Filmmaker Talks Spirituality

Filmmaker Helen Whitney discussed four very different groups of outsiders—Trappist monks, targets of a Communist witch hunt, young gang members, and mentally ill adults—through the lens of spirituality in a lecture in Memorial Church.

Whitney screened clips from four of the earliest documentaries in her long career as a screenwriter, producer, and director.

She described her films as “a spiritual autobiography” that illuminates both her internal experience and her interest in learning about the lives of marginalized factions of society.

Her lecture on Monday, the first of three consecutive nights of speeches she will deliver in Memorial Church, traced the first part of that autobiography, beginning with the unexpected death of both of her parents when she was 11 years old.

After her parents died, she said, “I became an outsider, looking in on what used to be my normal life through a very dark glass. I had to start asking the big questions earlier than I would have liked.”

Her first attempt at an answer was “Youth Terror: The View from Behind the Gun.” While making this documentary, which dealt with teenage crime in Newark, Brooklyn, and Harlem, Whitney was robbed, beaten up, and treated for wounds in an emergency room.  “Though I hungered to enter worlds radically different than mine, this was scarier and more different than I had planned,” Whitney said.

Her next project brought her to a more serene environment: St. Joseph’s Abbey in Spencer, Mass. Her intent in making a documentary on monks’ lives, she said, was to revive the idea of the monastery, which she felt had lost resonance in modern times.

Introducing Whitney’s lecture, religion professor Diana L. Eck said that Whitney’s films “offer extraordinary explanations of some of the most profound and complex questions of our time.”

Eck added, “This is a woman who is deeply educated in the world, in the wells of human experience, and you will see this in her films.”

Mable Chan, a researcher at the Fairbank Center for Chinese Studies, said she attended the lecture on a whim.

“I came in with an open mind to let her guide the narrative and the film” Chan said. “It was beyond anything I’d ever seen in a church setting. It was refreshing. It was powerful.”

Whitney said that she hoped to demonstrate that “a life in film, even though financially precarious, is one of the most humanizing careers a person can have.  You come to respect the mystery of the otherness of other people.”

“It can’t help but enlarge your heart and your brain,” she said.