPs who are all incredible, all award-winning, who really believed in the project and donated their time to come in to film this scene, which was really, really, really moving.
They all listened to the piece of music. We had several meetings about what their respective “missions” were. And then on top of that, Nikolay and I created a video village, which gave us a really wide scope for monitoring the shoot and directing the different cameras. It was like calling a live TV broadcast, which was pretty incredible. And it was funny that after so much planning and so much time, I was in a booth during the performance, removed from the experience, but it was still incredible all the same. We were just very lucky that we had such a solid team to help us with the technical execution.
CC: Where do you see Audrey Benac’s future? Where’s her story going or, in keeping with how often your films look into the past, what is left of her past to explore?
SB: I think it’s the end of the road for Audrey.
CC: That’s sort of what I was expecting to hear.
SB: Yeah. Audrey has explored so many interesting facets of my family’s life, of different cultural figures’ lives, and because she really self-actualizes in this film, and every film before this was about Audrey reaching for something, I think this film shows it can’t really be taken much further. But for me, it’s exciting to end this series in this way. Maybe there will be a Twin Peaks season three which comes out years later. But for us, anyways, it really felt definitive, and, for me, I don’t think you can get any better or any bigger.
CC: I’ve been talking about my obsession with Deragh Campbell all year, so I want to talk a little bit more about her in Measures. As far as your films go, the relationship that you have with her goes back around 10 years now. What about her makes her the person you want to work with all the time?
SB: Deragh and I met in 2012. She was coming to screenings that were being hosted by Dan Montgomery and Kazik Radwanski of MDFF, and that’s how we met. She had just come from making Matt Porterfield’s I Used to be Darker, and also had collaborated with Nathan Silver, who’s one of my favorite filmmakers. Whenever I saw her, whenever I spoke about cinema with her, I always felt this palpable sense of belonging. And I love how playful she is in her approach. I love how dedicated she is to different characters. I think she has a great imagination, an incredible sensitivity. I think she’s very graceful. I think she’s also very courageous. She’s a Taurus, so she is very stubborn and when she sets her mind to something, she does it, she goes for it, which is an incredible way to work. I think you do need to have this stubbornness and sense of direction, especially when you’re inhabiting a character. It is hard to inhabit the body or the mentality of a person who has this kind of tragedy happening in their life. And I think in film we don’t see a lot of examples of what the aftermath of abuse looks like in someone’s personality.
In feedback sessions a lot of people were asking, “what’s wrong with her,” “why isn’t she emoting?” And that’s part of the reason why we changed the title of the film. It used to be Opus 28, but we changed it to Measures for a Funeral because we needed something that reminded people that her mother was dying. I think this particular kind of character is really hard, someone who’s disconnected from the world and closed off because they are carrying all of these different experiences. I think Audrey, in many ways, is kind of like a cylinder in and of herself. She’s a very wounded character, and if you look closely, you can see that in the way she wears her history. But another layer is that when we were collaborating with Athina Tsangari on the film, she said, “Audrey is like a samurai, and the violin on her back is like a sword,” which is a really cool way to look at it. So another consideration for us was watching Toshiya Fujita’s Lady Snowblood, and thinking of Audrey almost as like an Asura, this ghost or spirit who is on a revenge mission for her mother. And the idea of Audrey being this vessel or spirit is explored at the end of the film in the last shot. I won’t talk about that too much, because it’s a magical moment, but I think with all of these factors it creates a really fascinating character that I don’t think anybody else could have created as well.
CC: Really lucky that Kathleen didn’t play the double bass.
SB: Totally! Would have been much more difficult to burn. That’s very funny. [laughs]
CC: What’s always drawn me to Deragh’s acting is her total control of her face, and the counterintuitive expressiveness she gets out of it by a conspicuous lack of emotion. But in Measures for a Funeral she gets at least three opportunities to really let it all go, which was exciting to watch. Can you talk about your collaboration on this different style of performance and why it needed to happen this way for this film?
