| Inquiring Nuns | |
| Music: | Philip Glass |
| Cinematography: | Gordon Quinn |
| Editing: | Gordon Quinn |
| Runtime: | 66 min. |
| Country: | US |
| Language: | English |
Inquiring Nuns is a 1968 Kartemquin Films production directed by Gordon Quinn and Gerald Temaner. The documentary film features Sisters Marie Arne and Mary Campion, two young Catholic nuns who visit a variety of Chicago locales to ask people the question, "Are you happy?"[1] They meet a variety of individuals ranging from hippie musicians to intellectuals, whose responses are everything from the mundane to the spiritual. The film was directly influenced by Jean Rouch's Chronique d'un été,[2] which Quinn and Temaner had watched at Doc Films while they were undergraduates at the University of Chicago. The film was shot on Kartemquin's "Camera #1," a custom-modified crystal sync Auricon with a used manual zoom lens Quinn purchased from Albert Maysles, and to which he added a World War II gunner handle bought from a pawn shop as an extra grip for steadiness.[3]
Quinn and Temaner's fourth collaboration was produced for about $16,000 ($110,005 US in 2016) for Chicago's Catholic Adult Education Center which never suggested any changes or requested a single edit. Both Sisters Marie Arne (now named Kathleen Westling) and Mary Campion (now named Catherine Rock)[4] served at the St. Denis Parish in Chicago's Southwest Side at the time of the filming. They subsequently left the sisterhood within a few years after the film's release, the former eventually becoming a family counselor in the Chicago suburbs and the latter a school superintendent in Florida. One of the random people they encountered in the film was Stepin Fetchit who showed a few of his publicity shots and stated that he was happy.[3]
An Official Selection of the 1968 Chicago International Film Festival, Inquiring Nuns features music by the then relatively unknown composer Philip Glass (Truman Show, The Fog of War) who was paid $100 ($688 US in 2016) for earning his first film credit.[3] [5]
Entertainment Weekly graded Inquiring Nuns an 'A' and applauded the film's "reaffirmation of the virtue of conventional wisdom."[6]
In 2018, Kartemquin received a grant from the National Film Preservation Foundation for a new restoration of the original 16mm print, and collaborated with Argot Pictures on a 50th Anniversary release of the film in US theaters.