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Mavericks
A note to the reader: Some of the quotations printed in this volume contain
racially insensitive language. The author has chosen to document the original
terminology to provide full historical context for the events under discussion.
Discretion is advised.

Copyright © 2024 by The University Press of Kentucky

Scholarly publisher for the Commonwealth, serving Bellarmine University, Berea

College, Centre College of Kentucky, Eastern Kentucky University, The Filson
Historical Society, Georgetown College, Kentucky Historical Society, Kentucky State
University, Morehead State University, Murray State University, Northern Kentucky
University, Spalding University, Transylvania University, University of Kentucky,
University of Louisville, University of Pikeville, and Western Kentucky University.
All rights reserved.

Editorial and Sales Offices: The University Press of Kentucky

663 South Limestone Street, Lexington, Kentucky 40508-4008
www.kentuckypress.com

Unless otherwise noted, photographs are from the author’s collection.

Cataloging-in-Publication data is available from the Library of Congress.

ISBN 978-0-8131-9794-4 (hardcover : alk. paper)

ISBN 978-0-8131-9796-8 (epub)
ISBN 978-0-8131-9795-1 (pdf)

This book is printed on acid-free paper meeting the requirements of the American
National Standard for Permanence in Paper for Printed Library Materials.

Manufactured in the United States of America.

Member of the Association of University Presses

To the memory of Peter Brunette—a great film critic, and my dear
friend.
 Contents

Introduction
Howard Alk: The Murder of Fred Hampton
Ousmane Sembène
An Interview with Marcel Ophuls
Bernardo Bertolucci and 1900
Pell Mel Brooks . . . and He Is Mild
Interview with Hal Ashby regarding Coming Home
Roberta Findlay: Woman in Porn
Short Visits with Three European Masters
Interview with Martin Ritt
Two Interviews with Margarethe von Trotta
Bill Forsyth: Speaking with Scotland’s Finest Filmmaker
A Rare-and-Brief Glimpse of Director Akira Kurosawa
Norman Mailer: Where Tough Guys Spend the Winter
Volker Schlöndorff and Margaret Atwood: The Handmaid’s Tale
Depicts Futuristic Puritans in Harvard Square
Three Short Encounters with Gus Van Sant
Hybrid Identities: An Interview with Agnieszka Holland
Errol Morris and Stephen Hawking: The Universe in a Mind
Two Interviews with Gillo Pontecorvo
Two Short Interviews with Liv Ullmann
Two Interviews with Jim Jarmusch
Interview with Frederick Wiseman
A Talk with Benôit Jacquot
Two Interviews with John Waters
Set This House on Fire: William Styron and Charles Burnett
Voices in the Middle East
Index
 Introduction

May I contextualize this volume? I would not have interviewed

filmmakers for the three decades covered here, 1973–2005, sought
out twenty-eight directors from around the world, if it had not been
for the ascendancy of the “auteur” theory of cinema and my
ascribing to its premises.
The story is a well-known one. It was in the mid-1950s that, in
France, the writers (and future filmmakers) at Cahiers du Cinéma
adopted a polemical position that it was the director who is the
creative force behind a film of worth, and who must be
acknowledged as the essential Artist. The “auteur.” Film is a
collaborative art, but all others involved in the making of the film—
the screenwriter, the cinematographer, the actors, the technicians—
are working under the forceful orchestral arm of the director-
filmmaker.
In the 1960s, the “auteur theory” was brought to America by
Andrew Sarris, the influential film critic for the Village Voice. He
wrote enthusiastically about directors, often very unusual ones,
whom his readers should know about. I was a Sarris devotee, and
my “Bible” became his 1968 book, The American Cinema, in which
he streamlined American film history into an exalted story of great
American filmmakers. But it wasn’t only Sarris. Many other critics in
the 1960s shifted the focus in their reviews to the person in the
director’s chair, including Pauline Kael.
For the first time in the history of cinema, directors who were
championed by critics were engaged for public appearances, asked
to ruminate about their careers. In the late 1960s, when I was a
graduate student at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, Hollywood
veterans George Stevens and King Vidor were invited to our campus
to speak, and each showed one of his essential movies. My first live
filmmakers! But at Wisconsin, “the Berkeley of the Midwest,” I had
other things in mind. I became embroiled in the seventies with
campus issues, which included protesting America’s war in Vietnam,
supporting strikes of Black students, and the unionizing of teaching
assistants. I looked for similar themes to be taken up by filmmakers.
The first two interviews in my book reflected my concerns, as a
“radical” White student, with issues of Black liberation, at home and
around the world. Howard Alk came up to Madison from Chicago to
show his blistering documentary The Murder of Fred Hampton, and
we spoke of the death of the young Black Panther leader by Illinois
police. The legendary Senegalese novelist and filmmaker Ousmane
Sembène stopped in Wisconsin on his American tour, and he
discussed the anticolonialist struggles of West Africans trying to
make movies. I was delighted to have these conversations with Alk
and Sembène, the latter a collaboration with Patrick McGilligan. But
a co-interview with Maureen Turim with France’s Marcel Ophuls, also
on tour in Madison, got contentious and argumentative at times.
Despite Ophuls having made the monumental The Sorrow and the
Pity, we youthful left-wingers showed little sympathy for what we
saw as a middle-of-the road liberalism in his work. (Looking back
now, we certainly could have been more polite, more respectful to a
filmmaker of consequence.)
Meanwhile, Hollywood through the Reagan eighties was far more
conservative politically than today. When I moved East from
Wisconsin and, in 1978, became a professional film critic in Boston, I
sought out the then-rare Hollywood “mavericks” who dealt openly
with social issues. I spoke with Hal Ashby, who was the director of
Coming Home, the first overtly pacifist Hollywood film to address the
war in Vietnam. I interviewed Martin Ritt, whose Norma Rae and The
Molly Maguires were made in support of labor unions. Ritt was also
the only White Hollywood filmmaker who consistently made
antiracist films about Black subjects, including Sounder. Finally,
visiting Europe on assignment, I was thrilled to speak with Italy’s
Gillo Pontecorvo, the person behind the revolutionary call to arms,
The Battle of Algiers.
The Cahiers French critics, I came to realize, were generally
hostile to filmmakers who used the cinema for Important Themes
and didactic purposes. And I had a division, too, with my American
critic mentors. For much of the 1970s, I was the opposite of Sarris
and Kael, who were centrist liberals, as I demanded above all of
filmmakers a progressive political agenda. That can be seen even in
my interview with Mel Brooks, whom I accused of making frivolous
comedies. “To say there is no message in them is, I think, to be
unfair and shortsighted,” Brooks defended himself.
Slowly, my hard-edged radicalism softened, as I began attending
the New York Film Festival at the end of the 1970s. I interviewed
European filmmakers such as R.W. Fassbinder and Bernardo
Bertolucci, and their politics, though avowedly Marxist, were never
more important to them than the sexual obsessions of their
characters.
I spoke with Eric Rohmer, whose films dealt only with the rarefied
French bourgeoisie. Rohmer, in truth, was a political conservative.
And yet I liked his films. And where was overt concern with politics
in the oddball, humanist world of Scotland’s Bill Forsyth? The
baroque expressionist universe of Werner Herzog? Or the samurai
tales of Akira Kurosawa?
Through the 1980s and 1990s, my conception of a “maverick”
filmmaker became far more inclusive. I still admired politically
minded filmmakers. But I made room to interview directors who
placed on screen their private idiosyncratic universes, sometimes
hermetically sealed off from the world at large. I am talking of John
Waters and his black-humor gay Baltimore, and Gus Van Sant and
his subterranean Portland, Oregon. Frederick Wiseman and Errol
Morris made documentaries that were nominally on the left and yet
were never ideological. And where politically did I place the
anarchist-libertarian novelist Norman Mailer, whom I interviewed on
the set of a movie he was directing?
Every filmmaker above, political and less so, is male. What of my
commitment since the 1970s to feminism? Unfortunately, none of
the handful (then) of women directors ventured to the University of
Wisconsin in the years I was a graduate student there.
Only when I was a film critic in Boston was I finally able to
interview contemporary women filmmakers. I started oddly in 1979,
with the first interview to be done with Roberta Findlay, the sole
woman then directing pornographic features. And I met with
Agnieszka Holland from Poland, whose films touched on the political
world around her much more than so-called women’s issues. In 1984
and 1983, however, I twice sat down with the avowedly feminist
German director, Margarethe von Trotta. Here, I encountered
thematic obsessions radically apart from what concerned male
directors.
For most “maverick” women filmmakers, the personal is what is
political, and nothing is more personal than what happens to a
woman’s body. This theme is put in a larger context of a dystopian
future society in the film of The Handmaid’s Tale, for which I
interviewed both the German male director, Volker Schlöndorff, and
Margaret Atwood, Canadian author of the feminist novel adapted for
the screen.
This volume ends with a return to my earliest concerns as a
“radical” student interviewer: racial justice, colonialism. On the set in
Virginia, I spoke with Charles Burnett, the esteemed African
American filmmaker, about his film Nat Turner, a Troublesome
Property. The soft-spoken Burnett admitted his admiration for Turner,
mastermind of a murderous rebellion of slaves against their White
masters and families: “His decision to do something so positive
made the country a better place. Nat Turner was more American
than those who denied him.” In 2005, Palestinian filmmaker Hany
Abu-Assad talked to me about the formidable task of making political
films within the confines of the Palestinian Territories of Israel. “Now
there are about a hundred people who live by producing their own
work,” he said proudly, “[including] tough, professional actors who’ll
do anything to survive in this field.”
The best of luck to them! Finally, when conducting interviews,
sometimes two are better than one. May I thank those who
participated with me in several of the discussions, all Madisonians at
one time: Patrick McGilligan, Maureen Turim, and the late Peter
Brunette and Michael Wilmington. Also non-Madisonian Bill Nichols.
 Howard Alk
The Murder of Fred Hampton

There are no credits on the important documentary The Murder of

Fred Hampton (1971), for those behind the film wanted nothing to
distract from their telling of the story of the murdered leader of
Chicago’s Black Panther Party. They filmed Hampton in the time
before his shooting by police and government agents and finished
the film after. The actual credits would number only two, reflecting
an almost exact division of labor between producer, codirector, co-
cameraman Michael Gray and editor, codirector, co-cameraman
Howard Alk, the latter the subject of this interview.
Alk, who lives in Ottawa, Canada, is a native Chicagoan, a
cofounder in the late 1950s of Chicago’s original Second City troupe.
Of his earliest films, he is most proud of editing a crude but potent
1959 documentary short called “The Cry of Jazz.” Alk says, “It was
made by a bunch of Black cats in Chicago. The film was
embarrassingly primitive but it was a film which was prophetic about
the Black–White situation.” Alk did second camera on Don’t Look
Back (1967), D. A. Pennebaker’s film on young Bob Dylan, and he
coedited Dylan’s Eat the Document (1972), a pseudo-documentary.
What makes him proud? “The thing that gasses me is that the
Panthers took Murder of Fred Hampton to China, where it is showing
now.”
The interview occurred during Alk’s visit to the University of
Wisconsin-Madison. Behind one-way silver shades, he looked a bit
like a fast-moving rock promoter.

