Tiffany Dawn Smith: 08/15/21

Sunday, August 15, 2021

The Cloud of Unknowing (link to full film)

Rodney Thompson lived as a hermit for thirty years in a small Connemara cottage [in Ireland], dedicating his life to silence, solitude and prayer.

"The Cloud of Unknowing" is the title of a Middle English anonymous manual on contemplative prayer. This practice dates back to the third century Desert Fathers (and Mothers) - Christian mystics who separated themselves from distractions in order to find God.

The film is constructed from the interplay of formal and thematic dualities: movement and stasis, speech and silence, portrait and landscape, the sky and the ground.

Filled with majestic vistas and robust Connemara weather, the film allows the viewer to step into the mind of a hermit, as the natural world unfolds at an unhurried pace.

“When I was introduced to Rodney I was struck by his graceful and calm benevolence. I wanted to communicate something of this in the film. He has followed an ancient mystical tradition, and his way of being in the world is a blissful respite from the ever increasing hectic pace of contemporary life. As a documentary film maker, I’m perhaps more motivated by questions of form than content. So the film that I made is not a conventional biography. Instead, it’s oriented towards the experience of the viewer. It tries to move beyond words and images, much like contemplative prayer itself.”

- Mike Hannon, director

The Cloud of Unknowing, link to full film: https://vimeo.com/201640633

Day of a Stranger

Day of a Stranger is an intimate portrait of a world-renown mystic and author during his final years living in solitude from 1965 until his shocking death in 1968. As a Trappist Monk, Thomas Merton became a prolific writer and was in dialogue with some of the twentieth century’s most influential figures, luminaries such as D.T. Suzuki, Rachel Carson, Henry Miller, Thich Nhat Hanh, Martin Luther King, Jr., and Dorothy Day. Interweaving meditative images of his hermitage nestled deep in the woods of Kentucky and rare audio recordings he made in isolation; the film pieces together a glimpse into the consciousness of one of the twentieth century’s most brilliant minds.

Full film here: https://vimeo.com/ondemand/dayofastranger

“Nonadaptation” by Czeslaw Milosz

"I was not made to live anywhere except in paradise.
Such, simply, was my genetic inadaptation.
Here on earth every prick of a rose-thorn changed into a wound.
Whenever the sun hid behind a cloud, I grieved.
I pretended to work like others from morning to evening,
but I was absent, dedicated to invisible countries
For solace I escaped to city parks, there to observe
and faithfully describe flowers and trees, but they changed,
under my hand, into the gardens of Paradise.
I have not loved a woman with my five senses.
I only wanted from her my sister, from before the banishment.
And I respected religion, for on this earth of pain
it was a funereal and a propitiatory song."

"On Urge to Withdraw" by Naida Muslic

"The withdrawal from the world - into forests as a mad mystic who plays lute to birds and visits the towns only to scandalise and scare people who were too adapted to the world and its ways, seemed the only way to exit the wheel of samsara. I felt aged - like I've already seen it all, had hundreds of children and husbands and wives, like I've been a criminal, a priest, a queen, a prostitute, and there was nothing left for me to be anymore. All the roles seemed too familiar and already explored and lived. It wasn't nihilism that was behind the urge to withdraw - it was inability to see any evidence of my belief that there had to be more to life than dying with a stomach more full than you started with."