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MASINA
ULRICH MEURER
SACRED HORROR
ULRICH MEURER
ΙΕΡΟΣ ΤΡΟΜΟΣ
Sacred Horror
I.
July 6, anno Domini 1415: the theologian and Church reformer Jan Hus is undressed and tied to a stake, hands behind his back, the neck bound with a chain. Wood and straw are piled up around him, covering his body to the chest. The fire is lit – but it refuses to fully blaze up. After some troublesome attempts to kindle the flames, an old woman makes toward the stake and throws a withered bundle of brushwood onto the pile. At the sight of her dutiful act, the martyr exclaims: “O Sancta Simplicitas!”
What he means – while the flames are already licking at his limbs – remains rather obscure. “Holy Simplicity” might be an address laden with bitter irony, mocking the zealousness and servility of a human being that has been kept in ignorance through religious indoctrination. Then again, “Holy Simplicity” could also, at the moment of approaching death, rise before the eyes of Jan Hus as the only true epitome of humble naivety, as a new saint in glorious rags and as the antithesis of the many learned Christian scholars (including Hus himself) who had been debating for several months at the Council of Constance.
What is beyond dispute, however: The bundle that the modest woman supplies to spark off the executioner’s fire is the same, down to the last twig, that the young Gelsomina carries strung across her shoulder when she appears, more than five centuries later, in the very first shot of Fellini’s La Strada – her back towards the camera, clad in a dark, monkish cape as the waves roll in on the windy, wintery beach near Fiumicino. The bundle serves as a relay – in all the word’s meanings – it changes hands, it is passed on as insignia of the terrible ambiguity of holy simplicity.
II.
Circa 1210: another execution – this time averted. The city of Viterbo is besieged by the merciless tyrant Nicolai (a fictional warlord from the anthology of legends The Little Flowers of Saint Francis who, in Roberto Rossllini’s cinematic retelling Francesco, giullare di Dio, appears more like a burlesque ogre than a military leader). Due to the false accusations of the devil, Nicolai takes the benevolent Franciscan brother Ginepro who wanders into his camp for an assassin and condemns him “to be tied to the tail of a horse and dragged along the ground to the gallows, and then to be hanged by the neck.” Only when a priest recognizes Ginepro as a companion of St. Francis, the tyrant studies his prisoner’s face more intently – its gracious gaze and silent smile and childlike candor – he rolls his eyes in stupefaction, puffs his cheeks, cannot make sense of this countenance that returns his inquisitive look with the deepest trust, until he finally crumbles in the face of this terrible simplicity.
What’s so atrocious about this face and this simplicity is their disturbing immutability – in brother Ginepro as well as in Masina, in the strongman’s assistant Gelsomina, in the streetwalker Cabiria, the carefree mother Giulietta (byname “Passerotto,” the little sparrow) in Europa ’51, the betrayed wife Giulietta (of the Spirits) ... This, however, does not mean that the face of simplicity is a mere mask of unchangeable, mild humility, a featureless surface without depth. If anything, this face is only depth, an inner substance that occupies the entire plane of expression. Its affects do not well up, as we like to think, from an underlying deeper stratum (the mind, the movements of the soul). Instead, they drift over the plane of expression like weather events. Meanwhile, the plane itself consists of a goodness that confronts us like a dense slab of stone; except for its meteorological variations, this face is essentially immobile because it does not know time or becoming. It is a quality: it is made from a nameless and obstinate white matter – precisely the opposite of a clown’s makeup – that consists of an inexorable modesty, ingenuousness and quiet meekness.
Fellini revels in this mineral expanse, in Masina’s “little round face which can express happiness or sadness with such poignant simplicity.” The film scholar John Stubbs calls this face a zone of defamiliarization, “to set the material off from the quotidian train of events” and see it as “something on the level of myth or fairy tale.”
III.
October 6, anno Domini 303 (or 287): a third execution – averted only fifteen centuries later, during its theatrical reenactment in 1965. A maiden named Faith, having consecrated her life to Christ, is summoned before the Roman procurator Datianus of Agen and ordered to sacrifice to his pagan gods. As she refuses, the legionaries tie her on a bronze grill and burn her to death on its red-hot lattice ... When the little Giulietta (of the Spirits) is chosen for the martyr’s role in a play at her convent school, her grandfather rushes onto the stage, cranks down the child on the fiery grid that, with a wooden capstan, has already been hoisted halfway to the gates of heaven, and saves her from the plastic-foil flames: “You like being roasted, stupid girl?”
The grandfather’s rescue and scolding – Ti piaceva farti abbrustolire, eh, Bella stupida? – mark a certain doctrinal split or discrimen: St. Fides of Agen belongs to the class of canonical saints whose immovable faith demands suffering. Apart from all types of hot metal objects and wild beasts that come into violent contact with their bodies, this suffering may also include periods of doubt and (self-)searching, painful epiphanies, wanderings through the desert, flagellations, stigmata. It presents itself as assignment, exercise, or work. From this, however, another model of sainthood branches off, somewhat less statutory and orthodox, manifested by saints who merge entirely into their own innocence. They seldom “work,” they rather breathe, incorporate, excrete their almost heretically natural faith – which is directed not so much at a venerable higher being as at the world of living things. This saintliness does not lack sincerity, but it knows little of severity ... Leaving behind the nuns’ burning vision of St. Faith as well as her own awed childhood self, Giulietta enters that very realm of holy simplicity. And all her kin, Gelsomina, Cabiria, Giulietta (the little sparrow), Masina, will inhabit the same sphere: even when abused and exploited, they will still show more “joy-thru-foolishness” than St. Francis himself, a “silly humility” that Rossellini’s giullare di Dio pictures as the merrier aspect of Franciscan life.
But at the edge, or perhaps in the heart of this humble, unwise, guileless mode of sainthood, its fiercest and most resistive property is born – an ultimate unsacrificeability. This unfitness (of the simple mind and the slightly droll body) to be sacrificed begins to push the figure of the saint out of every “Christian” system and community: