Vision Brings Hildegard von Bingen, a Prototypical Renaissance Woman, to Life

The name Hildegard von Bingen pops up most often these days — nearly a millennium after her birth — in Early Music circles, where her surviving compositions represent one of the largest existent repertoires of medieval composers. What is not readily known about this monastic musician is that she was a Renaissance woman before the Renaissance. She wrote botanical and medicinal texts, composed poems, drafted theater pieces, and wrote many theological works, some of them inspired by the supernatural visions she claimed to have had from an early age. She managed all this while leading a religious community, founding a number of convents, and traveling on lecturing tours through the German Rhineland.

No doubt the intrigue in this woman for German filmmaker Margarethe von Trotta (Das Versprechen, The Lost Honor of Katharina Blum) was that Hildegard managed to accomplish these feats at a time in which the life of a typical woman was generally dominated by multiple patriarchal forces: fathers, husbands, abbots, bishops, lords, nobles, kings, and popes. However, in her film, Vision: From the Life of Hildegard von Bingen, von Trotta creates a biographical portrait of the medieval woman that doesn’t overly glorify her talents, deify her as a feminist icon, or set her up as a victim of a subjugated time. Rather, the director, who emerged among the so-called New German Cinema filmmakers of the 1970s (Herzog, Wenders, Fassbinder, etc.), creates a subtle character study that zeroes in on the complex nature of the heart and motives of a holy person.

We meet Hildegard when she is 9 years old, being handed over to the local monastery by her parents, and she becomes the foster child of the abbess. Flashing forward to the abbess’s death, Hildegard has become a brilliant, well-studied, and confident woman, and the confidant of the abbess. She is eventually elected head of her convent, where she begins to find friction with her abbot and other religious and social leaders. She has to fight to have permission to transcribe her visions. She writes one of the first surviving morality plays, but it is dismissed by a higher-up in her order. She fights with the abbot to obtain access to the lands given to the monastery as a direct result of her nuns’ work (the sisters share with a male monastic community).

When one of her nuns is impregnated by a monk and subsequently kills herself, Hildegard pushes to have her nuns leave and start their own convent. The abbot refuses because he knows Hildegard’s reputation for holiness has brought in the lion’s share of the donations to the monastery. Hildegard eventually out-maneuvers the abbot politically and achieves the autonomy she seeks.

Hildegard’s reputation spreads, and the 16-year-old Richardis von Stade (Hannah Herzsprung), the daughter of a wealthy family, seeks to enter the convent and devote herself to Hildegard. The abbess resists, at first, unsure of the young girl’s bubbly free-spiritedness. But under the pressure of the Abbot (the von Stades are major patrons) and Hildegard’s intuitive sense of something in Richardis’ character, she allows the young girl to join. Richardis becomes like a daughter to von Stade, sharing her innate moral and judicious sense, while possessing a similar courageous spirit and willingness to challenge authority.

Vision is a startlingly honest film, one that takes a nuanced approach to its portrayal of medieval history and religious life. Beautifully shot on location in ancient German monasteries, this lost world is recreated in away that is historically convincing because its political, social, and religious structures are organized around human motives. (It is not the brutal and far-fetched portrait that is often passed off as medieval times.)

But it is Hildegard who is and remains the focus of this deep and probing film, and actress Barbara Sukowa proves tremendous at subtly navigating the complexities of her character. As a religious leader, Hildegard articulates a spirituality that is brighter and more joyful than many of her contemporaries, speaking out against the extreme acts of physical mortification which had become popular at the time. But Hildegard isn’t a storybook hero. Her inflexibility creates many enemies and skeptics, even among her sisters. As with most religious figures, the nun’s righteousness can come off as pride, and her steadfast determination can make her seem reckless and self-serving.

Hildegard fights from the convictions of her ideals against the corruption and conventions of human self-interest. But as Hildegard’s love for Richardis grows, her spiritual journey becomes wrapped up in the young girl’s fate. For all of her works, visions, studies, and prolific accomplishments, Hildegard’s ultimate trial becomes the handing over the daughter she loves — a participation in the self-sacrificial action that is the center of Christianity.

Source: D Magazine

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