In Aretha Franklin’s revelatory concert film Amazing Grace, she barely speaks a word. Aside from one muffled request for water and a hushed discussion with her musical director, there’s not a peep out of her. Instead, she focuses her concentration wholly on the spirit of the gospel music she came to perform during the film’s historic two-day shoot, which took place in January 1972 at the New Temple Baptist Mission church in Los Angeles. “She came for a church service,” the late singer’s niece Sabrina Owens, who controls the estate, said to the Guardian. “The way she conducted herself was totally different than what you would see at one of her pop concerts. Her eyes were closed. Her head was thrown back. She was focused entirely on something higher.” To witness the whiplash contrast between that self-effacement, and the star power of her vocal performance, is just one element which greatly distinguishes watching the Amazing Grace film from listening to the album of the same name, which came out late in 1972. That double-set became Franklin’s biggest-selling album, as well as the top-grossing gospel collection of all time. Meanwhile, the film lay uncompleted in the vaults for another 38 years, hobbled by gobsmacking mistakes, poor planning and, eventually, by Franklin’s health issues. After a complex, fraught and dragged-out series of events, the movie was finally completed by the producer Alan Elliott last fall, allowing for fleeting runs in two US cities in December. Amazing Grace has just started a broader release, followed by a full, international roll-out on 19 April. While Elliott finished the film, he had no connection to the original shoot (he was seven at the time). His initial connection came in the early 90s, when he was a staff producer for Atlantic Records. Jerry Wexler, who had co-produced many of Franklin’s greatest hits for the label, mentioned the languishing footage to Elliott, who had long been a fan of the Amazing Grace album. The two had brief talks at the time with the man who directed the film back in 1972, Sydney Pollack. However, a full decade and a half passed before Elliott began to nudge Wexler again about the film, leading to a reconnection with Pollack. By that time, the director was gravely ill with cancer, a disease that would take his life the next year, in 2008. According to Elliott, Pollack told him at the time: “You know this movie better than I do. You finish it.” Soon, he discovered what a daunting task that would be. The reason the film hadn’t been completed was because Pollack neglected to take the most rudimentary step in synchronizing the sound of the music to the images in the film. All that would have been required to accomplish that was to employ a most common filmic device: a clapperboard, which snaps open at the start of a piece of film and shuts at the end of it, thus marking the visual segment to be connected to its sonic corollary. In this case, “the camera guys kept turning their cameras off and on, and off and on”, Elliott said. “So, there were, like, 15 or 20 different start points on a given piece of film. It’s just unfathomable.” The result left about 2,000 pieces of film bits without sync points. Such a colossal screw-up might never have happened had the film studio hired the original guy they would considered to helm the project – James Signorelli, who served as cinematographer on Super Fly, a film which achieved the tricky feat of matching its dialogue to live music created by Curtis Mayfield. But because Pollack’s previous movie, They Shoot Horses Don’t They, earned him an Oscar nomination for best director, the studio went with the bigger name. According to Elliott, Pollack did no pre-production work for Amazing Grace, and, afterwards, didn’t even write down the names of the songs. While the clapperboard oversight may have scotched the original release, Elliott feels it created a secondary gain. “All of those cameras moving in and out, and turning on and off, gave this energy to the footage, and it also allowed them to take these beautiful pictures,” he said. The tedious work of finding the connecting points between the film’s image and sound fell to a special technical team in 2008. “They spent three weeks to get all 13 or 14 hours of film synced,” said Elliott. Even so, another 10 years would pass before lingering legal issues involving the singer and the movie would be worked out. For a long time, no one could locate a signed contract from Franklin to approve the film’s release. Once they finally did, in 2013, she challenged it, preventing planned screenings at several film festivals at that time. Franklin’s niece says she doesn’t know why the singer held things up. “She never talked about the film,” Owen said, adding that she does know that her aunt cherished the original performance. In the past, Elliott has said that Franklin asked for $5m to grant final approval of the film, but he now believes the main issue that affected things at the end was her worsening health. “This was a slow, slow death that she had to go through,” he said. “If she had to do a tour, or do press around this movie, I understand her decision. If she had been healthy, I believe the movie would have come out.” Owens said she had no second thoughts about approving the film’s release several months after her aunt’s death. “Everybody in the family had the same feeling,” she said. “There’s nothing offensive in the film. If she was that opposed, she would have let somebody know. That didn’t happen.” Alan Elliott, Sabrina Owens and Tirrell Whittley attend the premiere of Amazing Grace. Photograph: Rachel Luna/Getty Images For Elliott, the film has great value apart from the album. For the recording, Franklin added instruments in the studio, such as a celesta, and also overdubbed some of her vocals. By contrast, the film “is just the stuff that was in the room”, he said. “It’s more truthful.”