Question: How did you and Michael Gray1 meet to make a film about
Fred Hampton?
Response: I had been in New York after the 1968 [Democratic]
convention working on an American Civil Liberty Union’s film
answer to [Chicago] Mayor Daley. I was very dissatisfied with
that work, with people like John Kenneth Galbraith talking about
moral outrage. This guy named Michael Gray came up and asked
me to cut his footage of the convention. He had undergone some
sort of political catharsis by being hit on the head while shooting.
We agreed we would not make another convention film but a film
about people in Chicago to whom that shit had been happening
for a long time, and for whom the convention was no news at all.
Howard Alk editing The Murder of Fred Hampton. Courtesy of Jesse Alk.

The Panther office had opened that week in Chicago. I went in

and explained what we were about, and they said, “Sure.” It
didn’t strike me as odd that the Panthers were in favor of getting
their information out. There was no question of conning them.
Our purpose was not to make an “objective evaluation” as the
networks would have done. Our object was to let the Black
Panther Party be seen.
Question: Before your Fred Hampton film, you and Gray made
American Revolution II (1969).
Response: That’s right. In addition to the Panthers, we met a bunch
of Appalachian hillbilly shit-kickers called the Young Patriots. They
were trying to make the change from a street gang into some
kind of political organization which would serve the people. They
were having a hard time but knew of the Panthers. We were
shooting both groups simultaneously. The two met, and the film
became the story of the Rainbow Coalition of Chicago, which was
Appalachian Whites, Puerto Ricans, and Blacks. The Coalition
frightened official Chicago enormously. The police were terrified.
Question: What happened to your film?
Response: American Revolution II did very well critically but very
badly theatrically, except in Chicago. I never did recoup the
money necessary to make it. It finally got into the hands of some
tits-and-ass distributor which had become an artistically viable
organization by handling the film Joe (1970). They realized that
AR II was a political film, and they put it on the shelf with no way
to spring it out. What we finally did was allow bootleg prints so it
could be shown.
It was clear that the Black Panther Party was not understood
by White America and much of Black America. Al[bert]
Grossman, who used to be Dylan’s manager, gave us money. He
said of Fred Hampton, “That man’s got to be heard.” In addition,
it was commendable courage and commitment on the part of
Michael to put [himself] $70,000 in hock in order to make sure
the film was completed.
Question: Had you the experience of watching Fred Hampton speak
in Black neighborhoods?
Response: Yes, I had, and it was really terrific. A lot of people seeing
the film have the same idea that people had who knew Fred.
That is, they love him. They are in the presence of a man who
tells the truth. It seems to me that Black audiences have been
accurate in determining who tells the truth and who bullshits. I
think most people believe when Hampton talks of “White power
 for White people” that he is not a racist. But racism is a
byproduct of capitalism.
The film centers mostly on Fred as a teacher, leader by
example. There is no personal material in the film. He and Mike
and I felt it would be irrelevant and distracting to show a thing
like, “What is Hampton like when he is not doing his job?” It was
because he was doing his job that the state killed him. Fred
Hampton was the enemy of the state. He made me an enemy of
the state. You can quote me on that.
The material you see for the most part was Fred in public
assembly, relating to a mass of people as you would speak from
a stage. He didn’t care about the camera, though. He was a
serious man, not hung up about a movie being made about him.
Question: What was Hampton’s background?
Response: Fred came from Maywood, Illinois, a suburb of Chicago,
where he had been, before moving to the Panther Party, a youth
leader of the NAACP. He was very much loved in Maywood, a
predominantly White suburb, instrumental in getting people
elected responsive to the people.
Question: Maywood is the site of the mock trial shown in the movie.
Response: The people of Maywood made their courtroom available
for the mock trial set up by the Panthers as an instructional
event. Those playing “pigs” are community people from
Maywood. The guy who suggests a policy of repression and
genocide is a councilman who Fred helped elect.
Question: Was the mock trial arranged because the film was being
made?
Response: No. The Panther Party was into a whole series of people’s
courts. There was [also] a people’s inquiry after Fred was killed
as a public event. The Panthers just called up and said, “Hey, did
you hear about the mock trial?” They would tell us when
something important was happening. One time they called me
and said, “The pigs are coming down to our office tonight. Are
you up to standing with us?” The day of the murder they called
Mike and said, “Get over here and shoot every foot of the
apartment.” That footage was seen by the grand jury.
Question: Have you had people accusing you of being manipulative
in your documentary in building up a case that Hampton was
murdered?
Response: Nobody has accused me of that to my face. Some
reviewers have hinted that we may have been involved in special
pleading, although I think that the case is very tight that is
made, inescapable. Now you may approve if you are so inclined
of [Cook County state’s attorney Edward] Hanrahan’s actions.2
But I don’t think you can take refuge in the position that the
murders [of Hampton and Panther member Mark Clark] were a
defensive act on the part of poor attacked policemen.
Question: In the film you allow the law officials to present their own
cases.
Response: It’s a question of giving people a fair shake. Everything
Hanrahan says in the film is in chronologically correct order. I
don’t fuck with him in filmic terms. When he begins to crumple
and bullshit and backtrack, it happened that sequence. I’m not
that interested in getting people to scream “Right On!” and go
crazy. I’m not even that interested in Hanrahan. I’m interested in
the reasons that Fred was murdered, and in changing a system
not responsive to the needs of the people.
Question: Don’t you think that many people who voted for Hanrahan
for state’s attorney in the 1972 Democratic primary knew he was
a murderer and yet voted for him anyway? And how do you think
he will do in the upcoming general election?
Response: It’s a very discouraging situation. Sure, there were a lot
of people who thought Fred caught what was coming to him.
There were even Black wards which went strongly for Hanrahan.
Surveys were taken to find out why, and people said, “Well, we
heard the name.” He’s going to be reelected.3
Question: Why do you think the Panthers didn’t retaliate against
Hanrahan?
Response: The heat that would have come down on the Black
community would have been unspeakable. The Panthers have
made it clear that they are oxen on whose backs the people can
 rise if they choose. Their concept of the vanguard is to offer
themselves, let the shit come down on them. It’s an outrageously
courageous position.
Question: For your film, did you have trouble securing television
documentary footage of the events surrounding the murder?
Response: A great deal of trouble, a great deal of money, a great
deal of hassle. First of all, footage [we needed] was missing.
Some of it had been subpoenaed by Hanrahan the week of the
murder. It was an interesting subpoena because it was partly for
footage yet to be shot, an unheard-of kind of a subpoena. In
another case of footage which mysteriously disappeared, a copy
had been sent to Huntley–Brinkley [at NBC]. Some of the missing
footage had been on TV. CBS had run six minutes of the official
re-enactment of the shooting by the police on national TV.
Therefore it had to be made available for sale. We had to go
through the process of finding it, confronting them with its
existence.
Footage was inordinately expensive, somewhere between
$20,000 and $30,000 to the networks. I don’t know how that
compared to their normal stock footage sales prices. I only know
if you are going to make this kind of film, you have to, somehow,
beat the problem of getting “bread.”
Question: How do you respond to someone who complains that The
Murder of Fred Hampton is technically and aesthetically a faulty
movie?
Response: Mike and I didn’t really think if it was going to look pretty
or not. In some cases, we were shooting too fast. In the office
scene, where we were waiting for the cops to come and raid the
place, there was twenty-five minutes notice. It was dark. There
were no lights. That’s Plus X film pushed to 800. For technical
errors, the film can be faulted totally. There is sloppy
camerawork, all kinds of sloppy shit, and bad recording. Bad Art.
A bad film if you want to discuss film aesthetics. But it makes no
pretense of being a “movie.” It’s a political document, a sharing
of material. Yet I think you get a sense of Fred, the man. And I
think the case against the State is tight. You can’t make a case of
 murder as an absolute. But you can make an absolute case for
perjury. And the implication of murder is as close as it could be
gotten by using the film media.
Question: Have you tried to sell The Murder of Fred Hampton to
distributors?
Response: The film was seen by an enormous number of
distributors. The responses ranged from “We couldn’t possibly
handle this film because those [customers] will tear up the seats
in the theaters” to “Documentaries don’t make money.” Well,
there are documentaries that have made money: The Sky Above,
the Mud Below [1961], Mondo Cane [1962], the [Jacques]
Cousteau-type films. Maybe documentaries such as mine don’t
make money. It may be a total error on our part, given the
nature of the system, given the fact that people are made acutely
uncomfortable by this kind of film, to think that such films will
ever be distributed to the mass of people.
Question: What kind of film would you ideally want to do?4
Response: The film I would most like to make at the moment is one
that it is not my vision imposed on the people at the other end of
the camera but coming from them. I would like to go around the
country presenting people with the proposition, “OK, we’re
making a movie. It’s cool. You can do whatever you want
because this is only a movie. But assume you had the power to
run the community, what would you do? Let’s play a little game
called ‘Running It.’”
Question: There’s a scene in The Murder of Fred Hampton which
maybe hints at the kind of vision you would like to show in your
movie: the breakfast program for children offered by the Panther
Party.
Response: Mike shot the breakfast program, and that’s the way the
breakfast programs were! All the horseshit suspicion in the media
that the Panthers were feeding those children’s minds with “off-
the-piggery” wasn’t true. The point was to feed people who
needed to be fed. Some people were willing to dedicate
themselves to serving the people. Fred Hampton was a man who
 was serving the people. In Chicago, since Fred’s murder there are
more Panther programs than ever before, four or five times more
medical centers, ten times more breakfast programs.
Question: What can we learn from the lesson of Fred Hampton and
the Panthers?
Response: White people are suffering from a lack of models. Black
people had Malcolm [X] and Fred. They have Huey [Newton].
Models of free men, cats who stand in free space and say to their
community constituency, “We’re here. If you’re up to it, step in.”
To the real American youth out there (as opposed to the wilted
flower children, the underground newspaper bull-shitters, the
“counter culturalists”), people like Abbie Hoffman and Jerry Rubin
are disgusting. And to real revolutionists, people like that are a
disgrace. For Abbie Hoffman to talk about “Revolution for the hell
of it” is an appalling goddamned thing, as Fred Hampton told
him.

