I Found it at the Movies

When I was a child in Brooklyn, New York, during the 1940s and 1950s, I saw very few movies in theaters. The first two movies I saw terrified me with their very few, but very intense, moments of violence. I had no interest in seeing movies, although other children I knew frequently went to the movies with their families.

Then came the revelation. I saw a movie that would transfix me, move me the way literature and music did. It was the Italian movie Il Miracolo (The Miracle, 1948), directed by Roberto Rossellini and starring Anna Magnani and Federico Fellini. I was 10 years old, and my mother took me to see it when we were in

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New York City after a prolonged censorship battle.

The Miracle was first shown in New York City in 1950 as part of three movies shown together under the title The Ways of Love. The movie was considered sacrilegious and blasphemous; protests took place, ranging from picketing to bomb threats. The Catholic League of Decency and Archbishop Francis Cardinal Spellman condemned it. In 1951, during the wake of the outcry against the movie, the license to show the movie was rescinded by New York State’s Board of Regents. The debate moved to the courts. In 1952, the United States Supreme Court ruled that movies were protected as free speech by the Fourteenth Amendment.

My mother followed the case avidly, fervently believing in free speech. When The Miracle was shown again, she and I went to see this remarkable movie. As I think back on it, I am astounded that at 10 years old I understood the depth of what was being portrayed, every nuance, the moral issues, the symbolism, and that I was deeply moved by the visual beauty, the miracle of 47 minutes in black-and-white, more truthful and real than color could be.

Rossellini focused very much on the peasant girl who was the main character, Nanni (played by Anna Magnani). I found my 10-year-old self totally caught up in Nanni’s world, perspective, fantasy, and suffering. Although I was raised in a secular Jewish household, somehow I understood the religious symbolism in the depiction of an unmarried pregnant peasant girl suffering what Jesus suffered. Nanni claimed that the father of her baby was Saint Joseph, played by a startlingly handsome and roguish Federico Fellini, and she was not believed. She was mocked by the people of her village, a mob. She was crowned with a bucket, evoking the crown of thorns. She is “robed” in a tattered blanket. She is pelted with vegetables. Escaping, she struggles up a mountain path, her own Via Dolorosa, to a little chapel. In the sanctuary of the chapel, she goes into labor, clinging to a cross, a reenactment of the crucifixion. Somehow, though, she is not forsaken, no cry of “Father, Father, why hast thou forsaken me?” Rather, she is fulfilled. She cradles her baby with love. I understood the miracle of the movie, that somehow, the crucifixion motif, the death of Jesus, becomes a nativity scene, the birth of a baby who is the equivalent of Jesus. I found the power of the visual conveys deep messages at the movies.

Yes, I also found the power of the visual to convey deep

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messages in museums, art books, and paintings. My parents took me to museums. My father was a clerk in a bookstore that specialized in art books, and he brought home books at wholesale prices and remaindered books at bargain prices. I learned so much about the culture in which we all are embedded by visiting museums and reading those art books, reveling in the color palettes. But paintings were static. They said a lot, but they captured a particular moment. The movies moved. Stories unfolded the same way stories in books unfolded. Something was going to happen next, and something happened next!

The early 20^th century filmmakers discovered that they could edit scenes together, one after another, to tell a story. Their early audiences encountered a sense of absolute reality in those images, those unfolding stories. They sometimes believed that what they were seeing was actually happening, not confined to a screen. People screamed when they saw moving pictures of trains racing at them. They thought the trains were real.

We learned, as a society and a culture, to appreciate the “feels like it is real but it is make-believe, just a story” aspect of movies. We also learned that we could watch newsreels in movie theaters, real-life events not happening in the present in the movie theater, but happening in the recent past. We learned to “see” what movies show us, in various ways.

Movies moved, and what they depicted, the stories they told, the way the stories were told in images and words, moved me. The next movie to move me as radically as The Miracle was The Seventh Seal (1957), written and directed by Ingmar Bergman, who became my all-time favorite movie director.

The Seventh Seal premiered in New York City at the Paris, the same theater that first showed The Miracle. I was 15 years old, and I was becoming a devotee of foreign films. Once again, I found truth and reality in the splendid black-and-white cinematography. I was captivated by the religious imagery, the symbolism that both portrayed and challenged codified religious beliefs.

