Voices from the twentieth-century interview a variety of individuals in a medieval town; a woman, a jewish itinerant storyteller, a Benedictine friar, a madwoman, a jewish man named Jacob, a physician and a knight. The image is frontal and unnatural. The questioner speaks bluntly, unemotionally and succinctly. The questions asked are formulated in a very direct, inquisitive and somehow assertive style. These are twentieth-century questions brought into the medieval age mind by the interviewers, questions that are charged with current knowledge; political debate; social habits, and current western ethical and moral dilemmas. The most expressive and powerful moments of the interviews are shown by their facial expression and the ways they formulate their responses. The characters appear to be surprised, puzzled, insecure, or just ignorant of the nature of the questions.

In a premonitory way, a Jewish girl called Eva, whispers to the camera that she has had a vision where many people die. The camera pans into a modern day street, the screen suddenly floods with a red filter and different color images of nature and human life start to unravel. The sequence follows planet earth set from the surface of the moon; the mushroom cloud of a nuclear explosion; rough seas and waves; a spider creeping its legs looking at the camera; a flower hanging upside down and blooming in fast motion; Ku Klux Klansmen and military parading around a bonfire, a group of men seated in a kitchen table toasting, soldiers in Vietnam, a couple kissing, magma flowing downhill at night.

The Black Death strikes and the peoples start to die from the ailment all over the city. The camera enters the darkness inside the door of the jewish home. In the left, laying in bed, rests the body of a woman. As the camera shifts to the right, another woman lays facing up in the top of a table, beautifully dead with her arms and long hair hanging graciously down to the floor. The camera keeps moving aiming at the floor where three bodies wrapped in dark cloth lie together. In the last image we can see the dead bodies of Jacob and his young granddaughter Eva; her head peacefully resting in her grandfather’s chest and hugging him. There are signs of disorder in the room, pieces of bread and a dish in the floor, there is dust in the bodies, maybe commotion ending in some violence. The camera pans out of the room immediately, and connecting through vocal music, a sequence of images of maps showing undetermined locations in each continent follow. Each continent shows a brief take of its native peoples carrying out their daily rituals and routines that freezes an instant before the next follows. Persia starts, then moves to North America, South America,  Japan and ending in Africa.

Comment on Book of Days.

The movie pulls many different strings and opens enormous possibilities for conversation by blending imagery and inquiry. The initial explosion opens the perspective into an old town in the medieval times. The blown wall is a gateway into the past within the present of a twentieth-century city. Despite the divergence in time, the questions its citizens are trying to answer are all the same ones we still ask ourselves today.These are timeless and like Yael Samuel says “depicts all of history happening at once”. This blending of two cities in different ages in one single location at the same time contemplates the enigmatic question of a society and a civilization that fundamentally remains unchanged over the centuries.

From a broad perspective the movie opens the conversation about the human experience and how we understand the equilibrium between nature and progress in our societies. The questioning of the locals  is connected through the eyes of the jewish girl and her family to quotidian life routines and nature scenes. The images are powerful, some violent, others lovely. The questions, while very obvious and vital to us, are intriguing and puzzling for a fourteenth-century mind. The answers show a different understanding of the cosmos and the world. We can see that there is a different believe system, with superstition, magic and natural religion. Social anxiety, existential concerns and contradictions might shape differently but coexists with life as in today’s society.

These images and interviews are woven together to inquire, explore and converse about different realms of society, times, history and elaboration of thought. This is done by shifting simple daily activities and structures of thought into a different historical moment six centuries ago. By interchanging these realms and mindsets elsewhere in time, a world of contrasts erupts in an unexpected way.

Reflection on Book of Days.

Monk’s goal “to create an art that breaks down boundaries between the disciplines, an art which in turn becomes a metaphor for opening up thought, perception, experience” ¹is abundantly accomplished in this movie. The images, vocal music and words portray a rainbow of symbolism and metaphor.

The movie originates from a fundamental metaphor, the plague and death, which is used by Monk as the conductor of a plethora of other metaphors that ramify simultaneously across many different dimensions of the human experience. These other metaphors are strongly rooted in our societal behavior, and Monk comes to open a crack, and “create a world in which the audience has a chance to see things that they take for granted, or never think about, in a new way”². She invites us to explore and inquire onto all those other plagues we inhabit: segregation, intolerance, homophobia, aporophobia, religious fanaticism, xenophobia, because as she argues “projecting fear onto an ‘other’ seems to be a recurring thread throughout human history”³.

In his article Yael Samuel says that “everyone has a story to tell in Book of days”⁴; Meredith Monk later gives more sense to it replying: “I’m trying to leave a lot of space, so people can hook in, in their own way”⁵. Indeed there is a deep dialogue and connection between those who speak in the movie and the viewers that enter that space to hook and reflect on the myriad of conversations it promotes. Equally, the viewer and character juxtapose their roles. The viewer also has a story to tell, and the dialogue happens. Samuel closes the circle of time and dialogue in a fascinating way: “The human narrative is like a palindrome: it can be read in either direction”⁶.

There are indeed lots of hooks to choose from. I however refused to narrow my evaluation solely to a question of intolerance, Holocaust, pandemics or AIDS. I became specially interested in the hook of the relationship between Eva and the madwoman, because made me think of beauty and the complexity of creating that relationship.

Eva and the Madwoman, in their loneliness, relate to each other through music (niggun) Samuel argues, “the niggun becomes a medium of communication”⁷ for both. I find it lovely that music then and now is a “meeting of minds”⁸.

Citations/Footnotes:

¹ Meredith Monk – Mission Statement, 1983, Revised 1996. Para 1.

² Meredith Monk – About Book of Days. Page 160, para 1.

³ Meredith Monk – About Book of Days. Page 161, para 2.

⁴ Yael Samuel – Meredith Monk: Between Time and Timelessness in Book of Days. Page 16, para 3.

⁵ Yael Samuel – Meredith Monk: Between Time and Timelessness in Book of Days. Page 17, para 1.

⁶ Yael Samuel – Meredith Monk: Between Time and Timelessness in Book of Days. Page 22, para 2.

⁷ Yael Samuel – Meredith Monk: Between Time and Timelessness in Book of Days. Page 19, para 1.

⁸ Yael Samuel – Meredith Monk: Between Time and Timelessness in Book of Days. Page 19, para 1.