‘Sacred Music’ Rounds Up Top Artists

Partly a documentary on the nine-day Los Angeles segment of a global 1999 event, “World Festival of Sacred Music--the Americas” also represents an exploration of how film and video can interpret complex cultural traditions for a wider audience.

Previously available on home video, it comes to public television tonight as an 83-minute testament to the rich overlapping spiritual contexts of the Los Angeles community. From world-class artists offering their views of the sacred on major stages to a family’s religious ceremony in a private home, the telecast honors diversity of belief and tolerance for difference, celebrating middle-class religious institutions as avidly as radical-fringe mysticism.

Unfortunately, few of the filmmakers who created the 16 segments heed the opening statement by the Dalai Lama (who envisioned and inspired the multinational event) that sacred music and dance are more effective than words. Instead, words dominate and often obliterate the exciting performances on view, sometimes explaining what we need to know but frequently underlining the obvious. Why bother to tell us that gospel music is thrilling, for example, when the First AME Church Brookinaires Gospel Choir is in full cry?

Executive producer and festival director Judy Mitoma runs several major film-related projects at UCLA and gathered a constellation of talented independent filmmakers for this anthology. Among them, Mitchell Rose proves especially artful in telescoping whole programs by Meredith Monk and Robert Een into graceful, beautifully shot medleys. John Allen’s overhead time-lapse photography compresses into a few minutes of ghostly images the five-day process in which Tibetan Buddhist monks of the Drepung Loseling Monastery fashioned an intricate sand-mandala for the festival. Magical.

Ultimately, so many interpretations of the sacred come from so many people that the viewer is virtually challenged to consider what a personal definition might be. And that, of course, is a challenge that could change lives.

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* “World Festival of Sacred Music--the Americas” airs tonight at 9 on KCET-TV with a repeat at 1:15 a.m.