From: Patrick Finneran '53: Remembering Campion
My memory of Campion begins in 1946 and the visit to our home of one Francis J. Carey, SJ. The war was over and life was getting good again.
Father Carey swooped in, 16-millimeter projector in hand, a portable movie screen and several reels of silent color scenes of life at Campion.
He was there both to recruit me and interview the family. I didn't know it then, I later learned that he'd already visited my grade school, where he "interviewed" Sister Margarita, OSB, principal of St. Bartholomew Catholic School about the Finneran boy.
The movies were really something, as was the running narrative provided by Father Carey.
When the movies were finished my mother announced that dinner was ready and we all adjourned to the formal dining room, where Father Carey regaled us with more stories of Campion. To say he was a crackerjack salesman would be to understate his talent. By the time he left that night, I couldn't wait to get to Campion!
Growing up in Columbus, Indiana, a small town in central southern Indiana- population back then about 15 or 20 thousand- I'd never been away from home for any length of time before, so my Dad decided it would do me good to spend a few weeks at a boys camp in Minnesota to acclimate me to being away from home and family.
Except for a case of mumps, it was a great time, and I found the joy of making new friends. While I was away, Mom took care of assembling Campion's required list of clothing, (so many T-shirts, socks, underwear etc.,) nametags on everything, and impedimenta required by the school. The last two required items: a footlocker, and a laundry box. These items were to be shipped to Campion via Railway Express, (remember Railway Express?), about a week before the required reporting date.
Having survived camp without pains of homesickness, a few weeks later, a day before the appointed arrival date, the family boarded Indiana's own Monon passenger train, in route to Dearborn Station in Chicago. Once there we stayed over night at the Ambassador East Hotel. It wasn't my dad's first time in Chicago by a long sight, so he took the family out to dinner at the famous Barney's out by the old stockyards.
The following morning we were off to Union Station to put me aboard the Burlington Zephyr. At Union Station I joined in a large group of high school age boys, all headed for a strange new place- Prairie Du Chien, Wisconsin. A Jesuit had been assigned to keep us herded together and put on the train. If memory serves I think it may have been Fr. Paul Murphy, S.J.
By mid afternoon the train pulled to a stop and we were herded off the train. My first look at Campion was the backside of Marquette Hall, Our Lady of Angels Chapel, and off to the south a large playing field. The footlockers were placed on a stake-bed truck, and we were instructed, to take up our suitcases and "Follow me!"
Next- my first night and day at my new home away from home.
From: Director Matt Micka '74: The Story Behind Begone Satan
The Story Behind Begone Satan
by its director Matt Micka
I made my first Super-8 film as a freshman for Mr. Donnegan’s English
class, in the spring of 1971. The camera and editing device was
borrowed from Charles “Chuck” Link. Mark Monoscalco taught me how
to edit—how to splice film together. The film was called “Al,”
and starred Al Kamarowski. At the climax, he slips into a toilet
stall on Wing 2-South of Marquette Hall, and emerges as Nose-Man, a
super-hero in a cape with a nose the size of… Al’s own nose! I
shot two 3 min.+ rolls of film, and the soundtrack featured Richard
Strauss’s “Thus Spake Zarathustra,” in other words, the “2001:
A Space Odyssey” theme…
The
first semester of my sophomore year I spent in Maracaibo, Venezuela,
where my father worked for Mobil Oil Company. I returned to Campion
in January, and, in the spring of 1972, my mother bought me, for my
birthday, a lovely Rollei Super-8 camera, from a tiny camera shop in
St. Louis. I shot one roll of film that semester, documenting the
all-male production of “A Midsummer Night’s Dream,” which took
place in a little glade of trees close by the gymnasium.
I shot two Super-8 films in the fall of 1972, both starring Roland
Winkler. I appeared in the second, which consisted of Roland and I
seated on the railroad tracks that ran behind Marquette and Lucey
Halls, playing a game a chess. This was intercut with shots of an
approaching train, plus some “pixilation” I’d done with my
sister’s stuffed animal collection, over the summer in Maracaibo.
(Don’t ask what these various elements were supposed to add up to,
please!) I was laughing hysterically, seated on those tracks, and
could not stop. Roland grew exasperated with me. I never DID stop
laughing, but my long hair concealed my face! I was at that time
taking Still Photography that semester with Fr. Strzok, and he was
aware of my interest in filmmaking.
So in the spring of 1973, Fr. Strozk asked me two questions, in the
darkroom, while we were developing film. One was whether or not I’d
ever considered joining the Society. This struck me as funny, since I
had stopped attending mass as a freshman. But he also asked me
whether I wanted to make a 16mm film, using the Jeb’s wind-up 16mm
Kodak camera, and receive credit for it. He told me that, while I’d
have to pay for the film and processing myself, he’d be able to get
me the “Jesuit Discount” from the lab. I said sure. I had $100.
So I began concocting a plot.
Much of the plot was contingent upon features of Campion’s campus that I
thought photogenic. I loved the Study Hall, which was no longer used.