Notes
This chapter originally appeared, in slightly different form, in Take One, May 1973.
1. Michael Gray (1935–2013) moved to Los Angeles, where he cowrote the
skillful screenplay for The China Syndrome (1979), directed Wavelength (1983), a
science fiction film, and was a producer for the TV series Starman and Star Trek:
The Next Generation.
2. Under Hanrahan’s orders, fourteen Chicago police staged a December 4,
1969, raid on the West Side home of Fred Hampton, ending in Hampton’s death.
3. Actually, Hanrahan (1921–2009) was defeated. According to Wikipedia:
“The combined votes of Republicans and African American Democrats sufficed to
elect his Republican opponent in the general election.”
4. Howard Alk (1930–1982) would direct Janis (1974), a documentary about
Janis Joplin, edit Hard Rain (1976), a TV movie about a Bob Dylan musical tour,
and shoot and edit Dylan’s feature Renaldo and Clara (1978). He died at fifty-two
of a heroin overdose in Dylan’s Santa Monica studio, perhaps a suicide.
 Ousmane Sembène
Interview by Gerald Peary and Patrick McGilligan

Senegal’s Ousmane Sembène is an evocative conversationalist, a

committed political activist, and Africa’s most important filmmaker,
based on his first five films.1 He has an international reputation, and
his volatile works have often been banned in Africa, typically through
pressure of the French bureaucracy, which vigilantly watches over its
former colonies. Only Sembène’s second feature, the much-
celebrated Mandabi (1968), has been widely distributed in Africa
outside of Senegal.
Sembène was born in the rural southern region of his country,
where Emitai (1971), his latest film, takes place. Emitai’s story of
unwilling African natives being recruited by the French colonialist
establishment parallels his own life: he fought in the French army
during World War II as a forced enlistee. He remained afterward for
a time in France, employed as a dockworker in Marseilles, and
became a union organizer while training to be a writer. Sembène has
published five acclaimed novels and a collection of short stories. His
most famous novel, God’s Bits of Wood (1960), documents in semi-
fictional form the historic Dakar–Niger railroad strike of 1947. His last
novel, Le Mandat (1966), was the basis for Mandabi, about a simple,
uneducated man in the city who is reduced to hopelessness in his
circular confrontations with government bureaucracy.
The filmmaker toured the United States in the fall of 1972 in
order to raise funds for his next film project. He stopped in Madison,
Wisconsin, for a day, showed Emitai at the university, and was
interviewed about his life and career. An adept translator put
Sembène’s answers in French into articulate English.

Question: You were a highly successful novelist. Why did you make
the switch to filmmaking?

Ousmane Sembène directing an actress.

Response: I’ve just finished another book but I feel it is of limited

importance. First, 80 percent of Africans are illiterate. Only 20
percent of the population can possibly read it. But further, my
books indispose the [African] bourgeoisie, so I am hardly read at
home.
My movies have more followers than the political parties and
the Catholic and Moslem religions combined. Every night I can fill
up a movie theater. The people will come whether they share my
ideas or not. I tell you, in Africa, especially in Senegal, even a
 blind person will go to the cinema and pay for an extra seat to
pay a young person to explain the film to him.
Personally, I prefer to read because I learned from reading.
But I think the cinema is culturally more important, and for us in
Africa it is an absolute necessity. There is one thing you can’t
take away from the African masses and that is having seen
something.
Question: But are the films by native Black Africans being watched
at home?
Response: In West Africa, distribution remains in the hands of two
French companies that have been there since colonial times.
Because of the active push of our native filmmakers, such as our
group in Senegal, they are forced to distribute our films, though
they do so very slowly. Of the twenty movies we have made in
Senegal, five have been distributed. It’s a continuous fight, for
we don’t think we can resolve the problems of cinema
independent of the other problems of African society.
Neocolonialism is passed on culturally through the cinema.
And that’s why African cinema is being controlled from Paris,
London, Lisbon, Rome, and even America. And that’s why we see
almost exclusively the worst French, American, and Italian films.
Cinema from the beginning has worked to destroy the native
African culture. A lot of films have been made about Africa but
they are stories of European and American invaders with Africa
serving as décor. Instead of being taught our ancestry, all we
know is Tarzan. Many of us perceive Africa with a certain
alienation learned from the cinema. Movies have infused a
European way of walking, a European style of doing. Even
African gangsters are inspired by the cinema.
African art has continued, even as the black bourgeoisie has
aped American and European models. True art remains in the
villages and rural communities, preserved in the ceremony and
religion. It is from believing in this communal art that we can be
saved.
Question: What are the particular circumstances of making films in
Senegal?
Response: We produce films in a country where there is only one
party, that of [President] Senghor. If you are not within the party,
you are against it. Thus we have lots of problems, and they will
continue while Senghor is in control.2 For instance, his
government just vetoed the distribution of the film of a young
director, the story of a Black American who discovers Senegal.
We are approximately twenty filmmakers in Senegal. Last
year we made four long films produced through our own means.
Financing is our most complex problem. You can find a very small
group of people who have money which they might lend you in
exchange for participating in the filming. Perhaps you can locate
a friend who has credit at a bank. Emitai was shot on money I
received on a commission from an American church. We do not
refuse any money, even from a church.
We began by making our films on 16mm, much more
economical. But the distributors would refuse to project the films
in the cities because of the 16mm, so we had to adapt to their
game. Our films are shot on 35mm for the city theaters, then
presented in 16mm for the rural areas where there is no 35mm.
Emitai has been banned everywhere in Africa except in Senegal,
where it was allowed only after a year of protests. We tried to
show Emitai in Guadeloupe, but the ambassador from France
interceded. The film had one night of exhibition in Upper Volta3
but never again. When I was invited by the government and
students of the Ivory Coast, the French ambassador went to the
head of the government. I was told that it wasn’t an “opportune
time” to show this film. They were all very polite, so I didn’t say
anything. I took my film and left.
Question: Has Emitai ever been screened in France?
Response: Every time I want to show the film, the date falls on a
“day of mourning for de Gaulle.” De Gaulle dies every day for my
film.
Question: Can we go back to your second feature, Mandabi. Who
were the actors?
Response: They weren’t professionals. The old man who plays the
main role [Makuredia Guey], we found working near the airport.
He had never acted before. I had a team of colleagues and
together we looked around the city and country for actors. We
didn’t pay a lot but we did pay, so it was always difficult to
choose. There was also the influence of my parents, my friends,
and even the mistresses of my friends, and we had to struggle
against all that. You laugh, but I assure you it was very difficult.
Once the police called and this fellow arrived who was their
representative. He came to tell us he had a friend who wanted
his mistress in the film. I was forced to accept or else it would
have cost me. It is concessions like this one that make work
difficult.
We rehearsed for one month in a room very much like this
lecture hall. Mandabi was the first film completely in the [Wolof]
Senegalese language, and I wanted the actors to speak the
language accurately. There was no text, so the actors had to
know what they were going to say and say it at the right
moment. I composed the music for Mandabi, and tried to make it
of maximum importance. After the film was presented in Dakar,
people sang the theme song for a while. But the song was
“vetoed” from the radio, which belongs to the government.
We in Senegal are looking for music that is particularly suited
for our type of film. I think here is where African cinema still
suffers certain difficulties. We are undergoing Afro-American
music and Cuban music. I’m not saying that’s bad, but I prefer
that we would be able to create an African music.
Question: Are you satisfied with your conclusion to Mandabi?
Response: I don’t think I really have to like the ending. The ending
is linked to the evolution of Senegalese society; thus, it is
ambiguous. As the postman says [in the film], either we will have
to bring about certain changes or we will remain corrupt. I don’t
know. Do you like the ending?
Question: Some would say it is the duty of the political artist to go
beyond a picture of corruption and to present a vision of the
future, what could be.
Response: The role of the artist is to feel the heartbeat of society.
But the power to decide escapes every artist. I live in a capitalist
society, and I can’t go any further than the people. Those for
change are only a handful, a minority, and we don’t have that
Don Quixote attitude that we can change society. One work
cannot instigate change. I don’t think that in history there has
been a single revolutionary work that has brought the people to
create a revolution. It’s not after having read Marx or Lenin that
you go out and make a revolution. It’s not after reading Marcuse
in America. All that an artist can do is bring the people to the
point of having an idea in their heads that they share, and that
helps. People have killed and died for an idea.
I have no belief that, after people saw Mandabi, they would
go out and make a revolution. But people liked the film and
talked about it. People discussed Mandabi in the post office or
the market and decided they were not going to pay out their
money like the person in the movie. They reported those trying
to victimize them, which led to many arrests. But when they
denounced the crooks, they would say it was the government
which was corrupt. And they would say they were going to
change the country.
Question: Mandabi is a city film. Why did you address Emitai
particularly to the peasantry?
Response: In African countries, the peasants are even more
exploited than the workers. They see that the workers are
favored and earn their pittance each month. Therefore, the
element of discontent is much more advanced among the
peasants than the workers. This fact doesn’t give the peasantry
the conscience of revolutionaries, but it can lead to movements
of revolt with positive results. There are peasants involved in
commercial activities who are beginning to understand economic
exchange. To tear apart this discontent, Senghor distributed
three billion francs to the peasants.
Question: What is the historical background of Emitai?
Response: I came myself from this rural region, and these true
events of the Diola people inspired me. During the last World
 War, those of my age, eighteen, were forced to join the French
army. Without knowing why, we were hired for the liberation of
Europe. Then when we returned home, the colonialists began to
kill us, whether we were in Senegal, the Ivory Coast, Algeria, or
Madagascar. Those of us who had returned from the French
involvement in Vietnam in 1946 came back to struggle against
the French.
Question: Aren’t the women the true heroes of Emitai, as they were
also in your revolutionary novel, God’s Bits of Wood?
Response: As Emitai shows, when the French wanted our rice, the
women refused but the men accepted the orders. Women have
played a very important part in our history. They have been
guardians of our traditions and culture even when certain of the
men were alienated during the colonial period. The little that we
do know of our history we owe to our women, our grandmothers.
In certain African countries it is the women who control the
market economy. There are villages where all authority rests with
women. And whether African men like it or not, they can’t do
anything without the women’s consent, whether it’s marriage,
divorce, or baptism.4
Question: What were the circumstances of filming Emitai?
Response: The Diolas are a small minority with a native language
about to disappear. For two years, I learned and practiced it.
Then I set out to make contact with the chief of the Sacred
Forest. I needed to bring a gift offering. He preferred alcohol, but
I myself drank it along the way. When I arrived and was hungry,
the chief ate without inviting me. Afterward, he said, “You know
well to speak to a king you have to bring something.” The chief is
not chief by birth, incidentally, but initiated after receiving an
education and training. There have been moments when the
Diolas elected leaders who then left in the middle of the night.
The people in the movie are people from the village. I had a
limited time to tell my story, so I couldn’t permit them to do only
what they wanted. We would rehearse beginning fifteen minutes
before the filming, but all the movements were free. I bought red
 bonnets for the young people to wear as soldiers. They refused
at first because such bonnets are reserved for the chief.
Question: Did you consciously move from the individual in Mandabi
to the collective hero of Emitai?
Response: I’m not the one evolving. It’s the subject which imposes
the movement. This story happened to be a collective story. I
wanted to show action of a well-disciplined ethnic group in which
everyone saw himself as an integral part of the whole.
Question: Have the Diola people seen Emitai?
Response: Before premiering the film for the Senegalese
government, I went to the village to project it. I remained three
nights. All the villagers from the whole area came and, because
they have no cinema, their reaction was that of children looking
in the mirror for the first time. After the first showing, the old
men withdrew into the Sacred Forest to discuss the film. When I
wanted to leave, they said, “Wait until tomorrow,” then returned
to the forest. They came back the second evening [for a second
screening]. The third evening, there was a debate. The old men
were happy to hear that there was a beautiful language for them,
but they weren’t happy with the presentation of the gods. The
gods still were sacred and helped the old men maintain authority.
The young people accused the old of cowardice for not
resisting [the French colonialists] at the end of the war. The
women agreed, but were very proud of their own role.
Question: And the reaction in the cities?
Response: Many asked why I wanted to make a film about the
Diolas. You have to know that the majority of maids in Senegal
are Diolas to give you an idea of the superiority felt by others in
relation to them. The African bourgeoisie have two or three
maids. It isn’t very expensive. To see Emitai, the maids left the
children. They invited each other from neighborhood to
neighborhood to see the film. Finally, the majority Wolofs went to
see the film and realized that the history of Senegal and the
resistance was not just the history of Wolofs. The Diolas are part
of Senegal, and so are other ethnic groups. And when the
Senegalese government finally decreed that they were going to
 teach Wolof, they were in a hurry to add Diola. I don’t know if it
was because of the film, but that is what happened.
Question: Even if you are modest in believing so, your films are
influential political instruments in Senegal. Could films made in
the USA have the same effect in this country?
Response: Alone, no. With the people, yes. You can put all the
revolutionary work on the television, but if you don’t go down
into the streets, nothing will change. That is my opinion.

