‘I want to go where the sound goes after the bell stops ringing.’ – Alex Caldiero, ‘The Sonosopher’

This is Alex Caldiero’s deeply personal and profound definition of a sonosopher. Whether in the remote caves of The Ear of Dionysus in southeastern Sicily, at a performance reading on the Utah Valley University campus in Orem, amid the clutter of the basement workshop in his suburban Utah home, or in a reading at a Brooklyn poetry café, Caldiero is continuously aware of a huge amount of sound. Like the avant-garde composer who understands just how concerts, recitals, and recordings standardize our responses to music, Caldiero unashamedly approaches his literary-sonic artistry as a completely open process, preferring not to attempt realizing the directives or commands of the poet’s genre for the purposes of achieving an intended effect.

And, Caldiero’s emotional performances fascinate because they involve listeners/viewers/readers so completely and so intimately. More importantly, they’re over before one can become bored or uncomfortable. Caldiero is never mundane.

So is the case of ‘The Sonosopher,’ the outstanding biographical film directed by Torben Bernhard and Travis Low. The 66-minute film effectively busts through the biographical genre focusing not only on Caldiero’s life, work, and creative process but also rendering – with an exceptional panoply of music and sound – the impact one can expect to feel at one of his performances. But, where first-time directors Bernhard and Low (both former and current UVU students) distinguish themselves especially is giving coherence to the mosaic that is Caldiero’s life, art, and experiences as they explore the severe challenge of redefining fundamental notions of a conceptual art.

Clearly more comfortable with the title of sonosopher as opposed to the more traditional tag of poet and author, Caldiero, 60, takes an idea and process (and not particularly a “literary” one) to the extreme. Sometimes, the words become progressively indistinct amid a palette of sounds – some musical, some natural, others synthesized – and then they’re reconstructed as the process reverses. Or, perhaps a simple phrase or sentence is deconstructed with emotionally charged rhythmic loops that build the tension and then release it.

This is captured memorably by the directors but there is even a more radical notion underscored by Caldiero’s own artistic restlessness as it echoes throughout the film. The impact of the initial exposure to Caldiero’s performance, no matter how good, is so fragile because that sense inevitably will be compromised in its repetition.

Caldiero’s art offers a worthy tradeoff – a memory so profound in its emotional and spiritual depths yet so acutely vulnerable to losing its strength for recreating precisely the experience of that first impact. The film reflects this with stunning clarity and it’s worth reiterating Low’s explanation as taken from an earlier interview with The Selective Echo:

“The emotional content seemed to be what was going to pull us through the mass of material, so that is what we gravitated toward. We streamlined the emotional content into a longer, more singular arc and built the film around that. That meant cutting out a lot of precious material for the ‘greater good.’ It also took a lot of time, blood, sweat, and tears to even identify and realize this.”

And, the biographical details are wisely picked to propel the film’s emotional arc. Daring as Caldiero appears in his art, he also could mix in sublime, common, vulgar, and sentimental elements, doing so with an insouciance and freedom unique to the American character. We learn how he was drawn initially to the mysticism of Mormonism but left disappointed as its religious leaders lost that contemplative sense of mystery. We know readily of his passion for preserving Sicilian language and tradition, his intuitive connection to St. Francis of Assisi, the continuous project of simultaneously editing and revising as many as 21 books in process, his fascination with bells and unusual instruments, and his acute awareness of the risks he accepts for not abiding by the conventional boundaries of the poetry world.

In several well-placed moments in the middle of the film, we get a sense of the harshest criticism leveled against Caldiero intimating that he is not a true poet but a mere stand-up comedian. At a reading in Brooklyn, the event organizer seems baffled, hopelessly narrow-minded, thinking that Caldiero’s work is nothing more than indeterminate babble. Appearing on a cable TV show based out of Park City, Utah, Caldiero leaves the host speechless. Unfortunately, these are the typical reactions among those scared to dream and speculate freely about art. However, viewers also see the enthusiastic appraisal of Caldiero’s work and presence in Utah in the words of Monroe and Shirley Paxman, a couple in their late 80s who have been Utah Valley University’s most active supporters of the arts for many decades. The most sincere artistic impulses function well without the benefit of genre conventions.

Most significantly, it is these two 20-something energetic directors, growing up in the heart of arguably one of the most conservative valleys in this nation, who ask: Where do we go from here? While the film preserves and disseminates the work of an artist who exemplifies the potential to make a positive, lasting contribution to humanity, the film directors show that we’re at a point where everything is possible. We should trust fully our instincts, selecting and enjoying whatever elements of our own real and imagined worlds are the most meaningful.

In a film that achieves its thematic meaning with disarmingly efficient power, Caldiero clears away the conventional and stultifying performance barriers between art and the external world, constantly rekindling his relationship with nature, his geographical roots, and his spiritual yearnings. In the skilled hands of Bernhard and Low, poetry accompanied by all its glorious sound is not the escape from reality but a tribute to our individual and collective potential for creative genius.

The film originated as a project of Utah Valley University’s integrated studies program as Bernhard and Low worked with a handful of other UVU students and faculty, producing more than 100 hours of film footage. First screened earlier this fall, the film already has been accepted for the official competition at the 20th annual Cinequest Film Festival in San Jose, California, which starts Feb. 23. This festival brings more than 80,000 people during its 12-day run.

As an artistic testament of intense intimacy and technical execution, this film undoubtedly and rightfully will attract the attention of the festival circuit. In addition, the film is a significant indicator of the artistic and creative potential at the state’s newest university. For more information about the film, see here.

PHOTO CREDITS: Top photo by Don LaVange. Bottom photo by Ashley Thalman