(I think that my class, the Campion Class of ’74, might have been
the last to utilize it.) I loved the cupola on top of Campion Hall.
And I was aware that there was an entrance to the steam tunnels
beneath the priest’s booth within one of the Chapel’s
confessionals. And it just so happened that I was appearing in a
theatrical presentation that was to take place in the Chapel over
Mother’s Weekend, so I had access to keys! Evidently among the keys
on the ring was a key to the padlocked trap-door that opened into the
tunnels.
I was also an ardent revolutionary at that moment in time, thoroughly
steeped in the “Social Justice” ethos of the Order itself—of
Mr. Richard Lundstrom in particular (who’d himself been a Jeb,
although I didn’t know this, I don’t think, until years later),
and Fr. “JVOC” O’Connor, and African-American Ed Smith, who Mr.
Lundstrom had been instrumental in hiring as an instructor, in the
winter of 1973. With Mr. Smith, I was taking Black Studies, which
concerned former colonial Africa, and Urban Studies, which concerned
the United States. I loved both classes, and loved Ed Smith, and was
one of the few white kids enrolled in both classes. Mr. Smith
screened “Battle of Algiers,” which remains a favorite film of
mine. I recall one of my African-American classmates objecting that
the protagonists of the film didn’t look very Black. Which of
course they didn’t, since Algerians aren’t Black Africans! Mr.
Smith smiled at this…
Anyway I was all for revolution, but I knew that I wouldn’t be all that
enthusiastic about killing people. In other words, I supported a
revolution’s results, but was squeamish, about its methods. So some
of this anxiety figured into the plot of “Begone Satan,”
definitely. Superficially, “Begone Satan” might seem to have
been made by someone who was vehemently at odds with the Jesuits—or,
at least Catholicism. While I wasn’t a Believer, however, I wonder
whether there was any student on campus at that time who was more of
a proto-Jesuit than I was! For me the S. J. after a Jesuit’s name
stood for Social Justice, and I couldn’t have been more in
agreement with the whole thrust of the Society, towards that end. I
had no problem whatsoever with the Jesuits!
I did however have a huge problem with my father. Of course I did my
best not to think about this, but it worked its way thoroughly into
the plot of “Begone Satan,” in the character played by Dan
Fullerton, in other words the Headmaster. He is an authoritarian
bully, not unlike my father was. In the end, he gets pitch-forked to
death, and the “good” rebel, played by senior John Seery, laments
this violence. The “good” rebel was of course the non-violent
rebel whom I most identified with. It would have behooved me,
however, in real life, to have been more like the “bad” rebel,
the rebel with the pitchfork, played by Don Nausbalm… More on that,
in a moment.
On my 17th
birthday, then, May 7, 1973, we began shooting, in the Chapel, two
days after the second and final performance of “Through the Eye of
Man,” the Mothers’ Weekend theatrical extravaganza. In other
words, we still had the keys! Through Fr. Strzok, we’d formally
requested permission to shoot in the steam tunnels; but, permission
was denied. To Fr. Strzok’s everlasting credit, he not only went
along with me shooting in them anyway, he himself manned the camera
in one “action” shot, the one where you see the “good” rebel
from behind. That is actually my back, and, my long hair, in that
shot, not John Seery’s! That, I guess, was my “Alfred Hitchcock
Moment,” the moment in the film when the film’s director makes a
semi-clandestine appearance!
Fr. Strzok in fact was on hand for nearly all of the “shoots” over
the next two weeks. He was responsible for doing all of the
light-meter readings, and telling me what F-stop to set the camera
at. I did the actual shooting. When we got the “rushes” back in
mid-May, he chastised himself for not having adequately lit, or else
not properly exposing, the scene in the Chapel, but I love those
shadows, and all that “spooky” darkness. Alice Krahn, who was our
drama instructor, and a friend to me, was on hand for all of the
“shoots” but for one, when she couldn’t line up a babysitter.
At first I’d thought that she’d be “in charge of the actors,”
while I’d concentrate on cinematography, but it became clear from
the first day that I had plenty of ideas concerning exactly what I
wanted each and every actor to be doing. Alice, however, very kindly
continued to show up, to provide me with moral support, and what
amounted to artistic nurturance/mothering.
Alice’s
husband Lucian played one of the three ecclesiastical “henchmen.”
He’s the guy who delivers the electrical shock to those who are
being punished. The other two henchmen were played by Scholastics.
Mr. Romanowski, the fellow in the glasses, had been a star student at
Campion just a few years earlier. He’d just appeared in our
theatrical extravaganza, believe it or not, dancing a ballet with
Alice. He got permission from the Order to study ballet in New York
the next school year, but promptly permanently injured a knee at the
onset of his training. He soon left the Order.
I had dinner with him once in New York, and I
wish that I’d spent more time with him. The other henchman was
played by Mr. Cretik, who is now the Provincial of the Wisconsin
Province of Jesuits! It’s him who we see at the beginning, up in
the cupola, surveying the campus, wielding a telescope. (Passing
through the very top floor of Campion Hall, which amounted to its
attic, by the way, to film on the roof, was one of the highlights of
my years at Campion. That top floor had of course once been where the
entire freshman class had lived in little “stalls” or cubicles,
as best I understand it. When we passed through it, it was used for
storage, only, but its stale air exuded Campion history.)
