Here it is - it’s taken a lot of work. This one was based largely on the interviews done in our last round of celebrations in Hungary, but covers a bit of every place we shot in. This time, the interviews were almost all in English, so I made this an English-language only trailer.
This is really a rough, unfinished version; there are still a lot of problems. One of the biggest is due to the fact that Michael was unable to use his light package in Hungary — his high-powered lights blew out the fuses in the place where we were staying. So we couldn’t move around for interviews, and had to gather as many of the lamps and other lights the Manreza Center could find for us all in one place — Michael’s room. So every interview was shot in the same spot, and from almost the same angle. It can be very tiring to look at. I hope there will eventually be some way to fix all this in editing, or at least not to have so many of the interviews with the same background one after another.
On the other hand, this one uses a greater variety of images, and is faster-moving and more visually exciting than the first trailer.
There will be more edited footage as time goes on. So keep checking back.
I must confess that I have been very remiss about putting up any updates about the St. Elizabeth documentary since the end of December (here). A great deal has happened, not all of it good, but things finally seem to be back on track.
On returning from Hungary with a disk drive containing all the footage our camerman Michael shot, plus the tapes from my own camcorder, I expected to be able to start editing, or at least viewing the footage, right away. But when I made my first phone call to my mother when I arrived home, she informed me of my uncle Joe’s death. I left right away, and only after I returned from the funeral and Thanksgiving holidays did I discover that the drive was unusable. I couldn’t even read it with my computer.
Long-distance consultation with Michael didn’t help; I gave the disk to my brother Nick at Christmas, and he couldn’t access it either. So it eventually went back to Michael, who discovered that though it was supposed the be cross-platform, the formatting of the files themselves (at least that’s what I think he said), made it impossible to read on anything but a Mac. So he had to re-copy every one of the some 300 gigs of footage through his computer network from a Mac to a PC and then to the portable drive - which took around 200 hours. Which would have been fine, but he had to be absent on other filming gigs a good deal of the time during the next four months. I didn’t receive the footage until the middle of April, five months after I returned home. And even then we found footage that had not been copied, which had to located.
In the meantime, a lengthy illness, five separate tax returns for the back sales tax for my business, plus regular taxes on April 15, made it nearly impossible to keep up with my regular job (freelancers don’t get paid time off), let alone other tasks like writing the script and obtaining permissions for using still images and archive footage. I also had to test out various editing programs, and started learning to use Adobe Premiere Pro.
Then at long last, when everything was all set for editing, my laptop stopped working. The motherboard had fizzled out. Back it went to the company for repairs (thank goodness it was still under warranty), Then I had a replacement computer to set up, and finally to work — though I no longer had the trial version of Adobe Premiere, which was on the other laptop (you’re only allowed one trial version). To save time, I decided to resort to using the simple Windows editing program that I already knew for the trailer. Then when everything was ready again, I discovered that the drive I had copied my own footage on had failed. There were parts I hadn’t transferred to my laptop, so they had to be captured from tape again.
In the meantime, I finally got some good news: the Presidency of the International Council of the SFO (CIOFS) would be able to reimburse me for some of the filming expenses. They are also going to put the trailer on their web site and help promote the video when it’s done.
So things really seem to be back on track now, and the trailer at least is close to completion. In spite of the frustration, seeing all the tons of disconnected footage you shot finally connect and come alive into an actual story is thrilling. We already have a trailer from 2007 that focused on our interviews in Rome; this short teaser trailer will focus more on the actual experience of the Franciscans of the various orders who attended the celebrations in Rome, Assisi, Esztergom and Budapest, as well as an outline of Elizabeth’s life. It should be much more visually exciting than the first trailer.
So keep checking back here for the trailer, which I hope will be done in a couple of days. Then on to editing the real thing!
Oh and one more thing; if you want to be put on the e-mail list to receive updates about the documentary, just write to me at editor@taucrossbooks.com.
Though I’ve blogged about The Da Vinci Code, I haven’t yet described the strange experience of actually reading it. It’s so hard to give the 2 or 3 people left in the world who haven’t experienced this wonder of a book a proper idea of the superior cheesiness of its dumb thriller plot, the sublime wackiness of its bug-eyed “secrets” and “revelations,” the . . . well you get the idea.
Above all, they have missed the fever of its author’s enthusiasm for the “sacred feminine” — though this is certainly very widespread in culture today. But nowhere will you find it as you do in DVC. We not only learn, as everyone knows by now, that Jesus was really just the hanger-on, that Mary Magdalen is the real divine figure, the religious link to the goddess in every woman - the feminine principle the male-dominated church has been oppressing for centuries. We also learn that the hero, Robert Langdon, wears a Mickey Mouse wrist watch — in honor of the divine Disney figure of Sleeping Beauty, made so drowsy by patriarchial oppression — or maybe just by the droning nature of the prose. This particular revelation is where I finally lost it, and gave in to the giggles.
