“Silent Light”

A Film Review

Jim Juhnke

Carlos Reygadas, a Mexican film director, is the latest in a long line of worldly wise artists to exploit traditionalist Mennonite (or Amish) community as a canvas to express a creative spiritual vision. Reygadas’ new film, “Silent Light,” shared the Jury Prize with another film at the Cannes Film Festival. It opened on January 7, 2009, at the Film Forum theater in Manhattan. It is not clear if and when “Silent Light” will be released for wider distribution. An art film that makes great demands of its viewers, it will not likely reach a mass audience.

I saw the film after paying a six-dollar senior discount admission fee at the Film Forum. “Silent Light” had a greater impact on me that weekend than several other acclaimed shows that I saw on Broadway (“Equus,” “In the Heights,” “Becky Shaw”) where my seats cost more than ten to fifteen times as much. I hope to see it again and recommend it, with reservation, to others.

The “Silent Light” story unfolds in the Old Colony Mennonite community of Chihuahua, Mexico. A Mennonite farmer—married, and father of six children—is committing passionate adultery with a single Mennonite woman. We see the silent strength and love of the family in extended beautiful scenes of patterned behavior at mealtime, at devotions, and at a swimming/bathing pool.

The farmer and his lover are both anguished by their infidelity that, if they continue, will bring chaos to family and community. The farmer tells the most important people in his life about the problem—his wife, his father (who is also a preacher), and his good friend, a mechanic.

But none is able to help him control his passion. The result is tragedy, followed by a shocking shift into a magical realist mode that implies some kind of redemption.

“Silent Light” moves as slowly as an incoming tide. The audience has its attention span tested to the limit. The opening sunrise scene takes six minutes—moving from a dark starry sky to the rich colors of clouds and the rising sun, accompanied by the sounds of awakening insects and farm animals.

Subsequent scenes linger agonizingly long on the actors’ faces and on simple architecture, with human figures subordinated as they move in or out of the frame. Spoken words are sparse. Viewers must listen to the silence and see the subtle changes in the light.

Perhaps the director’s most bold decision was to use non-professional actors. Almost all are Mennonites whose ancestors migrated from Prussia to Russia to Canada, and, in the 1920s, to Mexico. Their names are familiar to those of Mennonite background: Wall, Pankratz, Klassen, Fehr, and Toews. All the conversation is in Low German (Plautdietsch) with English subtitles.

Convincing proof of Regadas’ genius as a film director lies in his ability to get his amateur cast to manifest the demeanor and expressions essential for his extended camera takes. No doubt the director was helped by the fact that the sad and somber mood of “Silent Light” corresponds well with the simplicity, gentleness, and impassivity of Old Colony ways.

One of the lead actors did not come from the Chihuahua Old Colony community. Miriam Toews, a prominent ex-Mennonite Canadian writer, plays the role of the farmer’s wife. According to an article in the Toronto Globe & Mail, director Reygadas found her photograph on the inside cover of her popular novel, A Complicated Kindness (2004). The director saw there “something mournful and broken and perfect for his new film.”¹

 Toews does not speak Low German, but that was no problem because her lines were few and perhaps dubbed.

There is an ironical difference between Regadas’ film and Toews’ novel. “Silent Light” is respectful of Old Colony Mennonite life to the point of sentimentality. A Complicated Kindness

is the polar opposite of sentimental. Toews lashes out bitterly against her home community of Steinbach, Manitoba, for the wounds that Mennonite religious bigotry inflicted upon her and her family. 

Those of us who have Amish and Mennonites roots, as well as any who care about the fate of traditionalist communities, will leave this film with questions about the impact of the project on Old Colony Mennonites in Mexico. Were these actors from the center or from the fringes of Old Colony life? What was the attitude of the truly traditionalist leaders toward this project?

Two of the lead actors, Cornelio Wall Fehr (Johan) and Maria Pankratz (Marianne), who played the farmer and his lover, went to the Cannes Film Festival and were photographed in tuxedo and fancy dress along with Carlos Regadas, “looking a bit sheepish.”²

This must remind us of the five young Amish adults featured in the ten-week 2004 television reality show, “Amish in the City.” These are people in hapless flight from their religious/ethnic homes.

In 1984-85 the prize-winning film, “Witness,” on an Old Order landscape in Pennsylvania, prompted a controversy about media exploitation. John A. Hostetler, an ex-Amish sociologist and writer of books about the Amish, warned against the corrosive effects of this media invasion. Paramount Pictures offered one Old Order Amish man two thousand dollars for the temporary use of his farm. To another whose barn had recently burned, they offered full payment for an authentic Amish barn raising. The Amish rejected both offers.

Nevertheless, Hostetler predicted that the movie would “signal a milestone in the erosion of the social fabric of the Amish community.”³ “Witness” did turn out to be a popular box office success that resulted in a substantial growth of tourism into Pennsylvania Amish country.

I am not aware of any Mennonite scholar/expert on the Old Colony Mennonites in Mexico who is taking up a role akin to that of Hostetler in defending the traditionalist religious community against outside intrusion. There are substantial differences in these cases. Peter Weir, director of “The Witness,” answered Hostetler’s charges by noting that he did not use any Amish actors and did not film any actual Amish persons. Carlos Reygadas’ success with “Silent Light” had everything to do with his Mennonite actors.

Did the making of the film affect the social fabric of the Old Colony community? Perhaps not much. “Silent Light” is no blockbuster, and the isolated Old Colony Mennonites, as far as I know, are unlikely to fall victim to tourist voyeurism.

Both “Witness” and “Silent Light” sustain respect for the core values and traditional ways of Old Order and Old Colony people. In both cases there were some details about traditionalist life that the directors did not get exactly right. Reygadas has less interest than Weir (and than most literature by Mennonites) in the social mechanisms Mennonites use to maintain boundaries against worldly influences. Both Weir and Reygadas intended to produce works of art. They should not be judged primarily by a standard of documentary fidelity to Mennonite or Amish social reality.

But what are we to make of the hints of redemption at the conclusion of “Silent Light”? Here the film falters. In the end, Reygadas shifts into a fantastic world where the rules of nature, of time, and of the social order no longer apply. A dead person awakens and the sun sets in the east. Unlike Christian images of a future in heaven, Regadas offers a mystical return to the past. Symbolic confession and contrition are apparently supposed to make it magically possible for these plain and simple people to return to a blessed time before adulterous passion, before the Fall.

"Silent Light" may be stunningly beautiful and provocative. It may reveal the aching contradiction between human passion and social order. But by the conclusion I, for one, found it pretentious, confusing, and unconvincing as an ultimate spiritual vision.

—James C. Juhnke, Wichita, Kansas, is Professor Emeritus of History, Bethel College.

Notes

1. Simon Houpt, “Miriam Toews: from author to actress,” Toronto Globe & Mail, May 12, 2007, cited by Magdalene Redekop, “‘Stellet Licht’ and the ‘Narcissism of Small Differences,’ Rhubarb 16 (Winter 2007): 44. 
2. Redekop, 45-46. 
3. John A. Hostetler, “Marketing the Amish Soul,” The Gospel Herald (June 26, 1984), 452.