CVN films new movie
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photo by Nathan VanderKlippe
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Ben Krygsheld and Aaron Johnson act in the student-directed screen version of ‘Trial of God.’
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photo by Nathan VanderKlippe
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Joel Veenstra and Kirk Heynen work through ‘Trial’ during a pre-filming run-through several weeks ago. The filming, which is still ongoing, has taken longer than first expected.
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By Nathan VanderKlippe
EDITOR IN CHIEF
Joel Veenstra isn’t acting yet; he’s reading. But you might not notice, for all the verve and power he emanates, script in hand.
“I’ll kill! I’ll kill!” he bellows, his voice saturating the small room with its intensity. He keeps reading, excited by the passion of Berish, the bartender he is portraying. The smell of superheated dust singes the air, as the few stagelights shining in the room produce a dim bar-room atmosphere. A peach-colored light glows underneath a round glass-topped table, striking an amber hue through the four IBC Root Beer bottles on the table. Standing up from a stool behind the bar counter, Jeff DeKock looks on and whispers into the ear of actors, giving direction and instruction.
As he speaks, Veenstra stumbles while navigating around the jumble of actors and props all squeezed together in a Calvinist Cadet activity room transformed into a sound stage. In the background, Tiffany Leighton emits a ghoulish whine that’s part demon, part mouse. As Veenstra builds to a crescendoed finish, the room erupts into an unsettling cacophony of eerie screaming and shouting. The sound of laughter soon becomes part of the noise, as weary students sit down with the heaviness of fatigue. The run-through is over.
It’s hard work putting God on trial.
And the stakes are high, since it’s being done entirely by students. The above scene is taken from “The Trial of God,” a script adapted from the play Elie Wiesel wrote based on a concentration camp experience he had as a young boy in Auschwitz, when a number of Jewish scholars tried God and ultimately indicted Him for crimes against humanity. Struggling to find a way to adequately express this experience, Wiesel ultimately wrote it into a play set in a Ukrainian village in 1649, where Jews were being killed in a series of pogroms.
The version adapted by DeKock, a senior and the director of the film, brings the play back to its original setting in World War II, and modifies it for the big screen. (It will be presented in the Commons Lecture Hall on May 4 at 7:30 p.m.)
“Although the play was set in these earlier rise in Jewish suffering, the ideas are the same and they fit the Holocaust the same,” said DeKock. “The questions that it raises are universal, and time doesn’t matter. We put it in the Holocaust because that’s something that happened only 50 years go. People don’t realize how short a time [ago] that was.” The project is an ambitious one – a student-run endeavor funded by the Calvin Video Network and the Communication Arts and Sciences department. The ultimate product will be a 80-minute film, complete with a 10-minute introduction recounting stories of Holocaust survivors and playing images of Jewish suffering.
It will be the longest film ever to be made at Calvin; the longest script to date was 20 pages long; “Trial of God” fills more than 70 pages.
Shot entirely with two digital cameras, the raw footage will fill hundreds of gigabytes of space; CVN bumped up their hard drive storage capacity to 140 gigs in order to edit and manipulate the data. Using digital technology, “we can make a professional-quality feature film on Calvin’s campus now with the equipment we’ve got this year,” said DeKock.
The project has also drawn together a wide cross-section of technically-skilled Calvin students. Everything from the costumes to the lights to a pyrotechnic display is being done by students. “I would have never thought there was that amount of talented people on campus,” he said. “I’m thankful that in four years a large number of us have learned enough to accomplish something truly meaningful, well-done and original.”
The eight-person cast is comprised primarily of Calvin Theatre Company actors who auditioned for the parts last month. Moving from the theatre to the screen poses its own particular difficulties.
“You don’t have to worry about which way you’re facing, about having your back to the audience,” said sophomore Ben Krygsheld, who plays Mendel, one of a traveling group of actors who plays a staged trial within the play. “To capture anger, you don’t need a huge, mean face. [On screen] you can be smaller and convey the same sense of anger.”
Rebekah Blanchard, a senior, plays Maria, a barmaid in the play. After spending four years in CTC, she said it is different working in an all-student environment.
“You have to be a lot more self-motivated. You have to say schoolwork has to be forgone,” she said.
Senior Joel Veenstra plays Berish, the bartender who orders that God be put on trial. “I love the part – he’s a fascinating individual, very passion-driven,” he said. He said the divine questioning was more natural than uncomfortable. “A lot of people question God, so it’s not far-fetched at all. A lot of different things in this world don’t make a lot of sense, and this production delves into that. What is perception? What is reality? It’s a questioning play.”
That questioning is the raison d’être for the production of the play. For DeKock, the play/film will have achieved its purpose if people leave the screening burning with a desire to know more.
“Just seeing a movie isn’t enough, it never is,” said DeKock. “To go and dive into the subject itself – not to put it off as a one-night thing but to spend time reading and thinking about it – that’s what we hope people do after seeing the film.”
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