New Merton Documentary

There's a new Merton documentary! Morgan Atkinson's film, entitled Soul Searching: The Journey of Thomas Merton, was released on DVD in 2007. Because Merton's life is so rich, this is welcome news. The first Merton documentary, Paul Wilkes' Merton: A Film Biography (1984), was true to its title. Beginning with his early life in France and England, it traces Merton's life from Cambridge, to Columbia, to Gethsemani, to his interests in peace and civil rights, to his interest in Asian religions, and finally to his tragic death in Bangkok while attending an interfaith monastic conference. Along the way, it interviews various people close to Merton to give the viewer a sense of Merton's significance and greatness.

Soul Searching attempts to tell the same story with very similar methods (and even some of the same talking heads). The first obvious improvement is the quality of the picture and visual imagery. In a scene in A Film Biography displaying undergraduates partying in Cambridge that is supposed to give the viewer a sense of Merton's wild days, what really comes through is how bad women's haircuts were in the 80s. Soul Searching does not suffer from this problem. One of the best parts about Soul Searching is the manner in which it uses footage of different settings in which Merton lived (including footage of New York in the 1930s, the inside of Gethsemani as well as its rural grounds, photos of the novices he taught as Novice Master, and the hermitage where he lived in the 60s) to give the viewer a sense of the world in which he lived.

One of the problems with Soul Searching is the scant attention it gives to several important aspects of his life. It does not pick up his story until he reaches Columbia University. One of the important issues in his life is his constant search for home. (This yearning for home was manifest later in his life in his search to find his true vocation.) Leaving out how he got to Columbia does not the give the viewer a sense of how important this quest was in his life. In addition, it spends too little time on his interests in Christian mysticism, peace, civil rights, and especially the Asian contemplative traditions.

One theme Soul Searching develops that A Film Biography leaves out is Merton's romantic feelings for a young nurse who cared for him in a Louisville hospital while recovering from back surgery. I guess this means that I have not read his journals from this period, but this section of the DVD was a part of Merton's story that was new to me. It helped to humanize Merton the mystic, prophet, and saint.

Overall, Soul Searching is very much worth seeing. I wish there was a way to make a documentary about someone like Merton other than splicing together (sometimes without enough attention paid to transitions) the comments of an uneven assortment of talking heads, but I guess most viewers would not be able to sit through a narrator reading from his books for an hour. It's not perfect, but it is another very good introduction to one of the most important Christian voices of the 20th century, one that still speaks very much to our time.