<doc-sep>"If you watch modern music documentaries, you have all these talking heads who explain it and lead you by the hand through the whole thing, but in this, the music envelopes you, there's no chat," explains Boyd. "And her look is in keeping with her sound - live, in the moment, not over-produced, beautiful. It's a different era now - there weren't many moments like this after 1972, much less in the second decade of the 21st Century."<doc-sep>There’s an oceanic swell of euphoria and joy in this extraordinary film, effectively a rediscovered concert movie showing the creation of Aretha Franklin’s gospel LP, Amazing Grace, recorded over two nights in 1972 in front of a live congregation and accompanied by the Southern California Community Choir. The concert was at the New Temple Missionary Baptist Church in Watts, Los Angeles, the interior being dominated by a vivid fresco of Christ’s baptism, a painting that by now might have almost pop-art status. Sydney Pollack shot the original footage but the project had to be abandoned because sound and vision had not been properly synchronised. Only decades later has digital technology permitted this match-up to be achieved under the supervision of Alan Elliott. Franklin is stunningly charismatic in her very reticence and restraint. Unlike the church’s ebullient and charming pastor, James Cleveland, who MCs the event, Franklin never addresses the audience other than in her singing, sometimes from the pulpit, sometimes from the piano keyboard; she is dressed simply, almost sacrificially, in a plain dress. Her one purely dramatic gesture comes at the very end when she turns and sings directly to the choir – an electrifying, enigmatic gesture. The most heartwrenching moment arrives when Cleveland invites Franklin’s father, the Rev CL Franklin, to address the congregation, which he does, talking fondly of Aretha’s childhood. At another stage, he rushes forward while she is singing and mops her brow, just as he might have done when she was a girl. Yet, however moved we all are, Franklin herself remains calm between numbers, as if in the studio rather than on the concert stage, yet perhaps sensing, as a true artist, that it is her audience and not she who must cry. I felt wrung out at the end of this film. How incredible must it have been for those who were there in person.<doc-sep>Late in 1971, some unlikely news spread among the Southern California Community Choir in Los Angeles. Aretha Franklin was coming to town to record a live gospel album in January, and 25 of its members would be backing her up. The group was led by one of the most famous gospel figures of the era, the Rev. James Cleveland, but its singers were local churchgoing Angelenos. Mary Hall, an alto, was 22. “The reverend just said, ‘You be at rehearsal, and you be at rehearsal,’” she said in an interview last month. “I couldn’t believe I was getting ready to sing with the Queen of Soul. It’s still one of the greatest moments in my life.” That moment — an electrifying two-night session before live audiences at the New Temple Missionary Baptist Church in Watts — resulted in Franklin’s “Amazing Grace,” the best-selling gospel record in history, featuring now-canonical arrangements of gospel standards like “How I Got Over” and “What a Friend We Have in Jesus.”<doc-sep>
Dir: Alan Elliott. U cert, 88 mins When Aretha Franklin died in August last year, she bequeathed one mysterious artefact no one had properly seen. It was an unfinished concert film, shot over two consecutive nights at LA’s New Bethel Baptist Church in 1972, where she was recording her live gospel album Amazing Grace. Warner Brothers hired Sydney Pollack, then one of the hottest directors in town, to document the two sessions, but for undisclosed “technical reasons” the film was never completed or released. According to Alan Elliott, the man who has masterminded its restoration, these had to do with sound-syncing issues caused by a clapper not being used, leading to the shelving of this footage for 47 years. An almighty legal wrangle resulted with the star herself, who had been promised her Woodstock and didn’t get it. The record, in the meantime, went double platinum, becoming the best-seller of Franklin's career and the biggest gospel album of all time. So when the film, after all Elliott’s digging and reassembly, was presented to the Toronto film festival in 2015, Aretha sued, wanting an unrealistic $10m settlement. Only now, after negotiations with her estate, is it being made public, and what a vital communion it proves to be with her colossal talent. Aretha gets a rhetorical drumroll of an introduction from the Reverend Dr. James Cleveland, then musical director of that church, whose pastor was Aretha’s own father, Reverend C.L. Franklin. “She can sing anything,” the former simply announces, before reminding the live audience to be mindful of the holy setting.