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| THE ENIGMA OF SANCTITY |
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1950 |
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"THE ENIGMA OF SANCTITY," says Thomas Merton, "is
the temptation and often the ruin of historians" — and we may add, of
filmmakers, too, and perhaps even their audiences. The depiction of piety in
cinema often amounts to religious kitsch, even if devised or appreciated from
what seem the purest intentions. Not that religious kitsch can't be a means
to genuine religious experiences for some. But real spiritual perfection is
generally very different than popular conceptions, and our pursuit of what
seems holiness may be in fact the pursuit of a superficial substitute. Not
only that, but our motivation may be as spurious, inasmuch as while most of
us love the idea of associating with saints, basking in the glory, we tend to
shy from the flames that produce a true saintly glow.
The Plaster Saint, the stereotype of sanctity, is but a caricature, says
Thomas Merton. Shaped by the unrealistic conventions of hagiography and
pious art, that which offers itself as a divine pattern is generally a pious
fraud: sinless perfection, immunity to temptation, pristine motivations, all
the pat answers, right actions, and edifying clichés — all of which
could almost be chapter titles in a book on screenwriting for a Hollywood
film about a saint. The Plaster Saint of the movies tends to stand above the
world, abstracted from it, without humor, wonder, curiosity, or doubt.
They are always there kissing the leper's sores at the very
moment when the king and his noble attendants come around the corner and stop
in their tracks, mute in admiration... Worse than this kitschy
perfection, says Merton, is that most of us secretly think this model is the
right one, that in our hearts we believe that the supernatural is equal to
the denial of the human. Therefore, it should be no surprise if filmmakers
can never seem to get it right. Especially in Hollywood, where the
sanctimonious glow of celebrity has already baptized a dubious culture, the
litany of saints and Messiahs, religious or secular, range on a continuum
from stiff to fluff.
In 1961, Michael Curtiz made a Cinemascope life of St. Francis. Cinemascope,
says Fritz Lang in Contempt, is only good for "snakes and funerals",
but it's also pretty good for the pomp and power of empire: widescreen
religious epics - even those featuring Messiahs born in stables and rag-clad
monks — generally have tended to be an excuse for rendering to Caesar in
all his glory. Michael Curitz specialized in romantic adventures. Not to
say that Francis wasn't a bit of a swashbuckler as a youth, but as with most
of the films about Christ, the still small voice of otherworldliness tends to
be upstaged by the power and glory of this world when splashed on such a
canvas. Curtiz makes it hard to understand why people were ever attracted to
Francis, or could still be. And despite the emphasis on eye candy, the
director fails to take advantage of his big budget and aspect ratio to
balance the vision of artificial glory with natural landscapes: Curtiz uses
nature as a background that might as well be painted flats and Styrofoam
rocks.
There's a passage from Chesterton's biography of Francis that is
most fruitful to consider in this context:
For St. Francis nothing was ever in the background… Francis was a man who
did not want to see the wood for the trees. He wanted to see each tree as a
separate and almost a sacred thing… He did not want to stand against a piece
of stage scenery used merely as a background, and inscribed in a general
fashion: 'Scene; a wood'… Everything would have been in the foreground… St.
Francis was emphatically a realist…
That last observation is particularly fascinating in the light of the fact
that Rossellini's film about St. Francis was made in the context of a
movement of "neorealism" in cinema. And neorealism takes that Franciscan
realism and love of all creation, not just as a matter of content, but of the
form.
Truthfully, I expected Michael Curtiz's architypally-Hollywood -style
approach to be oblivious to the possibility of making any formal connections
with Francis's vision of nature and wholeness. But I was surprised, when I
finally sat down to watch it, how stubbornly prosaic and abstracted Franco
Zeffirelli's film on the same subject was. There are shots there of Francis
dancing in the fields, but one can hardly believe either in the dancing or
the fields. The image is forced into a single overdetermined meaning: "Look
at what a free spirit he is!" Thus the fields and dancing are abstracted
from concrete realities into symbols, real things turned into painted
background, images — for all the vaunted emphasis on screensize —
made functional illustrations for plot points. Screenwriting books often
give the advise to "show" rather than "tell": these images "tell" without
"showing". Ironically, Zeffirelli's film even touches upon Francis's own
aversion to wordiness in its wordy dialogue, as he's urging a brother to go
out and preach. The real St. Francis is known for the opposite approach:
"Preach the Gospel: if necessary, use words."
Right upon this point, a consideration of Rossellini's version illuminates
both the difference that neorealism makes, and it also proves how uniquely
qualified neorealism is for depicting Francis. In The Flowers of St.
