The Camino Mirrors Art

Does The Camino Mirror Art?

I think this is a relevant title for an event back in my high school years that taught me something about life. It is a lesson that the Camino de Santiago further re-inforced for me.

Don't be afraid to face new ideas; work through it.

Don't think that the unknown is dangerous; safely explore.

*** I asked my partner to do a proof read of this memoir. Her suggestsions are in the next paragraph.
(Editor Notes:) Interesting and timely theme. I’d suggest focusing on the details, making the events you experience and care about vivid for the reader before commenting on them. This will allow the reader to enter the event with you and participate in your experience and learning. I am also thinking that by the end of this, I should have some sense of who the “devil” might be and how you’ve developed sympathy for the devil.

Protestors and Chicago Police Officers in Grant Park 

DPLA/National Archives at Chicago, 

Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

Sympathy for the Devil

The Documentary Trailer

Intro

The documentary about the Rolling Stones recording the song “Sympathy for the Devil” came out in 1969. But in fact, the movie was much much more than a recording session.

I was a junior at King's Prep Catholic High School and one day after school, I went alone … I don't remember why, to see “Sympathy for the Devil”. There weren’t many people for the afternoon showing.

The Documentary

The movie was a repeated juxtaposition between scenes of the Rolling Stones recording the song and scenes without the Stones of Black Panthers committing murder, a young woman spraying graffiti everywhere and finally something with virgins.

In any given scene with the Rolling Stones, the band was hard at work in the recording studio. They made suggestions and compromised and recorded a snippet one more time. In later scenes with the Stones, there were counter-suggestions and more compromising and re-recording the snippets of the song … over and over.

But then there were the scenes of political diatribe, quite virulent I thought, on late-1960’s politics. This was my first exposure in film to themes other than lost dogs, space adventures, and pirates etc. I tried to understand the movie's depictions of political didacticism, violence and anarchy.

My Reactions

To me, the movie was a manifest against everything in a corrupt, self-centered society. Anarchy was the tool, the technique of counter-oppression.

Being alive in those tumultuous late 60’s of the Viet-Nam war, race relations, women’s rights etc, I had debated with classmates whether violence achieved goals. I often argued that these techniques were not designed to change the system but to invite further repression which only created a cycle for further resistance.

I went home from the movie deeply bothered by the director's viewpoint. I needed discussion and debate about the themes of my first far-left anarchic film experience.

Guiding Me Through Some Difficult Thoughts

Lou Giansante was our English/Film Studies teacher at King’s Prep. And he was the person that I needed, really needed to talk with.

I didn’t need to be questioned by others on why I even went to see such a movie, or to have it suggested that I was not mature enough to be exposed to such material.

So one day after English class was dismissed, I hung around until there was only Mr Gisante and myself. I must have had study hall next so I was not in a rush. He was sitting on the edge of his desk, nearer the student chairs.

I felt that I could talk with him about the movie.

I told him about the senseless acts in the movie that I found extremist, and pointlessly violent. I did not agree with the movie's premise of a Marxist ideology of struggle and resistance. And I did not know how to process my reactions to a visually powerful but incomprehensible film. I lacked a frame of reference.

Mr Gisanti had the frame of mind to ask me what I thought and what I felt. We explored more about my feelings than concentrating on objective and subjective rights and wrongs.

When we were done, Mr Gisante had not answered my questions, but he had helped me to think about myself and how to think about the world.

In looking back on these few minutes in my life and the film itself, I came across a quote by Jean-Luc Godard, the director of the film. “There is only one way to be an intellectual revolutionary, and that is to give up being an intellectual.”

Wrap-up

I still don’t like the film, but I did like that conversation with Lou Gisanti. And every once in a while, I have the awareness of self to think about why I'm feeling something before I react to it.

That's a good lesson from an English teacher.