We got the “rushes” back just before the school year ended. A few
classmates saw them, but of course, you shoot films out of sequence,
and only fashion the shots into a narrative in the “editing room.”
I duly edited the film in St. Louis, as soon as classes ended, in
early June. I rented editing equipment from the same camera store
from which I’d purchased my Super-8 camera, and the incredibly nice
store owner let me project the completed film on his projector in the
store after I’d finished. I then went to the main branch of the St.
Louis Public Library, and spent an afternoon listening to scratchy
recordings of classical music. One piece by Richard Strauss, whose
“Thus Spake Zarathustra” I’d already used in “Al,” seemed
uncannily promising.
Like “Begone Satan,” it was 14-minutes long, plus a few extra seconds.
Using a methodology so primitive that, in today’s digital world, it
is almost laughable, I “timed out” the film with notation of when
the scenes in the film changed, i.e. when it changed from humorous to
dramatic, etc., and compared this against a similar “timing out”
of the piece of music, Richard Strauss’s tone poem, “Till
Eulenspiegel’s Merry Pranks. And, to an absolutely “uncanny”
degree, the shifts in the dramatics of my film seemed to coincide
very closely to the emotional shifts in the music. Indeed, the very
“plot” of the tone poem is about a mischievous “imp,” Tll
Eulenspiegel, who plays jokes on everybody, and who gets his
comeuppance, in the end. So I “went with it,” never even hearing
the piece of music played with the film when I ordered and purchased
an LP recording of “Till Eulenspiegel,” and then recorded it
onto reel-to-reel tape.
Then my authoritarian father, who I had problems with (!), removed me from
Campion again. Halfway through the summer preceding what was supposed
to have been my senior year, I was informed of this. I was devastated
but silent, because my father intimidated me, terribly. I did not
fight back. How I wish, in all seriousness, that I’d been possessed
of more of the “balls” of my “bad” rebel in “Begone Satan,”
and been capable of defending myself. In a very real way, because I
wasn’t at least able to fend of my father’s authoritarian
decision with a “metaphorical pitchfork,” I let HIM kill ME, by
“aborting” me from Campion. (By the way, my only “sins” at
Campion were refusing to cut my hair, not attending mass, and, worst
of all, being critical of the doings of Mobil Oil Company in
Venezuela, a political perspective which had but of course been
provided to me by the “Social Justice” Society of Jesus. I was no
pot smoker. I didn’t drink. I wasn’t getting anybody pregnant.
No, not even close, there was nobody to impregnate, alas…)
We moved to New Orleans, and I entered Loyola University, a Jesuit
instution of course, but no Campion! I submitted the film, with its
soundtrack, to the 1973 Kodak Teenage Film Festival. Of course it
didn’t win. It was returned without comment. What the poor judges
must have made of the scene in which the confessional doubles as an
electro-shock chamber, we’ll never know!
So nobody who appeared in the film ever saw it in its finished form,
until it got digitized finally in 2004, 31 years after its
completion! Michael Murray, Mark Gomez, Joe Miesen and Ed Egan each
pitched in $200 to get the digitization done. Back in 1973, the film
had been “hot-spliced,” and the glue of the splices had
discolored. So, futzing about somewhat with it digitally, I “removed”
single frames on either side of each splice. Then I took the titles,
which had been at the end, and moved them up front. Then I removed I
think a two or three second pause near the climax of the tone poem
“Till Eulenspiegel.” At which point my soundtrack, this famous
piece of classical music, gave the impression of having been
specifically written for the film. The co-incision between multiple
changes in the music and changes of action in the film are “uncanny!”
One final uncanny co-incision remain to relate. I’d learned of “shock
treatment” while reading “One Flew Over the Cukoo’s Nest”—but
of course at Campion, in Freshman English, with Mr. Donnegan. Thus
the confessional shock-chamber. Now, in New Orleans, I couldn’t
confront my father, couldn’t consciously hold anything against him,
even. But, I could hate my mother, and subject her to endless
ridicule, for “aborting” me from Campion. I left her have it,
relentlessly, throughout the fall of 1973. It was she, after all, who
had championed the Jesuits, because she’d attended an all girls’
Catholic high school, Rosate Kane in St. Louis, which had been the
“sister school” of the Jeb St. Louis University High School. She
took it to heart, too, the fact that she’d at least let herself be
bullied into going along with my second and final removal from
Campion.
When she suggested, in early 1974, that I obtain a ring, a class ring I
mean, and attend my class’s graduation, in May 1974 (since I would
technically “graduate,” having barely earned enough credits, my
junior year), I let her have it ten times harder than I’d been
letting her have it since the previous September. And, what did this
culminate in, all this miserable family drama? My mom got shock
treatment, at Oshner’s Clinic, and was institutionalized for
months. Upon her release, she promptly became an alcoholic. Alas! Had
I only been more like my “bad” rebel!