Sisters Screened

Few years ago a French cinema director named Robert Alexandre went to Vatican City, had the first of some 50 interviews with high Roman Catholic churchmen. For his company, Pathe Cinema de France, Director Alexandre wished to film the first motion picture ever made inside a Catholic convent. After protracted negotiations, permission was secured from His Holiness Pope Pius XI. With a crew of 15 men, Alexandre set up cameras in the mother house of the Sisters of Our Lady of Charity of the Good Shepherd at Angers. Never posing or attempting to direct its 1,000 inmates, he took occasional shots for two years. The result, a 65-minute production called Cloistered, was on view last week in Manhattan. Critics agreed that it would interest Catholics, clear up for non-Catholics many a misapprehension about life in a nunnery. Devoted specifically to redeeming wayward girls, the Good Shepherd sisters have some 300 houses throughout the world. They differ from most other sisterhoods pictorially (flowing white robes instead of the usual black) and in organization. As postulants maidens of 21 or over may enter the order of their free will, become novices after six months' probation, take the veil of a nun after two years, take their final perpetual vows in five and one-half years. Also in the convent are "penitents," delinquent girls who may be committed by their families or by a court, and worldlings impelled to immure themselves by a sudden agony of remorse or access of faith. From these is recruited a third group, the "Magdalens," black-habited nuns who lead an austere contemplative life completely segregated from the other two. Cloistered shows many a calm, luminous face, including that of the plump, masterful Mother Superior. Accompanied by adroitly "dubbed" dialog, church music and a commentary by a U. S. priest named Rev. Matthew Kelly, the picture presents no conflict, reaches no climax, accepts without demur the phenomenon of women adopting a medieval mode of life to become mystical brides of Christ. Much of Cloistered was filmed in a churchly murk illumined with twinkling candles and rare shafts of sunlight. Arresting shots: nuns wielding pickaxes, laying bricks, pecking typewriters, operating a printing press; penitents sewing under the watchful eyes of Magdalens; a single nun prostrating herself face down; nuns swirling to & fro before a classic portico; the great scenes of investiture in which the nuns are given wreaths of orange blossoms to signify their marriage to the Son of God and the Mag-dalens crowned with thorns as a symbol that their need for penance is not over.

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