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| THE PROBLEM WITH NORMAL |
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(aka The Greatest Love), 1952 |
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ROSSELLINI'S FINAL FILM in his "War Trilogy" was
Germany: Year Zero That title suggests an obliteration of the past and
starting utterly over. This film is Europa '51, a kind of diagnostic
update on the postwar reconstruction. Germany: Year Zero featured a
12-year old boy named Edmund who was fatally damaged by the traumatic
experience of growing up in the midst of war and the total destruction of his
country. This film features a 12-year old boy who grew up in the bomb
shelters of Rome, and is likewise scarred by his experiences. The
devastation of Italy was not nearly as severe as in Germany, but conditions
were dire enough to produce the rawness of neorealism in films depicting
unemployment, homelessness and weary disillusionment. From a certain
perspective, little had changed five years after the war ended. The
Fascists still seemed to be in charge; the Resistance in opposition. The
only way forward seemed either Capitalism or Communism, which Rossellini took
to be twin means to the same end of life-killing materialism. Many people
threw themselves into making money: the next generation of filmmakers was to
expose the unhealed wounds and emptiness that lay beneath the Italian
"Economic Miracle." But Rossellini had already seen through the proposed
alternatives and decided the cures were as bad as the disease. He'd scouted
an alternative path from the rubble in St. Francis. Now he considered what
that ideal might look like worked out more practically in a modern setting.
The times, Rossellini believed, demanded a new kind of saint: an idea he
learned from one of them.
Europa '51 is based very loosely on the life of Simone Weil, the
French intellectual whose unconventional spirituality and radical
identification with the poor have inspired poems, plays, a jazz cantata, and
no doubt further manifestations of her new kind of sainthood. Born into a
family of geniuses (her brother was one of the 20th century's major
mathematicians), Simone fled the sterile comfort of academia to live and work
with the poor. The sequence in Europa '51 where the character
modeled on her takes a factory job is from Weil's biography: though she was
trained in and taught philosophy, she always chose action over theory —
marching with the workers, going off to the Spanish Civil War. Weil's
deeply-felt identification with the oppressed began when she was a child and
refused to eat sugar as long as others suffered from hunger and privation;
her asceticism was as extreme (and arguably pathological) as many a Medieval
saint, and ultimately led to a sort of self-martyrdom. She was drawn to
Catholicism but remained on the threshold of the Church in solidarity with
those still on the outside, and would surely have chosen to go to hell as
long as any were excluded from heaven. Weil's was an odd, existential
Christianity; she went to Mass, prayed the Pater Noster, and in her
dense writing displays a profound understanding of the Gospel alongside
astonishing (if often brilliant) heterodoxies.
Rossellini doesn't offer the Weil-like character of Irene Girard as a model
for practical piety so much as an image of authentic personhood in a world
dominated by oppressive abstractions. The action is built upon accelerating
conflicts between Irene and various Guardians of Order, authorities on good
and evil, who know patrol the borders and keep out the illegals. Various
spheres are represented: family, society, religion, politics, and especially
science, which is the primary paradigm of impersonal, systematic, ultimately
inhuman, control. Yet it isn't just the scientific Moderns who tend toward
abstraction and domination. Common decency and common sense are ultimately
are threatened by that uncommon individual who doesn't merely violate a given
system but calls into question the authority of all impersonal systems in a
world of persons. Love is above all laws, and the lawlessness of Irene's
love runs afoul of the Pharisaical authorities here in familiar ways, leading
to the predictable Passion and its inevitable end.
It should be noted that Pharisees may be decent, conscientious and ethical
human beings: but even ethics poses its threat to authentic human
existence by making individual persons subservient to universal, impersonal
law. Kierkegaard makes this point memorably in his retelling of the Abraham
and Isaac story — which, like most Bible stories, has been domesticated
beyond recognition. Kierkegaard confronts us with the shocking strangeness
of a devout man whose obedience to God requires the murder of his child.
This little domestic drama shouldn't fill our complacent hearts with smug
righteousness, says Kierkegaard, but rather DREAD. A God who thinks and
commands that far outside-the-box should leave us in "fear and trembling."
Abraham, then, is a "Knight of Faith" — before whom all our "normal"
categories are pathetically inadequate.
Likewise, Irene learns to become a Knight of Faith: Europa '51
follows the journey of its protagonist, starting before the conversion
experiences that led her down the path of sainthood. For a film about the
contrast of abstractions with concrete reality, this film makes plot and
ideas more central than the others of Rossellini's postwar cycle: at times it
can get a little preachy. Yet most movies presuming to depict sanctity offer
the viewer the dubious perk of imaginatively identifying with the saint;
here, the abnormalness of Irene keeps us at a distance. We're more likely to
identify with those moral authorities in making some kind of judgment about
her. This is even more unpleasant, and so we are thereby pressed to move
beyond our own categories. The film offers no free ride on vicarious
sainthood but makes us wrestle with our own rationalizations.