Notes
This chapter originally appeared, in slightly different form, in Film Quarterly 36,
no. 3 (Spring 1973).
1. Sembène (1923–2007) would make eleven films in all. The last was
Moolaadé in 2004.
2. Senghor (1906–2001) remained president until 1980.
3. Now Burkina Faso.
4. Sembène often dealt in his films with issues of women’s rights. Black Girl
(1966), his first work, is about an African girl trapped in slavery by a French family
who has brought her to their country to be a nanny. His final film, Moolaadé, is an
attack on the practice in some African countries of genital mutilation.
 An Interview with Marcel Ophuls
Interview by Gerald Peary and Maureen Turim

Marcel Ophuls made one of the greatest and most ambitious of all
documentaries, The Sorrow and The Pity (1969), his 251-minute
revisionist telling of what happened in France during the German
Occupation and with the establishment of the Vichy government. No,
not everyone was a noble member of the French Underground.
Many French, Ophuls insisted, were collaborators, including such
beloved cultural icons as singer Maurice Chevalier and actress
Danielle Darrieux.
What could Ophuls do afterward even to begin to match The
Sorrow and the Pity for potency and political relevance? He
continued with back-to-back ambitious documentaries: America
Revisited (1971), a series of interviews with representative
Americans about current concerns such as racism and the Vietnam
War, and A Sense of Loss (1972), interviews with both Catholics and
Protestants about the ongoing troubles in Northern Ireland. A Sense
of Loss quickly found distribution and an audience. Not so for
America Revisited, which prompted Ophuls to cross the United
States personally showing it on campuses. When the filmmaker
embarked at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, we interviewed
him—and sometimes grilled him—about his whole career.
Especially in discussing The Sorrow and the Pity, should we have
been more respectful of Ophuls’s accomplishments? We demanded
that his interviews be less politically balanced and that he assume a
more activist way of interrogation. But Ophuls is a precursor to the
strategies of Shoah in letting anyone, even Nazis, get their say
before the camera. Still, as they speak freely, those with nefarious
secrets will implicate themselves.

Question: Could you tell us your background and earlier filmmaking?

Response: There’s a lot of background but there aren’t many films.
I’m a second-generation filmmaker, following after my father, Max
Ophuls, the motion picture director who died in 1957. He was a
German Jew, and I was born in Germany [in 1927]. We left there
when I was five in 1933 to settle in France. And so I became a
French citizen. I went to school there and saw the fall of France
as a twelve-year-old. We came in exile to this country and,
because of my father’s business, settled on the West Coast. I
went to Hollywood High, later to college, and I was a GI in
Japan.
I went back to France and got into film as an assistant
director. Later, François Truffaut, who was one of my friends in
Paris, helped me to make my first [short] as a director, a sketch
in a film called Love at Twenty [1962]. Truffaut did a French
sketch, and I did an autobiographical German sketch. Afterward,
I met Jeanne Moreau, who bankrolled me to buy movie rights to
an American paperback novel.1 I collaborated on the screenplay,
then made the movie, Banana Peel, with Moreau, which was a
nostalgic comedy attempting to recapture the classic, prewar
Hollywood atmosphere. After that, I made a couple of films I
don’t like to talk about.2
Question: What a leap to The Sorrow and the Pity, your first
theatrical documentary. There is so much to praise about this
film. But watching it, we couldn’t help but be bothered because
the women are in such a subordinate position. Why is that?
Response: This question comes up at every bull session, every time
the picture comes up [for discussion] in a group, especially in
your country. I believe the quota system is sort of dangerous,
seeing films in terms of head count. Yet if you looked at [A Sense
of Loss], you would find that this problem with the number and
role of women does not exist. Women are a very important part
 of the political and social activities of the Irish crisis. France was,
and is, an extremely bourgeois country dominated by traditional
Catholic bourgeois values.
Women resistance leaders are treated today as sort of Joan of
Arc figures at official ceremonies. They transport the flowers and
the flag to the sounds of trumpet calls. Maybe it is because of
this sexist representation that I intuitively stayed clear of their
particular fate. Also because most of these women are now
Gaullists. Maybe I am just rationalizing.

Marcel Ophuls.

My basic belief about documentary film direction is that you

must not upset the scene you are filming, and especially not by
projecting your own ideas, whether they be sexist, democratic, or
whatever. A good example of this belief in action is this evening
 sequence in The Sorrow and the Pity spent with the Grave
brothers. In the movie you see only men sitting at the table
drinking wine. Madame Grave comes in every once in a while and
pours a little more wine. Now I spent several days there and
happen to know that Madame Grave is a very important figure in
the household. And during the time of the Resistance, she was
also a very important figure. Yet for the whole evening of filming,
she stayed geographically between the kitchen and the living
room. For the whole evening she listened in on everything that
was said. And every once in a while she interjected remarks, and
these were important and with good purpose.
Question: It seems imperative that we hear with a full voice the
story of this woman who was in the Underground. Shouldn’t you
have made that happen?
Response: Something very significant occurred which I think holds
the answer to our question. One of the producers of the film, a
political journalist named André Harris, became very
uncomfortable because he believes in sexual equality, that every
member of the family should contribute. So he said at one point,
“Madame, why don’t you join us? Come sit around the table,
participate in the discussion.” Here is an example of what a
documentary maker should not do. The men starting shifting
their feet. And she didn’t want to sit down. Now all of us were
uncomfortable. I kept shoving my elbow in his ribs, yet Harris still
insisted. Finally, out of courtesy and politeness, Madame sat
down. We shot two or three more reels and I found in the editing
room that I couldn’t use a single sentence. André Harris, who
should have known better, had blown it.
Question: It often feels that you are obsessed with balancing one
side to another, being generous to everybody, the Truffaut school
versus Godard. Why shouldn’t a documentarian take sides?
Response: I think there is an awful amount of misunderstanding in
your question. I always accept the challenge to take sides. You
ask me whether I am on the Godard side or the Truffaut side. I’m
on the Truffaut side, and there you are right. I do believe in
pluralism. And if you want to call that “shitty liberalism,” it
 doesn’t matter. My politics are in complete accordance with those
views. You are free to put me in league with the type of TV
journalist who gets one man representing one side and one the
other and thus hides behind both of them. I don’t believe that I
am at all in that camp. I think the films I have been making have
points of view which annoy a great number of people, so much
that I am accused of manipulation.
I do get the facts from both sides. I can accept this attack
because it is closer to the truth. I do use confrontation of
different points of view by means of irony, contrast to put across
my point of view. This may be a very bourgeois way of
expression, but this form of film is the only kind which would
interest me in the nonfiction field. To me, agitprop is not creative.
I can’t do anything with it. It would bore me.
Question: Someone like Godard could conceivably attack The Sorrow
and the Pity by labeling it as a “Hollywood film.” How would you
react to such a label?
Response: I don’t know what Godard thinks of the film. I don’t know
if he dislikes it as much as I dislike his films. But if someone
called The Sorrow and the Pity a Hollywood film, would I be
insulted? No, I think there is a great deal of truth in that
statement. It’s a work by someone who’s trying to tell a story
with a beginning, middle, and an end by means of sex, music,
cutting, and manipulation. I’ve seen a great many American
movies in my life. I’m the son of a moviemaker. Perhaps I have
very classical taste. Different from most documentarians, I
believe in trying to put things across through entertainment.
Actually, I don’t think I’ve changed that much since my
comedy film, Banana Peel. I think I have a comedy director’s
sentiment. Most of the directors I like are comedy directors like
Lubitsch. There are a great many laughs in The Sorrow and the
Pity, though laughter was not my main priority in the cutting
room.
Question: Could you talk a little about your father, Max Ophuls, who
directed such masterpieces of romance as Letter from an
 Unknown Woman (1948), La Ronde (1950), and The Earrings of
Madame de (1953).
Response: I don’t think he was a romantic. I don’t think he was
nostalgic. I think he had an awful lot of pertinent comments to
make about society and about the condition of women in
bourgeois society. And these were not apolitical [films] and he
was not an aesthete. He was a very tough guy indeed. Anyone
who met him in private life can confirm this. He had very tough
ideas about the world. I’ll grant you, however, that he did take
pleasure in luxury and elegance and in manners. I sort of
sympathize with him.
Question: The Sorrow and the Pity was attacked from both the left
and right more than almost any recent film . . .
Response: May I interject, just a matter of personal vanity, that it
also received a great deal of praise on both sides.
Question: Granted. But considering the various criticisms of your
approach, did you alter your methods in making A Sense of Loss?
Response: No, nothing. Let me cite my father. He said, “Work for
yourself, for what makes you laugh, weep, think, reflect, and
then hope there is a bridge to what people perceive.”
Question: What is the most immediate difference in the perspective
of The Sorrow and the Pity and A Sense of Loss?
Response: The Sorrow and the Pity benefits from the reflections and
analyses of individuals confronting their experiences of years
ago. But persons seeking this same intellectual approach will find
it missing from A Sense of Loss [which] is not a politically
reflective film. Most of the talk about politics in Ireland today is
rhetorical, clichéd, dull, and repetitive, and so those people
wound up on the cutting room floor. What I found interesting
were other things, what loss of life meant individually. I showed
real maiming, real suffering, and real death.
Question: Is it true that your cameramen were disguised as a TV
crew from Sweden?
Response: They weren’t disguised. They were a TV crew. And they
weren’t from Sweden but from Switzerland, which had a
wonderful advantage for me. When trying to get clearance with
 the police or with the army, I had working with me people who
seemed so fantastically neutral. [Though] A Sense of Loss was
95 percent a private American production, they were technically
coproducers of the film for camouflage. No, not camouflage, but
to make it easier for necessary clearance.
I had a conversation with Bernadette Devlin3 on this topic.
She was always getting young, committed filmmakers,
photographers, journalists [who] never got clearance with the
police. So, when the shit hit the fan, all they could photograph
were people’s backs . . . jumping people somewhere and maybe
one or two authentic noises.
Question: What are your personal views on Irish politics after the
experience of filming A Sense of Loss?
Response: My answer has to do with my general politics, which are
left-wing social democratic. This means that when the crunch
comes, I’m more interested in the luxury of individual freedom,
which I realize is a luxury of privileged people, than I am in the
far distant goal of complete social justice. In Ireland, violence is
dividing the working classes. Most of the suffering occurs in the
working-class neighborhoods in Belfast and Derry, and it is these
people who get it in the necks. And so I believe that violence
there, because it is so nationalistic and sectarian in nature,
cannot possibly be good. I’m in favor of negotiation. I’m also
very much in favor of the British army staying there for the time
being. I think if it leaves, there will be a bloodbath, and not a
useful bloodbath at all.
Question: Why are you taking America Revisited around America?4
Response: I’m hoping to find an audience for it, and perhaps interest
an American distributor. There is a technical problem releasing
this film in the United States with the music and movie rights.
Because of all that old Crosby, Sinatra, and Glenn Miller stuff,
plus scenes from the Marx Brothers and Rebel Without a Cause
[1955], the commercial rights for all that material would probably
cost $50,000. A distributor would have to think about whether he
would get a return on the money.
Question: Did you have a particular thesis while shooting the film?
Response: The answer is “No.” That doesn’t mean that I didn’t have
a basic structure to hang my coat on. In this particular case, it
was the business of coming back to America and looking up my
family and old friends. My films are post-structured. That’s why
they are such edited works. That’s where my point of view and
creativity come in. Before that, I’m in a much more passive
position.
Question: How can you remain so utterly calm when interviewing,
especially when those to whom you talk say such outrageous
things?
Response: Whatever anger I feel is pushed into the background by
my professional reaction telling me, “Well, I got it.” I laugh on
the inside thinking, “That’s going in the film.” Even when
interviewing Lester Maddox5 in America Revisited, I didn’t get
mad at him because I knew I had him. When I get mad, it’s
usually when I fight with my wife or producer, and then I start to
scream and throw tantrums. But not with the camera. There’s no
reason. In a very significant way, I’m the stronger one in these
situations.
Question: What is your responsibility in informing people you
interview how you might use their words?
Response: I always tell the people that the average interview [is
used] at a ratio of fifteen to one. That’s the truth, although I
sometimes will use the whole interview. But the average is fifteen
to one. I also warn people that their interviews will be juxtaposed
with opinions in conflict with their own, and that I will be the
person deciding this. There is no collective democracy here.
Question: America Revisited concludes with crosscutting from a
Village Voice left-liberal cocktail party, which you attend, to an
interview with a Black mother in a lower-class housing project.
Could you describe your strategy behind the sequence?
Response: I tried to show the terribly screwed-up conversation of
the professional liberals, with whom I belong. If I lived in
Manhattan, I’d be in with those people. They are caught in a
 contradiction which I understand. All their lives they have been in
favor of integration, of wanting to be on the good, right side of
things. Suddenly, when confronted with sending their own
children into the front lines, their priorities change. I find this
very natural and understandable, nothing to snicker at.
But I do put that scene in contrast with the Black woman who
says, “I want my children to be in an integrated school because if
they aren’t, then they will grow up and be prejudiced.” I think
this is a beautiful sentiment. I ended the movie with her
quotation, “Because otherwise they will be prejudiced.”
Question: From making America Revisited, what do you see as the
near future of the United States?
Response: I’m not a political analyst, historian, or sociologist. I can
only gather impressions and juxtapose them to give some sort of
an illusion of totality, perhaps. Keeping that in mind, I will say
that I am pessimistic because I feel that the period of activist
confrontation may have come to an end for a while. The people
in power are extremely clever about keeping it down.

