Back to selection
Resurrecting Kathleen Parlow: Sofia Bohdanowicz on Her TIFF-Premiering Measures for a Funeral
Deragh Campbell in Measures for a Funeral Around a decade ago, Sofia Bohdanowicz began what would become a cycle of films, encompassing the features Never Eat Alone, MS Slavic 7 and A Woman Escaped (co-directed by Blake Williams and Burak Çevik) and the shorts Veslemøy’s Song and Point and Line to Plane, starring Deragh Campbell (who is often credited as cowriter or codirector) as Audrey Benac, a sort of fictional alter-ego who has encounters with art, and in particular with the artistic legacy of Bohdanowicz’s forbears. In Veslemøy’s Song, Audrey travels to the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts to listen to a haunting vintage recording of a piece composed for Kathleen Parlow, a once-famed, now largely unknown Canadian violin virtuoso who taught Audrey’s grandfather (and Bohdanowicz).
The recording belongs to someone else, as does the titular collection of papers in MS Slavic 7, in which Audrey visits Harvard to see a tranche of letters between her grandmother, Zofia Bohdanowiczowa, and a more historically prominent Polish-exile poet. In all the films, Audrey is surrounded by physical traces (which are simultaneously mystical) of the past (which is simultaneously present). Campbell’s translucent, reactive performance builds a bridge between antiseptic contemporary academic spaces and the precious, often dusty real-life archival material which Bohdanowicz inserts into the films, but this bridge is necessarily a swaying, temporary passage over a massive void of forgetting.
Measures for a Funeral is at once the most self-referential of the Audrey films and the most self-contained. In 2015, an archivist at the University of Toronto who was organizing Kathleen Parlow’s papers found a complete score, long thought lost, for the Norwegian composer Johan Halvorsen’s “Opus 28,” a violin concerto composed for Parlow. The rediscovered piece was revived in November 2023 in a full orchestral performance of Montreal’s Orchestre Métropolitain under the baton of Yannick Nézet-Séguin (who taught Bradley Cooper to conduct for Maestro). In the film, this concert is the culmination of the dogged efforts of Audrey Benac, who, like Bohdanowicz, grew up in Parlow’s faint shadow. “There’s value in a minor work,” Audrey insists in the film, arguing for the piece’s resurrection, and possibly for the validity of her own indecisive, burrowing research process. “Something that isn’t whole or irrefutable can emote a sense of effort and grasping.”
Shot in handsome and sinuous widescreen digital, with an almost thriller-y buzz of static frequently on the soundtrack, 142-minute film follows Audrey on research trips in Canada, England and Norway, and through personal dramas sharpened to a dramaturgical point relative to the previous films: romantic and academic indecision, and family tensions, with an embittered, dying mother in the hospital and an unwanted inherited violin on her back. Her quest, and the film’s, is to link past and present, and at last apply a concrete sense of purpose and vocation to the ambient past the haunts the Audrey Benac films. I spoke with Sofia Bohdanowicz before the film’s premiere at the Toronto International Film Festival.
Filmmaker: The sheet music for Opus 28 was rediscovered in 2015. This is around the time that you and Deragh started making the Audrey films. For instance, Veslemøy’s Song, in which she goes to listen to the only extant recording of Kathleen Parlow playing part of “Opus 28,” was made after the rediscovery of this score. It seems in retrospect like this concert was the thing that had been looming over the films all along.
Bohdanowicz: There is so much overlapping with all of the films. As I was finishing one film, I was starting the idea to begin another, and often writing a different Audrey film while editing or touring the previous one. The concerto was discovered in 2015, then in ‘16 it was brought into the public eye. I couldn’t understand how it had been lost for such a long period of time—it was such an incredible, harrowing story that this piece of music, thought to be burned by this well-known composer, was found again in a violinist’s shoebox. I became fascinated with going to go see the score to understand its history, and also to look at the archive at the [University of Toronto’s] Edward Johnson Music Library, because I had known a little about Kathleen Parlow growing up, knowing that she was my grandfather’s violin teacher.
I started going to the University of Toronto archive at the end of 2016 and at the beginning of 2017. This was going to be a film that I was going to do for my master’s degree at York University. But when I started to see how vast the archive was—all of these beautiful photos, all of Kathleen Parlow’s daybooks, letters that she received, heating bills; her life could be perfectly tracked—I saw how large, how momentous and epic the story was. This was too big for my master’s thesis, I needed more time to piece all these things together. After about a year and a half of working in the archive, really looking at all the objects, photographing them, organizing them, studying them, that’s when I brought Deragh on. She came to the archive once to get an overview of things, then we embarked on a series of experiments to study Kathleen Parlow.