For a film conceived as an imagining of St. Francis in contemporary Europe,
this one has a stern tone — the consequences of embracing "the jester
side" of life might play out in more disturbing ways than Brother Ginepro's
humorous encounter with the tyrant in The Flowers of St. Francis.
It may be helpful to reconsider the Franciscan vision in the light of the
ideal of the Knight of Faith.
ACCORDING TO SIMONE WEIL'S account of her
spiritual journey, the place where she was first driven to her knees to pray
was St. Francis's Portuincula in Assisi. You may recall, this was one of
several ruined churches that Francis restored (in answer to God's call to
rebuilding), and where he first gathered his brothers like Merry Men in the
forest. The forest is long gone, but the chapel is still there: inside a
much larger church that's taken the original name, the magnificent Santa
Maria degli Angeli. The little chapel sits under the soaring dome at
the front of the nave, shining as if dipped in plastic, sealed into that
giant structure like a tiny ship in a mammoth bottle. The contrast is
breathtaking — and thought provoking. Some might view the
juxtaposition as a betrayal of St. Francis's message of poverty, a co-option
by wealthy powers who had much to lose if that message couldn't be contained:
an illustration of Lyndon Johnson's famous preference for having a
troublemaker inside the tent pissing out rather than the reverse. On
the other hand, one wonders where the little chapel would be today if it
hadn't been brought inside these walls. Simplicity is an acid, and after
their founder's death the Franciscans fought over who was the simplest —
until the Church intervened and, it may be argued, took Francis into its
heart, assimilating him, holding his simplicity like a radioactive element to
power the Church ever after.
For Francis is radioactive: either he's crazy or the rest of us are;
judging from his popularity and the esteem he enjoys nearly a thousand years
after his death, he wasn't completely crazy. But like Christ, he doesn't
leave much room for us to just pat his head or rub him like a rabbit's foot.
Not that people don't try. Francis is everybody's favorite saint, their pet,
the one they want to identify with. As I've sat waiting for the long list of
benefactors of the restored print of The Flowers of St. Francis to
pass by in the opening credits like some interminable train, I ask myself:
why do I want to associate myself with Francis? What do I gain by
proximity? A blessing, like a pilgrim kissing a relic? Am I willing to face
the challenge to my own life that his represents, or do I want to safely
contain him, maybe wear him around my neck or plant his statue in my
garden?
Francis of Assisi was certainly a Knight of Faith - and the designation is
doubly appropriate in his case since he started off a real knight, or aspired
to, until he was abruptly turned around and went on to turn the world
upside-down. Even as a friar, Francis remained within the thought world of
chilvalry and courtly love, enraptured by his "Lady Poverty" like a monkish
Don Quixote. Seen by his rightsideup contemporaries, Francis could only be
considered a madman. He remains at even sharper odds with contemporary
norms: if St. Francis doesn't leave you in fear and trembling, you haven't
been paying attention. Out of the full Medieval context, the details are
even more alien, but there's no escaping the Francis who sprinkled ashes on
his food, threw himself into thorn bushes and ice water, embraced lepers, and
bled from a Stigmata. Even those sing-songy lines about finding Perfect Joy
in abject misery, abuse and suffering should raise some red flags. What
are we supposed to do with this guy? How can we avoid smoothing off
the rough edges to the point that we've remade Francis, like Christ himself,
in our own safe image?
Francis stubbornly resisted temptations to abandon the simplicity of his
vision. When urged to adopt a more traditional (and practical) rule he
refused, saying, "The Lord told me what he wanted: He wanted me to be a new
kind of fool in this world. God does not wish to lead us by any other way
than this." Yet the order grew, and management became ever more complex.
Francis appointed as administrator an able and practical man, Brother Elias
— generally seen as the Judas of this story, who betrayed the order by
his cold expediency and tyrannical control. His eventual revision of the
Rule made it more sensible, but in a way that would have disqualified
Francis. Perhaps Elias has been given a bad rap. Next to a Knight of Faith,
no doubt, any practical, conscientous and ethical person might be cast in a
bad light. Of course, it's equally easy to imagine the weak ruler who
succombs to power: for not every member of the fellowship is fit to carry the
ring, which even Gandalf refused, knowing he would be tempted to use it for
good.
In any case, after Francis' death, Brother Elias built a huge Franciscan
basilica at Assisi to honor the founder and house his bones. Whatever the
original motivation, its possible to see in this church - like the preserved
Portuincula — a larger purpose at work, and another useful
image. The church is a split-level. The lower church is low-ceilinged,
catacomb-like, discreetly decorated. The soaring ceiling and open space of
the upper church is breathtaking by contrast, the walls covered with Giotto's
famous frescoes of the life of the saint. For me, the two levels suggest
both the contradiction, and the paradox, that is Francis: suffering
side-by-side with joy, self-denial with celebration. These are akin to the
paradox of Christ: the God-man, both Suffering Servant and Conquering King,
Crucified and Resurrected. Finally, there is the paradox of the Church in
all its humility and glory, poverty and wealth, with Francis and Rome.
