In May 1989, I met Brother David Steindl-Rast for the first time at Esalen Institute in Big Sur, California, a humanistic psychology conference center since the early 1960s. He was leading a seminar; one of the participants, John Doty, who I had known from a film seminar that we attended together at Esalen in 1986, introduced us.  Even though I had known of his work, including Gratefulness, the Heart of Prayer, I was not prepared for the immediate connection we mutually felt about film as a vehicle for spiritual experiences and development (as opposed to escapist entertainment).   I said that I was interested in how film could facilitate contemplation as seen in Tokyo Story by Yasujiro Ozu, and Brother David responded that the monks at the monastery watched films to help with meditation.  From this one-hour conversation hatched our first film seminar that we co-led together on “Film and Contemplation” in 1990.  We were so deeply moved about the experience that we have continued to co-lead film seminars every year (except 1997-2000 when Brother David was not conducting seminars).  During these five-day residential seminars, about 6 to 10 films on a particular spiritual theme would be shown and discussed focusing, on the participants’ own personal experiences of the film. 

I am most grateful to have had the opportunity to teach with and learn from Brother David during these seminars, which I consider the most meaningful activity in my professional life and the highlight of each year for me personally.  I have been enriched in the process of deciding on spiritual themes that spoke to us, selecting and sequencing the films to be shown and conducting the seminars where the participants shared their personal experiences with us.  Brother David and I would view many films prior to each seminar, discuss them through email and arrive at our final list.  We would each have our own creative ideas for certain films that often agreed, but we would go through discussion to fine tune the list, which sometimes changed as the seminar happened onsite. We selected films that not only illustrated certain themes, but also were considered artistically great films that touched our souls deeply.  Such films would often depict characters who both experienced an epiphany that led to a transformation of consciousness and embodied the Hero’s Journey myth described by Joseph Campbell in The Hero With a Thousand Faces.  We also paid close attention to the sequencing of films so as to invite the participants into the process:  more inviting and gentler films on the first day and more difficult and complex films on the second and third days. The films take on a cumulative effect as the seminar unfolds and our collective attention focuses on the films in the contemplative setting of Esalen, undistracted by the everyday world, senses opened and sharpened by the Pacific Ocean.

I remember especially our seminar, “Healing through Gratefulness:  A Film-viewing Adventure,” from July 7 to 12, 2002, announced in the Esalen catalog as follows:

Gratefulness is the key to joy – the key to a happiness which does not depend on what happens. We hold that key in our own hands, but we need to learn how to use it. There is no better place to practice gratefulness than Esalen, and no better medium to explore it than film. This will be the 10th film-viewing seminar that Francis and Br. David offer together at Esalen. Receiving carefully prepared handout material about the films, viewing them on state-of-the-art home theater equipment, discussing them with others in a group, and reflecting on them by yourself under a tree by the ocean – all this greatly enriches the experience of exploring a topic through cinema. Our topic: Healing through Gratefulness. What gratitude does for you is as important as what it does for others. It calms your fears, strengthens your courage, opens your heart for adventure – gratefulness heals. We will see about eight films, made in different countries and at different periods – each of them chosen for being brilliant, all of them showing various facets of gratefulness. Whether you are a sophisticated film buff, or simply enjoy a vacation with movies, you are in for a film-viewing adventure. Better still: you are apt to live more gratefully – and so more joyfully – long after you have returned home. Suggested reading:  Gratefulness, the Heart of Prayer, by David Steindl-Rast.

About 30 people from all walks of life attended this seminar.  Many had been to our seminars before; all were passionate about film.  The seminars consisted of the films shown on home-theater equipment, elaborate handout packets of information about the films and discussion among the participants.  The handout packets included material gathered in earlier years from the Film Study Center at the Museum of Modern Art (New York) and the Pacific Film Archive (University of California, Berkeley); in later years, internet websites like The Internet Movie Database (IMDb) have provided easy access to additional documents. For each film, I would select an assortment of outstanding reviews, critical analyses, literary sources (i.e., short stories) as well as information about the actors, actresses and directors. 