Notes
This chapter originally appeared, in slightly different form, in Velvet Light Trap, no.
9 (Summer 1973).
1. Charles Williams, Nothing in Her Way (New York: Gold Medal, 1953).
2. Fire at Will (1965) with Eddie Constantine is the only listed film.
3. A civil rights activist in Northern Ireland who served in Parliament from
1969 to 1974.
4. Since America Revisited and A Sense of Loss, Marcel Ophuls (1927–) has
made five feature documentaries. Hotel Terminus: The Life and Times of Klaus
Barbie (1988) won an Academy Award. His last film is Un Voyageur (2012), a self-
portrait.
5. Lester Maddox (1915–2003) was a militant segregationist who was elected
governor of Georgia.
 Bernardo Bertolucci and 1900

The great battle of 1900 ended in cease-fire and compromise.

Previously, its director, Bernardo Bertolucci, had clashed with his
producer, Alberto Grimaldi, and refused to allow more than a trim for
his five-and-a-half-hour epic of Italian history from 1900 to 1946.
However, 1900 weighed in at a mere four hours and seven minutes
for the 1977 New York Film Festival; and Bertolucci, in Manhattan for
the American debut, claimed to like the film better this way. “Instead
of a castration, I arrived at an artistic work. What we have now is
the film I want,” the English-speaking Italian director explained,
when interviewed. What was deleted? “My friends in Italy couldn’t
even tell me. I didn’t remove any sequences. I cut short pieces of
film. The difference is only in the rhythm. The meaning, the
strength, is absolutely the same.”
An advantage of the “short” 1900 is that it will be exhibited in the
United States. Paramount Pictures had been set to turn their
investment in the $8-million film into a tax write-off rather than
challenge the five-hour-plus director’s cut. The studio had contracted
originally for a three-hour-and-fifteen-minute picture. But after
Bertolucci applied his scissors, Paramount came back into the film. “I
read in the newspaper that Paramount is releasing the movie,” he
said, bemused. “Nobody told me. Strange.”1
Paramount’s financial destiny with 1900 lies with American
audience interest in the sexy, bed-hopping stars. Dominique Sanda,
once slated for Bertolucci’s Last Tango in Paris in the Maria
Schneider role, has sex with Robert De Niro in the film’s most
scandalous sequence. But De Niro is equally devoted to European
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inconsistent both with the general scope and the minute details of
the writing itself, that even without the support of this most
incontrovertible evidence of the earliest Christian antiquity, the
falsehood of the idea of any anti-papal prophecy can be most
triumphantly and unanswerably settled; and this has been repeatedly
done, in every variety of manner, by the learned labors of all the
sagest of the orthodox theologians of Germany, Holland, France and
England, for the last three hundred years. A most absurd notion
seems to be prevalent, that the idea of a rational historical
interpretation of the Apocalypse, is one of the wicked results of that
most horrible of abstract monsters, “German neology;” and the
dreadful name of Eichhorn is straightway referred to, as the source
of this common sense view. But Eichhorn and all those of the
modern German schools of theology, who have taken up this notion,
so far from originating the view or aspiring to claim it as their
invention, were but quietly following the standard authorities which
had been steadily accumulating on this point for sixteen hundred
years; and instead of being the result of neology or of anything new,
it was as old as the time of Irenaeus. The testimony of all the early
writers on this point, is uniform and explicit; and they all, without a
solitary exception, explain the great mass of the bold expressions in
it, about coming ruin on the enemies of the pure faith of Christ, as a
distinct, direct prophecy of the downfall of imperial Rome, as the
great heathen foe of the saints. There was among them no very
minute account of the manner in which the poetical details of the
prophecy was to be fulfilled; but the general meaning of the whole
was considered to be so marked, dated, and individualized, that to
have denied this manifest interpretation in their presence, must have
seemed an absurdity not less than to have denied the authentic
history of past ages. Not all, nor most of the Christian Fathers
however, have noticed the design and character of the Apocalypse,
even among those of the western churches; while the scepticism of
the Greek and Syrian Fathers, after the third century, about the
authenticity of the work, has deprived the world of the great
advantage which their superior acquaintance with the original
language of the writing, with its peculiarly oriental style, allusions and
quotations, would have enabled them to afford in the faithful
interpretation of the predictions. From the very first, however, there
were difficulties among the different sects, about the allegorical and
literal interpretations of the expressions which referred to the final
triumph of the followers of Christ; some interpreting those passages
as describing an actual personal reign of Christ on earth, and a real
worldly triumph of his followers, during a thousand years, all which
was to happen shortly;――and from this notion of a Chiliasm, or a
Millennium, arose a peculiar sect of heretics, famous in early
ecclesiastical history, during the two first centuries, under the name
of Chiliasts or ♦ Millenarians,――the Greek or the Latin appellative
being used, according as the persons thus designated or those
designating them, were of eastern or western stock. Cerinthus and
his followers so far improved this worldly view of the subject, as to
inculcate the notion that the faithful, during that triumph, were to be
further rewarded, by the full fruition of all bodily and sensual
pleasures, and particularly that the whole thousand years were to be
passed in nuptial enjoyments. But these foolish vagaries soon
passed away, nor did they, even in the times when they prevailed,
affect the standard interpretation of the general historical relations of
the prophecy.

♦ “Millennarians” replaced with “Millenarians”

It was not until a late age of modern times, that any one pretended
to apply the denunciations of ruin, with which the Apocalypse
abounds, to any object but heathen, imperial Rome, or to the pagan
system generally, as personified or concentrated in the existence of
that city. During the middle ages, the Franciscans, an order of
monks, fell under the displeasure of the papal power; and being
visited with the censures of the head of the Romish church, retorted,
by denouncing him as an Anti-Christ, and directly set all their wits to
work to annoy him in various ways, by tongue and pen. In the course
of this furious controversy, some of them turned their attention to the
prophecies respecting Rome, which were found in the Apocalypse,
then received as an inspired book by all the adherents of the church
of Rome; and searching into the denunciations of ruin on the
Babylon of the seven hills, immediately saw by what a slight
perversion of expressions, they could apply all this dreadful
language to their great foe. This they did accordingly, with all the
spite which had suggested it; and in consequence of this beginning,
the Apocalypse thenceforward became the great storehouse of
scriptural abuse of the Pope, to all who happened to quarrel with
him. This continued the fashion, down to the time of the Reformation;
but the bold Luther and his coadjutors, scorned the thought of a
scurrilous aid, drawn from such a source, and with a noble honesty
not only refused to adopt this construction, but even did much to
throw suspicion on the character of the book itself. Luther however,
had not the genius suited to minute historical and critical
observations; and his condemnation of it therefore, though showing
his own honest confidence in his mighty cause, to be too high to
allow him to use a dishonest aid, yet does not affect the results to
which a more deliberate examination has led those who were as
honest as he, and much better critics. This however, was the state in
which the early reformers left the interpretation of the Apocalypse.
But in later times, a set of spitefully zealous Protestants, headed by
Napier, Mede, and bishop Newton, took up the Revelation of John,
as a complete anticipative history of the triumphs, the cruelties and
the coming ruin of the Papal tyranny. These were followed by a
servile herd of commentators and sermonizers, who went on with all
the elaborate details of this interpretation, even to the precise
meaning of the teeth and tails of the prophetical locusts. These
views were occasionally varied by others tracing the whole history of
the world in these few chapters, and finding the conquests of the
Huns, the Saracens, the Turks, &c. all delineated with most amazing
particularity.

