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After the exposed viscera of Hospital, healing through "the workshop of learning to listen to the spirit." A Benedictine monastery in rural Michigan, a zone of spiritual middle management in Frederick Wiseman's secular gaze. Daily activities, private and group discussions, ascetic rituals. Weathered disciples, inquisitive novitiates. "I was wondering... Could you give me a theological rationale for discipline?" Modest sessions, with folding chairs in a circle as each individual talks against a bare wall in close-up, eyes shut in concentration. The Abbot is a sturdy fellow, diligent, empathetic, humorous through all of it. (He gently argues about the ostensible disrespect of using first names with a prickly older monk, who punctuates their debate with a flyswatter blow.) Members and misfits, "loneliness is one of the worst things a person can be in." Private realms within a communal retreat, itself a realm within a system within a nation, all kept in balance by Wiseman. Need for wholeness, turmoil behind order. The outside world has supermarket muzak and push-pull with an amused-irritated storekeeper over a potato peeler, the timbre is not Bresson purity but McCarey jocularity. ("I would hate to see one of the Brothers prostrate on the floor, bleeding from the fingers.") A bearded young monk aches with torment, quotes Teilhard de Chardin and the Tibetan Book of the Dead, takes solace in the "river of joy always underneath." Preparations for the Eurachrist, with prayers for "peaceful settlement of the conflict in the Middle East" and "all draft resisters in prison." Crucifix on a darkened background for the closing sermon on Mary and Martha, allegory for spiritual traveler and searching filmmaker alike. In black and white.
--- Fernando F. Croce |