September Grab Bag
Nuns! Knights! Labor Unions!
Watching
Apparition (2012)
[cw: sexual assault]
I always hold my breath when I watch movies about nuns, waiting to see if the filmmakers will do something stupid. (Benedetta will be the exception, since I already know that stupidity is Paul Verhoeven’s modus operandi.)
Isabel Sandoval’s second feature is set at a wooded convent in the Philippines in the early 70s. Sister Lourdes, the newest member of the community, arrives hoping her prayers can be of help for her family, who have been racked by the disappearance of her brother (possibly a politically-motivated kidnapping). The Mother Superior, Sister Ruth, is welcoming and not very villainous as far as movie-mother superiors go, though she’s prone to shutting down conversations with constant recourse to the dictum that a nun’s duty is to pray. Against this stance Sister Lourdes finds solidarity with Sister Remy, the convent’s extern, who brings Sister Lourdes along on her trips into town, ostensibly to make deliveries but in reality to attend meetings of the Liberal Party opposition to President/dictator-ascendant Ferdinand Marcos. Rounding out the cast is the shut-in Sister Marcia, who in her first of only two appearances portentously mistakes Sister Ruth for an apparition of the Virgin Mary.
Though the film was shot with subpar digital camera quality (the colors are at times distractingly cheap looking), the compositions and camera movements prove that the film’s limitations owe to the technology and not the filmmaker. The stillness of the monastery as Sandoval frames and edits it captures the contradictions of monastic life. The obedience to superiors and adherence to routine required of the nuns can be oppressive, yet this regimentation also creates the conditions necessary to pray deeply, to contemplate deeply, and, eventually, to grieve deeply.
On their way back from one of their secret leftist meetings, Sister Lourdes and Sister Remy are attacked by a gang of men, who rape Sister Lourdes and leave her pregnant. Sister Ruth and the bishop who visits to sort out the aftermath of the attack tell Sister Lourdes that she must bring the baby to term; Sister Lourdes wants to abort it, but knows that under the circumstances there’s no way she can. At this point in the movie I saw multiple versions of abortion movies from the past 20 years flash before my eyes as I anxiously wondered what direction Sandoval was going to take this in. Both the option of having Sister Lourdes procure an illegal abortion, or the option of having her do an about face, accept her situation, and deliver the baby would be unrealistic in their own ways, all the more so if handled carelessly by the filmmaker.
Sandoval threads the needle with ease, first by staging an extraordinary scene where Sister Lourdes is given space just to feel. One night she takes out her anger on Sister Remy by slapping her. After she stops, Sister Remy picks up Sister Lourdes’ hands to continue beating herself with, feeling responsible for exposing her friend to danger, but Sister Lourdes cuts her off. They collapse into each others arms and sob for a length of time that’s only made possible by the careful pacing Sandoval had worked so hard to establish in the 45 minutes leading up to this point. In another remarkable move—although this is also the only point at which I think the filmmaking really falters—Sandoval later introduces a flashback from Sister Ruth’s point of view which suggests that her obstinance in the face of Sister Lourdes’ trial is not pure villainy but in fact [extremely deep breath] a trauma response. Not everything is a trauma response, yes…but sometimes, some things are!
Sister Lourdes does eventually give birth, and in a moving parallel scene with Sister Remy she explains her acceptance of her situation and desire to bring the child into the world in terms of her and her child’s place in the broader liberatory struggle underway all around them. The political backdrop of the film is by far its most interesting aspect. After her first trip into town with Sister Remy, Sister Lourdes brings back a copy of Paulo Freire’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed and a contraband radio, through which we and the nuns learn about Marcos’ steady consolidation of dictatorial power. Sister Lourdes goes to confession to ask forgiveness for sneaking away to a political rally, but before the priest is heard giving absolution Sandoval projects a newsreel with audio of political protests on Sister Lourdes’ face through the confessional screen like some sort of waking nightmare.
