fajrdrako | Vision: from the Life of Hildegard von Bingen (Reply)

Went to see Vision: from the Life of Hildegard von Bingen. Didn't want to miss it - how often do we have movies about people in the twelfth century? Not often enough. And movies about women writers of the 12th cenury? I'm sure Heloise has cropped up in movies before, but.. it's rare enough. I tried to count women writers I knew of in the 12 century off the top of my head, and came up with much less than Wikipedia, but then, I wasn't counting the Asian ones.

Anyway: this movie. Being about a medieval nun, it lacked dramatic explosions, car chases, and gunfights. In fact, to a large extent, it lacked a strong point of view - not perhaps a bad thing, but I was left feeling that I didn't have a strong impression of what Hildegard's writing, her visions, or her faith were all about.

One of the movie's themes is about Hildegard's love of her student and assistant Richardis, and her heartbreak when Richardis left to become abbess at another convent. This might have meant more to me if I'd liked Richardis herself; for all she was beautiful, dutiful, charming, talented, and clever, she seemed a little too driven by ego and a little too good to be true. Nor was her psychological volte face clear to me. In one scene, she's despairing that Hildegard might die before her, leaving her alone; next, she's voluntarily leaving Hildegard to go to another convent; next, we are told she decided to come back. Fair enough, but I wanted more of a sense of why she made each of those choices.
Moreover, since the question of Hildegard's love of Richardis was raised, I expected more of a resolution. Hildegard never admits or considers that her possessiveness was somewhat unnunlike, or that her loss might be a sacrifice of some value to God, the Church, or Richardis herself. I suppose what I'm saying here is that I was looking for some sort of character growth with circumstances, and didn't see it.
I would have liked more of a sense of Hildegard's relationship with God, as distinct from her relationship with the Church, or with individuals in it.
In a movie full of nuns and clerics all of the same order, it was sometimes hard to tell characters apart.
Not much detail about the content of her her visions, except in passing. No voice of God, no authorial explanation - true visions? imagination? hallucination? deception?
Sometimes Hildegard's approach to a nun's life seemed utterly fluid and free-flowing: defying the Abbot, the Archbishop, or whatever authorities opposed her will; staging musicals, travelling, corresponding with the great men of her time - but her only explanation or justification is that she does what God wills in the visions he sends her. I couldn't tell if she was rebel or conformist, or simply manipulating the system while changing it to suit herself.
Loved her comment about the 400,000 volumes in the library in Salerno. Gotta love a book-lover, in any century.
I loved Brother Volmer, played by Heino Ferch. Liked Abbot Kuno, too - often at odds with Hildegard, but he had a lot of personality.
The movie never mentions that Hildegard made up her own script, which is very cool indeed.
It seemed odd to start the movie with the year 1,000 and the millennialist panic that accompanied it, including self-flagellation. I thought a point would be made that witnessing this had an influence on Hildegard's thought, but it wasn't mentioned again. Was it just there as background, or was it to start off on a note of melodrama? Since it is primarily a very peaceful movie - even in conflict, these people seldom raise their voices, and never get passionate - this is a bit of an antidote.
I could understand some of the German - more than I expected to. And all the Latin.
Lovely settings and architecture. But the clothing on the laymen was ghastly, with hats that reminded me more of Alive in Wonderland illustrations than real history.
I enjoyed the chess-playing scene, but the historicity of it is picked up and put down without explanation or follow-up. Was Hildegard right in her prophecy? Did that this man would become Holy Roman Emperor?
The subplot of Sister Clara, the young pregnant nun, also left me somewhat perplexed. A sad scene, yes, and presumably Hildegard thought so too, but I wasn't sure what we were to make of it. Was it to show that the Church made no accommodation for carnality? Other convents might have. Or just to show what a patriarchal world it was? That's more likely.
With many of these characters, I was curious whether they were all mentioned in Hildegard's writings and her Vita, or whether they were ficitonal and added by the screenwriter, Margarethe von Trotta.
I was happy to see Peter Abelard mentioned, and Bernard of Clairvaux.
I liked the 'envy' theme, which I thought was as close as the movie came to making a moral statement.
It strikes me that, given Hildegard's artistic nature and her accomplishments, I would have drawn her as a quite different personality type: more intense, more tense, more driven, even within the system.
Before the movie opened, someone from the Bytowne Cinema got up to say that the 35mm film had not been delivered to Ottawa, but misdirected to another city, and the distributors didn't have another copy to send us - so we saw a DVD version instead, and in recompense got free tickets for another movie. This made us happy, particularly since I couldn't see any problems with the copy we saw. Would the 35mm film have brighter colours, or crisper defininitons?