Beelzebub's tall tales to his mama

"In 1920 an unknown man appeared in Europe having lived through some extraordinary experiences in the East. His name was George Ivanovitch Gurdjieff. This is the story of his early years." So begins this curious film, made by Peter Brooke and available for free on Youtube.

The Greek-Armenian G. I. Gurdjieff was a controversial and erratic spiritual teacher, whose ideas sounds like a combination of Buddhism and encounter therapy. Many consider him to have been a charlatan, and even his main disciple and propagandist, P. D. Ouspensky, eventually broke with him (although not with his ideas - after the death of the two men, their respective followers were re-united). Gurdjieff's main work, "Beelzebub's tales to his grandson" is a more or less incomprehensible exposition of the Fourth Way, as the would-be guru called his teachings. Another famous work by Gurdjieff, "Meetings with remarkable men", is ostensibly an autobiography of his youthful adventures and encounters with spiritual teachers in various parts of the world. I never read it, nor do I intend to. Peter Brooke's movie is based on this book, which for all we know might be entirely fictitious.

"Meetings with remarkable men" isn't a particularly exciting or action-packed production. Its sparse dialogue often contains references to various aspects of Gurdjieff's teachings, sometimes hidden ones - as when Gurdjieff's friend on the boat to Egypt says that he is interested in machines, thereby revealing that he is a "machine" himself. You probably need to know a few things about the Fourth Way to really understand the movie. I readily admit that I might have missed some esoteric references myself... Thus, we are dealing with a somewhat "narrow" film, probably of interest only to Gurdjieff sympathizers, obsessed cult-watchers or cineastes who just *have* to watch every weird thing shown at high-brow film festivals.

"Meetings" follow Gurdjieff from childhood to early manhood, and depicts him as a restless seeker for spiritual truths. Influenced by his father, the young man rejects Orthodox Christianity at an early age. He also realizes that regular science doesn't contain the answers. Instead, Gurdjieff goes on a quest that takes him far outside his Armenian homeland (at the time controlled by Russia). He visits Egypt, Mongolia and Bukhara, picking up bits and pieces of information on the way, usually from Muslim Sufis.

Gurdjieff's goal is to find the mysterious Sarmoung Brotherhood, a religious order of considerable antiquity which still guards the esoteric truths of man's place in the universe. The order turns out to be based in Kafiristan. Apparently, such a place really does exist - it's a province of Afghanistan. Note, however, that "kafir" in Arabic means infidel. Thus, Gurdjieff finally finds the answers in "the land of the infidels". In the monastery of the Brotherhood, Gurdjieff sees a number of weird dances, which apparently reveal the secrets of the universe. Some people believe that these bizarre dances are actually taught in Fourth Way groups as a kind of spiritual exercise. Others claim that the dance acts in the film were specially developed for the screen, and that *real* Gurdjieff dance looks different. Ah, how these people love their little mystifications!

Here, "Meetings with remarkable men" ends...

Although this wasn't really my cup of tea, I'm willing to give Peter Brooke's quasi-documentary about Gurdjieff's early life four stars for the effort. Not very exciting if your main interest happens to be, say, "Finding Bigfoot", "Dallas" or "Game of Thrones", but probably of some interest to a certain breed of seekers and lovers of rare films.