Historical Story: Gedogen

           

INT. - GEDOGEN COFFEE SHOP IN AMSTERDAM- DAY

Guests lounge, blow smoke, and chat. From the smoke emerges MEIKE (25), she wears an apron and greets guests as they come in. On the wall of the coffee shop is a large ornate and colorful painting of Mary on the wall with the date 1566 engraved on the frame. In a corner table sits a guest whose face is obscured by smoke. Meike makes her way over to this guest and the smoke clears, revealing ANGELA (60). Meike sits down at Angela's table.

MEIKE

It's good to see you, Angela. 

ANGELA

Well you haven't aged a day. 

MEIKE

Ha. I feel ancient. 

ANGELA

And I feel as young as we were the day we met. 

Angela pulls out a lighter and fidgets with it nervously. 

MEIKE

Forty years is too long, Angela. 

Angela flicks her finger over the flame of her lighter back and forth quickly.

MEIKE

I was beginning to think I would never see my only friend ever again. 

Angela's hand shakes involuntarily and she fumbles with the lighter, dropping it. Meike reaches out and catches it before it falls to the floor. 

ANGELA

I'm dying, Meike. 

CUT TO:

EXT. CATHOLIC CHURCH 1566 - NIGHT

Angela stands among a group of protestants outside a Catholic church. Her face is 40 years younger, but full of the same youth and spirit. A man, PETER (30), stands in front of the group and preaches. A POLICE MAN walks by and looks briefly at the protestant group, but keeps on walking.

Peter makes eye contact with another person in the crowd and nods. Angela looks over to see Meike, who looks exactly the same, nod back and duck away from the crowd. 

Meike walks around to the back of the church and Angela follows. There is a SMALL GROUP OF MEN with various axes, torches, and bats. 

MEIKE

The church is empty?

MAN 1 

Aye, sir. 

MEIKE

Be quick and get out then! 

The men storm the church. Meike hangs back a moment and after all the men are in the church, she follows. Angela follows closely behind. 

INT. CATHOLIC CHURCH - NIGHT

The men are breaking catholic idols and slashing paintings. Meike excitedly joins in, grabs a torch and drops it on the altar, but Angela reaches out catches it before it falls.

ANGELA

If you burn it now, the police will see the smoke. 

MEIKE

Who are you? What are you doing here?

ANGELA

I'm protestant. Like you. 

Meike shrugs and runs off. Angela watches her as she smashes an idol. Meike looks back and sees Angela watching intently. 

MAN 2

That's everything! Let's get out of here!

Meike runs out but stops and notices a painting of Mary, the same painting in the coffee shop. She is about to slash it, but Angela is still watching.

ANGELA

She's beautiful, isn't she? 

Meike stares at the painting in a moment of respect. She takes the painting off the wall and leaves the church. 

CUT TO:

INT. - GEDOGEN COFFEE SHOP IN AMSTERDAM- DAY

MEIKE

Dying? Wh-- how? What's wrong?

ANGELA

Look at me, sweetie. I'm old now. I've been aging ever since I caught that nasty sickness in the eighties.

MEIKE

But you're hardly old enough to be planning your funeral.

ANGELA

When does old age ever kill anybody? (Beat.) I brought you something.

Angela pulls out a large brown paper wrapped package and lays it on the table. Meike unwraps the paper revealing paintings of Dutch landscapes. She gasps.

INT. MEIKE AND ANGELA'S HOME 1567 - DAY

On the wall hangs the Catholic painting of Mary. Other works of art featuring more humble paintings of peasant life and landscapes also hang on the walls. Meike sits in front of a window that opens up to a landscape of the sea. She sits behind an easel, painting the same painting she later unwraps in the coffee shop. Her painting is realistic, but she incorporates a little bit of the same flare from the Catholic painting of Mary: a gold rim of light on the horizon of the sea. 