We ended up in the UK: We went to the British Library, where we listened to some recordings that Parlow had made. We went to her old home in Meldreth, in the countryside, where we met Joan [Gane] from the Meldreth Historical Society, who gave us a tour. All these excursions added to the story. I also went to the St. Petersburg music conservatory in 2018 and spent time with a violinist who let me sit in on some of his lessons. I was able to witness the way that he instructs students, which comes from his teacher who learned from Leopold Auer. It was really, really interesting to see a real-life occurrence of the kind of person that Parlow would have studied with.
It was a film that required delicate handling, attention to detail, but also organizing all the details and deciding which ones were the most significant—this film, sure, speaks to Parlow’s history, but I hope that for audiences, it’s only a starting point, because it’s impossible for the story to be so comprehensive.
Filmmaker: So all of the trips in the film are sort of recreations, fictionalizations, of your initial research trips? It’s a really nice depiction of grant-funded travel—waking up in somebody else’s apartment, the panic of not having enough time in the archives, the race to structure your day and all the little indignities, like an unfamiliar shower head in a foreign country, the messiness of the labor behind intellectual or cultural work.
Parlow: In a lot of my films, the way Deragh and I started was by filming and capturing these live documentary moments then tethering them with her performance. But I always knew that this would be a different kind of film, because this is a film where Audrey actually completes a task. [Laughs] She self-actualizes, she really pulls through! And is able to put an end to, I guess, her inquisitiveness, to her journey.
It was important for me to keep that documentary element, and to embody the concept of field notes. That’s how I constructed Veslemøy’s Song: I went to the New York Public Library and wrote down every single detail. That was something in my practice that I found and felt really worked. All of these characters—so Joan, from the Meldreth Historical Society, we spent a lot of time with her, and with her consent we’ve recorded conversations. We transcribed those conversations and put them into a script. The librarian at the British Library, who’s played by Rosa Johan Uddoh—who’s an incredible performance artist—she was actually reenacting a sound archivist named Andrea Zarza. I had seen her speak at the Thyssen in Madrid many years ago, and was fascinated by her presentation of cylinder phonographs, talking about how the wounds on these objects act as a marker of the passage of time, and how you can really be transported as you’re listening to it. So again, I took that lecture off of YouTube, transcribed it, and then collaborated with Andrea on the script to adapt it to that character.
I feel like all of these like eccentricities, details, manners of speaking from all these different characters contribute to this odyssey—all these interesting people that she meets help her build this collective portrait or shadow of who this woman was.
Filmmaker: In dealing in this film, as you have in others, with fragile archival material, what are the issues that arise?
Bohdanowicz: As far as the Edward Johnson Music Library is concerned, we filmed in the actual room where the manuscript of “Opus 28″ was discovered. That was meaningful, and it’s also, visually, a stunning room that my DP, Nikolay Michaylov, was into shooting in as well. Sometimes the most historically accurate spaces are not the most photogenic.
The cylinder phonograph was really amazing: We found this man, Keith Harrison from the City of London Phonograph and Gramophone Society, when I was on a scouting trip. I just wrote to him and said, “Hey, I’m looking for a phonograph, do you know anyone? I’m working on this project about Kathleen Parlow.” This wonderful man said, “Not only do I have a cylinder phonograph machine that you can borrow, I have about ten cylinders of Kathleen Parlow playing, and I’d love to be involved in your film.” It was one of these instances where these objects and this knowledge which was very niche just kind of apparated in front of us as we were getting closer and closer to production, and I started to realize that a lot of the things that Deragh and I had written about in the script had to materialize.
In terms of accuracy, Andrea Zarza said that archivists wouldn’t play wax cylinders on a historical machine. They have ones that are focused on rendering a better sound and are also more geared towards preserving the object. But for a moment where Audrey feels moved by the music, feels transported, it was important to use an object that Kathleen Parlow would have listened to a cylinder on herself.
Filmmaker: On the theme of technology and the presence of the past, were there conversations about shooting on film versus digital?
Bohdanowicz: The most important shot in the film for me is the wide shot of the symphony. Nikolay and I worked back from that shot, because everything is leading up to this moment where you hear this piece of music that represents Parlow’s voice, as well as Audrey’s journey. We had to think about what would be the best shooting format to capture this moment. So, it was easy to determine that the film would be 2:39—no-brainer.
“Opus 28,” what we hear of it in the film is about 15 minutes long; the actual piece of music is about 22 minutes. Knowing that it would be a live event that would be incorporated into the film, we had to be very silent, because Yannick Nézet-Séguin is famous for stopping the orchestra if people are coughing or talking or if a cell phone goes off. We knew we were very lucky to be able to get in there to capture that moment. We needed a filmmaking process that was as silent as possible, and that wasn’t constricted to reels of ten minutes.