I don’t want to give the impression that I think that patriarchal oppression is a laughing matter. Particularly when it comes to the very real sins of the Church towards women in the past - part and parcel of what society has done to them, and the Church, holy though she may be in her essence, is always part of a sinful society (Hey, did the author even realize that the Church he sees as so oppressive of women is actually always described as feminine?).
But surely inquiring minds (at least 2 or 3 of them) want to know: what does the religion of the goddess and the “sacred feminine” offer that is so much better than what the Church has given women? What exactly does The Da Vinci Code’s goddess stand for? What does she do? Darned if I know, and, as I’ve said, I’ve read the book. The closest I can come to an actual answer is that she stands for the principles of tantric sex. Yep, that’s it. The divine earth mother sexuality in every woman is the means for the male partner, as the moment of greatest pleasure, to experience the divine - what women get out of it isn’t mentioned. Oh, I forgot, they’re already divine. Is this all the revelation we’re going to get? That’s what a goddess woman is for? To give men pleasure? Well, they certainly have for centuries, but what’s so liberating for women in it?
Now I believe, and the best writers in the Church, starting with St. Paul, have always believed that the physical love of man and wife should be a divine mystery of self-giving, like the relationship between Christ and the Church. But it’s not likely to come about through tantric techniques, or we women imagining that we’re already divine. It comes about through the effort to overcome the self, through mutual self-sacrificing love, which isn’t very popular with Da Vinci Code devotees searching for an easy fix religion. Nor will such a religion give any cure for the real source of oppression, one which Langdon and crew don’t seem too eager to search for — inside the human heart and its sinfulness.
Most of all, this feeble and impoverished conception of women conceals from them their real greatness. Some of the greatest women in history have a divine aura of a quite different kind about them — the saints, not imagined “goddesses” pasted over the image of saints like Mary Magdalen.
This brings me to the reason I haven’t blogged for almost a month. I’ve been given an assignment by Minister General and Vicar General of the Franciscan Third Order in Rome, to revise my doctoral dissertation on St. Elizabeth of Hungary and to translate some of the earliest sources on her life in time for the eighth centenary of her birth in 2007. This is going to keep me very busy for some months, but for me, it’s a glorious and longed-for opportunity to let people know more about one of the strongest and most compelling women in history.
Elizabeth, the daughter of King Andrew II of Hungary, was brought up in Germany and married to Landgraf Ludwig IV of Thuringia. At one of the most glittering courts in Europe, with a husband and children she was devoted to, she became aware of the suffering and misery outside the walls of her castle. She founded a hospital, cared for the poor, and comforted lepers in person. When she became aware that much of the suffering was due to unjust taxation, she refused to eat any food taken from the poor peasants in this fashion — perhaps history’s first boycott. Though her husband supported her, she became a scandal among many at the court. When her Ludwig died, Elizabeth was cast out with her children. She gladly accepted suffering with the poor as one of them. Devoting herself to God, she donned the habit of the Franciscans and worked for the rest of her short life in a hospital for the destitute. She went from being her country’s Princess Diana to its Mother Teresa. She is still loved and remembered and celebrated 800 years after her death as an example of courage, love and selfless dedication.
If an “oppressive” Church can produce a woman like that, what kind of woman would a truly liberated society produce?
Forgive me, though, for thinking that real liberation is going to come from somewhere besides the teachings in the Da Vinci Code.
Pausing to look at all the sights on our way to Jerusalem. . . Mainly about faith, the Church, film, writing, famous Christian authors, and anything else I'm interested in at the moment.
The photo above was taken at St. Peter's Basilica in Rome in March 2007.
Quote of the Month
"Jesus stands for all victims of brute force. In the twentieth century itself we have seen again how inventive human cruelty can be; how cruelty, in the act of destroying the image of man in others, dishonors and destroys that image in itself. The fact that the Son of God took all this upon himself in exemplary manner, as the "Lamb of God", is bound to make us shudder at the cruelty of man, on one hand, and make us think carefully about ourselves, how far we are willing to stand by as cowardly or silent onlookers, or how far we share responsibility ourselves. On the other side, it is bound to transform us and to make us rejoice in God. He has put himself on the side of the innocent and the suffering and would like to see us standing there too."
Joseph Ratzinger, God and the World with Peter Seewald
.jpg "St. Elizaberth of Hungary by Hans Holbein the Elder")
