A Bit Part In History

In May 1986 The Mission won top honors as the best film at the internationally prestigious Cannes Film Festival. The award was unprecedented, since the film had been entered into the festival before it had undergone final editing.

News of the award was received at Sojourners with great interest, as our good friend and contributing editor Daniel Berrigan had both a part in the movie and a role as adviser to it. Berrigan had received a phone call months earlier from Roland Joffe, the British director of The Killing Fields, inquiring as to his availability for a film about the mission work of 18th-century European Jesuits in South America. Berrigan had agreed to get involved.

In Berrigan's words, the film attempts a "straight-faced impossibility: a two-hour summary of a 150-year achievement." For a century and a half, the Jesuits evangelized and served the indigenous people of South America. Their success was well known throughout Europe. But other news reached Europe as well: news of gold and silver and "red gold," the term given to the Indian slave trade.

In the Treaty of 1750, Spain and Portugal, two superpowers of the day, agreed to carve up the South American continent for their mutual profit. Boundaries shifted, and the Jesuit missioners under the Spanish crown found themselves in Portuguese territory.

A papal delegate was sent to the Jesuit mission in Paraguay to determine its future. He demanded that the missioners close down the mission and return with him immediately to the Paraguayan capital of Asuncion; that they announce the closing to the Indians; and that they exert their influence on the Indians to prevent armed resistance and urge submission to the Portuguese regime.

In the film Robert DeNiro plays Mendoza, a former murderer and dealer in the Indian slave trade who became a Christian convert and an aspirant in the Jesuit order. At the announcement of the ousting of the Jesuits, Mendoza takes up arms, claiming that he must above all else stand with the Indians. Fr. Gabriel, the superior of the mission, played by Jeremy Irons, accuses Mendoza of renouncing his vows and tries to stay faithful to both the Indians and the nonviolent love of Christ.

The struggle between Mendoza and Fr. Gabriel gets at the heart of Christianity that takes the side of the oppressed. In Berrigan's words, "The Mission...is an accurate image and foretaste of Nicaragua and Afghanistan and Northern Ireland and Southern Africa. Also of England and America. Armies mass from the four winds, determined to 'settle matters.'"

Berrigan spent four months in South America during the filming of The Mission. It is a privilege to offer the following excerpt from the journal he kept on location. It offers an exciting foretaste of The Mission: A Film Journal, his complete journal to be published by Harper & Row in August, as well as the movie The Mission, to be released this fall.

Despite the ambivalence that sometimes plagued Berrigan during his involvement with Hollywood, he finally chose to be involved with the project as a sort of tribute. At the close of the introduction to The Mission: A Film Journal, he states: "The film celebrates memory, the present, the prisoners of conscience, the martyrs, all who renounce pernicious well-being and the middle way. To all such, we send a blessing. From them, we receive one. And with them, we go on."

-The Editors

I arrived in Cartagena [Colombia] on Easter Sunday evening; to be met at the airport by a bustling crowd of movers and shakers. In the midst of everything chaotic and torrid, it was a joy to see the wide smile of Roland Joffe, riding above it all like a transmogrified Cheshire cat. Such a good start could only augur well.

My own assignment seemed reasonably vague, given the fact that I was landing on an unknown planet, as an unknown species. I was to be available for the actors who were to play Jesuits in the film, helping them dissolve to a degree the enigma and folklore surrounding the order. I was also to play a Jesuit myself, in the minor mode.

The former task was not long in getting started. Roland suggested that Jeremy Irons and myself spend some time in solitude; luckily there was a massive Jesuit history in Cartagena, centered about the church of San Pedro Claver. We repaired there, were shortly made welcome, and settled in for 36 hours of silence and reflection. We centered things around the famous Spiritual Exercises of St. Ignatius, which every Jesuit undergoes with considerable thoroughness at the start of his training....

We returned to what many are pleased to call real life; in this case, the work being pursued in the courtyard of another splendid colonial church, Santo Domingo.

