A woman of vision

Vision—Aus dem Leben der Hildegard von Bingen (Vision—From the Life of Hildegard of Bingen) 2009 Germany (110 minutes) written and directed by Margarethe von Trotta, cinematography Axel Block.

Y1K: the full moon is on the horizon above a snowy plain in central Germany on the last night of the first millennium.

People gather in a small candlelit stone church crudely decorated with apocalyptic figures. Women are praying, several men are flagellating their naked backs; all await the end of time. Mankind would have to wait another thousand years for people to get this worked up over 999 turning to three zeroes, with the same result: a sunny January 1.

Near the end of the first century of that new millennium, the girl who would become Hildegard of Bingen (1098-1179) was born in Bermersheim, not far from Mainz, to a family of the German middle nobility.

After the harrowing candlelit eve of the second millennium, the story opens with the eight-year-old Hildegard (Stella Holzapfel) brought to the Benedictine monastery at Disibodenburg by her parents to be assigned to the care of Jutta von Sponheim (Mareile Blendl), a beautiful, kindly and severely pious anchoress enclosed—committed for life—in the monastery.

Jutta is the 16-year-old daughter of a nobleman who granted land and money to the monastery. Besides Hildegard, Jutta has another eight-year-old charge who took her name, Jutta (Nina Littman). Over time, the girls’ pious practices would attract a following of other well-born girls and young women.

The key to what makes this movie work is its simplicity. The skill with which von Trotta introduces a modern viewer to the life Hildegard was getting to know in this remote time is achieved with what is surely a deceptively easy simplicity. The sets, design, and costumery are richly plain, the lighting appears to be entirely natural, and the actors’ faces are from medieval paintings. But the unusual atmospheric stillness of the frames and meditative calm that the clear eyed, pious characters emanate occasionally is jarred by the jerk or swing of a hand-held camera.

Once the mood and pace are set, the time shifts to her middle age, from when Hildegard (Barbara Sukowa) succeeded the senior Jutta as magistra of the nuns when Jutta died in 1136, to when Hildegard set forth on her first preaching tour in about 1158.

In this period, Hildegard had her first vision that she reported to the women’s priest, Volmar (Heino Ferch) in 1141. In this vision, she saw what she described as a ‘living light’ which ‘flowed through my brain and my breast and my heart… like a flame that didn’t burn but warmed like the sun,’ and that a voice instructed her ‘to reveal that which is hidden.’ She told Volmar that she had been directed to write down everything she had seen and heard.  

Modern medical science suggests that migraines could have caused the sensations Hildegard experienced as ‘living light’, but her work and achievements speak for themselves. She taught her nuns medicine and music; she won a battle with hostile churchmen over setting up an independent convent in Rupertsberg in 1150, oversaw its construction, guaranteed its economic viability, and ran it; and she did most of her writing and composing during this time.

She was a gifted, inspired and able woman as an artist and administrator at a time when women had low status, but circumstances conspired to help her. The Gothic Age was an age inspired by vision. A person with bona fide visions was an asset for a religious institution that relied on attracting pilgrims and receiving endowments and land grants from the powerful. Abbot Kuno of Disibodenburg (Alexander Held) and Volmar supported Hildegard’s visions before a synod ordered by Pope Eugenius III. The pope held that her visions were God-sent and instructed her through Archbishop Heinrich of Mainz (Wolfgang Pregler) to write everything down. (She also got help by a direct written appeal to her contemporary, the influential cleric Bernard of Clairvaux.)

Abbot Kuno later changed his tune when Hildegard announced that a vision instructed her to leave the monastery to found an independent convent for women in nearby Rupertsberg. She achieved this vision—or ambition—with the support of the archbishop and the wealthy mother (Sunnyi Melles) of her favorite protégée, the striking Richardis von Stade (Hannah Herzsprung).

Hildegard developed a bond with Richardis which the adult junior Jutta (Lena Stolze) envied and Richardis’ mother, and brother, Hartwig von Bremen (Christoph Luser), ended by appointing Richardis abbess of Bassum in Saxony in 1151.

The rub came where the divine nature of Hildegard’s visions conflicted with her human nature; where what she said God had ordered conveniently aligned with what the steel-willed Hildegard wanted. Sukowa colors her intensely devout—and subsequently beatified—Hildegard with the self-awareness to recognize her potential human frailty, but not to stand in the way of what she was driven to achieve in the face of daunting odds against her.

A notable feature of the movie is performances of Hildegard’s music, including parts of her musical play Ordo virtutum [Play of the Virtues] and liturgical music she wrote for the community’s masses. Sukowa, a performing soprano, sings her own parts with mezzo soprano Salome Kammer, who appears as a nun, and alto Judith Schmidt (presumably singing for Herzsprung and not listed in a dramatic role).

Sabina Flanagan, whose work was consulted in preparing this review, is the author of a life, Hildegard of Bingen; a Visionary Life (Routledge, 1989), and Secrets of God, Writings of Hildegard of Bingen (Shambhala, 1996).