Sonic Arts Union: Perfect Lives
This film will play continuously with starting times at 1pm, 4pm, and 7pm (single full-day admission)
Commissioned by The Kitchen and co-produced with Great Britain’s arts network Channel Four, Perfect Lives is an opera for television in seven half-hour episodes. First broadcast in Great Britain in April 1984, Perfect Lives has since been seen on television in Austria, Germany, Spain and the United States and has been shown at film and video festivals around the world. It is widely considered to be a pre-cursor of “music-television.” Perfect Lives has been called “the most influential music/theater/literary work of the 1980s.” At its center is the hypnotic voice of Robert Ashley. His continuous song narrates the events of the story and describes a 1980s update of the mythology of small-town America. Derived from a colloquial idiom, Perfect Lives transforms familiar material into an elaborate metaphor for the rebirth of the human soul. It has been called a comic opera about reincarnation.
dir. Robert Ashley and John Sanborn, US, 1983, video, 175 mins, color
Sonic Arts Union Retrospective has been supported by The Pew Center for Arts & Heritage through the Philadelphia Music Project.