There a throng milled about, a meld of many nations and tongues, and skills of every conceivable kind. Also nuns in their dark bustles and brimmed hats. The workers busy about a multitude of tasks, from connecting a veritable spaghetti knot of wiring to scrubbing the courtyard floor.

I'm told I'm welcome to use one of five directors' chairs, occupied as I am in observing the goings on, taking notes on wind and weather and voice and conduct and outcome, readying myself to cast a vote on this or that scene.

Last night one of the actors, a mettlesome spirit from New York, offered the corps of actors a six-course "bash" to celebrate the start of our work. I decided that, despite the world (or perhaps because of it), I would get in step with the others, though I must confess that the supply of the heart's helium is at a new low. Celebrate with the others, yes; but strictly for my own reasons, thinking as I do constantly of our dear ones in prison, those dying in the hospice at St. Vincent's in New York, the homeless women at Holy Name shelter. My landmarks, my sea marks, my very sanity.

SOMEONE ASKED shortly before my departure for Colombia: Can you in good faith leave those who so need you, just to make a film?

I said as simply as I knew how, "Yes, I can...,They're in better hands than mine."

I wandered about the courtyard, in wonderment at the complex clotting of skills and machines transported across continents and seas, all to be assembled here in a colonial cloister that hasn't reverberated to such commotion since slave days, to be sure.

There are trunks filled with trinkets and artifacts, splendid gowns whizzing by on equally splendid bodies, peasants, seminarians and grand ladies and functionaries (the latter surely the ancestors of yuppies: primitive briefcases, noses in air, an atmosphere of impenetrable wisdom). The workers pull and push things about in a very frenzy of "getting things right."

A crew of vandals, one might think at first. But there are signs posted about the town, signed by the film makers, Gold Crest Mission, apologizing for inconveniences to the citizenry and promising to restore all properties to their original order.

Ancient saddlebags and equine gear, plastic hosing, old leather-bound volumes, cameras, lights beyond count mercilessly glaring down, a host of suns. A madonna and child gaze from a portal fantail, bemused, apart, finished images of the human, no doubt in wonderment as to this seizure and fever of the instant.

In any case, a question arises: Are we merely, dumb as the fabled door mouse, running backward in time, finding the present beyond sense or sequence? Or is it true, as a friend said to me, that the cinema can deal adequately and fairly only with the past, the present being "too much with us"?

Muskets and musical instruments, tools of every heft and use. A cleaning woman wanders through the charade, shaking her head in incomprehension at this outer space landing on her terrain.

Someone snatches up a gigantic raw carrot from a paper sack and proceeds on his way, munching as he goes. It all looks like chaos, as I suppose a hill of ants does at first glance. But if one has patience, hangs around, an order emerges, things come together....

The perishing heat. The sun a floating furnace. And the great smoking orbs beating down from their stilts. A subaltern (never the director) barks: "Stillness! No need of moving about! Still!"

The spectators lean forward perilously from their height, like a frieze of humans. One of the kliegs begins to hum and sputter: "Cut it!" Roland huddles with the actors; they stand stock still in their outrageous finery, in the shade. Beautiful inward faces, caught in the splendor of a moment they create, inhabit, slowly let go;...

The camera on its high dolly is like a wheeled centaur, all seeing, wildly mobile, fiercely recording the jots and tittles of mortals, judging, grimacing, in charge of things, so to speak....

I watch and ponder; and a few questions occur: Does the dictum "more is less" not apply here? Which is to ask, could an extraordinary film...have been made with more modest means to even greater effect? Can an assault on the senses be construed as favoring contemplation? Indeed, has any film in history made us (makers or viewers) more apt for spiritual or social change? Perhaps the question is off base. Films after all, according to one peculiar theory, being modes of entertainment, not instruction. Are films today only another example of the triumph of widening technique? Even an example of questionable means over ethical ends?