Beneath all this lies the crypt of the saint, a chapel where visitors may
pray and wrestle with the pardoxes.
Some find paradox a dodge, a coward's way of having cake and eating it, bad
faith: fleeing the responsibility to choose. Perhaps, and the conclusion is
certainly sensible, in a Brother Elias sort of way — that is, unless
reality itself is a paradox. And if that's the case, that a quantum mystery
lies at the heart of it all, then perhaps a glimpse of wholeness is only
possible via image, poetry, and myth. Whether that means you should sprinkle
ashes on your food, I leave to you to decide. She was always
willing to take the step beyond the trivially silly; and the ridiculous
pushed far enough, absurdity compounded, becomes something else - the Absurd
as a religious category, the madness of the Holy fool beside which the wisdom
of this world is revealed as folly. This point Simone Weil came to
understand quite clearly. Of the implicit forms of the love of God, she
said, "…in a sense they are absurd, they are mad," and this she knew to be
their special claim.
ONE WRITER HAS DESCRIBED his own wrestling with
Simone Weil as a matter of determining which ways she was more sane than most
people, and which ways she was probably a bit crazy.
This is also not a bad way to think about Roberto Rossellini. Like Francis
Bernardone, he was a playboy and a bit of a no-account rascal as a young man.
When his father died he had to go to work, and he went to work for the
movies. He started making documentaries under the Fascist government, then
after the war he began making this series of films that had so much impact on
film history. But he never made sainthood, and he never really stopped being
a bit of a rascal. His films slid off-the-map of conventional moviemaking
and kept drifting further. He preferred to live and work in the midst of a
whirling, creative chaos that made life for everyone else an adventure, if
not intolerable. He worked without script or schedule or budget, inventing
everything as he went along. And sometimes he'd just stop and go fishing or
race his Ferrari. He was a Holy Fool (of a sort), drawn to Holy Fools, and
to depict their Holy Foolishness in film.
Europa '51 is one of Rossellini's most challenging films, and it
takes a certain leap of faith to make the connection. The dubbing is
horrendous, the editing jumpy, the acting wooden - except for that of Ingrid
Bergman, who holds things together by an astonishing performance, even more
astonishing when you consider her circumstances: a Hollywood actor thrust
into the midst of Rossellini's madhouse whirl. It's what she signed up for,
in a sense: she'd fled the obscene excesses and drivel of a Hollywood system
that cast her as nuns and saints, and a public image that forced her to
pretend to be one. Like Joan of Arc, who she played in a bombastic Hollywood
epic (but also deeply identified with) she listened to her own inner voices
to come work for Rossellini, who likewise followed his own path toward a new
kind of filmmaking, one that seemed more rooted in reality. Yet even with
Ingrid Bergman, Europa '51 is not an easy film to watch.
It's helpful to understand that it was made under difficult circumstances.
Rossellini was having a hard time attracting investors for his projects at
this time, as Martin Scorsese says in his excellent My Voyage to
Italy. We'll leave Rossellini's career problems at that for now. I've
used clips from Scorsese's survey of Italian cinema in screening these films
for people, to sketch the landscape of neorealism and Rossellini's career,
which takes up half that four-hour documentary. There is no better guide to
these subjects than Martin Scorsese. My only quibble is that he tends to
give away the best moments, and its better to see them in context, especially
the first time. On the other hand, many people might not see these films at
all without such a thorough introduction. (And the fact is that with
neorealism, knowing a bit about the story beforehand is pretty much
irrelevant to the experience of watching the film - which is the point with
neorealism anyway.) I also appreciate Scorsese's authority when it comes to
establishing the significance of these films — especially when the
going gets tough and first-time viewers may wonder what the fuss is about.
He makes a special plea for Europa '51: yes, the film has flaws.
But if you give yourself to it, spend some time with it, this film (which had
significent influence on him) will repay the effort.
If you want or need to, you can think of the flaws of this film as so many
ashes sprinkled on your food — to keep you humble, like Francis, and
follow his lead out of your own comfort zone. It's certainly critical for
our journey and Rossellini's, and focusses on a central struggle: the
difference between chasing after and filling our lives with novelties, and
cultivating an openess to the Other.
A new kind of saint, a new kind
of fool, a new kind of filmmaking. And when Rossellini violated what was
quickly established as the orthodoxy of "neorealism" to go on to a
neo-neorealism, he was attacked by Guardians of the New Order, provoking
Andre Bazin to come to his defense. The human tendency toward the security
of law, and the familiar, produces a familiar, vicious cycle. Even though
Europa '51 isn't isn't the first film Rossellini and Bergman made
together, we screen before the others and after The Flowers of St.
Francis because of its connection with the saint. If St. Francis
is the anti-thesis to the thesis of Germany: Year Zero, than Europa '51
is the synthesis. This film picks up almost exactly where Germany:
Year Zero leaves off, and follows not necessarily to a happier ending,
to a resolution, but to the paradox that Rossellini keeps trying to present
as the only way to short-circuit the terrible destructive logic of human
selfishness.
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