It was a spectacle every bit as astonishing and awesome as the venue that hosted it: Paolo Cherchi Usai’s “Passio,” accompanied Saturday by a live ensemble of singers, string performers, and organists, all gathered in the Cathedral Church of St. John the Divine to play their part in an experience that was at once riveting, revolting and, above all, reflective.

It was evident throughout the film’s introduction that its appearance on Tribeca’s schedule was seen by organizers as a kind of breakthrough, something to expand both the geographic size and conceptual scope of a festival that this year has taken more chances than ever before.

As billed in the festival’s promotional materials, “Passio” is a movie constructed with a “declared ambition to manifest the neglected or repressed memory of the human race” during the 20th century. But as it was presented during the weekend, the visual experiment seemed less like an ambiguous, far-reaching thesis on the “moving image” than a focused and provocative consideration of what it means to see, to watch movies, and even to exist as a human being.

It was also a fascinating mix of media, incorporating an orchestral score, operatic singers, cryptic calligraphy, and religious iconography, as well as black-and-white and color images. More than anything else, Mr. Cherchi Usai relies on the power of a blank screen — of pure blackness — to achieve a startling effect, spacing out the images of color, animals, and humans to give them a more charged meaning and a greater sense of urgency.

The experience was primarily a musical one, relying on the famed orchestral piece by Arvo Part — widely hailed as one of the last great musical masterpieces of the 20th century — which echoed beautifully off the walls and the arches of St. John’s cathedral. The church is an acoustic marvel that regularly attracts throngs of visitors to listen to live Sunday performances of the Cathedral’s choir, and last weekend’s music, as conducted by Owen Burdick, achieved the difficult task of balancing the Trinity Choir’s voices with the bombastic intrusions of the organ, the lighter diversions of the clarinets, and the consistent swells of the violins.

It was this musical score, often dissolving into gorgeous, echoing harmonies, that provided more than a few opportunities to consider what Mr. Cherchi Usai was doing with his most challenging filmic montage. Opening to the horrific image of a distorted human body, its flesh stretched out by stakes in the ground, the performance offers a number of shocking images to break the movie’s black surface. Much as Mr. Part’s composition continually returns to a fixed chorus, Mr. Cherchi Usai uses his images, his alphabet of calligraphy and his empty, dark screens to create a structure for his non-narrative work: prolonged blackness, followed by a second or two of a moving image and then a quick flurry of calligraphy, moving too quickly to decipher.

Thus the few dozen images chosen for the film are rendered that much more essential for audiences seeking meaning. At times, Mr. Cherchi Usai seems to be reflecting on the nature of human sight, alternating between observational images of nature (such as a lizard scurrying along the ground and fish moving back to the sea), flurries of color (a handful of bright collages breaks up the film’s blackand-white scheme), and close-up shots of the eye itself, wildly looking about in the midst of a surgical operation.

At other times, though, the images seem to have a distinctly religious significance, as depictions of mummies morph into X-rays of human bodies and as flashes of human agony and death are then contradicted with images of life, love, and birth (all suggestive of the resurrection). Meanwhile, other segments seem preoccupied with expressing rage at the despicable acts of which humans are capable, repeatedly cutting to horrific medical experiments in which unknown doctors subject naked men and women to a horrific battery of tests, later watching as they fall to the ground mid-seizure, nearing death.

Amid all this, there are yet other asides that call attention to the artifice of cinema, as separate sequences examine spools of undeveloped film stock, the crude process of editing together strips of celluloid, and even, in one scene, the way an image on a film print — the idealized image of a man and woman kissing — can be scraped off with a knife. Between them all is the same refrain: a blur of unintelligible figures, static black, and the soaring heights of Mr. Part’s harmonies, echoing from every side.

It’s difficult, and perhaps unwise, to assign a meaning to “Passio,” a work that clearly strives to remain open to interpretation. But while some in the audience were moved to walk out early, others could be seen leaning forward in their seats.

For those who missed out on last week’s experiment, there’s still a chance to get in on the action. This weekend, DJ Spooky (aka Paul D. Miller) will bring his renowned “Rebirth of a Nation” to the Winter Garden at the World Financial Center, offering a live spectacle of sampling and remixing. Taking a new musical score, and a random array of images pulled from D.W. Griffith’s 1915 controversial silent epic, Mr. Miller seeks to reconstruct, and re-create, the shape and story of this profoundly racist film for a new generation.