I have a half-articulated sense that the culture, in its death throes, wants death "popularized," in all its idioms, varieties, incursions, gratifications. Does such florid meticulosity only serve, as conspicuous consumption invariably does, to destroy all spontaneity?...

Two athletic workmen climb the top of the garden wall, there to hold branches in hand and cast wavering shadows on the faces of the principals. They squat there, motionless, like benign gargoyles: a considerable discipline, since the surface is not flat, but sharply peaked.

It's a cause of wide grins and more that I prefer to go about barefooted; it can't be credited that a Jesuit so disports himself amid the formal splendors of the old city. Ha!...

An edifying reflection is in order. In 1965 I was shipped off to these shores by order of Cardinal Spellman, my delict being a rather visible opposition to the Vietnam War. The intemperate speed with which I was disposed of quite reduced me for a time to a kind human detritus--dust, ashes, and desolation. Evidently my indefinite absence from my country was to make war easier to wage with the concurrence of the church. My absence, so to speak, would make many hearts fonder. Fonder even of me, as long as absent.

I find it hard, perhaps even impossible, to describe, even to myself, the atmosphere of those sulphurous hours; hours like weeks, weeks like years. The heavens remained closed, turned to adamant, no rain fell upon my spirit.

It was a time of death on rampage, not only in Vietnam. Death followed close, the death of friends. An entire family of friends perished in Mexico by asphyxiation shortly after I had visited them. Then months later, as I approached Bogota to meet with Camilo Torres, he was murdered.

My present circumstance is, as they say, something else again. I come here as a teller of tales to the necromancers. They seek someone who knows the secret formula, a potion out of the Jesuit pharmacopoeia to work its magic on the actors. It goes without saying that they, being deprived children of our generation, have never downed so magical and renewing a brew, brought up as they've been on the available lukewarm dregs....

We passed a day in the so-called Courtyard of the Inquisition. A great to-do on foot and horseback, as DeNiro and Aiden warm up their pacers. A bronze tablet on the wall of the place informs: These were the headquarters for some hundred years of a peculiar Spanish institution. Under its hammers many died, many more lived in terror, and a number of unfortunates were converted to something known as orthodoxy.

They do the scenes piecemeal. If a prop or a setting is useful, time itself is shifted about like a piece of scenery, and we are months into the past or the future. Sequence--moral, physical, or temporal--counts for little. What is counted as important is absolute meticulous fidelity--such and such a room or backdrop or costume. There is a great jolting of time in favor of place. In this scene, for example, a minor hero perished before he had fairly drawn a breath--at least in the film.

This dislocation places a double burden on the actors. They must not only step into another century than the one they were born into. They must also snatch at fragments of imagined time, cling there awhile, and then let go. Something like puppets whose masters have flung down the strings.

Jeremy and I passed another quiet two hours. We discussed discipleship (the word is too long for comfort; we talked about trust and belief and giving oneself to a community). "Who are the Jesuits, and what is it like to be one?" he asks;

I ventured a few confidences, heart in throat. In my worst hours, it appeared to me that the Jesuits were created by a kind of necessity in nature, a spontaneous generation of Western culture itself. And this not merely to confer a blessing on the eruptive ego of Europe. Jesuits would be the "light-armed cavalry of the church," in the regrettable metaphor.

To be sure, being a muscular arm of the post-Reformation church, their outreach was to be primarily "spiritual," a word on which they were shortly to confer a new and startling definition. The definition, as a matter of history, would be at times worldly, practical, and visionary.

We would even produce from time to time a spectacular rogue Jesuit. To the relief of the order, he would usually be shown up as entirely out of whack, since the vast majority of Jesuits at any given time were apt to be devoted workhorses, living and dying harnessed to their Bible and their Exercises; in sum to the glory of God.

These, the vast majority, and not the paltry few who betrayed, were the puzzle and the triumph. Any Jesuit worth his salt would find them, his brothers, beyond all praise, his feeling for them too deep for words. It was these unknown and unsung laborers in the vineyard whom our film properly set out to celebrate; it was toward their secret springs of life the actors were to find their laborious way....