Francis, when one of the younger brothers wants to go out and preach,
Francis agrees only reluctantly, and with this caveat: Brother Ginepro must
announce before each sermon, "I talk much, but accomplish little." Ginepro
obeys, but since he preaches his first sermon standing behind a waterfall, he
proves his own point but nobody notices anyway. The only way he's able to
make any kind of contact is to step down to the level of his hearers. These
turn out to be a group of children, and instead of talking any more and
accomplishing any less, he joins them in their play. Later, his most
effective sermon turns out to be suffering and silence.
Rossellini made his cinematic choices intuitively, like D. W. Griffith. Just
as the Soviet filmmakers extrapolated Griffith into theory, so André Bazin
helped articulate what Rossellini was up to. One implication of the
neorealist approach, said Bazin, was a rejection of manipulative methods of
Griffith and the Russians which sought to impose (with a certain violence) an
idea upon the raw data of reality. That montage-oriented style of
filmmaking, in Bazin's view, "talked much and accomplished little" — or
at least little good. Socialist Realism calcified into a thudding literalness,
all matter and no spirit; neorealism sought to incarnate Word into flesh.
And just as Francis was (as has been said) the first democrat, so neorealism
sought a democratization of creation that loosed possibilities within the
frame with a freedom that the filmmaker facilitated rather than dominated.
The Plaster Saints of Soviet propaganda and Hollywood mass-production are
convincing only to someone who's never seen the real thing — which may
say something about both the creators and the audiences for both. And just
after the war, this concerned Rossellini very much.
HOW DO YOU MEND A BROKEN WORLD? Rising from the
rubble of war, Europe was confronted by what seemed opposing alternatives:
Capitalism and Communism. Rossellini wasn't an economist, he was a poet - or
at least he had a poet's sensibility that this forked path led to the same
end: his response was of a piece with that of the Romantics to the Industrial
Age, of the Southern Agrarians in America to the triumph of manufacturing
over traditional ways. In many important ways, his reaction was that of the
existentialist philosophers against the Modern Age. Whatever the ideology
were to dominate, the result would be domination — by the relentless
pressure of efficiency, applied science, and a rational, utilitarian ethos
that made war on anything that was not functional — all those parts of
human experience that made life worth living. In any case, at immediate risk
was what Rossellini called "the jester side" of man: his playful,
imaginative, poetic, relational elements that did not reduce to either
ideological or economic sum.
As he made the films of his Postwar Trilogy, he began probing among the
rubble in search of a third alternative. Perhaps it was the chance discovery
by his junior colleague Federico Fellini of the monastery where they shot the
"Romagna" episode of Paisan. The forces set in play in that brief
episode — simplicity versus complexity, innocence versus the moral taint
of war, idealism versus pragmatics — seemed to have remained with him
for the next several years as an artist: Rossellini seemed to have been
haunted by an image of wholeness in a broken world. He returned to the
monastery a few years later and recruited the monks for another film, this
time an episodic treatment of the Fioretti — the "little flowers"
of St. Francis, edifying snippets of biography and saintly legend. It was
natural that Rossellini would think of Francis of Assisi at a time like this:
Francis was the patron saint of Italy whose original calling had been
rebuilding. With Europe still in ruins, Rossellini saw an opening to clear
the rubble and start fresh on an old foundation.
In a sense, with Germany: Year Zero and The Flowers of St.
Francis, Rossellini has set up for our consideration the two most
significant opposing archetypes in European history. Adolf Hitler, though he
only appears in the first film as a malignant absence, has all but replaced
Satan himself in Western demonology, the father of lies and archetype of
total destruction. Francis is his opposite number: a representative of
undifferentiated oneness and transparent truth. In Germany: Year
Zero, we're left with fragments. With Francis, we glimpse a vision of
wholeness.
Of course, just as St. Francis's call to "Rebuild my church" referred to a
larger entity than little wrecked San Damiano, so also perhaps the rebuilding
of Europe involves a larger project than putting the pieces back together
after World War II. It could be that the human condition is predicated on
division, on complexity. Man is separated from nature, others, himself and
God. Our cognizance of our deep disharmonies burdens and blocks us. The
gaps between real and ideal, is and ought, gnaws at us and wears us out. Our
poor species will do or believe almost anything to be relieved from a state
of tension or cognitive dissonance: the lure of being a member of the Master
Race was the promise of unity — a promise that tends to produce only
more rubble. With that in mind, postmodern thinkers advise us the best
solution is to give up the quest for totality and wholeness and surrender to
the flux. Yet we all remain haunted by some vague notion of Original
Oneness. The Garden. The Womb. The Child. Heaven and Home. Whether
memory or mirage, the vision taunts us, makes us crazy, feel entangled and
impure.
Despite all the disappointments, people tend to be suckers for promises of
Paradise restored.
