Documentary portrait: "Dorothy Day, Don't Call Me a Saint"

"In these times when social concerns are so important, I cannot fail to mention the Servant of God Dorothy Day, who founded the Catholic Worker Movement. Her social activism, her passion for justice and for the cause of the oppressed, were inspired by the Gospel, her faith, and the example of the saints."

Pope Francis addressing U.S. Congress, September 24, 2015

Women in Cinema and Television, one of the student clubs at Cal State Northridge, had arranged for a screening of Claudia Larson’s documentary Dorothy Day: Don’t Call Me a Saint (2006) a few months ago when Pope Francis mentioned her and Thomas Merton, the contemplative Trappist monk, for their “commitment to social justice, the rights of persons … the capacity for dialogue and openness to God.”

Director Claudia Larson came to the CSUN Cinematheque on October 19 to screen her first “and only film, fifteen years in the making, as she noted in conversation with the students afterwards.  It is a superb and engaging portrait of Dorothy Day (1897-1980), the Greenwich Village leftist writer and activist who converted to Catholicism and co-founded the Catholic Worker movement in the 1930s. Her work and legacy continue to make an impact until today. The Pope’s address to Congress aligns Day’s combination of social activism and deep religious faith, with Francis insistence on looking after whom he calls the ‘discarded’, the ‘forgotten’, ‘the people in the periphery’, seeing in all of them, all the time, the face of Christ.

 The force of Dorothy Day’s personality shines through a documentary that compresses 83 years in less than an hour. The focus is primarily on her work and charisma as seen through the lens of her daughter, friends and colleagues; her many writings, voiced by Rosemary Forsyth; personal and archival materials, including newsreels, television footage and a wealth of photographs. The last shot of the film is the black-and-white photo Richard Avedon took of her in the 1960s, an intense creased face that beckons us to action.  There is no narrator guiding the story, and the chronology of events is not foregrounded.  The result is a polyphony of voices and images, tied by a beautiful score by the director herself, that approach the protagonist as a human being who made the works of mercy the center of her life.

The first half of the film is the weaving of interviews, mostly from the 1990s, to compose a mosaic of Day as a figure of strong presence in the public square for over forty years. In contrast, the second part offers an intimate portrait of Day as a young bohemian in the New York of the 20s, a member of the New York left during the Depression, a single mother, and since 1927 a fervent Catholic convert, who lived the Gospel radically.

It is the task of a different documentary to explore and explain the paradox hinted throughout this film: Day begins as a radical leftist and ends up a committed Catholic, loyal to the teachings of the Church. How did she do it?  In today’s polarized political environment such a journey seems inexplicable.  Larson meets this challenge with expediency, the reading from Day’s 1952 memoir The Long Loneliness.  By founding the Catholic Worker newspaper with Peter Maurin and opening the first houses of hospitality for the homeless and the hungry, Day writes that she channeled her social vocation while searching for intimacy with God.

Using Cole Porter’s Night and Day as a tune without lyrics, emblematic of the thirties, I think that Larson is pointing to the duality that shapes Day’s engagement with the world: a sensitive and artistic nature attuned to glimpses of truth and beauty, put at the service of work, back-breaking work, among the dispossessed, in a life lived in voluntary poverty.

After the screening the director recounted how the film got off the ground.  She knew of the Dorothy Day story since 1991 but was unclear about the format it should take, perhaps a book, or an oral history.  She was a photographer, not a filmmaker. Slowly and mysteriously Dorothy Day guided her steps, and for the next four years she began to shoot interviews and amass archival materials. Around 1995, and thanks to a grant from the Hilton Foundation, she knew the work would be a documentary.  She spent the next eleven years working on it, a labor of love, with setbacks and unexpected twists and turns.  She realized the practical wisdom of Day’s advice about accomplishing any endeavor:  ”Just begin and detach from outcomes”. In 2006, the documentary premiered at the Tribeca Film Festival in New York. 

Larson is now preparing to write a book about the backstage of the film, so that she can send – as she ruefully noted – Dorothy to college, that is Marquette University, the Jesuit institution in Wisconsin that holds the Dorothy Day Archive, where Larson will deposit her materials.

The companion to the film is an interactive website, dorothydaydoc.com, where the visitor can further explore the remarkable life of a woman who responded to a profound calling to help others based on the teaching of Christ.

Thanks to Claudia Larson, Dorothy Day -  ‘a saint for our times’ as the Archbishop of New York called her - graced the Armer screening room last Monday evening. And anyone there could feel that she had been really there with us.