From there it was very easy to determine that this film would be shot digitally. Nikolay and I watched a lot of films together: Margaret, we really studied the concert scene at the end. Bunny Lake Is Missing, Kieślowski’s Blue, Les Rendez-Vous d’Anna. What these films had in common is that they used these vintage lenses called Cooke Speed Panchro lenses that render fine details, have natural textures, and have a swirly bokeh, which makes your eye go to the center of the image. In this film’s aesthetic, it creates a claustrophobic framing, Audrey is always in the center. In every other film, Audrey is captured on a different format. We have her on hand-processed 16mm, we have her in 3D, we have her on a digital SLR, I also filmed her on mini DV. So it makes sense for this film to be in 2:39 shot on an Alexa in a 6K HD format—it was kind of like the last one (that we could afford).
Filmmaker: I’m also curious about recording the concert audio. There’s acknowledgement of Deutsche Grammophon in the end credits.
Bohdanowicz: Deutsche Grammophon came on board because of María Dueñas. When I was doing research to decide who would play this piece of music, Maria Duenas was brought to my attention by our music producer, Amanda Abel Hadi, who had a huge hand in coordinating all these pieces and booking Orchestre Métropolitain, which was a massive, massive undertaking, I think probably over 200 Zooms happened in the course of three years because of Amanda.
In pitching María Dueñas’s agent, he said to me, “I will ask Maria if she’s interested in this part if she listens to the music first.” And she listened to “Opus 28″ and, I think, really identified with the music, and so she signed on. A few months later, Deutsche Grammophon brought her on board. So when that happened, Deutsche Grammophon was like, “Let’s make this like a collaboration.” They were excited about the historical and artistic value of the piece, it finally being brought out into the open and played. We were fortunate in that Deutsche Grammophon had a sound recordist based in Montreal. He recorded that track, then he mixed it for us and delivered it to us for the edit. It was spectacular to witness that performance for the first time in person, but also to hear it back and to edit it.
Filmmaker: As with MS Slavic 7, I’m moved by the depiction of, I guess, archival paralysis, which is…
Bohdanowicz: Yeah, you’re putting words to it. Archival paralysis.
Filmmaker: It’s the reason I could never do academic work myself. It’s too overwhelming to open up even an old PDF of The New Yorker to try to find a specific article and then get distracted by everything else. So, your depiction is of a sense of responsibility to the past, where all this stuff is just there, and you’re the only one who cares. Audrey is touching all of this material, as if it’s animate and needs to be acknowledged with a little caress. I detect a parallel between this and the interstitial scenes of grad students eating Pret sandwiches on a train on a research trip. That’s what’s overwhelming about the archive: You can see, not just the 10 events that make up a person’s wikipedia page but the train ticket, they went there; their Pret receipt, they ate that; the weather report that day. You can step all the way into the past. And in this film there are moments you hold on for a bit longer, for the sake of building an archive for the future, and being present in the present, as well as conjuring the presence of the past.
Bohdanowicz: In MS Slavic 7, Audrey is looking at all of these pieces in the archive that belong to her grandmother, right? And she doesn’t know what to do with them; she wants to get all the objects together so she can decide, and in that film she doesn’t get all the objects together, because Harvard holds on to the letters. But here in this film she has full access and can see the full scope. Not only that, she’s traveling to all of these locations and becoming a little bit of a medium. She’s downloading all these frequencies and experiences through her sheer empathy—she’s a little bit of a cylinder herself. She’s a wounded person who is carrying all this weight from the past, and that comes out in how she behaves with other people.
I think Audrey feels the weight and the responsibility of telling Kathleen Parlow’s history. I mean, as do I. It’s very easy, narratively, to use a historical figure as a vessel to tell a story, but then the figure can disappear into the film. So, it was important that we hear Kathleen Parlow. That comes through in the voiceover narration—collaborating with Mary Margaret O’Hara to bring that character to life was instrumental, in that it gives a sonic example of what this woman could have been like. Mary Margaret O’Hara was also a little bit of a medium.
What we see in the film of the Edward Johnson Music Library is really only the beginning. When my production designer Jess Hart and I were getting all the objects together that Audrey would use in that scene, there were a lot of darlings I had to kill, a lot of images and side stories and subplots that I had to erase from the film because I knew there wouldn’t be the time to sit in those moments. It would be too overwhelming for for the audience. Certainly there is a plethora of images and information about Kathleen, but it only touches a surface level in terms of what is profoundly interesting about her life.
