As the closing titles of Caroline Golum’s Revelations of Divine Love inform us, all that is known about the life of 14th century mystic Julian of Norwich is contained in her work. Even her birth name has been lost to history. Golum and co-writer Laurence Bond faithfully recreate the spiritual substance of her writings while deftly weaving in historical context that stirs the indignations of contemporary audiences. The historical Julian might have been scandalized by second- and third-wave feminism, and she never explicitly mentioned the Black Death or the peasants’ revolt, but Golum embellishes her adaptation with righteous vignettes designed to probe the revolutionary potential of an artist who saw Christ as “our true mother by nature.”
Golum introduces Julian (Tessa Strain) in solemn close-up, cast in cosmic purple light, as she’s sealed into the cell where she will “rest forevermore.” A funeral and a housewarming. After experiencing delirious visions of Christ on what she thought was her deathbed, Julian has chosen to live as an anchoress, physically existing in a small, doorless room attached to a church, while her mind and pen pursue divine immensity. Her isolation is not complete, however. Three windows connect her to the material world: one through which food and bodily waste pass, another for outside visitors in search of her counsel, and yet another offers a narrow view of church services. (Logophiles should be pleased to know that the last of these is called a “hagioscope” or “squint”.) Within these four walls she will record her encounters with the Almighty, writings that will survive centuries as the oldest English-language works attributed to a woman.
Golum recreates Julian’s visions in rich, unfussy tableaux. Naturally, Christ’s suffering features prominently, as does the blessed virgin, who catches blood flowing from her child’s side, the arrested spurt strikingly resembling an umbilical cord. When the lord places a hazelnut in Julian’s hand, another gateway to the divine is opened. The fragile hazelnut “is all that is made… it lasts and ever shall because God loves it. And all things have being through the love of God.” Hand-in-hand with her subject, Golum plunges into the dialectic of the infinite that colors human activity. As many third-rate comedians have been reminding us for decades, we are meat sacks of measurably meager dimensions capable of imagining endlessness. Such is the profundity of the notion that no open mic evocation can diminish it. Millions worship the figure that is simultaneously man and God, anticipating the death that is new life. Julian’s confinement defied its boundaries in both time and space. The film charts an exchange between the 14th and 21st centuries, and like Julian herself, elevates continuity over disjunction.
These paradoxes are echoed in the material presentation of the story. Golum and production designer Grant Stoops capture the push-pull between theater’s stage-bound limitations and cinema’s pretense of infinite possibility by foregrounding the artifice of their constructed environments. Charming miniatures and painted backdrops surround convincing facsimiles of aging masonry and productively clash with location shots. Halfway between the theater and the cinema is a rich no-man’s land in which the former is liberated from its fixity and the latter abandons its seductive verisimilitude. Revelations of Divine Love occupies that uncanny lacuna. Like Julian of Norwich, the film wrestles with the infinite while believing some better world will come.
[Full disclosure: you’ll find my name in the end credits, thanked among many others by the film’s producers for their generous support. You’ll have to take my word for it that this connection did not impact my adamant appreciation of the film.]
Revelations of Divine Love screens this afternoon, April 5 (aka Easter Sunday), at Nitehawk Prospect Park. Director Caroline Golum and producer Kate Stahl will be in attendance for a Q&A. It plays April 11 at Low Cinema and April 17-19 at Roxy Cinema, and April 24-26 at Spectacle.
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