How many times have you heard that the best remedy for bridging our great American divide is conversation, sitting down with someone of an opposing viewpoint and talking it through? This proposed solution, however, is nothing new, as “A Time for Burning,” currently streaming on the Criterion Channel, demonstrates. In 1965 at the height of the Civil Rights Movement, a Lutheran minister in Omaha, L. William Youngdahl, sought to have his parishioners engage with black members of the community in conversation to help bridge their divide and perhaps begin the road to integrating their church. But Barbara Connell and Bill Jersey’s ensuing 1966 documentary is not about those conversations. No, it is about the conversations to have those conversations, none of which (spoiler alert) come to pass, as Youngdahl finds a flock laying claim to an open mind while cycling through a litany of close-minded excuses of it being too big a first step, too soon, etc., prompting Youngdahl to wonder aloud, “How many years do I need to prepare myself in order to talk with another human being? What am I waiting for?” The black barber that Youngdahl visits in the documentary’s most searing scene would probably tell him that they’re all waiting out the end of the world.
That black barber turns out to be Ernie Chambers who would go on to become Nebraska’s longest serving state senator. And Youngdahl’s congregation is not juxtaposed against Chambers so much as it is described by Chambers in the exact religiously hypocritical terms that they are shown to embody. Indeed, the two men are not really even having a discussion at all; rather Chambers is telling Youngdahl exactly like it is and in terms as likely to infuriate white liberals as white conservatives. (White Supremacy in one minute explains someone who uploaded this scene to YouTube.) And though “A Time for Burning” might classify itself as cinéma vérité, suggesting it is free from aesthetic embellishment, the severe close-ups of the two men in these moments are incredible. The palpable perspiration on Youngdahl’s face and his agonized eyes encapsulate hearing something so difficult while these intimate glimpses of Chambers capture him just as he is described later: “He talked hate, hate, hate, but his eyes were full of love.” Youngdahl leaves this conversation in distress, and though he professes a genuine desire in wanting to listen, Chambers’s prediction that by merely trying to listen, by trying to do something, Youngdahl will be relieved of his ministerial duty, proves prophetic.
Yet, there is one figurative, even semi-literal, ray of light in the form of Ray Christensen. One of Youngdahl’s parishioners, he begins “A Time for Burning” like all the others, not skeptical, exactly, of the intention but hesitant, worried it will fracture the church, only to experience something like a conversion in meeting with several leaders of the black community in Omaha, including Chambers. Christensen’s very air changes, no longer equivocating but speaking with the forceful clarity of someone who has seen the light, only to be stymied as Youngdahl was by fellow congregants who have not. That includes Christensen’s own wife. She yearns for a return to normalcy, you might say, for the church to remain a place where people can gather in peace. “This isn’t the peace that Christ was talking about,” Christensen says in referring to the organ, the hymns, the stained-glass windows. “It’s the wrapping paper.” “A Time for Burning” brings that wrapping paper to life as it ends with scenes from a church service and a hymn laid over it on the soundtrack that given what we have seen does not feel like an affirmation but an open-ended question. “There is a power in me somewhere / I know it’s there.”