SORCERESS
(Le moine et la sorciere)
dir. Pamela Berger and Suzanne Schiffman, 1987
97 mins. France.
In French with English subtitles.
FRIDAY, APRIL 10 – 10PM
THURSDAY, APRIL 7 – 7:30PM
SATURDAY, APRIL 16 – 11:59PM
SATURDAY, APRIL 23 – 7PM w Q&A (THIS EVENT IS $10)
SUNDAY, APRIL 24 – 7:30PM
SORCERESS (Pamela Berger and Suzanne Schiffman, 1987) from Spectacle on Vimeo.
In 13th century France, a Dominican Friar descends upon an Edenic village on orders from the Vatican to root out heretics in the countryside. There is little evidence of such heresy to motivate the hunt, but so sayeth the good book, seek and ye shall find. News of a “healing woman” practicing homeopathic medicine (and her practice’s provenance in the local legend of a saintly greyhound) disturbs the friar, and his subsequent confrontations with the healer begin a gentle philosophical march into the nature of faith and its many means of expression. Brooding on the peripheries are struggles of power, secular and otherwise, which are dissected for their tendencies to contradict and align when convenient.
SORCERESS is the collaboration of two filmmakers; Pamela Berger and Suzanne Schiffman. Pamela Berger is a medievalist specializing in iconography. She teaches film and medieval art at Boston College, and has directed two other films, The Imported Bridegroom and Killian’s Chronicles. Suzanne Schiffman was a behind-the-scenes powerhouse of the French New Wave, serving as a script-supervisor for Godard, writing numerous films for Truffaut (Day for Night, The Last Metro, among others) and collaborating closely with Rivette throughout his career, providing the scenario for many of his films and co-directing Out 1.
Special thanks to Pamela Berger.