# THE GURDJIEFF FILM
## Another "first" for San Francisco

by
Kathryn Hulme

This extraordinary film, *Meetings With Remarkable Men*, is another Peter Brook masterpiece which will be shown to the general Public for the first time anywhere in the world, in one of San Francisco's neighborhood movie houses, The Surf, starting April 27th.

Prior to this, only students of the Gurdjieff work in the established Gurdjieff Foundations of London, Paris, New York and San Francisco, were invited to the special showings. Thus, I came to see the film in late January, in a small theatre in Berkeley, invited to the private showing doubtless because I once studied under Gurdjieff himself, in Paris before World War II. I am now the sole survivor of a small American group which he himself selected as pupils.

As I sometimes call myself a "vintage San Franciscan", (i.e. one who remembers the Big Earthquake!) so perhaps I may also call myself, for the space of this review only, and with unutterable love and respect, "a vintage Gurdjieffian", one who lived through the primordial upheaval of his personal teaching.

Speaking then, in my venerable voice of experience of Gurdjieff, I call Brook's film the truest and most believable portrayal of the famous mystic that has ever been created in any medium. Gurdjieff himself might have written the scenario, so faithfully does it follow, in spirit and substance, the book on which it is based - his own life story, his second published work.

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Peter Brook, the versatile and innovative producer of such rare films as *Marat-Sade*, *Lear*, etc. wrote the scenario for the Gurdjieff film and directed it, in close collaboration with Mme. Jeanne de Salzmann, one of the few remaining of Gurdjieff's earliest disciples who, in her own published words, "spent thirty years with Gurdjieff, from 1919 in Tiflis until his death in 1949, following him to Constantinople, Berlin, Paris and New York and participating in all the stages through which his work passed - even carrying the responsibility for his groups during the last ten years of his life." Thus, it was from the start an inspired collaboration - Jeanne de Salzmann and Peter Brook - which wove together the subject matter of *Meetings With Remarkable Men*, the fact and fancy, myth and magic, inner and outer-world experiencing, and made of it all a *believable* whole.

The film opens with long views of the locale where most of it was shot in Afghanistan's remote mountain valleys walled in to the North by the granite spears of the Hindu Kush. Donies and fat-tailed sheep share steep stony village streets with turbanned natives, Afghans, Turkomen, Kafirs, Kurds, not one of whom looks to be less than six feet tall. I felt myself swept into the alien scene with a sense of familiarity and heard my inner voice exclaiming silently: "This is Gurdjieff country! These are HIS people!"

The realization snatched me from that Berkeley playhouse and swept me back some forty years to a momentous day in Paris in the Thirties when I sat at Gurdjieff's dinner table listening to him tell, when an association spurred the memory, some incident of his boyhood days when he occasionally travelled with his father, a famous bard who chanted the epic poetry

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of Asia Minor in its contests that sometimes went on for a week. On the screen that I was watching from Gurdjieff's table, so to speak, a contest was going on in a high mountain valley of the Caucasus. Tribesmen carrying strange-looking wood-wind instruments that suggest primitive flutes, oboes, clarinets, are gathering in a circle around the judge, a patriarch with white beard and face of wisdom. This is a contest for the production of a certain vibration, we are told. Each contesting musician will blow a tune or some notes on his instrument. When the right vibration is struck, the rocks will echo it back exactly as blown.

This is how Peter Brook opens his film on Gurdjieff's search for hidden knowledge - a stunning prelude to mystery presented as factually as a travelogue about some strange land. It is remarkable how tension builds up as the camera explores the rugged faces of the contestants listening for the rocks to answer back after each performance has blown his tune. These are the faces of the descendants of Jhengiz Khan or Tamerlane since most of the actors, except the Yugoslav who plays the adult Gurdjieff, Dragan Maksimovic, were recruited in Afghanistan.

The young actor who plays the boy Gurdjieff sits cross-legged on a large boulder looking down on the scene, his dark eyes alert and unsmiling taking in every detail. You fancy you can follow his thought by the direction of his gaze. When it lifts to the granite rocks that wall in this dishlike valley, you wonder why they possess that peculiar property of echoing back only one vibration from a collection of instruments which all vibrate when blown. It just doesn't make sense, except to these assembled tribesmen whose air of expectancy seems almost a visible thing, as visible as

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their huge wrapped turbans and woven wool capes. I remembered
how Gurdjieff loved the men of the mountains. "Man without
quotation marks", he called them, his expression for a developed
being. I wondered if the degree of self-development of the
contestants had anything to do with the special vibration that
would cause the rocks to answer back. Volume of sound appar-
ently had nothing to do with it. Deep-throated bassoonlike
the
notes filled /mountain amphitheatre and nothing happened.

The sweet tender sounds from an instrument resembling a shepherd's
flute evoked no echo and I became aware of a mounting excite-
ment in the audience around me in the Berkeley playhouse,
so that,
I missed entirely
the tribesmen who played the winning vibration and the instrument
on which he blew, and caught up with the film only when
the rocks began to speak back in clean clear echo the notes
he had blown. For the listening tribesmen on the
screen and the theatre audience watching them, it was a
moment of standstill emotion, if such a thing can be.

There was no applause for the winner, no visible motion
of congratulation beyond the nod from the judge that signified
the contest had ended. The camera lingered with the contestants
as they arose and gathered up their primitive instruments; then
it panned to the boy Gurdjieff jumping down from his rocky
perch and starting down the trail leading to his village far below.

Thus, does Peter Brook begin his film odessy of Gurdjieff's
lifelong search for truth - by presenting us with an inexplicable
phenomenon, made to appear so possible, so down-to-earth real,
so utterly believable from every point of view that we accept it
as an actuality. This is the magic of Brook's directing. He takes