SB: It was important to stage those moments like they were actually happening. So when you see her reaction to the cylinder in the archive in London, much like [my short film] Veslemoy’s Song [2020], she’s really hearing the music. It was very moving to hear the cylinder in that way, on a historical phonograph. I chose the recordings for her and off we went. And it was the same thing for the concert, which was her actual live reaction. It’s incredible working with a person who’s open to that kind of spontaneity in this experiment. It’s a way of filmmaking that I’ve adopted from Phil Hoffman, where you incorporate whatever is happening in the moment, and you don’t look at bad things that happen as mistakes, but as gifts that make the film better.
With Deragh, it was a very rigorous process to incite this performance. The production sent her to Rome for a whole month, and she had a recorder where she recorded lines of different characters, and she would walk around the city listening to those lines, memorizing them. And when she came back to Toronto I put her through violin lessons so that she would have the memory implanted in her mind of having lessons as a little girl, and so she understood how to hold a violin and bow. And even though we don’t see her do this in the film, this exterior knowledge is really important. I also took her to one of María Dueñas’ concerts so she could see María play for the first time, and experience that in a space. And then we went through three weeks of rehearsals with Deragh on her own, but also with María Dueñas, Maxime Gaudette, and Eve Duranceau. I really wanted them to have a rapport together. And I also did different exercises, like one where I had María and Maxime go on a walk, and I had Deragh follow them and spy on them and take notes on what she thought they were saying. I think these kinds of scenarios really help to build the context for the character and give it depth.
CC: I’ve been fascinated by a line that Audrey’s friend tells her when they’re in the pub after walking through the old town in the countryside in England. Her friend calls attention to her “obsessive blindness.” I loved that because I think the more familiar term we hear is “blind obsession.” So hearing this phrase, which suggests that the mode of Audrey’s blindness to what’s going on in her life was obsessive rather than implying that the quality of her obsession was blindness to the issues in her personal life, was really important. I wanted to get your thoughts on that specific descriptor.
SB: I’m so glad that you pointed out that particular line because for Audrey it was really important to show the level of disconnection that she wanted from her life because of the amount of pain that she was in. It was as if she wasn’t seeking to be obsessively blind then she might be in a tremendous amount of pain. And that’s why she is running away from one woman and toward another, because she needs to have those blinders on in order to accomplish this mission that, at the same time, she takes very seriously for its own sake.
When her thesis supervisor says music begins where love leads off, she takes it very seriously, and literally, she just dumps her boyfriend and leaves. And maybe there are other problems in that relationship, but you see how she takes on that mission very seriously, and she puts the blinders on. In the same way that María does when she practices, you see someone who takes their academic journey just as seriously. But there’s another level of grief that’s following her, and the blindness enables her to function in the world. It helps her be more courageous and less afraid.
We wanted to focus on these ideas, which were also important in the films that we were studying, like Blue by Kieslowski, where Juliette Binoche’s character, Julie, is in so much pain that she becomes obsessively blind to the world around her, and tries to erase her family’s history because of the tremendous load that she’s feeling in her heart. Or if you look at Bunny Lake is Missing, the main character, Anne Lake, is being gaslit, and it’s this journey, similar to Measures, in that it’s a little bit of an odyssey. And then there’s also Kenneth Lonergan’s Margaret, where you have Anna Paquin, who’s on this weird morality crusade, but is also blind to the fact of how much of a pain in the ass she is and how difficult she is making everyone’s lives. But in order to accomplish what she’s seeking, she does need to be blind or immune to those factors. And it’s the same thing in Rendezvous d’Anna, where Aurore Clement is traveling around for all her own pursuits as a filmmaker, and she’s ignoring how disconnected and cold her life is for the sake of pursuing her career.
And what I love about your highlighting this line is that you do need a certain level of blindness or naivete in order to accomplish great things. You can’t think too much about it. So certainly there is a lot of blindness in Audrey, in the way that she moves through the world, the way that she treats other people, in the way that she perceives herself. But also, I think it’s a really interesting person to look at as well, and we don’t see many characters like this in films anymore.