INT. MEIKE AND ANGELA'S HOME 1567 - DAY

Meike and Angela welcome guests dressed in their Sunday best into their home. Peter, dressed in clergy attire, enters the home.

PETER

Meike, Angela, thank you for hosting services this week. King Philip is cracking down hard on any practicing protestant. 

ANGELA

It is no problem at all, we are happy to provide a place where we can practice freely and without suspicion.  

A man, HENDRIK (30), enters the house quietly. He sits among the others but does not speak to anyone else. 

MEIKE

Peter, who is that man who just walked in? I have never seen him before.

PETER

That is Hendrik, he is a new convert. He comes from a Catholic family in Germany. He is an artist.

The congregation gathers and sings a hymn. Meike steals glances at Hendrik who is not singing, but staring at the painting of Mary on the wall. Meike is suspicious. 

INT. MEIKE AND ANGELA'S HOME 1567 - LATER

After the services, the congregation socializes. Hendrik stands on the fringes, looking at the artwork on the walls. Meike approaches him.

MEIKE

You're an artist?

HENDRIK

Hmm. These are really good. I'm not familiar with the artist.

MEIKE

I painted these, actually. Well, except for Mother Mary.

HENDRIK

Yes, I know that artist.

MEIKE

You do?

HENDRIK

I did this painting. Though, I'm not sure how you managed to come across it. I donated it to a Catholic church in Amsterdam. 

MEIKE

I saved it from that church. I couldn't let it get destroyed like the others.

HENDRIK

I take that as a complement. (Beat.) Well, you're lucky to have it.

MEIKE

Oh yeah? Why is that?

HENDRIK

It's the blessing of Mary. Whoever is in possession of the painting lives as long and as beautiful as it does. 

MEIKE

Immortality? 

HENDRIK

Well, at least that's what I told the priests who bought it. 

HENDRIK(CONT.)

Just kidding. It was a donation. Either way, I wouldn't let anything happen to this painting. 

Meike smiles and looks at the painting with a deep respect. 

INT. - GEDOGEN COFFEE SHOP IN AMSTERDAM- DAY

ANGELA

We've been alive too long, Meike. I think it's time to move on. I knew what I was doing when I left that painting, and I think it's time you do the same. 

MEIKE

Angela, I've seen the reformation, the enlightenment, world wars, space exploration, and the beautiful growth of this city. And that's just the start of it. It's like just the sketch of something that will make such a deep and whole painting and I really want to see it through.

ANGELA

No one is meant to see it through. We just get to see a little bit of the process, and that itself is so beautiful, Meike. 

Angela gets up from the table and walks over to the painting of Mary and removes it from the wall and sets it on the table and replaces it with Meike's painting of the sea.

ANGELA

This was my favorite painting. 

Angela fiddles with her lighter again, igniting the flame in a nervous fashion. Finally she deliberately lights a napkin and drops it on the painting of Mary.

MEIKE

No! What are you doing!

The painting bursts into flames inexplicably and screams, as if possessing a soul. In an instant, the painting is ashes. Angela gets up from the table. 

ANGELA

Goodbye, Meike. 

FADE OUT.

THE END

            In Satrapi’s The Veil, Satrapi is forced to wear a veil she is not used to as her country seeks to establish a new order. For Satrapi, so much of her history – of her country’s Cultural Revolution – is of veils, of hiding behind things. Satrapi dons a veil and dons another figurative one as she pretends to want to be a doctor, not a prophet; her mother must disguise herself to avoid trouble.

Meike and Angela hide behind a variety of veils during their own revolution: the Iconoclastic Fury, or Beeldenstorm. Entoen.nu, a website developed by the Committee on Development of the Dutch Canon and managed by Hubert Slings of the Dutch Open Air Museum, speaks of the Netherlands’ own cultural revolution. “The Calvinists [a branch of Protestantism] believed the [Catholic] Church had to be purified of “papist superstitions”. By…smashing images of saints, they aimed to rid these Catholic symbols of their mystical value and make clear that Catholicism had been twisted into a sacrilegious puppet show of the true faith…The Calvinists believed they were restoring ties with the earlier, in their eyes more pure, Christians.”

