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Post by maolsheachlann on Jul 14, 2014 21:35:40 GMT
I don't think I've ever seen a really good religious film. A Man for a All Seasons is only OK, I think. The Passion of the Christ is....well, it's more an experience than a movie. Shadowlands is the closest I can think of a truly great religious movie, but even then, the religion is not in the foreground. I am tempted to put The Wicker Man forward as the best religious movie ever made, but I might be suspected of being deliberately controversial or perverse. (I mean the original, of course.)
A little bit of religion goes a long way in a movie. A lot of religion tends to be too much.
The life of our Lord seems to be unfilmable. It seems like irreverence, or bathos, or anti-climax, or one of those things, to actually commit it to film. (I was going to say 'celluloid', but are films even shot on celluloid any more?) I think part of the reason is that we just don't read the Gospels straight through.
A good movie might be made of Newman's conversion.
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Post by hibernicus on Jul 14, 2014 21:45:54 GMT
I can actually see the point about THE WICKER MAN. It's an expressly anti-religious movie, but it takes the policeman's faith seriously enough not to present him as a hypocrite (if he was a hypocrite the plot wouldn't work for a reason that will be familiar to anyone who has seen the film) and it expressly allows for a reading in which it is the story of a Christian martyr and challenges any Christian to be ready to die for their faith. (Bear in mind, BTW, that the policeman can be seen as a hero even in secular terms, since he is risking his own life to save someone else and is resisting an attempted seduction by someone whom he suspects - quite correctly, though not in the way he thinks - of being involved in a conspiracy to murder.) www.decentfilms.com/reviews/wickerman1973
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Post by assisi on Jul 15, 2014 10:59:22 GMT
I don't think I've ever seen a really good religious film. A Man for a All Seasons is only OK, I think. The Passion of the Christ is....well, it's more an experience than a movie. Shadowlands is the closest I can think of a truly great religious movie, but even then, the religion is not in the foreground. I am tempted to put The Wicker Man forward as the best religious movie ever made, but I might be suspected of being deliberately controversial or perverse. (I mean the original, of course.) A little bit of religion goes a long way in a movie. A lot of religion tends to be too much. The life of our Lord seems to be unfilmable. It seems like irreverence, or bathos, or anti-climax, or one of those things, to actually commit it to film. (I was going to say 'celluloid', but are films even shot on celluloid any more?) I think part of the reason is that we just don't read the Gospels straight through. A good movie might be made of Newman's conversion. I thought the the 1999/2000 film 'Padre Pio', made in Italy, was very watchable as it managed not to be too sentimental, quite realistic and dealt with political and supernatural side of Padre Pio's life very well. Just be careful if you are thinking of buying it on Amazon or elsewhere as it appears to be sold with Italian subtitles. I watched it, in sections, on youtube a few years ago, not the best way to watch anything, but enjoyable all the same. More Info: www.imdb.com/title/tt0211559/?ref_=nv_sr_1
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Post by hibernicus on Aug 5, 2014 20:36:51 GMT
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Post by hibernicus on Aug 5, 2014 20:50:10 GMT
Another take on the film CALVARY (now released in the US) from CATHOLIC WORLD REPORT. Basically the critic thinks the film has good (even great) aspects but lets itself down badly by lack of knowledge or interest at key points in what a priest might actually believe. (He makes the interesting suggestion that the film might work better if Father James was like the whiskey priest in Graham Greene's THE POWER AND THE GLORY - someone who in some respects is actually a bad man but who is still striving to do good.) It could be enlarged on a bit - the problem with the film is that it cannot present a "good priest" completely seriously because (a) that would require the writer and the audience to face the possibility that a good man might believe and advocate Catholic beliefs and practices which from a secular standpoint are uncongenial - nay, uncool (b) the larger point - they would have to consider the possibility that the Faith might actually be true and they ought to consider being Catholics themselves. www.catholicworldreport.com/Blog/3289/a_good_priest_is_hard_to_film.aspx
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Post by maolsheachlann on Aug 5, 2014 21:03:13 GMT
Funnily enough, I was discussing this film with one of the fellows who shares my office in work today. He thought it was amazing and he saw it as a needed argument that we are 'throwing the baby out with the bathwater' (his words) when it comes to Catholicism.
