Pope John Paul II Funeral Documentary

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Title Grazie Papa Sante
Medium Super 8 KodaKrome CiniFilm
Running Time 2:48
Soundtrack Latin Mass Cycadelia Remix

Brief

Capture the events and reactions during and in the aftermath of Pope John Paul II’s Funeral in Rome 2005.

Solution At the time of the Popes death I was mid way through my final research project for my degree at Camberwell, with the coincidental occurrence of such a monumental event in religious history I took the initiative to get myself to Rome and document the events as source of further research. At this stage in the project I hadn’t written a concise brief for my strategic outcomes so basically aimed to capture the events and peoples reactions to it in as many different mediums as possible. I went to Rome armed with a Hasselblad Medium Format camera, Leica 35mm and a 8mm Cine Camera from the 60’s.

On arriving at the Vatican 2 days before the actual funeral I was first drawn to the extent of the world media presence and coverage of the event. With this in mind I decided that as 200 or so TV crews would be capturing the event in the usual broadcast format I would try and capture it in a more emotion way, for this I used the 8mm cine camera. I chose this because of the obvious muted quality of the camera and soft yet deeply processed colours it achieves. Another important reason was the absence of sound and external noise which to me showed the seclusion amongst the chaos that the event seemed to exude, all though not religious myself for many of the people there it seemed to be a deeply personal pilgrimage despite the hustle and bustle of the events and frantic erratic behaviour of the media and authorities. On returning to the UK I edited and produced a short film of the 4 days and sound tracked it to a recording of Latin Mass that I mixed in with an obscure 1960’s psychedelic instrumental piece of music.

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Supporting Work

Below are a number of images taken while filming the documentary that acted as a valuable resource for this project but also the Religious Screen Prints (Click here for more informationon the Screen Print Exhibition) and also the Comme de Garcon, Religious Magazine.