Mennonite themes in the film Silent Light

Over since the 1955 Broadway production of the musical Plain and Fancy, the drama of encounters between the “plain” ways of life associated with conservative Anabaptist communities and the “fancy” habits of late-capitalist consumer culture has attracted substantial theater audiences. David Weaver-Zercher, who has studied the history of popular representations of the Amish, traces the appearance of this story in fiction back to the 1905 novel by Helen Martin, Tillie a Mennonite Maid. That story continues to be told in a growing host of popular novels, from the Amish romances of Beverly Lewis to the Amish mysteries of P.L. Gaus.

The film Silent Light (available on DVD), directed by Mexican filmmaker Carlos Reygadas, arguably marks a new development in the history of images of plain people in popular culture. On the one hand, it incorporates the standard pastoral scenes we have come to expect in such films—farmers in the field harvesting, the family praying and eating around the dining room table, milking in the barn, flocks of beautiful children in plain outfits, and the slightly awkward postures of people who do not appear to be at home in the world.

On the other hand, the film abandons popular dramatic conventions in order to allow the rhythms, habits and tensions of plain Mennonite culture to reveal, without any amplification, the complex emotional life of people who have inherited centuries-deep practices of restraint and reticence. Volumes are conveyed by a glance, a smile, tears, the slightest gesture. The bright silence between the few words spoken highlights the intensity and surplus of meaning found in the speech of people who are slow to speak.

Consumer culture: One reviewer—James Juhnke—has drawn comparisons with Peter Weir’s 1985 film about the Amish in Lancaster, Pa.—Witness. As in Witness and a good many popular cultural products about plain people, including the documentary film about Amish rumspringa called The Devil’s Playground and the TV reality show “Amish in the City,” the film Silent Light depicts plain people who are attracted to the rhythms, tunes and conventions of consumer culture. However, this attraction is neither shown to be perverse nor designed to reassure audiences of the normalcy of consumer culture. Indeed, one available reading of the film is that the central character, Johann, has had his otherwise orderly life fatally ruined by the intrusion into his world of the Hollywood myth of true romantic love.

On the other hand, he does not experience this intrusion as an outside alien force he must resist. Rather, he comes to understand this disaster as a gift that exceeds the compulsive and destructive experience of adulterous attraction. The disaster that has come over him is perhaps sent not by the devil, as his father suggests at one point, but by the same God to whom he prays reverently every day. Such a discovery is not comforting and does not ward off death and heartbreak. Humans are nothing in the face of such an apocalypse, his father reminds Johann during a mournful scene toward the end of the film.

Time outside time: What is perhaps most striking about the film is the eternity—the time outside time—that the film reveals to be contained in the most ordinary of moments. This timelessness shows up in the repetition of deeply ingrained habits that absorb somehow the profound disruptions of love and sorrow and death. Even as he is conducting an adulterous affair, Johann prays silently before each meal. Even when death invades, the community has songs to sing. And amid all the loss and chaos, the film calls our attention again and again to those things that remain: the expansiveness of the sky, the sensuality of skin, the luminosity of water and the miracle of creatureliness.

In the final instance, this film is not really about the Mennonites who live in Mexico, now numbering somewhere around 80,000. Their story is told elsewhere in history books and in newspaper accounts of their difficult struggle to build economically and culturally sustainable communities of peace in the decades since Russian Mennonites first began migrating from Canada to Mexico in 1922. That story, we might say, is a story in which, to use the words of Johann’s lover Marianne, “Peace is stronger than love,” in which communities of Christian believers devote themselves to the disciplines of harmony and kindred mind, a peace that shall destroy many, as Rudy Wiebe reminded us in his controversial novel almost a half-century ago. This film does not tell that story, although it alludes to it.

Rather, Silent Light uses the bodies of Mennonites who seek to live in peace as texts by which a more challenging and deeply biblical story can be told, one in which love is first and finally stronger than peace, stronger even than death. This film turns out to be a plain old resurrection story, told with the Pentecostal glossolalia of Latin American magical realism in a Low German dialect.

Gerald J. Mast teaches communications at Bluffton (Ohio) University and is a member of First Mennonite Church, Bluffton.