Screen:
Westerbeck, Colin L. Jr.
Buddhist Church of a Draft law making no provision for conscientious objection and shortly after a vigorous protest of the attempted confiscation of an orphanage, there was a night raid on the...
...Far from knowing what will happen, Linda is in her narration, like most children telling a story, only trying to cope with events over which she has no control...
...Paul wrote, "our homeland is in heaven, and from heaven comes the Savior we await...
...And there was ambience of summer, calm crowning new-thatched cottages, the grace- filled sway of laden wagons lasses in bright aprons led...
...Cowled in color, autumn's brilliant mantle spread, Credenhill was golden calm: Christ, speaking through His jeweled church...
...Winter grace was wind through wasted grasses, icy chants limbs creaked splendidly in glassy mantle streaked, in sun, like Joseph's coat...
...Indeed, the two ultimately merge, the humming of a windmill and of the belts on the big team harvesters becoming indistinguishable from the buzzing of the cicadas...
...They insult the flag...
...Often I wandered through each other church the city offered, grand cathedrals in great squares, shadowy in candled grace, ceilings carved ornately like a mantle angels crafted, altars coolly calm, and choirs modulating studied chants...
...How can people think like that...
...For us," St...
...It's as if she had that terrible power children covet, and satisfy in stories--the power to have whatever they say come true...
...This is not to say that the world as seen by Linda is devoid o; Commonweal: 816 detail...
...New Republic', and others knows how they can...
...Despite everything that happens, Linda's voice remains im- passive, calm, even witty, as if storytelling were her way to protect herself from the worst of life...
...They decry the Vatican as the fountain of evil...
...Just as all portraits drawn by a novice artist will tend to look like the artist himself, so all the characters in Days of Heaven as they are revealed by Linda, seem to be different aspects of single personality...
...rallying in Yankee Stadium...
...They resist the draft without condemning the war...
...It is not a portrait of an era, but only of a single individual, Linda...
...In the first sentence of her narration, fc instance, Linda tells us, "Me and my brudder, it used to be jm me an' my brudder...
...I liked the high-pitched chants pigs practiced, flicked along dirt lanes...
...At the same time that there are empty, windy spaces in this film, there are also moments when the screen is filled by an almost microscopic close-up of nature...
...We get to see into the secret places of the natural word--into the rocky bottom of a fiver bed and the eerie crevice underground where a single germ of wheat is beginning to grow...
...and she goes on to explain, amon other things, how he used to entertain her by juggling...
...I fear not many 'peace' organizations," he went on, "'will notice this event or respond to it with the energy they might give had it happened in South Africa...
...Among the material circulated was a letter from Thich Nhat Hanh, head of the Vietnamese Buddhist Peace Delegation in France, over- seas representative of the Unified Buddhist Church...
...The Jehovah's Witnesses are of greater public interest to Americans than any other religious group of comparable size, for one good reason: in their notori- ous resistance to the draft and to the pledge of allegiance, they won 150 State Supreme Court cases and more than 30 precedent- setting Supreme Court ca.ses, forc- ing the Court to broaden the mean- ing of the First and Fourteenth Amendments...
...Does either Scripture or tradition encour- age the Christian to regard physical real- ity itself, much less any single city, as eternal...
...A little like death in Kew Gardens...
...Eternal...
...The beginning of the end comes when Abby is courted by the farmer as they circle the roaring fire at a harvest dance...
...Like the other Buddhist monks, Amnesty had adopted him as a Prisoner of Conscience...
...Visually Maleck's film ha the same, child-like equanimity to it that Linda's narration has The film sees the world with that startling freshness which ca: shine through a youngster's first insights into life...
...She says that she "met this guy" who told her the world would end in fire: "There'd be flames comin' out o' here an' there.., an' birds flyin' up wit their wings on fire...
...Identities slip and slide as if Linda wer making them all up and gets confused sometimes...
...Let the phrase Rorna Aeterna stand for this scandal...
...This will be instantaneous, in the twinkling of an eye, when the last trumpet sounds...
...We are always vaguely aware that Maleck's characters are playing out their story against the background of an ulti- mate moment in American history...
...One thinks of Robert Coover's The Origin of The Brunists, which is set in the same coal-mining country where Charles Taze Russell founded Jehovah's Witnesses in the 1870s...
...As machines begin to encroach on nature and doughboys go off to the First War, there is, as I mentioned earlier, a general fall from grace in this film...
...Lik America at the time of the First War, when the film take place, Linda is at the age where she is about to cross over fror innocence into experience...
...Chile, Argentina, or South Korea...
...After the fire in the fields and a show-down between the farmer and her brother which Geraldine C. Little Meditations: Thomas Ts-aherne What I loved in Credenhill were chants of doves, in crowds, cream-colored on the church roof at Vespers, the way they chimed, calm and muted as the meadows cows stood in, mauve spring light upon them like a mantle thistle-woven, curlews tucking grace notes in satin air...
...The Jehovah's Witnesses seize on texts like this one (Philippians 3:20) as proof that this world is not eternal but temporary and indeed soon to pass away...
