Arvo Pärt’s Cantus in Memory of Benjamin Britten and Michael Moore’s Fahrenheit 9/11

Abstract This study examines how the absolute and the sacred are dilated through Arvo Pärt’s Cantus in Memory of Benjamin Britten (1977/80), as employed in a small section near the beginning of Michael Moore’s film Fahrenheit 9/11 (2004). It places the sacral aesthetics of Pärt’s music in the context of the film and shows how the music affords a contingent vision of and resistance to the sacral presuppositions (related to the Crucifixion) of the felling of the Twin Towers on 11 September 2001. It discusses the music and film as memorialization and mourning, exposing the absolute and sacred.