The Bardo Trilogy (consisting of Orson Rehearsed, 9/10: Love Before the Fall, and I Hear America Singing) explores operafilm, a new audiovisual genre in which auteur director-composer-writer-editor Daron Hagen’s consistent application of aesthetic, practical, and technical correlatives between music drama, film, and their performance practices create and sustain a coherent aesthetic world in which every element manifests that world. Hagen’s book, Exploring Operafilm: Making the Bardo Trilogy, features essays about making the operafilms, and shooting scripts for each.
ORSON REHEARSED
Orson Welles’ heart has just stopped. We enter his mind in this moment, on the threshold between life and death. In the bardo Orson’s thoughts unspool as a stream of consciousness that loops back on itself, like a Möbius strip. Three avatars onstage in the theater of his mind are paired with three oneiric films within the film as he shuffles through his memories, loves, regrets, like a magician preparing for one last trick. Is he ready for what comes next?
9/10: LOVE BEFORE THE FALL
The myths of Orpheus and Charon are interwoven with the entirely sung story of four friends dining in an Italian bistro who are fated to perish the next morning in the attack on the Twin Towers. At meal’s end, through magical realism, the restaurant’s mysterious strolling violinist is revealed to be Charon, hand extended, awaiting payment. Complying, each reconciles with death, and departs to the sounds of the next morning’s busy signals and the calls of first responders.
I HEAR AMERICA SINGING
Set over the final four days leading up to a high-stakes backers' audition, a documentarian named Charon follows Broadway composer Robbie Doerfler and his friends Rose and Roger as he navigates a magical realist liminal space between artistic ambition and existential collapse, culminating in the poignant and thought-provoking question: “Where do we go when we go up — is it Heaven?”