CineStar 5    13.02., 23.00 
CineStar 5    20.02., 15.00 

Sharon Lockharts new film, TEATRO AMAZONAS, was shot in the Teatro Amazonas in Manaus, Brazil, in June of 1999. The film might be considered a literal interpretation of the idea of one culture looking at another. In this case the culture we are looking at is that of the inhabitants of the city of Manaus. Lockhart filled the seats of the one-hundred and twenty-year-old opera house, one thousand miles from the mouth of the Amazon, with a cross-section of the regions indigenous and European population and filmed them, an attentive audience, from the theaters stage. Photographed from a stationary camera position in one unedited twenty-nine minute take, the audience listens to a live performance by the Choral do Amazonas. The musical score, an original choral composition written by the Californian composer Becky Allen, begins with a solid chordal mass which gradually becomes silent over twenty-four minutes. As the sound of the choir diminshes, the audience sound rises and films the space.
By locating the film in the Teatro Amazonas and populating it with an audience that is representative of each bairro in the city of Manaus, Lockhart dispenses with the standard practice of ethnographic documentary. She resists the temptation to have her cast perform their tasks of daily life, finding them instead engaged in the relatively leisurely activity of observing. Lockhart frees the film from the strict moorings of cultural observation and allows it to float into a less articulate, more visceral and thus more filmic sense of time and space.