...The latter two, especially, seem to circumscribe events in this film, which begins with the stoking of a blast furnace in Chicago and ends in a river in Texas...
...Kitty Genovese wouldn't be surprised...
...The loss of innocence which she resists by talking this way, as if she had already lost her innocence and nothing could really surprise her anymore, is not hers alone...
...This is the source of most of the disparities we find between what she says and what we see...
...And the catastrophe is conpleted when he goes after Bill with a lantern one night in the fields, and sets his own crop ablaze...
...But of course what looks like prophecy in Linda's narration is at most just a form of premonition...
...One hears, as it were, the bluestocking mother's rakeheli son telling tales of vul- gar belief to shock her but telling them for no reason other than that...
...It is impossible to speak of the history of civil liber- , ties in this country without speak- ing of them...
...Harrison tells this story and kindred ones in chapters entitled "Accumulating Wealth While the World Refuses to Die," "Catholics, Mob Violence, Civil Liberties, and the Draft," and "The Heroic Opportunity and Adventure: Jehovah's Witnesses Overseas...
...But it is almost literally true that her "days of heaven" on the farm are going to end in flames...
...Rome reckons in centuries, as the saying goes...
...To this difference in _practical eschatology, there corresponds a strongly marked differ-ence in religious mood...
...Most of all, they believe in Ar- mageddon, the imminent and violent End of the World...
...I spun in wonder at the swirling grace all space contained, and in beasts' innocent chants heard other stable sounds, and kings bow in...
...Hear Paul again: Brothers, I will tell you something that has been secret: that we are not all going to die, but we shall all be changed...
...Aurally the film is much the same, witl stretches of dialogue going unheard...
...marching from door to door...
...Whatever their mo-tives, we are very much in their debt...
...And seeing themselves so, they do see something scandalously true about the Roman church...
...As might be expected when a child from a Chicago slum finds herself in the wilds of Texas, Linda is particularly aware of the beasts and birds of the field...
...the religious bluestocking, believing or un- believing, asks of a group like Jehovah's Witnesses...
...A year later, Thich Thien Minh was arrested...
...Although there are rivers an~ woods somewhere nearby the farm, each place is a separat and discreet setting, We never see the continuity among them how one gets from one to the other...
...Books: WITNESSES AND CATHOLICS H OW can people live like that...
...The church took flowers in, full sun for warming mantle...
...London called, an honor...
...It is her imagination merely that the film depicts...
...IIIIII I IIIIIIII IIIIIIIIIIII IIIIIIIIIII Screen I IIH II II IIII I I II IIIII CHILDREN OF PARADISE INNOCENCE AND BEYOND D AYS OF HEAVEN is a film of elemental images--images of earth, air, fire and water...
...This is why her narration and th film's vision of the world, which Maleck fits to that narration are capacious enough to contain all the possibilities, all th contrarieties...
...and as her personal journey has led to Catholicism, so perhaps the meaning of the Witnesses as a group may be found in their opposition to Catholicism...
...On October 17, 1978 he died: There had not been any public outcry, not one demonstration, not one vigil at any embassy of the Vietnamese government...
...This is the key to the film's extraordinary beauty: it sees the world from this woman-child's point of view...
...The sphere of sounds is also alive to the same degree...
...Still, for this reader, it as the author's religious story that kept her book going...
...Barbara Grizzuti Harrison, feature writer for Esquire...
...Em-phasizing Thich Thien Minh's frailty, he said, "I fear he cannot long survive the harsh life of a prisoner...
...Visions of Glory presents the Witnesses' history as a series of digressions from a memoir of the author's conversion to "The Truth," as Witnesses call their faith, through her apostasy, and on, nearly twenty years later, to her conversion to Roman Catholicism...
...After all when you're a girl Linda's age, identities do get mixed up...
...The wonderment of the world accord- ing to Linda is this disregard for our usual sense of scale and proportion...
...Brooklyn, where Bethel, the Witnesses headquar- ters is located, reckons in instants...
...While we may miss much of what people say, there is scarcely a noise made by nature or machine that we do not catch...
...Ms., Saturday Re- view...
...Harrison, VISIONS OF GLORY: A HISTORY AND A MEMORY OF JEHOVAH'S WITNESSES Barbara Grizzutl Harrison Simon & Schuster, $12.95 [413 pp.] Jack Miles though extremely harsh in her criticism of the Witnesses, never condescends to them...
...They result from a kind of understatement with which she fends off disaster...
...We see the Witnesses in American prisons, Nazi camps, in new kinds of trouble in Africa...
...Insect heads fill the frame where, in the next shot, the farmer's house may be a little spur on the landscape far in the distance...
...A church- mouse said his psalms in dust, settling in a far stern stall, less cold than snow's spilled calm...
...This is scarcely to distort them: they see themselves in rather these terms...
...It Commonweal: 818...
...Something she says when first she arrives in Texas seems especially prophetic...