On the wall of the Palace of the Inquisition is engraved, together with the cross and palm symbols, a curious apologia. I translate rustily. Terror and incarcerations and loss of property, and even an occasional auto da fe admitted. But these, and Worse, are excused or dismissed (as the account goes, by "defenders of the faith," among whom, one suspects, is the composer of this revelation). The Inquisition is in fact (again, the sense) no more inhuman than other institutions in vogue in Europe at the time.

Thus went the elegant rhetoric of complicity, immortalized conspicuously on the courtyard wall. The room just off the yard bore a sign above the door: "Place of Torture." I entered, half expecting a display of instruments of infamy. Nothing of the sort. All the gore and glory were removed. But I went cold nonetheless; so blood ridden a history is not easily exorcised from the air.

I WAS WALKING in the old city, when from a balcony, the Jesuit pastor of St. Peter Claver Church shouted my name: "Come up, come up!" A smiling family, including numerous children and a grandparent, welcomed me. We settled in our box seats to witness the spectacular shot: Mendoza and his cohorts dragging and running the captured Indian slaves into the marketplace of Asuncion.

Alas, there is shortly heard the unnerving basso profundo of the assistant director: "MR. BERRIGAN, OUT OF SIGHT, PLEASE!" Whereupon everyone laughs, and we flee inside.

The slave traders thunder down the narrow street, a great commotion, a rake's progress. Mendoza upright in the saddle, arrogant as Satan on parade.

It terrifies me; it is too close to the original, the headlong contempt, the sense in one's bones of an early evidence, a hint of how we got where we are--horses rearing and plunging, slaves subdued in despair, the sword. And that ship of fools named ''our history" is launched.

That the Indians should mime their own enslavement? What are their thoughts as they are dragged along in the dust, singly or bound together through the Cartagena street, on foot, hand bound to hand, like a generational chain of destiny? Or roped hand and foot, naked, slung backward on horses?

A procession of numb anguish and guilt; not a fiction so much as a fact. A fiction which with meticulous industry is aimed at reproducing a fact.

But the fact is so portentous--enslavement of the helpless--as to lead to a mystery: the infection of time and this world by a sin called "original." It is the poor of the world, of Colombian favelas, who are on horrid display here. The Indian "extras," noble as they are, and pitiable in their dignity outraged, are existential stand-ins. Fact, fiction, symbol--all three; and at its deepest, as the missioners understood, the outraged dignity of Christ himself, in his least children.

Interminably, generation upon generation, the chain gang of humanity passes by; the aboriginal sin is rendered ingeniously original once more; new ways of death, new bonds forged, new slaves made captive.

A cold comfort of sorts comes over me; the slave traders, in their malign zeal, are miming their own enslavement. For a few hundred pesos' salary, these Indians have allowed themselves to be led or dragged through the streets.

The scene is shot over and over; the bellow heard time after time: "ACTION! CLEAR THE STREET! CUT!"

Do they think of the bitter past, how and when this all got underway? If they do, it seems to me more pitiable still, comparing their lot today with the part their ancestors were forced, not to play, but to live and die,

And a question must arise in their minds, inevitably: "Are we not today, some 200 years after this event, still being shunted about by the economic slave traders?...

A LONG, SERIOUS discussion last night at supper with Susan, the British casting director, on the role of Gabriel (Jeremy Irons). He chooses at the end of the film not to take up arms in defense of the threatened Indians. But in so choosing, he must avoid giving the impression that his is the decision of a weakling; that in fact, he has no contravening tactic to offer. And if the film so ended, with no effective alternative offered, it would be little more than a glorification of violence, its romantic apogee.

