Tone Blevins

Meredith Monk's "Ellis Island" is a haunting, reflective piece on Ellis Island and the immigrants who passed through there.

Monk’s meditation on WWII and recurring cycles of intolerance, fascism, and cruelty in history originated in 1976 as a live stage work utilizing elements of music, images, movement, dialogue, film, sound, and light. This film version, shot on 16mm in the Lepercq Space at the Brooklyn Academy of Music in 1977, was created in partnership with the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts as part of their initiative to document ground-breaking live performance for future restaging. QUARRY centers on a sick American child (played by Monk herself) whose world darkens as her illness progresses, this darkening including the rise of a dictator. A unique document of this innovative, boundary-blurring production, and a work of art on its own terms, replete with a film-within-a-film directed by Monk in 1975.

This film is a rich and haunting reinvention of medieval life that never loses its contemporary perspective. When the plague afflicts a village, this world seems to go up in an apocalypse of hatred and disease that presages our own century.