CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
1963

The Holy Land

In February, Paul was handed a real treat by Brian Freeland: the Holy Land. The idea was to capture on film images that Our Lord might have seen two thousand years ago as He walked His land, preaching and healing.

Paul, Brian, cameraman Norman Allin and his assistant Matt Tundo, and a quite pregnant continuity girl Helen, arrived at Lod airport in February, got into a prearranged van and drove the forty miles to Jerusalem’s New City, where they checked into the King David Hotel. Reconnoitring the next day, Paul felt his heart sink — Israel looked just as modern as North America. And to boot, native-born Israelis had a nickname: Sabra, a prickly cactus fruit. They resembled the fruit rather too closely. What kind of a film would this be?

Leaving Israel, they crossed through the concrete and barbed wire barrier of the Mandelbaum Gate on the Green Line at the western edge of the Old City. The contrast at the renowned American Colony Hotel in the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan was enormous: old beige stone walls, pleasant staff, spartan but comfortable rooms, and a lounge fire, so welcoming this chilly midwinter. For their guide (and bodyguard) the Jordanian Tourist Police assigned Moussa Taha, a warm and pudgy companion.

The Old City in East Jerusalem — what a revelation!

Golden stone, hidden markets, calls to prayer, bells at night, hurried meals, calls from the minarets: “Allahu-akbar”, kids racing past, people tugging, “buy, yes, buy!” fly-covered sweets, strong coffee, roofs over markets, so much to be explored, torn tapestries, hidden doorways, rats, hawkers, beggars, blind men, vistas, monasteries, tradition...

Here at last, Paul could walk the land where God had been made flesh. Now, he could know Jesus better by feeling how hot or cold He’d been, where He walked each day, what clouds He’d seen, what rain cooled Him, what clothes He’d worn. Imagine! Paul now listened with his own ears to the same murmurs in alleyways, the brays of ambling donkeys, the dawn calls of roosters. Whatever they could find and film from that era — a lot, even now — would illustrate for viewers the key Christian rituals: the water of baptism, round flat bread broken among friends, the amphoras of wine.

But first, St Peter’s Gallicantu (Latin for cock crow) in whose cellars they filmed a dungeon resembling the one in which Jesus had been held — accessible only through a hole in the floor where captives, and later their food, were lowered. Horrible.

But then, another revelation — the Kidron Steps. Paul asked Norman to hand-hold the little Arriflex and stride slowly down these huge old flagstones on which the very feet of Jesus had trodden into the Kidron Valley and on over to the Garden of Gethsemane.

Later, when they went to film in the Garden, the weather gave itself to rain, so they went into the Pater Noster Church with the Lord’s Prayer written on the walls in hundreds of languages. They sat, wrapped in thoughts, while Brian told them to imagine the simple disciples listening to their great Rabbi, twelve guys hidden away — such a far cry from Westminster Abbey.

When the weather turned sunny they drove to Bethany, a clump of mud houses whose villagers lived much as in the old days. But how to film Mary and Martha? They found a guard and got into the supposed tomb of Lazarus. Paul recalled pictures he’d seen at Ronald Duncan’s of the sculpture of Lazarus done by the great Jacob Epstein, who had also done a bust of his good friend Ronnie.

The others drove back to Jerusalem, but Paul walked in order to feel as Jesus must have felt, travelling to visit chums in Bethany.

Next, down into the Jordan Valley by the Old Roman Road. They pulled up near the ancient Greek Monastery of the Temptation, hewn out of rock in the sheer cliffs. They carried equipment up the long, tortuous stairs where, from a balcony, Paul and Brian hung onto Norman’s legs as he leaned far out and shot, twisting and turning, into the depths below, for the sequence when Satan offered Jesus dominion over all the world.

On to the Dead Sea, and up the valley to find the famous Jordan river. Pushing through tall reeds, the little crew got a shock at the muddy, polluted creek, the mighty Jordan of the Bible. As Norman filmed, Paul sat and imagined the crowds gathering around John, a latter-day hippie in a camelhair cloak (how scratchy!) while a scrubby, bearded young man (dressed like anyone else) submerged and re-emerged with an explosion from God filling his mind — He knew, yes, how He knew...

Crossing the desert again and filming in the extreme heat, they looked up at distant, huge, long escarpments westward toward Jerusalem. Brian told them how, after baptism in the muddy waters, Jesus came here to be alone, sleeping under the stars, knowing where it would all end if He followed his destiny. Then among fly-ridden dogs and cats in the cool of a vine-hung garden of a simple Jericho restaurant, they ate a tagine (stew) with a dessert of sweet oranges, as in His day.

Later they visited the distant Jerash and ten towns of the Decapolis, centres of Greek and Roman culture, where Jesus also preached. They filmed a donkey yoked with an ox tugging a handmade wooden plough, the simple farmer plodding behind, and later, a woman carrying sticks on her head.