But while these idle fancies were amusing the heads of men, who
showed more sense in other things, the great current of Biblical
knowledge had been flowing on very uniformly in the old course of
rational interpretation, and the genius of modern criticism had
already been doing much to perfect the explanation of passages on
which the wisdom of the Fathers had never pretended to throw light.
Of all critics who ever took up the Apocalypse in a rational way, none
ever saw so clearly its real force and application as Hugo Grotius;
and to him belongs the praise of having been the first of the moderns
to apprehend and expose the truth of this sublimest of apostolic
records. This mighty champion of Protestant evangelical theology,
with that genius which was so resplendent in all his illustrations of
Divine things as well as of human law, distinctly pointed out the three
grand divisions of the prophetical plan of the work. “The visions as
far as to the end of the eleventh chapter, describe the affairs of the
Jews; then, as far as to the end of the twentieth chapter, the affairs
of the Romans; and thence to the end, the most flourishing state of
the Christian church.” Later theologians, following the great plan of
explanation thus marked out, have still farther perfected it, and
penetrated still deeper into the mysteries of the whole. They have
shown that the two cities, Rome and Jerusalem, whose fate
constitutes the most considerable portions of the Apocalypse, are
mentioned only as the seats of two religions whose fall is foretold;
and that the third city, the New Jerusalem, whose triumphant
heavenly building is described in the end, after the downfall of the
former two, is the religion of Christ. Of these three cities, the first is
called Sodom; but it is easy to see that this name of sin and ruin is
only used to designate another devoted by the wrath of God to a
similar destruction. Indeed, the sacred writer himself explains that
this is only a metaphorical or spiritual use of the term,――“which is
spiritually called Sodom and Egypt;”――and to set its locality beyond
all possibility of doubt, it is furthermore described as the city “where
also our Lord was crucified.” It is also called the “Holy city,” and in it
was the temple. Within, have been slain two faithful witnesses of
Jesus Christ; these are the two Jameses,――the great apostolic
proto-martyrs; James the son of Zebedee, killed by Herod Agrippa,
and James the brother of our Lord, the son of Alpheus, killed by
order of the high priest, in the reign of Nero, as described in the lives
of those apostles. The ruin of the city is therefore sealed. The
second described, is called Babylon; but that Chaldean city had
fallen to the dust of its plain, centuries before; and this city, on the
other hand, stood on seven hills, and it was, at the moment when the
apostle wrote, the seat of “the kingdom of the kingdoms of the earth,”
the capital of the nations of the world,――expressions which
distinctly mark it to be imperial Rome. The seven angels pour out
the seven vials of wrath on this Babylon, and the awful ruin of this
mighty city is completed.

To give repetition and variety to this grand view of the downfall of

these two dominant religions, and to present these grand objects of
the Apocalypse in new relations to futurity, which could not be fully
expressed under the original figures of the cities which were the
capital seats of each, they are each again presented under the
poetical image of a female, whose actions and features describe the
fate of these two systems, and their upholders. First, immediately
after the account of the city which is called Sodom, a female is
described as appearing in the heavens, in a most peculiar array of
glory, clothed in the sun’s rays, with the moon beneath her feet, and
upon her head a crown of twelve stars. This woman, thus splendidly
arrayed, and exalted to the skies, represents the ancient covenant,
crowned with all the old and holy honors of the twelve tribes of Israel.
A huge red dragon (the image under which Daniel anciently
represented idolatry) rises in the heavens, sweeping away the third
part of the stars, and characterized by seven heads and ten horns,
(thus identified with a subsequent metaphor representing imperial
Rome;)――he rages to devour the offspring to which the woman is
about to give existence. The child is born destined to rule all nations
with a rod of iron,――and is caught up to the throne of God, while
the mother flees from the rage of the dragon into the wilderness,
where she is to wander for ages, till the time decreed by God for her
return. Thus, when from the ancient covenant had sprung forth the
new revelation of truth in Jesus, it was driven by the rage of
heathenism from its seat of glory, to wander in loneliness, unheeded
save by God, till the far distant day of its blissful re-union with its
heavenly offspring, which is, under the favor of God, advancing to a
firm and lasting dominion over the nations. Even in her retirement,
she is followed by the persecutions of the dragon, now cast down
from higher glories; but his fury is lost,――she is protected by the
earth, (sheltered by the Parthian empire;) yet the dragon still
persecutes those of her children who believe in Christ, and are yet
within his power; (Jews and Christians persecuted in Rome, by Nero
and Domitian.)

Again, after the punishment and destruction of imperial Babylon

have been described, a second female appears, not in heaven, like
the first, but in an earthly wilderness, splendidly attired, but not with
the heavenly glories of the sun, moon and stars. Purple and scarlet
robes are her covering, marking an imperial honor; and gold, silver,
and all earthly gems, adorn her,――showing only worldly greatness.
In her hand is the golden cup of sins and abominations, and she is
designated beyond all possibility of mistake, by the words, “Mystery,
Babylon the Great.” This refers to the fact, that Rome had another
name which was kept a profound secret, known only to the priests,
and on the preservation of which religious “mystery,” the fortunes of
the empire were supposed to depend. The second name also
identifies her with the city before described as “Babylon.” She sits on
a scarlet beast, with seven heads and ten horns. The former are
afterwards minutely explained, by the apostle himself, in the same
chapter, as the seven hills on which she sits; they are also seven
kings, that is, it would seem, seven periods of empire, of which five
are past, one now is, and one brief one is yet to come, and the
bloody beast itself――the religion of heathenism――is another. The
ten horns are the ten kings or sovrans who never received any
lasting dominion, but merely held the sway one after another, a brief
hour, with the beast, or spirit of heathenism. These, in short, are the
ten emperors of Rome before the days of the
Apocalypse;――Augustus, Tiberius, Caligula, Claudius, Nero, Galba,
Otho, Vitellius, Vespasian and Titus. These had all reigned, each his
hour, giving his power to the support of heathenism, and thus
warring against the faith of the true believers. Still, though reigning
over the imperial city, they shall hate her, and make her desolate;
strip her of her costly attire, and burn her with fire. How well
expressed here the tyranny, of the worst of the Caesars, plundering
the state, banishing the citizens, and, in the case of Nero, “burning
her with fire!”

Who can mistake the gorgeously awful picture? It is heathen,

imperial Rome, desolating and desolated, at that moment suffering
under the tyrannic sway of him whom the apostle cannot yet number
with the gloomy ten, that have passed away to the tomb of ages
gone. It is the mystic Babylon, drunk with the blood of the faithful
witnesses of Christ, and triumphing in the agonies of his saints,
“butchered to make a Roman holiday!” No wonder that the
amazement of the apostolic seer should deepen into horror, and
highten to indignation. Through her tyranny his brethren had been
slaughtered, or driven out from among men, like beasts; and by that
same tyranny he himself was now doomed to a lonely exile from
friends and apostolic duties, on that wild heap of barren rocks. Well
might he burst out in prophetic denunciation of her ruin, and rejoice
in the awful doom, which the angels of God sung over her; and listen
exultingly to the final wail over her distant fall, rolling up from futurity,
in the coming day of the Gothic and Hunnish ravagers, when she
should be “the desolator desolate, the victor overthrown.”

As there are three mystically named cities――Sodom, Babylon,

and the New Jerusalem; so there are three metaphoric
females,――the star-crowned woman in heaven, the bloody harlot
on the beast in the wilderness, and the bride, the Lamb’s wife. A
peculiar fate befalls each of the three pairs. The spiritual Sodom
falls under a temporary ruin, trodden under foot by the Gentiles,
forty-two mystic months; and the star-crowned daughter of Zion
wanders desolate in the wilderness of the world, for twelve hundred
and sixty days, till the hand of her God shall restore her to grace and
glory. The great Babylon of the seven hills, falls under a doom of
far darker, and of irrevocable desolation,――like the dashing roar of
the sinking rock thrown into the sea, she is thrown down, and shall
be found no more at all. And such too, is the doom of the fierce
scarlet rider of the beast,――“Rejoice over her, O heaven! and ye
holy apostles and prophets! for God has avenged you on her.” But
beyond all this awful ruin appears a vision of contrasting, splendid
beauty.

“The first two acts already past,

The third shall close the drama with the day;――

Time’s noblest offspring is the last.”

The shouts of vindictive triumph over the dreadful downfall of the

bloody city, now soften and sweeten into the songs of joy and praise,
while the New Jerusalem, the church of God and Christ, comes
down from the heavens in a solemn, glorious mass of living splendor,
to bless the earth with its holy presence. In this last great scene,
also, there is a female, the third of the mystic series; not like her of
the twelve stars, now wandering like a widow disconsolate, in the
wilderness;――not like her of the jeweled, scarlet and purple robes,
cast down from her lofty seat, like an abandoned harlot, now
desolate in ashes, from which her smoke rises up forever and
ever;――but it is one, all holy, happy, pure, coming down stainless
from the throne of God,――a bride, crowned with the glory of God,
adorned for her husband,――the One slain from the foundation of
the world. He through the opening heavens, too, has come forth
before her, the Word of God, the Faithful and the True,――known by
his bloody vesture, stained, not in the gore of slaughtered victims,
but in the pure blood poured forth by himself, for the world, from its
foundation. Yet now he rode forth on his white horse, as a warrior-
king, dealing judgment upon the world with the sword of
wrath,――with the sceptre of iron. Behind him rode the armies of
heaven,――the hallowed hosts of the chosen of God,――like their
leader, on white horses, but not like him, in crimson vesture; their
garments are white and clean; by a miracle of purification, they are
washed and made white in blood. This mighty leader, with these
bright armies, now returns from the conquests to which he rode forth
from heaven so gloriously. The kings and the hosts of the earth have
arrayed themselves in vain against him;――the mighty imperial
monster, in all the vastness of his wide dominion,――the false
prophets of heathenism, combining their vile deceptions with his
power, are vanquished, crushed with all their miserable slaves,
whose flesh now fills and fattens the eagles, the vultures, and the
ravens. The spirit of heathenism is crushed; the dragon, the monster
of idolatry, is chained, and sunk into the bottomless pit,――yet not
for ever. After a course of ages,――a mystic thousand years,――he
slowly rises, and winding with serpent cunning among the nations,
he deceives them again; till at last, lifting his head over the world, he
gathers each idolatrous and barbarous host together, from the whole
breadth of the earth, encompassing and assaulting the camp of the
saints; but while they hope for the ruin of the faithful, fire comes
down from God, and devours them. The accusing deceiver,――the
genius of idolatry and superstition,――is at last seized and bound
again; but not for a mere temporary imprisonment. With the spirit of
deception and imposture, he is cast into a sea of fire, where both are
held in unchanging torment, day and night, forever. But one last,
awful scene remains; and that is one, that in sublimity, and vastness,
and overwhelming horror, as far outgoes the highest effort of any
genius of human poetry, as the boundless expanse of the sky excels
the mightiest work of man. “A great white throne is fixed, and One
sits on it, from whose face heaven and earth flee away, and no place
is found for them.” “The dead, small and great, stand before God;
they are judged and doomed, as they rise from the sea and from the
land,――from Hades, and from every place of death.” Over all, rises
the new heaven and the new earth, to which now comes down the
city of God,――the church of Christ,――into which the victorious,
the redeemed, and the faithful enter. The Conqueror and his armies
march into the bridal city of the twelve jewelled gates, on whose
twelve foundation-stones are written the names of the mighty
founders, the twelve apostles of the slain one. The glories of that
last, heavenly, and truly eternal city, are told, and the mighty course
of prophecy ceases. The three great series of events are
announced; the endless triumphs of the faithful are achieved.
 iii. what is the style of the apocalypse?