...The chants most blessed birds hung in His wide church skies roofed, calm, as evening sifted in, a mantle stars scorched through, white coals of grace...
...Like children who don' understand the import of all that is said, we often catch onl~ bits and snatches of the conversation, and critical moments il the action tend to be done, like children's theater, in pan tomime...
...The space around the bi1 Victorian house where the farmer lives is like the enchante, void in which a child often seems to see events take place...
...The mood of Rome is grave, shrewd, unhur- ried, unenthusiastic, undiscouraged, un- surprised, undeterred, unexcited...
...The mood of Brooklyn, by contrast, is one of extreme excitement--in a word, of suspense--and of the fellowship that only shared suspense can create...
...Happy in whatever place I was, God's gentle mantle sure and light, I sang His sacred chants, holding in my mind the country calm beside the city pace, knowing grace is everywhere the same, all worlds His church...
...It frequently happens, as when Linda talks about her brother's juggling, that there is a disparity between what she says and what we see...
...When a plague of cicadas attacks the wheat, the camera sees enormously their gnawing infestation of the crop...
...It is this holocaust which Linda's narration seems to have predicted, fight down to the wild game starting up from the fields on fire...
...I Texas Bill and Abby lead the farmer to believe that they ar brother and sister rather than lovers, which is just the sort c ambiguity that would beset the imagination of a girl Linda' age...
...There was never a perfect person around...
...Characteristics attributed to one person get switched t. someone else this way...
...They refuse blood transfu-sions...
...This occurs whenever what she says doesn't seem to tell us what is actually happening so much as what will happen...
...On the contrary, her sensitivities, though selective, are also incredibly acute...
...That novel, despite its lip- smacking relish for human and religious grotesquerie, finally rings false...
...There is much to see and hear...
...Buddhist Church of a Draft law making no provision for conscientious objection and shortly after a vigorous protest of the attempted confiscation of an orphanage, there was a night raid on the headquarters of the Church in which six leaders were arrested, including Thich Huyen Quang, the UBC's previous General Secretary, and Thich Quang Do, his succes- sor...
...But Days of Heaven is not an allegory about history...
...At times that disparity seems almost like magic...
...If such a one were imprisoned in the United States, what a furor there would be--from the very people who will pay no attention to this tragedy in Vietnam and others like it...
...It's a rich farmer (Sam Shepard) with whor Linda and Bill and Bill's girl Abby (Brooke Adams) live i Texas...
...COLIN L. WESTERBECK...
...Here all th possibilities Maleck experimented with so brilliantly in Bad lands find their true embodiment in the person of Linda...
...But all this material gains a ne~ kind of tightness, a justness, in Days of Heaven...
...It" as if this pristine landscape, these endless, rolling fields o wheat, had been created simply by not noticing or bothering t, mention any trees...
...Much of the material in Days of Heaven--the romantic us of natural light, the grand Victorian house that belongs to th farmer, the imagery of fire, a savagely protective father figur and the narrative--come from writer-director Terenc Maleck's first film,Badlands...
...the bluestocking asks of the slum...
...Nobody's perfect," she comments...
...This is what makes it such a splendid movie...
...Such elemental imagery is suited to Days of Heaven because the film is itself an elemental vision, the vision of a twelve- or thirteen-year-old girl, Linda (Linda Manz), who is its narrator...
...There is, moreover, something wonderful in the film's total freedom from normative points of view...
...But late on it's not her brother, Bill (Richard Gere), who actually doe the juggling...
...She was one of them for eleven years, from 1944 to 1955, con-verted at the age of nine with her mother, who is a Witness to this day...
...Beneath the sheer prettiness of Nestor Almen dros's photography in th!s film there is always a cutting edge realism, an edge perfectly implied by the Chicago guttersnip accent with which Linda tells this fairy-tale story, What gives Days of Heaven its character, however, is th way that it remains Linda's innocence--the way that it recap tures a child's view of the world...
...Thich Huyen Quang is now reported !n weak condition, close to death, and Thich Quang Do in seriously weakened condition...
...The Texa landscape we find in the film is, like the landscape in fair tales, vast and featureless...
...Both were prisoners of the earlier Saigon govern- merits...
...Both the memoir and the history are full of color, confusion, and pain: wonderful material for a novel, you might say, but to novelize this kind of material is so often to eviscerate it...
...IFOR had published and widely distributed news of the arrest and the urgent need for response...
...In August, he was cited in Amnesty's annual Prisoner of Conscience Week, this year on the theme, "For- gotten Prisoners...
...As they had with his arrest in 1968, Amnesty International and the International Fellowship of Reconciliation sought to stimulate efforts in support of his release...
...I I II I I I II II 22 December 1978:817 leaves one man dead, Linda's narrative resumes in the same dry, philosophical vein as before...
...Her book is an investigation, not an entertainment...
...Thich Quang Do lost a lung as a result of torture...
...How can people think like that...
...When she says this we are looking at a veritable paradise abounding with deer and fowl completely at peace...
Vol. 105 • December 1978 • No. 25