Back in Jerusalem, they shot in the grounds of the Church of St Anne: the finest Crusader architecture in the Eastern Mediterranean, where they paused to hear boy choristers singing a mass and to reflect on Jesus healing the blind man beside the now garbage-filled Pool of Bethesda. What kind of dirty, grimy, unhealthy places were these seats of profound holiness where often all day, Jesus would squat in the dirt, telling parables of the Kingdom of Heaven.

To capture the feeling of a market as it existed two thousand years ago, Moussa found them a shop where they hid the camera behind hanging jellabas and shawls. Keeping well out of sight, Norman banged away on a long lens at beggars and woman sellers who had walked in from the countryside, often miles, with their babies, “the maimed, the halt and the blind.”

After they had sent back their first rushes, Paul and Brian arranged a time by telex to speak to their editor, Noel Dodds, assigned by CBC’s film department. Full of excitement, they phoned, in spite of the cost. But he and his supervisor were less than encouraging. Flabbergasted, obviously at sea, they offered constructive comments, none any use. The crew never suspected that Noel was actually the finest editor in the film department.

That night as Paul, depressed, lay in his bath to wash off the day’s dust, he heard a knock. “Come in?”

Brian came to sit.

“I’m awfully sorry, Brian. I thought we were doing so well.”

“Don’t worry, I have every confidence that we’re getting great stuff,” he said warmly. “When we get back, you’ll put it all together brilliantly.”

Well! His producer must have felt the strain and still he sounded confident — a true leader. Paul dressed and went down to join the crew, imbibing a little more arak than he should. Midway through their shooting, the little group felt abandoned.

Eventually, they had to fly to Cyprus, change to a second passport (because the first carried a Jordanian stamp – no double entry) and then fly back to Israel to shoot by the Sea of Galilee, Capernaum, and the Mount of the Transfiguration. They set out north along the coast and then turned inland for Bellevoir, an extraordinary tenth century Crusader castle overlooking the valley of the Sea of Galilee.

Sea? It looked like a small lake!

Down they went to stay at the elegant Galei Kinnaret Hotel on the shore.

The next day at the Church of the Multiplication, commemorating the miracle of the loaves and fishes, they were asked to sign a visitors’ book by an aged Franciscan friar.

On inspiration, Paul asked, “Have you been doing this a long time?”

“A very long time,” came the answer. Would his crew mind waiting while the aged monk went into the basement and retrieved books from 1929 or 1930?

Paul’s clergyman father, before being committed to Ste. Anne de Bellevue Military Hospital from shell shock, had visited the Holy Land with Paul’s mother on their honeymoon. Rene’s wealthy mater (Paul’s grandmother) had given the couple a round-the-world trip. (Later in her will, she left everything to Paul’s Aunt Leo, forgetting entirely Rene and Hilda, and thus of course her grandson.)

They searched and found on the page the very signatures and dates of his mother and long dead father. Such an exciting moment. Confirmation of a trip he had only vaguely learned about. He felt as if they were with him now.

Driving by the Galilee toward Capernaum, Brian asked them to stop as they passed sloping meadows with asphodel in bloom, the site of the Sermon on the Mount. As Norman shot, Paul imagined the hundreds sitting around as in a music concert, kids running and playing, babies nursing, old and young men and families — after all, with no TV and nothing much going on, a real Happening among happenings. The wretchedly poor, and the sick, forgetting their ill fortune with the murmur going round, “He’s coming soon!”

At Capernaum, though scattered with tourists, Paul managed to shoot among the ruined Roman pillars. The next day, not bothering to stop at Nazareth, the “city on a hill” — now full of open garages and garbage, they climbed the twisting road up Mount Hermon. Luckily, low heavy clouds gave Norman the opportunity of shooting the Transfiguration and the Ascension.

***

Paul had never made a documentary. So he relied on Noel. In the tiny editing room, he watched as Noel cut the 16mm film. Using a hot splicer between film reels on each side, Noel would pull the film through his viewer, stopping when he reached a possible cutting point. He’d pull it back and forth until they agreed on which frame to cut, losing it in the process. From his ‘trim bin’ Noel would select another strip of film, then scrape each end with a razor blade to get rid the emulsion, paint glue on with a tiny brush and, in the hot-splicer, clamp the two ends together and wait, perhaps a few seconds. Each time a cut was changed, a black frame was inserted to replace the lost one, so that screenings were peppered with black flashes.

Noel was not used to having a director sit next to him — especially one as ebullient and excited as Paul. So at lunch hour, Noel would lie flat on the floor, trying to shut out the explosive morning. A South African, with a round face, a quick wit, and an innate brilliance, Noel exhibited a talent equal to that of Paul’s other soul mate, Rudi Dorn. The film department hadn’t realized what a genius they had in their midst until they saw the superbly edited film, with stunning black and white photography by Norman Allin.

Brian oversaw The Dark Did Not Conquer, a total collaborator, especially with the script that Paul wrote, laying voices of his actors on the sound-track to illuminate scenes: Douglas Rain as Christ, for example, or the blind man rushing off crying at the top of his voice, “I’ve been healed, I’ve been healed!”

Of all the films made that year, Paul’s first documentary was the one submitted by the CBC for the Wilderness Award.