Originally planned to promote the gospel album culled from Aretha Franklin’s performances at the New Temple Missionary Baptist Church in the Watts district of Los Angeles, Sydney Pollack’s Amazing Grace has had an arduous journey to official release. For decades, the material that Pollack filmed stayed in the vaults because he failed to use a clapboard to ensure that audio was synchronized. Finally, it was painstakingly pieced together near the top of the 2010s. Yet when it came time to release the film, Franklin herself bafflingly intervened to keep it in the vault, tying up the documentary in red tape for years. At long last, Pollack’s film is seeing the light of day, and despite containing less than 90 minutes of music recorded in a small church, it immediately joins the ranks of great concert films.
Pollack films Franklin’s shows with a rough, hand-held style that edges closer to the then-current methods of D.A. Pennebaker than contemporary pro-shot equipment. Grainy, darting images give the impression of filming the proceedings almost surreptitiously, if not for the regular acknowledgements of the cameras by attendees and even performers, who occasionally mug for attention. Certainly the cameras bring out the fullest antics of the event’s emcee, Reverend James Cleveland, himself a gospel legend. Cleveland is in fine form throughout, introducing Franklin less as a reverend acknowledging a special treat than a carnival barker whipping a crowd into a frenzy before the trapeze artists take flight. Teasing and hyping an already primed crowd, he embodies the showman qualities that can be bred in church, where communal displays of faith can so easily be led by the most dynamic worshipper. Cleveland is so entertaining that he could have led the film on his own, stirring the congregation into hosannas with little more than warm-up performances.
When Franklin arrives, though, the energy immediately vaults into the stratosphere. This may be a house of worship, but she enters as if walking into Madison Square Garden: regal and resplendent. At the microphone, Franklin sounds humble as she talks about her faith and her childhood in the church, but her charisma is magnetic. Backed by a choir, she gently rolls into the first number, “Mary Don’t You Weep,” and the moment she suddenly jumps from bluesy moans and croons into one of her trademark wails you can feel every hair in the room stand on end. The music itself needs no real explication; upon its release in 1973, Amazing Grace became Franklin’s best-selling LP, a distinction that remains in place to this day. You can hear on the original album the sound of the crowd thrilling to her howls and screams, but it’s something else altogether to watch the energy pour off of her and radiate into the crowd.
Compounding the excitement of Franklin’s voice is, of course, the impact of the music itself. Pollack, clearly unversed in filming live music, may amble around in search of interesting sights, but if the direction lacks a clear throughline, he nonetheless captures something of the deep emotional resonance of gospel music in the black Christian community, the way that the songs are not merely sung but performed by every single person in the pews. There is a transfixed quality to the spectators that recalls many of the famed hippie festivals documented in the late ‘60s, albeit with chemically altered states swapped out for a purer form of transcendence. At times, the crowd’s chanting and applauding gives way to looks of awestruck bliss, with tears flowing freely as Franklin gives in to her own muse and hurls herself into the songs, eyes closed and face contorted in effort as sweat pours off her brow. She gets so lost in the music herself that at one point, her father steps on stage to gently mop her brow, she too focused to worry about sweat.
The religious fervor comes to a head in the showstoppers from each day’s performance, which Franklin transforms from simple renditions of faith into ecstatic vamps that recast gospel as borderline psychedelic pop. Her performance of “Amazing Grace” is the finest ever captured on tape, her stretching every syllable until it snaps and shatters, roaring up into wails so overwhelming that the choir can only gawk at her and Cleveland himself has to step up from the piano to go sit in a pew and cover his face as he weeps uncontrollably. In terms of sheer energy, though, this display is somehow topped by the second day’s climax, “Never Grow Old,” which produces paroxysms of big tent revival outbursts in the crowd, who lean and faint and sprint from the pews as if not merely seized by the Holy Spirit but thrown around the room by it. It’s here that Pollack’s inexperience with the live format almost serves him well, as his overwhelmed reaction as he attempts to capture every small display of wild joy and unvarnished pain leads to a fitting jumble of barely fathomable images. No other concert film has captured a response this naked, and when Franklin herself swoons from the mood of it all, one is left with an image of pop’s most notorious diva breaking through her own shell, producing music so gorgeous that even she succumbs to its spell.
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