So went her argument, which I found somewhat unconvincing, never having considered nonviolence a matter primarily of tactic, let alone of successful tactic. The supposition in this case seems to be that unless Gabriel can come up with a successful outcome, on the hot spur of the moment, his moral choice is discredited. But who says so? Certainly none of the classical agents of nonviolence, from Christ to Dr. King. Still their resistance against injustice and their eventual acceptance of death at the hands of the violent have apparently failed to take hold as an acceptable tactic. Especially, it must be noted, among Christians:...

NOW HERE'S AN entrepreneur of some note! He's a property owner along the street in the old city where the entrance of slaves and traders is being filmed. This gent refuses to move when the word booms over the horn: "CLEAR THE STREET!" And worse, by no means quelled, he actually issues forth at the precise moment when "ACTION!" sounds for all the world like a final trump. Strides up and down the street as fancy takes him, toward or away from the camera (it makes no difference as to his direction; the "take" is spoiled).

Monstrous indignation explodes around him. No matter; possession, including self-possession, is nine points of the law. With marmoreal calm, he states his case: a million pesos as the price of his absence.

Now let us concede that the presence of a superstar is worth many millions of pesos; but the absence of an otherwise unknown? Of a double negative, the shadow of a shadow? The crisis is apt to tie the cerebella of economists and logicians in knots....

Someone asked me in puzzlement, "What do you do in the film?"

"Put it this way; I'm kind of a sacred drone. I hum along with things, in extraterrestrial approbation. But when the humming stops, watch out!"...

It would be difficult to imagine a greater disparity: the lives of the actors on the one hand (including my own) and the lives of those portrayed. I know little of that invisible point, the very juncture of spirit and flesh, at which our pampered skills can touch the strings and gut of things, and raise the solemn basso of very soul....

When I came here to help make a movie, I had a strong sense that my best understanding would be: It's all for the fun of it. And when I put together a book, especially a book of poetry, it is the same. But when I try to live in the way I am called to live-that becomes serious indeed.

Even then I notice that my best foot (the third one) inches its way forward. When I'm at my best (my least worst), the fun tends to take over. It all becomes celebration, even on the dung heap.

And when nature comes beating at my shores, as now, and blazes a blessing from on high, as now, I sense the heart of it all is celebration. Then there rises that gravely voice of reproof, as though it groaned from the everlasting pit: But how can you dare celebrate in such a world? Are you more than a frivolous parasite, feeding off the anguish of others?

I have no answer. But I know the opposite landscape of the fiesta is that pit; and I have all but gone under. My family and a few friends know this, and they never venture on such a question as the above....

What are we after in all this? (What am I after?) I am gaining almost nothing if I compare my sojourn here with last year's exposure to the realities of Central America. "A way of saying thank you to the Jesuits," as I put the project to superiors. But a thank you must be more than an exercise in nostalgia or dependence, whether to the order or to the past.

We whiz along every morning from our hotel, past the barrios of Santa Marta, on our way to the filming. Those of the poor who can put their hands on a few pesos will undoubtedly, in a year or two, view our film. As will the middle class, from New York to Tokyo. But to what end? To whose benefit?

Are we merely adding to 50 years or more of film history, piling image on image, film on film, Olympus on Etna--frivolity, ambition, rancor, gloss, laughter, violence, defeat--all to little avail, only in aid and abetting of our present destructive plight and impasse, the exact ironic opposite of the purpose envisioned?...

ALMOST ALL associated with the film describe themselves as an "ex"-ex-spouse, ex-Catholic; a few maybe out of deference to me, whom they commonly look on as an "ex-activist" (!) There is a nagging sense among them (and I insist in all sorts of ways on being a nag) that the world is going to hell in a hot air balloon. But there is little thought given to the effort and courage required to bring the basket safely down.

The blockage of imagination being at least in part along these lines: plethora of pesos, unlimited deluxe travel (invariably, so to speak, by hot air balloon), multiple homes. The image industry offers the wherewithal to create a plausible world of unassailable security and well-being. The gas bag floats on, the gas flame blazes away, the world of misery and violence is viewed from above, an esthetic airy distance. Thus the illusions of a free-floating world, and its rewards, create illusion within....