            Meike and Angela’s involvement in Beeldenstorm forces them to don veils: to hide under cover of night and hold secretive church services in their home. Even in Meike’s coffee shop, Angela first hides in a cloud of smoke. Like Satrapi’s mother and sometimes even Satrapi herself, Meike and Angela are liberal, independent women who fight for freedom. In Amsterdam: A History of the World’s Most Liberal City, Russell Shorto defines liberalism: “Historically, then, liberalism involves a commitment to individual freedom and individual rights, and not just for oneself but for everyone, every human being who breathes the air.”

            Meike and Angela, then, are two liberal women in a world slowly changing, a world of idols and smashing them. They come to live forever by saving the painting of the Virgin Mary, an act symbolic of true liberalism and representative of the colliding chaos of their time. In the present day, they remain the same kind of women. Meike even owns a coffee shop named Gedogen, a Dutch term which translates to “technically illegal but officially tolerated”- much like the Calvinists' activities originally were. The painting of Mary hangs on the wall, remembering a different side of the past, next to the landscapes that represent the sea change in art and culture that came out of Beeldenstorm.

            In the script, art heavily affects ideology, but in the writing of the script, ideology heavily influenced art. Reading Shorto’s book is what inspired the script in the first place, and it was important that Meike and Angela embraced the liberalism that so characterizes their city. The sources helped us understand the importance of art in that time, and so we applied that to the script to symbolize the complexities of the two situations and eras. The result is art that hopes to convey not just a story, but a time, a city, and an idea.

Process Piece

Hannah Hansen and Tabitha Brower

Process Piece

In Dean Duncan’s Scriptures we watch as a family’s scripture study evolves into a subtle, complex communication. As each child in the Duncan family expresses his/her true feelings about the practice, we come to see how complex a simple process can be. Similarly, in our Process piece we wanted to explore how a simple piece of communication, a text, can be stretched into something more intricate. The process of texting may not seem like a form of complex communication, but consider this: When you receive a text, do you stop to think before responding? Do you call on a friend to discuss what would be the best response? Do you say something you wouldn’t normally say in person?

Our process focused on a scenario ubiquitous among female teenagers and young adults: a college student receives a text from the guy she’s into and calls on her roommate for backup, hoping for help in crafting the perfect response. Staging this process, we crafted a fake a text from a crush named “Tim”. To add audio depth to the piece, the first student left the room only to enter when called by the second. We then stepped aside to see how they played out the potential deconstruction, analysis, and response to the text. Based on past experiences, the text and “Tim” seemed to become reality as the two roommates improvised a process with which they were very familiar.

This particular practice is intriguing in terms of pondering process. We have, many times, been in the middle of said process and become suddenly self-aware; it can seem inane. But it’s sincere, and for all its silliness, has become crucial. Our world has transformed into an arena of social media with a new vernacular, texting, and for the last several years we have learned to communicate in this new language of a hundred characters and emojis.

The concern in both the above-documented microprocess and in the broader process of learning to speak in this abbreviated language lies with the finished product, the perfect text -- at once witty and chill. It’s meant to seem natural, but like “natural makeup”, that which appears effortless is often the reverse. The process takes time, patience, cleverness.

And like in Commoner’s The Smokehouse, while the preoccupation is with the finished product, half the value lies in the process. These are important moments, bonding over things like first love. On the surface, there may appear to be little value in giggling college girls texting their crushes together or in giggling college girls recording the process. But perhaps any process that can invest a text of less than sixty words with the trembling eagerness of interest and infatuation; any process that edges you toward mastery of the right word, the right note, the right emoji; any process that edges you toward one another, laughing over a phone and mugs of tea, is a worthy one.