One big problem with the movie, in my view, is that that-- for all its talkiness-- there is no real serious discussion of Catholic doctrine, except in tangential and glancing ways. Various characters make various opportunistic attacks on the Faith, and the priest rebuffs them with various degrees of seriousness, but we are left with little indication of what he actually believes himself, or why he believes it. It's hinted that he is not exactly orthodox, that's all. This would not be such a problem if the Catholicism was simply a background but the film clearly aspires to address Catholicism as a subject.
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Post by maolsheachlann on Aug 6, 2014 13:13:21 GMT
The way I look at it, there are three ways that Catholicism can be used in an artistic works. The first way is for Catholic imagery, symbols and concepts to be used in a purely metaphorical or expressionistic way, without any concern for whether they are true or not. The second way is to explore the subjective aspect of Catholicism, i.e., what it means to its adherents or those affected by it-- again, without any necessary reference to its truth or otherwise.
Rarely you get an artwork that seeks to explore the actual substance of the Faith, at least taking its claims to truth seriously. Calvary looked like it might do this, but it didn't.
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Post by hibernicus on Aug 7, 2014 21:04:51 GMT
Actually it didn't really do the second, either; it made it clear that the Brendan Gleeson character really believed but not why he did so or what difference it made to him (i.e. how much difference it would have made if he had been an agnostic social worker rather than a priest). To explore that the film would have had to take its tongue out of its cheek just a little bit more than the director was willing to do.
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Post by hibernicus on Dec 16, 2014 1:05:00 GMT
An interesting piece from CATHOLIC WORLD REPORT on the First World War poet/artist David Jones and his long war poem IN PARENTHESIS www.catholicworldreport.com/Item/3564/the_poet_the_great_war_and_the_break.aspxEXTRACT During the 1920s and 1930s, Jones, who converted to Catholicism in 1921, was among a group of Catholic writers and intellectuals who were exploring a world that seemed to be falling apart. At that time, the threats were from the materialist ideologies of communism, Nazism, and fascism; more broadly, the West was faced with a general rejection of religious belief and with it a rupture from its cultural past, what Jones and others at the time called “the Break.” Those figures, including the historian Christopher Dawson, confronted what they saw as a real challenge to religious artists and writers. If the culture no longer spoke in the language of the Gospel, literature or art invoking that language was at risk of being incomprehensible. Like the early Christian engagement with the pagan Roman Empire, Christianity—and the art used to express it—needed to be familiar and yet also completely new. In Parenthesis was one attempt to repair that break; so in another way was Jones’s visual work, as he was an accomplished painter and illustrator even before he achieved prominence as a poet. The danger for Jones was that an entire way of seeing and understanding that world lay on the other side of that widening space; he feared that and once it was gone, art as it had been known in the West, with a shared symbolic language and references, would be gone as well. Without what he called the materia of the larger culture, poetry becomes either simple narcissism or empty word games, a fate many would say has already befallen contemporary poetry. So his work is tightly wrapped with allusion and citation to the great tradition of the West, both Christian and pagan, in an effort to connect the experiences of the soldiers in the trenches with the larger martial tradition. This gives his poetry a completely different feel from that of the other war-poets, even those with a then-typical classical education. In Parenthesis ends, for example, with a passage combining the ancient legends of Europe such as King Arthur, and Christendom’s tales of heroism, such as the Song of Roland. The complexity of the poem, therefore, was not, as it became in some works of the period, simply for its own sake. It was meant to point outside of itself toward the truths of human nature and the story of salvation. In his work, Jones was trying to compress the history of his culture into an account of the war that brought that culture to an end. He continued this project in later, even more challenging works such as his long poem called The Anathemata, published in 1952, which combined the Christian story of salvation with the unique history of the British Isles. These poems, and his visual art, remain a kind of guidebook to the history of the West, and to the world without end to which he believed that history points. END OF EXTRACT
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Post by hibernicus on Jan 20, 2015 21:23:40 GMT
