Instruments of Study
By Sarah Fensom
Measures for a Funeral
Dir. Sofia Bohdanowicz, Canada/U.K./Norway, no distributor
Measures for a Funeral screened March 16 at Museum of the Moving Image as part of First Look 2025.
Measures for a Funeral, an epically scaled academic drama by Sofia Bohdanowicz, is about fixation. In one of the film’s opening scenes, Audrey Benac (Deragh Campbell), a young graduate student based in Toronto, takes a call from her dying mother before entering her locus of study, the Glenn Gould School of Music. Her mother recounts the myriad injustices of Audrey’s talented yet absent violinist father—grievances that Audrey seems to have heard many times before but still finds unsettling. Her father’s violin, another seemingly well-worn topic, comes up. “When I die,” Audrey’s mother tells her, “I want you to scatter the violin’s ashes with mine.”
The violin, we come to learn, is an object of totemic significance in Audrey’s family. Her maternal grandfather, a violinist as well, left the finely crafted instrument to Audrey’s father. Her mother, who was pursuing a career as a musician in her own right, took this as not only a slight but a sign to give up the violin altogether—which she did in an official capacity when Audrey was born. She passed down her grudge and regrets to Audrey as one would a precious heirloom, leaving them to her daughter to tote around and keep intact. It’s no surprise then that the violin and all of its significance is seen strapped to Audrey’s back throughout the film, a source of both anxiety and comfort.
Audrey is preparing a thesis on Kathleen Parlow, a Canadian violin virtuoso who dazzled Europe in the early 20th century. After the disruption of World War I, Parlow’s career never quite returned to its former heights, and she eventually resorted to making a living off the stage as a violin teacher—Audrey’s grandfather being one of her students. Despite Audrey’s fascination with Parlow and her deep commitment to resurrecting the violinist’s somewhat forgotten legacy, it’s revealed early in the film that Audrey is gravely behind on her thesis and her funding is running out. She flees Toronto to retrace Parlow’s steps in the UK and Oslo, leaving behind her mother, who is in hospice, and a five-year-long romantic relationship rather unceremoniously.
Though Measures of a Funeral is a lushly photographed, globe-trotting saga that runs nearly two and a half hours, its bones are that of an essay film. Parlow’s personal papers, which the director found in the Edward Johnson Music Library, are read in voiceover. Throughout the film, sheet music and archival images are scanned, letters and diaries are sifted through, and fellow academics are visited and interviewed by Audrey, clad in recording equipment. At times, as in a meeting with an archivist (played by performance artist Rosa-Johan Uddoh) at the British Library, there’s a dryness that can feel out of rhythm with the glossier, more dramatic sequences in the film. After a mini lecture about sound preservation, the archivist plays Audrey a rare wax cylinder recording of Parlow made by Thomas Edison, which makes Audrey emotional. It’s a discordant note after the sequence’s stuffy beginnings, but one that nevertheless serves to characterize Audrey and the effect her research has on her, and feels fully in keeping with the director’s filmography, which boasts a myriad of institutional settings and research sequences.
The character of Audrey Benac, always played by Deragh Campbell, appears in several of Bohdanowicz’s films, including her debut feature Never Eat Alone (2016). In that film, Audrey’s concerns are already focused on her family and their Royal Tenenbaums-levels of achievement in the arts. She tries to track down the former creative partner of her aging grandmother and an episode of the live-to-air television show the duo made years earlier. In the 2018 short film Veslemøy’s Song, Audrey discovers a book in her grandmother’s storage locker titled Kathleen Parlow: A Portrait. She becomes interested in the story of Parlow, her grandfather’s demanding violin teacher and a forgotten Canadian virtuoso, and seeks out a rare recording from 1909 at the New York Public Library. In MS Slavic 7, a 2019 feature co-directed by Bohdanowicz and Campbell, Audrey is made literary executor of the estate of her great-grandmother, a Polish poet, and attempts to piece together a series of letters between her and fellow Polish literary figure, Józef Wittlin, in the Houghton Library at Harvard.
Audrey, though she often comes off as reserved and awkward, is nonetheless admirable in her stalwart commitment to conducting her investigations in her own way. Campbell plays her with a certain flatness, so that Audrey’s connection to her subject—Parlow and her music—is always stronger than her connection to the people around her. Audrey is most certainly an academic in practice, but because she is so often looking towards the past she seems to carry an unconventional openness to the unexpected. At times in the film, there’s a spookiness surrounding Audrey’s findings, as in a scene in a darkened closet in Parlow’s former home in a small English village which features music queues and lighting that evoke the horror genre. In this way, Bohdanowicz presents Audrey not just as a historian, but also as somewhat of a spiritualist.
Audrey’s antecedents feel more literary than cinematic. One imagines her in the long tradition of scholarly women who have spurred on the resurrection of other women artists and writers’ careers, while trying to make sense of their lost or mismanaged legacies within a patriarchal system. Contemporary figures like Lili Anolik—the author of Hollywood’s Eve: Eve Babitz and the Secret History of L.A. (2019) and a 2014 Vanity Fair profile that re-entered the reclusive Babitz back into the literary establishment—come to mind, as does Carrie Courogen, writer of the recent Miss May Does Not Exist: The Life and Work of Elaine May, Hollywood’s Hidden Genius (2024), a book that grapples with May’s misanthropic reputation and checkered career despite her enormous talent. Bohdanowicz herself is one of these women, too. In making Measures for a Funeral, she staged the North American premiere of Opus 28, a symphony written for Parlow by Johan Halvorsen that was thought to be lost until 2015. Knowing that Bohdanowicz’s efforts were almost solely responsible for the performance of Opus 28 by the Orchestre Métropolitain at Maison Symphonique de Montréal gives the film a reflexivity that meaningfully adds to its feeling of purpose. The film itself becomes a sort of artifact—its own entry into Parlow’s legacy. In its final sequence, as the virtuosic Elisa (played by the celebrated violinist María Dueñas) leads the orchestra, the body of Audrey’s mother is guided into the crematory, as is the violin, which we’ve learned was initially Parlow’s. It’s the end of a chapter for Audrey and her family, but a beginning for Parlow.