Sorceress

SORCERESS tells the suspenseful tale of how the Dominican friar Etienne de Bourbon, a Church inquisitor, comes to a small French village searching for heretics and encounters the beautiful, mysterious forest woman Elda. The villagers respect Elda for her prowess as a healer. They have faith in her knowledge of medicinal plants and herbs and her use of ancient rituals to cure the sick. But Etienne, driven by an inquisitor's vocation to purge his Christian flock of false beliefs, suspects heresy. Fascinated by Elda yet knowing that the punishment for a heretic is to be burned at the stake, the conflicted cleric cannot help spying on the pagan rites Elda practices in the forest. The two of them become entwined in a confrontation between communal custom and Church dogma, between human sympathy and institutional authority. Product Description

Lady of the Beasts

Having treasured this film since its production, I am thrilled to have been able to update my aging VHS copy with this pristine DVD. It feels like a rebirth in more ways than one. Our current age of ecological crisis and commitment provides a ripe climate for this Medieval tale. Many Americans of European heritage can look back to the historical chapter depicted and understand how their lineage lost sacred connection with the Earth, and determine that it can be restored. So this is truly a story whose time has come...again!

Art Historian, co-producer, and co-screenwriter Pamela Berger was inspired by the 13th-century accounts of a Dominican monk who was a part of the early Inquisition in France. His treatise showed adequate cause for this pious predator to have brought a certain healer, herbalist and "Mistress of the Beasts" to trial and probable death as a heretic. Dr. Berger went further and created a more complex plot which shows the Monk's condemnatory eyes ultimately turned inward for a personal reckoning.

Of course the Dominican friar, Etienne de Bourbon (Tcheky Karyo), with his aristocratic family roots and theological education, strides into this isolated French village with an innate sense of superiority and entitlement, however arrogantly he might protest his humility. He tries to enlist the support of the local cleric (Jean Carmet) in routing out enemies of the faith, a pursuit the good, older, wiser priest dismisses as absurd: "There are no Heretics in my parish. My people are as pious as they are poor." But the intruder remains as rabid in his quest as a dog with a bone.

The good Trickster priest has already confided to his house-keeper (and probable life companion) his assessment of the Inquisitor's eyes : "like a bat's ~ fierce, unblinking, and blind." When the Monk wanders into the Sorceress' woodland domain with his nose in his breviary, he obviously only has eyes for his abstract, sky-based God. As Theologian Mary Daly noted in Beyond God the Father, "New space has a kind of invisibility to those who have not entered it."

The eyes of the Woods-Woman, Elda (Christine Boisson) are anything but blind, with her first request to the Friar ~ that he move his shadow off her collection of drying leaves ~ resonating on levels physical and psychological. Etienne's avid gathering of evidence against Elda as a "vetula" a Sorceress using crafts of the Devil, is prompted as much by his sexual conundrums as by church dictates, since Elda is a very comely woman.

In resurrecting and amplifying this tale, Pamela Berger joins the cause of Shakespeare and other writers of his day, who also perused church documents from the Inquisition and, in doing so, culled magical stories of the peasantry, resurrecting in their plays fairies, sprites, and other such spirits of Nature. Bravo!
March 5, 2008

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