It's ironic and even laughable that I'm "in" the film somewhat in the way I'm "in" the church. Which is to say, in each I have what is officially known as an "advisory" role and a "bit" part. The assignments conferred in each case are really unclassifiable. In the church, since I'm ordained, I cannot quite be reduced to an "extra." But on the other hand, I will never qualify for a star role. And in the film, in some mysterious monkish way, I am found useful, to render the actors, pro tempore and in a manner of speaking, pneumatic. A sort of air pump operator, so to speak. Delightful!...

AN ADVENTURE. Our young Swiss actor, Rolf, offered to guide us on the four-hour trek up to a lost village of the Taironas. The first hour was fairly easy through level jungle. Then started the test: three hours up the rocky face.

We viewed firsthand the unbelievable labor of an ancient people who had hewn this marvel out of virgin rock. They had bridged chasms, always with native stone, tunneled through rock, upended enormous boulders, shaped them to hold an immense horizontal weight. We crawled through stone needles' eyes, walked gingerly over stone bridges, clattered over steps unevenly and cunningly placed so that when trodden on, their sharp noise might warn of the approach of stranger or enemy.

On Rolf's invitation, each of us chewed a lump of coca leaves to relieve exhaustion and hunger, thus, I suppose, imitating the ancestors who bore the brunt of the labor, the altitude, the long marches. In our case I can report that it worked, the effect something like that of strong coffee or tea, producing a slight gentle "high," not striking or noticeable in the thinning air and straining lungs.

So we arrived at the summit fairly refreshed and, after the hours of strenuous effort, felt no hunger. And so we offered our food to an impoverished family, a mother and three big-eyed children whom we came on, camping disconsolate in a resurrected hut near the remains of the village.

Walked thoughtful and solitary amid the bones and stones of history, thinking those long thoughts induced by ghosts and hints; thoughts of greatness and mortality, the folly and grandeur of human endeavor, including, with all hope, the outcome of our own.

Then down and down, mercifully by an easier route, to hear the distant sea and be sweetly cheated, taking sound for proximity; then to be undeceived as we lost the thunders once more.

Purity of distance; we caught sight through the undergrowth of a watery sky, or skyey water, an indistinguishable blinding sheet that enveloped the world and met the heavens. Then at long last, level ground, salt spray on the face; the sea, the sea!...

I AM TO DEPART for New York early next morning. Hearing this, DeNiro quietly arranges a farewell party at one of the colonial houses of Cartagena, transformed into a splendid restaurant.

He gets the word about. Roland and all the actors are in attendance. Roland favored us with the words of a song, Jeremy the music, which he played on a guitar. I record here the verse of gentle delightful kitsch:

Here's a song to Daniel Berrigan
When, where will we see him again?
If we do, we'll tell and tell again
Loving tales of Daniel Berrigan.
'Cause if he's ill we'd wish him well again
That's the charm of Daniel Berrigan.
Let's pray he sinks a nuclear sub again
All his fights he'll win and win again.
Our very special Daniel Berrigan.

They concocted a potion, a mysterious essence, and named it instantly Loyola Punch. Full glasses of the ambrosial draught arrived on a tray, with a gentle light in the midst. A sight (and savor) for the gods. Glorious, as was the whole evening!

We said farewell. Jeremy embraced me: "It will be a different film because of you."

I tergiversated, in a shrugging Irish way, but nonetheless, pleased as a cat at the cow's teat: "All I did was twitch an altar cloth now and then; some ridiculous detail or other."

But he was, of course, correct.

And so farewell for a time, as I voyage from the Land of Undoing, homeward to the Land of Unknowing.

From the book The Mission: A Film Journal, by Daniel Berrigan, SJ. Copyright o 1986 by Daniel Berrigan. By arrangement with Harper & Bow, Publishers, Inc.