This inquiry refers to the language, spirit and rhetorical structure of

the writing, to its rank as an effort of composition, and to its
peculiarities as expressive of the personal character and feelings of
its inspired writer. The previous inquiry has been answered in such a
way as to illustrate the points involved in the present one; and a
recapitulation of the simple results of that inquiry, will best present
the facts necessary for a satisfactory reply to some points of this.

First, the Apocalypse is a prophecy, in the common understanding

of the term; but is not limited, as in the ordinary sense of that word,
to a mere declaration of futurity; it embraces in its plan the events of
the past, and with a glance like that of the Eternal, sweeps over that
which has been and that which is to be, as though both were now;
and in its solemn course through ages, past, present, and future, it
bears the record of faithful history, as well as of glorious prophecy.

Second, the Apocalypse is poetry, in the highest and justest sense

of the word. All prophecy is poetry. The sublimity of such thoughts
can not be expressed in the plain unbroken detail of a prose
narrative; and even when the events of past history are combined in
one harmonious series with wide views of the future, they too rise
from the dull unpictured record of a mere narrator, and share in the
elevation of the mighty whole. The spirit of the writer, replete, not
with mere particulars, but with vivid images, seeks language that
paints, “thoughts that breathe, and words that burn;” and thus the
writing that flows forth is poetry,――the imaginative expression of
deep, high feeling――swelling where the occasion moves the writer,
into the energy of passion, whether dark or holy.

The character of the Apocalypse, as affected by the passionate

feelings of the writer, is also a point which has been illustrated by
foregoing historical statements of his situation and condition at the
time of the Revelation. He was the victim of an unjust and cruel
sentence, deprived of all the sweet earthly solaces of his advanced
age, and left on a desert rock,――useless to the cause of Christ and
beyond even the knowledge of its progress. The mournful sound of
sweeping winds and dashing waves, alone broke the dreary silence
of his loneliness, and awaking sensations only of a melancholy
order, sent back his thoughts into the sadder remembrances of the
past, and called up also many of the sterner emotions against those
who had been the occasions of the past and present calamities
which grieved him. The very outset is in such a tone as these
circumstances would naturally inspire. A deep, holy indignation
breaks forth in the solemn annunciation of himself, as their “brother
and companion in tribulation.” Sadness is the prominent sentiment
expressed in all the addresses to the churches; and in the prelude to
the great Apocalypse, while the ceremonies of opening the book
which contains it are going on, the strong predominant emotion of
the writer is again betrayed in the vision of “the souls of them that
were slain for the word of God, and for the testimony which they
bore;” and the solemnly mournful cry which they send up to him for
whom they died, expresses the deep and bitter feeling of the writer
towards the murderers,――“How long, O Lord! holy and true! dost
thou not judge and avenge our blood on them that dwell on the
earth?” The apostle was thinking of the martyrs of Jerusalem and
Rome,――of those who fell under the persecutions of the high
priests, of Agrippa, and of Nero. And when the seven seals are
broken, and the true revelation, of which this ceremony was only a
poetical prelude, actually begins, the first great view presents the
bloody scenes of that once Holy city, which now, by its cruelties
against the cause which is to him as his life,――by the remorseless
murder of those who are near and dear to him,――has lost all its
ancient dominion over the affections and the hopes of the last
apostle and all the followers of Christ.

Again the mournful tragedies of earlier apostolic days pass before

him. Again he sees his noble brother bearing his bold witness of
Jesus; and with him that other apostle, who in works and fate as
much resembled the first, as in name. Their blood pouring out on the
earth, rises to heaven, but not sooner than their spirits,――whence
their loud witness calls down woful ruin on the blood-defiled city of
the temple. And when that ruin falls, no regret checks the exulting
tone of the thanksgiving. All that made those places holy and dear, is
gone;――God dwells there no more; “the temple of God is opened in
heaven, and there is seen in his temple the ark of his covenant,” and
all heaven swells the jubilee over the destruction of Jerusalem. And
after this, when the apostle’s view moved forward from the past to
the future, and his eye rested on the crimes and the destiny of
heathen Rome, the bitter remembrance of her cruelties towards his
brethren, lifted his soul to high indignation, and he burst forth on her
in the inspired wrath of a Son of Thunder;――

“Every burning word he spoke,

Full of rage, and full of grief.

“Rome shall perish; write that word

In the blood that she has spilt.

Rome shall perish,――fall abhorred,――

Deep in ruin as in guilt.”

In respect to the learning displayed in the Apocalypse, some most

remarkable facts are observable. Apart from the very copious
matters borrowed from the canonical writings of the Old Testament,
from Isaiah, Ezekiel, Daniel, and other prophets, from which, as any
reader can see, some of the most splendid imagery has been taken
almost verbatim,――it is undeniable, that John has drawn very
largely from a famous apocryphal Hebrew writing, called the Book
of Enoch, which Jude has also quoted in his epistle; and in his life it
will be more fully described. The vision of seven stars, explained to
be angels,――of the pair of balances in the hand of the horseman,
after the opening of the third seal,――the river and tree of
life,――the souls under the altar, crying for vengeance,――the angel
measuring the city,――the thousand years of peace and
holiness,――are all found vividly expressed in that ancient book, and
had manifestly been made familiar to John by reading. In other
ancient apocryphal books, are noticed some other striking and literal
coincidences with the Apocalypse. The early Rabbinical writings are
also rich in such parallel passages. The name of the Conqueror,
“which no one knows but himself,”――the rainbow stretched around
the throne of God,――the fiery scepter,――the seven
angels,――the sapphire throne,――the cherubic four beasts, six-
winged, and crying Holy, Holy, Lord God of hosts,――the crowns of
gold on the heads of the saints, which they cast before the
throne,――the book with seven seals,――the souls under the
altar,――the silence in heaven,――the Abaddon,――the child
caught up to God,――Satan, as the accuser of the saints, day and
night before God,――the angel of the waters,――the hail of great
weight,――the second death,――the new heaven and earth,――the
twelve-gated city of precious stones,――and Rome, under the name
of “Great Babylon,”――are all found in the old Jewish writings, in
such distinctness as to make it palpable that John was deeply
learned in Hebrew literature, both sacred and traditional.

Yet all these are but the forms of expression, not of thought. The
apostle used them, because long, constant familiarity with the
writings in which such imagery abounded, made these sentences the
most natural and ready vehicles of inspired emotions. The tame and
often tedious details of those old human inventions, had no influence
in moulding the grand conceptions of the glorious revelation. This
had a deeper, a higher, a holier source, in the spirit of eternal
truth,――the mighty suggestions of the time-over-sweeping spirit of
prophecy,――the same that moved the fiery lips of those
denouncers of the ancient Babylon, whose writings also had been
deeply known to him by years of study, and had furnished also a
share of consecrated expressions. That spirit he had caught during
his long eastern residence in the very scene of their prophecy and its
awful fulfilment. If this notion of his dwelling for a time with Peter in
Babylon is well founded, as it has been above narrated, it is at once
suggested also, that in that Chaldean city,――then the capital seat
of all Hebrew learning, and for ages the fount of light to the votaries
of Judaism,――he had, during the years of his stay, been led to the
deep study and the vast knowledge of that amazing range of
Talmudical and Cabbalistical learning, which is displayed in every
part of the Apocalypse. But how different all these resources in
knowledge, from the mighty production that seemed to flow from
them! How far are even the sublimest conceptions of the ancient
prophets, in their unconnected bursts and fragments of inspiration,
from the harmonious plan, the comprehensive range, and the
faultless dramatic unity, or rather tri-unity, of this most perfect of
historical views, and of poetical conceptions!

All these coincidences, with a vast number of other learned references, highly illustrative
of the character of the Apocalypse, as enriched with Oriental imagery, may be found in
Wait’s very copious notes on Hug’s Introduction.

There are many things in this view of the Apocalypse which will occasion surprise to
many readers, but to none who are familiar with the views of the standard orthodox writers
on this department of Biblical literature. The view taken in the text of this work, corresponds
in its grand outlines, to the high authorities there named; though in the minute details, it
follows none exactly. Some interpretations of particular passages are found no where else;
but these occasional peculiarities cannot affect the general character of the view; and it will
certainly be found accordant with that universally received among the Biblical scholars of
Germany and England, belonging to the Romish, the Lutheran, the Anglican, and Wesleyan
churches. The authority most closely followed, is Dr. Hug, Roman Catholic professor of
theology in an Austrian university, further explained by his translator, Dr. D. G. Wait, of the
church of England, more distinguished in Biblical and oriental literature, probably, than any
other of the numerous learned living divines of that church. These views are also found in
the commentary of that splendid orientalist, Dr. Adam Clarke, a work which, fortunately for
the world, is fast taking the place of the numerous lumbering, prosing quartos that have too
long met the mind of the common Bible reader with mere masses of dogmatic theology,
where he needs the help of simple, clear interpretation and illustration, which has been
drawn by the truly learned, from a minute knowledge of the language and critical history of
the sacred writings. This noble work, as far as I know, is the first which took the honest
ground of the ancient interpretation of the Apocalypse, with common readers, and
constitutes a noble monument to the praise of the good and learned man, who first threw
light for such readers on the most sublime book in the sacred canon, and among all the
writings ever penned by man,――a book which ignorant visionaries had too long been
suffered to overcloud and perplex for those who need the guidance of the learned in the
interpretation of the “many things hard to be understood” in the volume of truth. The first
book of a popular character, ever issued from the American press, explaining the
Apocalypse according to the standard mode, is a treatise on the Millennium, by the learned
Professor Bush, of the New York University, in which he adopts the grand outlines of the
plan above detailed, though I have not had the opportunity of ascertaining how it is, in the
minor details.
 In reference to the tone assumed in some passages of the statement in the text,
perhaps it may be thought that more freedom has been used in characterizing opposite
views, than is accordant with the principles of “moderation and hesitation,” proposed in
comment upon Luther and Michaelis. But where, in the denunciation of popular error, a
reference to the motive of the inculcators of it would serve to expose most readily its nature,
such a freedom of pen has been fearlessly adopted; and severity of language on these
occasions is justified by the consideration of the character of the delusion which is to be
overthrown. The statements too, which are the occasion and the support of these
condemnations of vulgar notions, are drawn not from the mere conceptions of the writer of
this book, but from the unanswerable authorities of the great standards of Biblical
interpretation. The opportunity of research on this point has been too limited to allow
anything like an enumeration of all the great names who support this view; but references
enough have already been made, to show that an irresistible weight of orthodox sentiment
has decided in favor of these views as above given.

Some of the minute details, particularly those not authorized by learned men, who have
already so nearly perfected the standard view, may fall under the censure of the critical, as
fanciful, like those so freely condemned before; but they were written down because it
seemed that there was, in those cases, a wonderfully minute correspondence between
these passages and events in the life of John, not commonly noticed. The greater part of
this view, however, may be found almost verbatim in Wait’s translation of Hug’s Introduction.