Baby Boomers were particularly susceptible to this pull, growing up affluent
but troubled by a pervasive sense of inauthenticity. Their youthful
rejection of bourgeois culture led to a rediscovery of primitivism and for
some (along with Jesus), St. Francis. Zeffirelli's Brother Sun, Sister
Moon presented Francis as a bearded, barefoot hippie whose stripping of
his past captured the imagination of a generation who longed to forsake the
weight of history and begin again. Of course, going back "to basics" or
"nature" can be problematic and the counterculture ran aground as the pagans
had — often going back too far, to a beastly end. (Chesterton maintains
that classical culture became so sexualized that it took a millenium of
cultural "fasting" to purge nature of debauched pagan associations and
Francis, the holy fool, heralded the end of that purgation.)
Still, theologian Harvey Cox saw the Sixties' counterculture as a reclamation
of facets of humanity eclipsed by the rise of technological society —
essentially, Rossellini's jester side of man. In his book the Feast of
Fools: A Theological Essay on Festivity & Fantasy, Cox idenfied certain
aspects of the youth revolt - the recovery of celebration and imagination
— not just with a hunger for for wholeness, but vital to both
psychological health and, significantly, to being able to have compassion for
the oppressed of the world. A capacity for being able to imaginatively "put
themselves in other shoes" was prerequisite for the developed nations to be
able to have understanding and compassion for those oppressed and different
than themselves.
Here we see why Rossellini takes this "jester side" so seriously and so
centrally: his offering of St. Francis as a model for conflict-weary Europe
isn't a simple-minded Utopian vision, a rejection of private property and
reduction to begging (that begs the question "begging from whom?"),
but a recovery of that sense of play and imaginative identification with
others that makes people more valuable than efficiency, and the "abnormality"
of the Other less prone to threaten and result in conflict. The mere
existence of the jester is a check on the hubris of power in both ruler and
system. In his book, Cox cites an essay by Leszek Kolakowski titled, "The
Priest and the Jester":
The philosophy of the jester is a philosophy which in every epoch denounces
as doubtful what appears as unshakeable; it points out the contradictions in
what seems evident and incontestable; it ridicules common sense into the
absurd — in other words, it undertakes the daily toil of the jester's
profession along with the inevitable risk of appearing ludicrous.
The jester is the quintessence of the carnival spirit, and just as the
jester's cap is pants worn on the head, carnival turns upside-down the values
by which the world is typically run. Carnival mocks the pretensions of
permanence and power, defies the illusions of the masses. No wonder the
faith of Francis has been described as a "carnivalized" Christianity: his
topsy-turvy insistence that Perfect Joy is found in suffering, his irrational
love for everything and everybody, his scandalous rejection of all the world
holds dear — power, property, status, etc. Technically, of course, this
is Christianity, for which the adjective "carnivalized" is required only when
it forgets its own scandalous identity. Yet the upsidedowness of a faith
whose God is born in a stable, the meek inherit the earth, and whose secrets
are given to children and fools is all too easily domesticated, and even the
court of Christ himself would seem to require its own jester.
Indeed, Francis referred to himself as "the jester of God," and the Italian
title of Rossellini's film is Francesco, giullare di Dio —
"Francis, God's Jester". The Italian term refers to a French one,
jongleur — whence comes "juggler" — but the jongleur
was more than a juggler. He was also a poet, singer, all-around entertainer.
The jongleur was in fact more earthy than the troubadour: the Latin
joculator means "joker", and Francis's joculatores Domini
("ministrels of God") were renowed for putting on a good show when they
pulled into a town to preach. Francis's name and terms point to France, home
to a Medieval love cult which, though eventually declared heretical and wiped
out, left a deep and permanent mark on European culture. So much of what we
know as "love in the Western world" finds its source in this flamboyantly
romantic vision, including the veneration of an ideal lady — whether
Dante and his Beatrice, or St. Francis and his "Lady Poverty."
Rossellini (who would himself be drawn to the Sixties counterculture) loved a
holy fool as against the powers and systems of this world. In several films,
the director is particularly attendant upon the notion of faith — even
just faith in humanity — as a kind of madness, at least as judged by the
standards of the Guardians of Order, of "normal". His heart is always with
someone who violates those standards to go his own way, to be an authentic
individual. He opens St. Francis with the citation from the Book of
First Corinthians, "God has chosen the foolish things of the world to
humiliate the learned, the weak to humiliate the strong, the vile, the
despicable, and all the things that are not, to annihilate all those things
that are." Even Francis isn't weak enough for him, and he devotes a good
deal of The Flowers in following the story of Ginepro, aka "Brother
Juniper," the silliest, most foolish, least of St. Francis' followers.
(Along with the Fioretti, the film draws from the contemporary work,
The Life of Brother Juniper.) Brother Ginepro's encounter with the
Tyrant, a showdown between the armed, technological society and humanity made
in the image of God, offers a truly carnivalesque reversal of our notion of
which of these is really the fool.
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