The processing of the film viewing has developed over time to involve the following steps: After the showing of the film, we remain in silence for a few minutes with the lights turned down; for the next five minutes, participants are encouraged to write or draw in their journals; and then, we would gather in a circle and go around sequentially asking each person if they wish to share for one minute the one image or scene that especially moved them.  In this way, we saw the film through the eyes of the other participants. Finally, we would open up the discussion focused on our collective experience of the film.

For our “Healing Through Gratefulness” Esalen seminar, we selected the films listed below.  From Monday through Thursday, two films were shown and discussed (generally one in the morning and one in the evening); there were bonus films at 10pm. On Friday morning, film clips from the week chosen with the audience were shown to summarize the week.  From our experience in leading the film seminars, the more seriously dramatic and complex films are best shown and processed in the mornings leaving the evenings for somewhat lighter films.

SUNDAY evening:  Introductions of participants, orientation to the seminar theme, and short film clips to demonstrate the processing of the film viewing.
1) Clip from Titanic (US, 1997)
2) Clip from The Wizard of Oz (US, 1939)

MONDAY
3) The Straight Story (US, 1999)
4) Il Postino (Italy, 1994)
5) Bonus film - City Lights (US, 1931)

TUESDAY
6) Twenty-Four Eyes (Japan, 1954)
7) From Mao to Mozart (US 1980, 2001) (DVD version also had  a 20 minute short on a return visit to China 20 years later)
8) Bonus film - Divided We Fall (Czech Republic, 2000)

WEDNESDAY
9) Tuesdays With Morrie (US, 1999)
10) Strangers in Good Company (Canada, 1990)
11) Bonus film - The King of Masks (China, 1996)

THURSDAY
12) The Road Home (China, 1999)
13) Mareclino pan y vino (Spain, 1955)
14) Koyla (Czech Republic, 1996)

FRIDAY
Clips of the highlights of the films of the seminar

The Sunday evening film clips are meant to be little appetizers for the week’s feast of films.  The Titanic clip was of the 101-year-old Rose Calvert (Gloria Stuart) at the end of her long remembered story of the love affair between her and Jack Dawson that began at sea a few days before Titanic sank.  She tells the captivated, tear-filled fortune hunter crew that “he saved me in every way a person can be saved.  I don’t even have a picture of him, only in my memory.”  One sensed the profound gratefulness she felt for Jack.  The Wizard of Oz shows the transformative journey of young Dorothy (Judy Garland) as a cyclone takes her from familiar Kansas to the magical land of Oz. Wishing to return, she begins to travel to the Emerald City where a great wizard lives. On her way she meets a Scarecrow who needs a brain, a Tin Man who wants a heart, and a Cowardly Lion who desperately needs courage. They all hope the Wizard of Oz will help them.  Working together, they survive many trials, and at the very end of the film Dorothy returns home by clicking her red ruby shoes three times. The clip showed Dorothy’s heartfelt gratefulness for: 1) the help of Scarecrow, Tin Man and Cowardly Lion just before she clicked her heels to leave the Emerald City; 2) Immediately following, her parents and friends upon her return to Kansas.

The seminar began perfectly with The Straight Story in which Alvin Straight (Richard Farnsworth, nominated for a Best Actor Oscar) played a 73 year-old man who drives 500 miles on a tractor lawnmower to reconcile with his ailing brother, who had suffered a stroke.  It was filmed along the route that the actual Alvin Straight traveled in 1994 from Laurens, Iowa to Mt. Zion, Wisconsin.  Along the way, he meets ordinary people who helped him on his journey from which a winsome sense of gratefulness emerged.  The film’s dramatic climax is at the end of the film when both elder brothers meet after his long odyssey.  Alvin’s brother Lyle has tears welling up in his eyes as he is surprised and grateful for the tremendous effort Alvin made to visit him; their eyes look upward to the stars.

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