The most satisfactory evidence of the meaning of the great mystery of the Apocalypse,
is in the true interpretation of “the number of the beast,” the mystic 666. In the Greek and
oriental languages, the letters are used to represent numbers, and thence arose in mystic
writings a mode of representing a name by any number, which would be made up by adding
together the numbers for which its letters stood; and so any number thus mystically given
may be resolved into a name, by taking any word whose letters when added together will
make up that sum. Now the word Latinus, (Λατεινος,) meaning the Latin or Roman empire,
(for the names are synonymous,) is made up of Greek letters representing the numbers
whose sum is 666. Thus Λ-30, α-1, τ-300, ε-5, ι-10, ν-50, ο-70, ς-200――all which, added
up, make just 666. What confirms this view is, that Irenaeus says, “John himself told those
who saw him face to face, that this was what he meant by the number;” and Irenaeus
assures us that he himself heard this from the personal acquaintances of John. (See Wait’s
note. Translation of Hug’s Introduction II. 626‒629, note.)

his last residence in ephesus.

The date of John’s return from Patmos is capable of more exact

proof than any other point in the chronology of his later years. The
death of Domitian, who fell at last under the daggers of his own
previous friends, now driven to this measure by their danger from his
murderous tyranny, happened in the sixteenth of his own reign,
(A. D. 96.) On the happy ♦consummation of this desirable revolution,
Cocceius Nerva, who had himself suffered banishment under the
suspicious tyranny of Domitian, was now recalled from his exile, to
the throne of the Caesars; and mindful of his own late calamity, he
commenced his just and blameless reign by an auspicious act of
clemency, restoring to their country and home all who had been
banished by the late emperor. Among these, John was doubtless
included; for the decree was so comprehensive that he could hardly
have been excluded from the benefit of its provisions; and to give
this view the strongest confirmation, it is specified by the heathen
historians of Rome, that this senatorial decree of general recall did
not except even those who had been found guilty of religious
offenses. Christian writers also, of a respectable antiquity, state
distinctly that the apostle John was recalled from Patmos by this
decree of Nerva. Some of the early ecclesiastical historians, indeed,
have pretended that this persecution against the Christians was
suspended by Domitian himself, on some occasion of repentance;
but critical examination and a comparison of higher authorities, both
sacred and profane, have disproved the notion. The data above-
mentioned, therefore, fix the return of John from banishment, in the
first year of Nerva, which, according to the most approved
chronology, corresponds with A. D. 96. This date is useful also, in
affording ground for a reasonable conjecture respecting the
comparative age of John. He could not have been near as old as
Jesus Christ, since the attainment of the age of ninety-six must imply
an extreme of infirmity necessarily accompanying it, unless a miracle
of most unparalleled character is supposed; and no one can venture
to require belief in a pretended miracle, of which no sacred record
bears testimony. If he was, on his return from Patmos, as well as
during his residence there, able to produce writings of such power
and such clear expression, as those which are generally attributed to
these periods, it seems reasonable to suppose that he was many
years younger than Jesus Christ. The common Christian era, also,
fixing the birth of Christ some years too late, this circumstance will
require a still larger subtraction from this number, for the age of
John.

♦ “consummamation” replaced with “consummation”

 his gospel.

The united testimony of early writers who allude to this matter, is

that John wrote his gospel, long after the completion and circulation
of the writings of the three first evangelists. Some early testimony on
the subject dates from the end of the second century, and specifies
that John, observing that in the other gospels, those things were
copiously related which concern the humanity of Christ, wrote a
spiritual gospel, at the earnest solicitations of his friends and
disciples, to explain in more full detail, the divinity of Christ. This
account is certainly accordant with what is observable of the
structure and tendency of this gospel; but much earlier testimony
than this, distinctly declares that John’s design in writing, was to
attack certain heresies on the same point specified in the former
statement. The Nicolaitans and the followers of Cerinthus, in
particular, who were both Gnostical sects, are mentioned as having
become obnoxious to the purity of the truth, by inculcating notions
which directly attacked the true divinity and real Messiahship of
Jesus. The earliest heresy that is known to have arisen in the
Christian churches, is that of the Gnostics, who, though divided
among themselves by some minor distinctions, yet all agreed in
certain grand errors, against which this gospel appears to have been
particularly directed. The great system of mystical philosophy from
which all these errors sprung, did not derive its origin from
Christianity, but existed in the east long before the time of Christ; yet
after the wide diffusion of his doctrines, many who had been
previously imbued with this oriental mysticism, became converts to
the new faith. But not rightly apprehending the simplicity of the faith
which they had partially adopted, they soon began to contaminate its
purity by the addition of strange doctrines, drawn from their
philosophy, which were totally inconsistent with the great revelations
made by Christ to his apostles. The prime suggestion of the
mischief, and one, alas! which has not at this moment ceased to
distract the churches of Christ, was a set of speculations, introduced
“to account for the origin and existence of evil in the
world,”――which seemed to them inconsistent with the perfect work
of an all-wise and benevolent being. Overleaping all those minor
grounds of dispute which are now occupying the attention of modern
controversialists, they attacked the very basis of religious truth, and
adopted the notion that the world was not created by the supreme
God himself, but by a being of inferior rank, called by them the
Demiurgus, whom they considered deficient in benevolence and in
wisdom, and as thus being the occasion of the evil so manifest in the
works of his hands. This Demiurgus they considered identical with
the God of the Jews, as revealed in the Old Testament. Between him
and the Supreme Deity, they placed an order of beings, to which
they assigned the names of the “Only-begotten,” “the Word,” “the
Light,” “the Life,” &c.; and among these superior beings, was
Christ,――a distinct existence from Jesus, whom they declared a
mere man, the son of Mary; but acquiring a divine character by being
united at his baptism to the Divinity, Christ, who departed from him at
his death. Most of the Gnostics utterly rejected the law of Moses; but
Cerinthus is said to have respected some parts of it.
A full account of the prominent characteristics of the Gnostical system may be found in
Mosheim’s Ecclesiastical History, illustrated by valuable annotations in Dr. Murdock’s
translation of that work. The scholar will also find an elaborate account of this, with other
Oriental mysticisms, in Beausobre’s Histoire de Manichee et du Manicheisme. J. D.
Michaelis, in his introduction to the New Testament, (vol. III. c. ii. § 5,) is also copious on
these tenets, in his account of John’s gospel. He refers also to Walch’s History of Heretics.
Hug’s Introduction also gives a very full account of the peculiarities of Cerinthus, as
connected with the scope of this gospel. Introduction vol. II. §§ 49‒53, [of the original,] §§
48‒52, [Wait’s translation.]

In connection with John’s living at Ephesus, a story became afterwards current about his
meeting him on one occasion and openly expressing a personal abhorrence of him.
“Irenaeus [Against Heresies, III. c. 4. p. 140,] states from Polycarp, that John once going
into a bath at Ephesus, discovered Cerinthus, the heretic, there; and leaping out of the bath
he hastened away, saying he was afraid lest the building should fall on him, and crush him
along with the heretic.” Conyers Middleton, in his Miscellaneous works, has attacked this
story, in a treatise upon this express point. (This is in the edition of his works in four or five
volumes, quarto; but I cannot quote the volume, because it is not now at hand.) Lardner
also discusses it. (Vol. I. p. 325, vol. II. p. 555, 4to. edition.)

There can be no better human authority on any subject connected with the life of John,
than that of Irenaeus of Lyons, [A. D. 160,] who had in his youth lived in Asia, where he was
personally acquainted with Polycarp, the disciple and intimate friend of John, the apostle.
His words are, “John, the disciple of the Lord, wishing by the publication of his gospel to
remove that error which had been sown among men, by Cerinthus, and much earlier, by
those called Nicolaitans, who are a fragment of science, (or the Gnosis,) falsely so
called;――and that he might both confound them, and convince them that there is but one
God, who made all things by his word, and not, as they say, one who was the Creator, and
another who was the Father of our Lord.” (Heresies, lib. III. c. xi.) In another passage he
says,――“As John the disciple of the Lord confirms, saying, ‘But these are written that you
may believe that Jesus is the Son of God, and that believing, you may have eternal life in
his name,’――guarding against these blasphemous notions, which divide the Lord, as far
as they can, by saying that he was made of two different substances.” (Heresies, lib. III. c.
xvi.) Michaelis, in his Introduction on John, discusses this passage, and illustrates its true
application.

It appears well established by respectable historical testimony,

that Cerinthus was contemporary with John at Ephesus, and that he
had already made alarming progress in the diffusion of these and
other peculiar errors, during the life of the apostle. John therefore,
now in the decline of life, on the verge of the grave, would wish to
bear his inspired testimony against the advancing heresy; and the
occasion, scope, and object of his gospel are very clearly illustrated
by a reference to these circumstances. The peculiar use of terms,
more particularly in the first part,――terms which have caused so
much perplexity and controversy among those who knew nothing
about the peculiar technical significations of these mystical phrases,
as they were limited by the philosophical application of them in the
system of the Gnostics,――is thus shown in a historical light, highly
valuable in preventing a mis-interpretation among common readers.
This view of the great design of John’s gospel, will be found to
coincide exactly with the results of a minute examination of almost all
parts of it, and gives new force to many passages, by revealing the
particular error at which they were aimed. The details of these
coincidences cannot be given here, but have been most satisfactorily
traced out, at great length, by the labors of the great modern
exegetical theologians, who have occupied volumes with the
elucidation of these points. The whole gospel indeed, is not so
absorbed in the unity of this plan, as to neglect occasions for
supplying general historical deficiences in the narratives of the
preceding evangelists. An account is thus given of two journeys to
Jerusalem, of which no mention had ever been made in former
records, while hardly any notice whatever is taken of the incidents of
the wanderings in Galilee, which occupy so large a portion of former
narratives,――except so far as they are connected with those
instructions of Christ which accord with the great object of this
gospel. The scene of the great part of John’s narrative is laid in
Judea, more particularly in and about Jerusalem; and on the parting
instructions given by Christ to his disciples, just before his crucifixion,
he is very full; yet, even in those, he seizes hold mainly of those
things which fall most directly within the scope of his work. But
throughout the whole, the grand object is seen to be, the
presentation of Jesus as the Messiah, the son of the living, eternal
God, containing within himself the Life, the Light, the Only-begotten,
the Word, and all the personified excellences, to which the Gnostics
had, in their mystic idealism, given a separate existence. It thus
differs from all the former gospels, in the circumstance, that its great
object and its general character is not historical, but
dogmatical,――not universal in its direction and tendency, but aimed
at the establishment of particular doctrines, and the subversion of
particular errors.

Another class of sectaries, against whose errors John wrote in this

gospel, were the Sabians, or disciples of John the Baptist;――for
some of those who had followed him during his preaching, did not
afterwards turn to the greater Teacher and Prophet, whom he
pointed out as the one of whom he was the forerunner; and these
disciples of the great Baptizer, after his death, taking the pure
doctrines which he taught, as a basis, made up a peculiar religious
system, by large additions from the same Oriental mysteries from
which the Gnostics had drawn their remarkable principles. They
acknowledged Jesus Christ as a being of high order, and designate
him in their religious books as the “Disciple of Life;” while John the
Baptist, himself somewhat inferior, is called the “Apostle of
Light,”――and is said to have received his peculiar glorified
transfiguration, from a body of flesh to a body of light, from Jesus at
the time of his baptism in the Jordan; and yet is represented as
distinguished from the “Disciple of Life,” by possessing this peculiar
attribute of Light.