The National Gallery is screening the films of Robert Bresson, the French-Catholic filmmaker, which I highly recommend to my DC readers. I went to the first one, which was his first feature-length film, The Angels of Sin. I wish I were going to be in DC for the rest of them.
The Angels of Sin follows nuns at a Dominican convent established to minister to (and primarily composed of) women released from prison. Anne-Marie is a young woman from a rich, luxurious family who feels called to this convent and to a particular inmate named Therese. Anne-Marie is idealistic and naive--this translates in the convent into someone whose proud and strong-willed and not that obedient. The head of the convent likes Anne-Marie's impulsiveness and love for nature and beauty, but she realizes that it doesn't fit well into the life of the convent.
The end of the film is melodramatic. Actually, the whole time I had the sense that it was building to a melodramatic ending, one like A Tale of Two Cities, when Sydney Carton gives his life up for Charles Darnay.
What stuck out to me in the film was the parallel and inversion of prison and the convent. Women often went straight from one to the other. Also, Bresson repeatedly emphasized the importance of silence--it isn't the words that are important, the head nun says at one point, it is the silence.
I also thought that the film was painfully honest about community life together--you see the nuns gossiping and getting frustrated with each other and talking back. This isn't nuns who I've met who at least appear to be overflowing with joy and happiness (I'm sure they have their struggles, too). These are nuns who have had quite hard lives and who are now adhering to a rigorous way of life.
A couple of the brothers I know from the Dominican house were there to see the film. I went to say hello to them after, but didn't get too much of a chance--in their Dominican habits, they were the celebrities there. Everyone else wanted a chance to say hello.
After the film, we peaked through a couple of the rooms upstairs. I was very excited by a couple of things. First, the self-portrait of Gorky and his mother that is an integral part of one of my favorite films, Ararat:
Notice the unfinished hands. Also, there are some of Joseph Cornell's boxes, which fascinated Elizabeth Bishop and which she imitated herself:
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