AMAZING GRACE

A spine-tingling performance long lost and lovingly resurrected

Certificate U Director Sydney Pollack Cast aretha Franklin, the Southern California Community Choir Released: Out now

Describing Amazing Grace as a documentary feels somewhat misleading and to call it a concert film suggests more artifice than is the case. Having sat in a vault for nearly 50 years, this footage of Aretha Franklin’s performances at the New Temple Baptist Mission Church in Los Angeles, 1972, is a time capsule. She was there to record both this live film and her gospel record of the same name. The record went on to be her best-selling album as well as the highest grossing gospel record of all time. The footage was dogged by technical and legal issues that kept it locked away until now.

The story of how this film finally came to be released is a fascinating one, but we would really like to concentrate on the energy and impact of the footage that’s been salvaged and cut together so well. You can feel first the uncertainty and trepidation in the air as it begins and then the growing excitement and spinetingling revery as it builds over two nights of

performance. Franklin herself is unflappable and virtually mute save for when she’s singing.

She stands at the lectern of the church or sits behind the piano to play, hardly even making eye contact with the audience. All of her effort and concentration seems to be in her performance and as her voice soars, so the audience – and rather wonderfully the choir at her back – begins to rise to their feet. Watching the Southern California Community Choir being swept up in Franklin’s performance more and more over the two nights creates a wonderful feedback loop with the audience in front of her and with you watching it all unfold.

Sydney Pollack was a pretty raw but clearly inventive director at this point, having just been nominated for a best director Oscar for They Shoot Horses, Don’t They? While he has to take much of the blame for the footage not being synced to the audio (for lack of a clapperboard), the energy of what he caught on camera can’t be denied. Not least, you get to see Pollack and his crew dashing around the front of the church trying to get every nuance of the event like reporters in a war zone dashing from cover to cover.

All of this energy and the unequalled performance of Franklin herself is set against a starkly humble backdrop of parishioners

(and the odd celebrity) packed into cramped theatre seats in a small church room, a muscular painting of Jesus hanging up behind the choir, an American flag off to one side. Franklin herself is simply – if still glamorously – dressed on both nights, reflecting her own deference to the setting. Something magical is being created with minimal grandstanding or support. Franklin and emcee Rev James Cleveland sweat profusely under the hot lights, with Franklin’s own father mopping her brow at one point while she’s in the middle of singing. It’s small moments like this, visuals that feel in such stark contrast to the angelic audio they accompany, that make Amazing Grace such a fascinating and emotionally powerful experience.

“She stands at the lectern of the church or sits behind the piano to play, hardly even making eye contact”