Now, 63 years later, I am a psychoanalyst who has devoted myself to fulfilling my destiny to work psychoanalytically with people for the past 40 years. I think of Forces of Destiny: Psychoanalysis and Human Idiom, a book by noted psychoanalyst Christopher Bollas, first published in 1989 and recently re-released with a new “Preface” in 2018. Bollas distinguishes between destiny and

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fate. Destiny is the manifestation of the true self, the personal idiom, and fate is external. Our destiny is within, and fate, external, happens to us. If I apply this to the character of the Knight, Antonius Block in The Seventh Seal, his destiny is his ongoing spiritual search, which led him to encounter his fate, bloody battles, and needless sacrifices of the Crusades. He intended to do good, but he was caught up in the evils of war. His fate is to see more evil, the depredations of the Black Death, and the challenges the dreadful illness brought. Yet he knows his destiny is to do good deeds.

The Devil is the first iconic representation of the religious beliefs in the medieval times in Europe that the movie portrays, beliefs that still have a hold all over the world today. Another iconic representation is the Holy Family, evoked by a troop of traveling players who gain their livelihood by bringing entertainment to the common people, amusing the impoverished and captives of the raging Black Death decimating Europe. The traveling players are a married couple, Jof and Mia, their baby Michael, and the manager, Jonas. The names evoke the Holy Family. Jof and Mia represent Joseph and Mary. The Hebrew name Michael means “Who is like God?” Are all babies a potential savior sent by God? Jof has visions and tells Mia that he saw the Virgin Mary walking with Baby Jesus. Is Bergman inviting the viewers to see a Holy Family with Baby Jesus on-screen as Jof, Mia, and Michael? Jonas, essentially a minor character, has a resonant name as well. Jonas in Hebrew means “dove.” In the Bible, a dove signals to the remnants of life on earth after the Flood that there is dry land, there is hope. A minor character traveling with those who depict the Holy Family may signal that a simple family may offer what human beings need: hope.

The movie begins with the famous scene on a beach of the Knight, returning from the carnage of the Crusades, playing chess with Death. We know that the Knight knows he will soon die, and we resonate with his wish to live a bit longer, to accomplish something of his true destiny.

The Knight tells his strategy to defeat Death in chess to a priest while confessing his sins. Alas, the priest reveals himself to be the Knight’s adversary, Death. Is Bergman warning his viewers not to trust organized religion? I think so. Or, at least, that’s what this secular Jewish girl thought then, and now what an old, secular Jewish woman still thinks.

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The Knight fulfills his destiny, doing several good deeds, the first of which is offering an anodyne, a strong painkiller, to a young girl who has been found guilty of witchcraft, consorting with the Devil, who will be burned at the stake. She cannot enlighten the Knight about the nature of the Devil, but even if he cannot save her, he can do something to ease her pain. Another good deed he does is rescue a servant girl from being raped by a theologian. Aha! A theologian! This particular theologian is the man who recruited the Knight to join the Crusades. Once again, a condemnation of organized religion.

What I found most compelling and memorable about this altogether compelling and memorable movie is the final scene, the Dance of Death. The Knight has seen an artist painting the Dance of Death in a church. Now the plague is ravishing the countryside everywhere, including the Knight’s home, where he is finally reunited with his wife. In the form of a storm, Death prevails. But the traveling players find shelter from the storm. As the storm subsides, Jof, who sees visions, sees the Knight, and all those who have accompanied the Knight in his search to fulfill his destiny, in a Dance of Death upon the crest of a high hill. I allowed myself to be enthralled by the magic of Ingmar Bergman in his magnificent movie, The Seventh Seal.

In New York City in the olden days, ladies and gentlemen, boys and girls, before there were videos that could be seen at home on a screen via a video player, there were revival houses, movie theaters that showed movies after they had had their first runs, such as the Thalia, the Bleeker Street Cinema, and the New Yorker. I saw The Seventh Seal 13 times in revival houses! Eventually, I bought a video of the movie to watch at home.

Other movies that I found thrilling for their depth and visual beauty are Streetcar Named Desire (1951), The 400 Blows (1959), Bicycle Thief (1948), On the Waterfront (1954), Padre Padrone (1977), Night of the Shooting Stars (1982), Forbidden Games (1952), Smiles of a Summer Night (1955), Rashomon (1950), Where is the Friend’s Home? (1987), And Life Goes On (1992), La Dolce Via (1960), When a Woman Ascends the Stairs (1960), and Sandakan No. 8 (1974).

I found the meaning of life at the movies and it was and is wonderful.

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