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Title: Vision
Date Viewed: 11/12/10
Details:
- Barbara Sukowa (Hildegard von Bingen)
- Heino Ferch (Mšnch Volmar)
- Hannah Herzsprung (Richardis von Stade)
- Lena Stolze (Jutta)
- Written & directed by: Margarethe von Trotta
Score: 1/2
The Review: Women visionaries fascinate me, in particular their tales of visions, voices and messages -- communication that is definitely "out of band". There are two at the top of my queue:
- Joan d'Arc -- about whom libraries have been written, and for whom several movies are still in print (although still in preparation after over 10 years, I've been drafting an essay on these films for this forum); and
- Hildegard von Bingen, the subject of the newly-released (in the US) biographical drama Vision.
Hildegard von Bingenfirst came to my consciousness in the 90s, when a lot of her musicwas being re-recorded & released-- in part following on the then-contemporary fad of chants as it moved toward the ecstatic, but also in recognition of the 900th anniversary of her birth. She had begun to achieve a popular notoriety as a multifaceted woman out of, or in advance of her, time. Abbess, religieuse, medic, herbalist, composer, chanter, author and eventually traveling preacher -- she pushed the envelope of women's roles and incurred both wrath and praise along her path: An ideal person for a potentially fascinating bio-pic.
Alas, I was a bit disappointed with Vision. It's actually a pretty good movie, with an excellent cast -- it just wasn't what I was looking for.
Cleverly, the movie starts with the end of the first millennium, emphasizing the dire predictions of the end of days -- echoes of numerological fantasies that survive to this day -- then moves one mere century into the future to give context to Hildegard's birth. She lived most of her life in the 12th century -- a contemporary with Henry II and Katherine of Aragon -- and although she could not claim these two among her contacts, Hildegard was widely known and even venerated in her own time, with a wide public for those days. For all that she was cloistered, her visions and writings managed to get out into the world. And the screenplay makes the reasons quite clear.
But the film's approach to her visions, per se, is minimal and almost pedestrian. The purity and intensity of light was its major component, even from a young age -- Lux vivens -- a visual phenomenon that mightshare features with migraine flashes;voices and messages are only recorded later. But only once do we see and share this peculiar light, and even then, never get a compelling sense of its quality. (Many of the movies with Joan d'Arc make a more effective attempt to illustrate her visions, a phenomenon to which the visual medium would seem well suited.) We see Hildegard almost as a neutral transmitter of the messages, with little feeling for her intensity and focus. If the film's intent was to document an remarkable life, it was successful. On the other hand, it failed to bring the intensity and nature of her visions to a waiting, vision-enabled audience.
The acting company was well cast and are interesting to watch. Sukowa not only lends gravitas to the role of Hildegard, but also her crystal soprano voice, which appears all too seldom throughout the film. Ferch's Volmar -- at first a friend and confessor, later scribe -- is sympathetic to her moods and a good match. These two lead actors will look curiously familiar, even though they are not -- Sukowa's face (and that's about all of her we see) is remarkably similar to that of Glenn Close; and Ferch reminds me ofJake Weber,who plays the husband Joe Dubois on the just-completed network TV showMedium-- whose protagonist perceives visions of a rather different character.
(13-Nov-10)
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