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Photo by Jane Scherr |
See also: Oliver Stone Interview: Conversations with History; Institute of International Studies, UC Berkeley
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Photo by Jane Scherr |
This speech by Oliver Stone is four pages, outlined below:
I had the fortunate privilege recently to be able to shoot one of my movies in Thailand. It was called Heaven and Earth, and it's coming out this year. I spent several months over there preparing the movie, and I was struck, as was my crew, by the spirituality of Thailand. By the concept of Buddhism immanent in every walk of life.
Of course Thailand has a very corrupt part of society, much like our own land. The politicians for years have been known to be on the take; there's a large amount of deforestation going on; bribes get you everything you need in that society. And the military pretty much dominates it. It's a military-dominated society. When we were there a military coup d'état occurred and democracy was shuttled to the side. It was an interesting time, because the people are very quiet, and in a sense, very passive by our standards. Until they killed some young people, some protesters, there wasn't the outbreak of sensational newspaper reaction that you get in our country; but something deeper was going on.
Thailand, as I said, is a Buddhist society; at 6:00 in the mornings everywhere you go you see monks walking on the sides of the roads with their beggar baskets. People give them food. It's very beautiful, the sharing and the trust given the monks.
At one point in my stay there, approximately 100,000 monks got together -- in a country that's about as big as Texas -- to chant and sing and pray in protest against the military regime.
It was something that was not reported in the newspaper; you didn't hear about
it probably because our secular press doesn't pick up
on things like that, but
it had a tremendous, tremendous impact in that country. It wasn't too much
longer after that day when the force of their prayers worked and the military
government collapsed. They gave up, and they returned to a form of democratic
government. It was a very noble example of bringing change through prayer.
When I got back to America, I was wondering where that element exists in our society. We are a very secular, information- and result-oriented society. There's very little faith in the right side of the brain type of thinking, or mysticism, or what we call spirituality. Buddhism in this country is not really understood; it's regarded as sort of quaint, it seems to be an old-fashioned religion. But it isn't, really. It's a very active one and has a place in the modern world.
I couldn't find that kind of spirituality in this country, except, oddly enough, in the American Indian cultures where I've been able to travel with some friends over the last few years. With the Sioux up north in South Dakota, and the Navajo and Hopi tribes down in the Southwest. It's been a very eye-opening experience for me to attend a sun dance, for example.
A sun dance, some of you may know, is a coming together of the tribes in a vast gathering in the summertime to pray, to exorcise the demons, to bring the tribe together, to make speeches. Certainly the physical highlight of the event is the piercing of flesh, where the males of the tribe walk around a tree in circles and dance around the tree for days on end. When I was there, there were 300 sun-dancers. There were old people, young people; they beat the drums through the day. There must have been a hundred with pierced flesh on the front, here on the breast, and on the back. They were crying as they went through a wall of pain, young boys up to age ll. I saw men lifted into the trees by their chests. Horses were pulling the ropes, they were dragging buffalo skulls in the dust like Christ figures. There was a man walking backward the whole time, for three or four days, until he was totally dizzy, I'm sure. But he was looking for the vision.
Visions -- often of ancestors. Without food and water in a hot summer, you start to see a lot of ancestors. And I felt that I was witnessing a combination of fear and an act of faith at the same time, which is rare.
The sun dance was their opera and their theater event of the year. In our culture, you go to the theater, the curtain comes down, you applaud, you pay fifty bucks and that's it. But there is faith in fear. And I think the whole event, the four days, the building of that fear was intended to induce a sacred state of belief in what St. Paul called "the evidence of things unseen." To the Indians, the thing unseen is the Great Creator of Being, Tonkasha or Tongashira. He's sacred in all things of the earth. The rocks that are our ancestors, Mother Earth, the sky, the sacred pipe that they smoke, the Indians view all things as spiritual. All our winters, the 70 or 80 winters that we pass here on earth, are as a speck in time compared to the eternity spent in the spirit world. We here in this room really are ghosts, secondary to that spark.
For them, the Holy Spirit very much exists, but it exists in ritual. A byproduct is art, and art exists for them only if it is holy, blessed with the spirit. Because art, cultural or whatever, is meant to heal, to bind the tribe together on an annual basis to revive mourning and tears and pity and horror and joy. Those things the Greeks called catharsis, the sharing of pity and terror and joy with all. A bond exists between the onlookers and the pierced ones. They give their flesh as offerings as Jesus did. We watch and we are moved by the sun dance's sacrifice, and after four days, we once again commit ourselves to things of the spirit.
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