The tension between the monastic need for reflection and the young nuns’ desire to take political action runs deep through the film, which in a way exemplifies a key theme of Freire’s text: to sacrifice one or the other of either reflection or action is to fall short of praxis, that which is needed to truly transform the world. Unable to participate with their compatriots in the political struggle against the Marcos regime, the nuns of Sandoval’s film are left to discern what authentic praxis looks like from the confines of a monastery, and whether transforming one’s own heart is enough to transform the world at all.
Apparition is streaming on Criterion Channel until the end of this month! They did not pay me to say that.
Reading, etc.
Mikis Theodorakis, composer for Zorba the Greek and Z, among other films, passed away earlier this month at 96. A Communist from his youth, Theodorakis was sent to prison camps on multiple occasions, first in the aftermath of World War II and again during the years of the Greek junta. Nevertheless, not even his political enemies could resist the power of his songs:
In the early 1970s, Greek exiles were fond of sharing a story about an Athens policeman who walks his beat humming a banned Theodorakis song. Hearing it, a passer-by stops the policeman and says, “Officer, I’m surprised that you are humming Theodorakis.” Whereupon the officer arrests the man on a charge of listening to Theodorakis’s music.
Steven Greydanus has written what is probably the definitive piece (for now) on The Green Knight, the David Lowery adaptation of the Middle English poem Sir Gawain and the Green Knight that was just compelling enough to draw me back to a theater last month. The movie is not without its problems, at both the narrative level and the aesthetic level. Greydanus is a generous critic (he watched it three times!) and accepts the film for what it is while taking its makers to task for how their revisions and omissions to the text weaken its intended impact, e.g.:
What does it mean that the lady then rebukes Gawain with the words “You are no knight?” Does she indict his unchastity? The fact that he allowed himself to be passively seduced instead of taking the initiative?
The truth, alas, is that The Green Knight offers no real sense of a code or standard by which “knightly” behavior can be judged. There’s quite a bit of talk about “honor,” but little sense of what that entails. Chivalry, courtesy, modesty and so forth are never mentioned. Virtue in general is mentioned a few times, but which virtues are expected of a knight is never set forth. Even when Guinevere talks about the “five virtues of a knight” in connection with the five-by-five-fold significance of the pentangle, the five-pointed star on Gawain’s shield that in the poem symbolizes the perfection to which Gawain aspires, we never learn what the “five virtues” are!
A cool new resource by Maya Cade of the Criterion Collection: the Black Film Archive, an online registry of Black cinema from 1915–1979, limited to titles that are readily available to stream. From her newsletter:
As debates about Black film’s association with trauma rage on, I hope Black Film Archive can offer a different lens through which to understand Black cinematic history, one that takes into consideration the full weight of the past. Through this lens, it is easy to see that the notion that “Black films are only traumatic” is based on generalizations and impressions of recent times (often pinned to the success of films like “12 Years a Slave”) rather than a deeper engagement with history, which reveals that “slave films” constitute only a small percentage of the Black films that have been made. I hope conversations evolve to consider the expansive archive of radical ideas and expression found in Black films’ past.
With New York Film Festival underway I would be remiss not to mention that the workers of Film at Lincoln Center—which includes ushers and theater staff as well as programmers and fundraisers—are still fighting for a fair contract after management has continued to reject their proposals for health benefits and equitable wages extending to both full- and part-time staff. You can learn more about how you can support them at flcunion.org/fair-contract/
Meanwhile, the International Alliance of Theatrical Stage Employees (IATSE), representing 150,000 members in the U.S. and Canada, is preparing for a strike authorization vote on October 1–3 in their own fight for better wages, benefits, and working conditions.
Early readers of this newsletter may recall the Poster of the Week feature…why not bring that back? For Mubi, Adrian Curry compiles the posters for the films of this year’s NYFF main slate and passes some judgments. I’m with him on the impressive title design for Neptune Frost, and I’d add to his favorites the lovely hand-painted treatment on Wheel of Fortune and Fantasy, though I wish he had highlighted the original poster for Petite Maman instead of the more modern UK poster. The Întregalde poster is giving me serious Liberté vibes, which is absolutely not what I assumed I was signing up for when I bought a ticket.