And Then Came the Evening and the Morning (1989) is a documentary portrait of the acclaimed Estonian composer Arvo Pärt. It was shot by Dorian Supin, Pärt’s brother-in-law. The featurette captures Pärt in semi-exile in West Berlin, while his native Estonia underwent a protracted process of independence from Soviet occupation. Awarded remarkable access to both Pärt’s family life and his time spent composing, Supin assembles a sincere portrait of an artist in a state of uncertainty—his career is on the rise, but his nation’s fate is up in the air; he is prone to solemn speeches, but occasionally amuses himself with household pranks; he is filmed resting his head on a piano while exhausted, but later shown skipping down the beach in a rare demonstration of joy.
Though Supin has since directed two feature-length documentaries about Pärt—24 Preludes for a Fugue (2002) and Even if I Lose Everything (2015)—And Then Came the Evening and the Morning remains his best due to its strange design. The film begins with a prelude that recalls the opening sequence of Andrei Tarkovsky’s Solaris (1972). Pärt is seen walking across a dreary urban landscape as the film’s score transitions from the classic sort of “holy minimalism” associated with the composer to sheer noise. Alongside these cacophonous sounds and scenes of Pärt’s confusion amid busy streets, Supin also inserts shots of mannequins and wax figures, de-peopling his documentary so that it seems like Pärt is all alone, exiled in a place he does not understand and with a talent he cannot quite control. All of this occurs within the first three minutes of And Then Came the Evening and the Morning, which continues to trace the erratic rituals of Pärt’s life in fittingly absurd ways.
One of the film’s running gags involves Supin walking up to strangers in different cities where Pärt is performing and asking them, “Do you know who Arvo Pärt is?” They all respond, “No,” except for one passerby whose response is dubbed over with bird chirps. It’s a strange, but simple and effective routine that summarizes Pärt’s relationship to the world. At this point, he did not see himself as a great composer, nor did he believe people knew his work—if they did, they either did not understand it or were incapable of explaining it, much like the interviewee who responds Supin’s question in bird chirps. Much of Pärt’s life was riddled with questions at this point. “It happens sometimes… almost always… that you cannot find an answer to any question,” he says late in the film, expounding on spiritual and musical matters. And Then Came the Evening and the Morning’s appropriately channels the composer’s existential concerns with its own set of unexplainable scenes and cinematic reveries, all of which made little sense to Pärt. In fact, when Supin tries to explain his idea for the street interviews included in the film, Pärt responds: “I have no idea what you’re saying.”
And Then Came the Evening and the Morning screens this evening, March 19, at Anthology Film Archives as part of “Arvo Pärt: Silentium.” It will be preceded by a short film on Pärt by Supin.