It was important to linger in her home in Meldreth—to see something that Kathleen would have seen, but also to spend time in this home that works as a visual metaphor for what happened to Kathleen and her legacy in that it was completely abandoned and is currently deteriorating. That’s what was happening to Kathleen Parlow’s artifacts at the U of T until the archivist Houman Behzadi, who discovered Opus 28, came upon the collection and decided to start organizing it in the early 2010s. Her collection was donated to U of T after her passing in the mid 1960s, but it wasn’t until about 2010 that they started organizing everything.
Certainly it was really, really important for the concert to be played out in its proper form. This was my first time making a film of this length, but when you start to get into this runtime you start to hear a lot of people talk about how—you know, the 90-minute mark is the ideal for a film to be sitting at so that it’s perfectly packaged, so that it’s marketable. It was certainly pitched to me that perhaps I should cut the concert down. But for me it’s a political gesture. Why go through all of this and not hear the full concerto? It was important for me to preserve that performance—for it to be heard, but also for the historical event to be perfectly preserved.
I think in similar terms about Deragh’s performance. It was important to preserve this very delicate moment where she’s listening to the cylinder phonograph for the first time, because Deragh is an actor that really doesn’t like to do fake work in a film. So in Point and Line to Plane when Audrey is loading the Bolex, Deragh was actually loading it, and in this film those are her real live reactions to the performance of the concerto.
I hope that the film serves as a sort of resurrection of Kathleen Parlow’s presence. Of course, you can’t fully ever do that, but it was important for me to embark on this series of experiences and experiments to see if her aura could find a place in our film.
Filmmaker: In the house, where Audrey is trying to trying to feel Kathleen Parlow’s presence despite the way that the house has changed over the years and the plastic sheeting that covers all the furniture and gives the sequence the feel of a ghost story, I wonder a) how dressed versus found all of that stuff was; and b) if laundering your philosophical concerns through genre, like in Personal Shopper, was something that appealed to you.
Bohdanowicz: The static that you hear in the film, every time it pops up as Audrey’s recording with her Tascam, is actually the sound of Kathleen Parlow’s grave, which my sound editor Stefana [Fratila] and I went to go record. So yes, it’s a little bit of a genre film. This woman is essentially chasing a ghost, who’s saving her from facing the abuse that she has dealt with her whole life from her mother; Audrey is using her study of this historical figure to contain her emotion, but also to isolate herself and process her mother’s death. We all have different ways of dealing with grief; this is one example of burying yourself in the life of someone else in order to escape your own.
As far as the house goes: It was photographed pretty accurately. It is in total disrepair, completely rotted—it was very difficult to film in, the kind of place that, when you leave, you feel like you need a shower. The scene where you see Audrey climbing around all of these objects covered in plastic was created by Jess Hart, because we were originally going to shoot in there with a hazer to make it look very dusty, but it kept setting off the smoke alarm. Jess saved the day by using all these plastic sheets and created this interactive obstacle course for Audrey to move through.
Is there anything else that you wanted to know that’s kind of lingering for you?
Filmmaker: I guess the prop violins. María Dueñas does play an 18th century violin at the concert, but I assume that’s not what Audrey is carrying around on her back in every scene.
Bohdanowicz: I wanted to get Kathleen Parlow’s Guarnerius del gesu for María when she was playing “Opus 28,” because I thought, what better opportunity than the performance of this concerto than to have the Guarnerius del jesu that Kathleen played upon when she first played this incredible piece of music. Now, this instrument was sold in a Christie’s auction in about 2014 or 15 for about two to three million dollars to someone living in China. I tried to track it down, with the help of very posh violin dealers, like J & A Beare in the U.K. It was all hands on deck to try to find this violin, but it didn’t surface. Maybe one day María will play “Opus 28″ on the Guarnerius del jesu, I think as she’s destined to, but unfortunately it didn’t happen for this performance.
We had a dear friend named Ric Heinl who’s a well-regarded violin dealer in Toronto, whose father worked with Kathleen Parlow. I used to serve at this restaurant in downtown Toronto called the Senator where Ric was a regular, and I realized only when we started talking that he knew my grandfather. We became friends because he sold my grandfather’s violin when my grandfather passed away. So, it was always bookmarked in my mind that he was someone that I could contact to help navigate these questions about the authenticity of the violin, because this is the film where I’ve had the most amount of budget to execute an idea, and certainly it’s important to be historically accurate. So, I actually consulted with J & A Beare about the Guarnerius del gesu, and the history of Guarneri versus Stradivari, and the difference between those two violins and what a Guarnerius del jesu would actually look like. I asked Ric to help me with that element, and a good friend of his (who would come in to the Senator) lent me one of her violins that is not a Guarnerius del gesu but looks like one, and looks very accurate to the violin that Kathleen Parlow would have played on. And, to add a sentimental layer to it, the violin case that Audrey carries belongs to my cousin Grace. It’s very important for me to have objects in my films that have a historical presence, but that are also connected to my family.