The SCottish Catholic blogger Lazarus discusses how a recent study of the Impressionist painter Cezanne glosses over the fact that he was a practising Catholic (which does not mean he was sinless, BTW) and fails even to consider the possibility that there might be a relationship between his art and his faith: EXTRACT All this is particularly strange in that Cezanne is quite clearly an artist who is engaging in that very Catholic thing of trying to find form in the world: a form, not with the accretions of tradition or French bourgeois seeing, but 'the dearest freshness deep down things'. And coupled with a purification of the see-er, we have almost a perfect case study of Catholic art and the encounter of French Catholicism with modernity. (I look up Bernanos, Peguy. They're not there either. Weil gets a one line mention -but a throwaway (and certainly no reference to her religion).) Googling a little more, I find this essay by Patrick Reyntiens. Reassured to notice that I'm not going mad in noticing something is a little odd here: An aspect of Cezanne's personal life not much harped upon is that he was a staunch Catholic. He was a daily Mass-goer. Such aberrations are best left unemphasised in the structure of the myth of the Modern Movement. But it explains a great deal. Cezanne's religion, however conventional it may or may not have been, constituted the prime basis for his sense of identity, stability and personal probity. This in turn fuelled his obsession with painting to heroic lengths. None of this matters much to Catholics, at least educated ones. I guess most of us are used to suspecting the airbrushing that goes on in cultural history (my children tease me for my adding, when possible, 'He's a Catholic' to any passing description of this or that celebrity) and can look (search) past it. But if you enter this world in medias res, unless you're a Catholic on the look out for lacunae, you find yourself in a world that has been scraped of its Catholicism in the same way that Protestant reformers scraped our churches of paintings and colour; and, unless you have it continually pointed out to you, you start to think that the normal state of the world is this barren remnant, smashed ruins being mistaken for the complete original. Cezanne's a small, relatively insignificant case study of that secularization, which is not simply an absence, but an act of positive violence, a distortion of what our Lebenswelt, the cultural environment we inhabit, is really like. Happy birthday to Paul Cezanne. Requiescat in pace. END OF EXTRACT cumlazaro.blogspot.ie/2015/01/happy-birthday-cezanne-catholic.html
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Post by hibernicus on Jan 29, 2015 23:40:29 GMT
Lazarus of CUM LAZARO discusses the TV series and book WOLF HALL and argues that part of the book's impact rests on its being seen through the eyes of Cromwell, imagined as the "disenchanted" secular modern man who no longer sees the world as being full of symbols relating to a greater Meaning - the difference between his own response and that intended by Hilary Mantel is that because Mantel sees secular modernity as a good thing she sees Cromwell as a good thing, whereas Lazarus sees him as psychotic and in this showing some of the problems of modernity: cumlazaro.blogspot.ie/2015/01/wolf-hall.htmlIn the combox, Lazarus makes an interesting point about how this interpretation relates to his recent reading of Walker Percy, and his own view that PErcy is better at representing modern alienation than embodying a way out, at least in his writings: EXTRACT Yes, thank you, that's a good comment to which I can only answer, 'I'm not sure!' First, I think 'modernist disenchantment', to the extent that it's embraced rather than regretted, is evil (or at least closely related to sin). Mantel certainly seems to find Cromwell a good thing rather than (as I'd see him in her representation of the character) something of a monster precisely because he does strip meaning out of the world. As to art needing to excite... I think there is a role for simple revelation: if one could show (eg) what evil simply *is* I'm not sure that one necessarily has to show the alternative. The danger is, as you suggest, that a representation of dullness (or whatever) simply becomes itself dull. I think Mantel does (just) avoid that, but I can see why others would disagree. (I'm aware in writing this post that part of the background here is that I've been reading a lot of Walker Percy recently. He clearly wants to *show* the alienation of modern man, presumably, to encourage readers not to be alienated. But I think: a) he's more successful in showing the alienation rather than the way out; and b) I'm not sure he actually shows it so much as drags the reader into it.) It's a general problem in modern art: what sets out to be a representation of an evil instead becomes an embodiment (or celebration) of the evil. END Percy I think is a bit more successful than this implies, but he seems to believe that the answer lies in life and not in art.
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Post by hibernicus on Mar 21, 2015 0:14:23 GMT
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Post by maolsheachlann on Mar 21, 2015 10:55:13 GMT
That's one of the best and least patronizing articles on Chesterton I've ever read from a secular source. Articles on Chesterton tend to fall into two categories; embarrasingly fawning (written by diehard Chesterton fans, almost always Catholics), and irritatingly patronising (written by secular literary critics who can't help seeing his brilliance but can't swallow half of what he says: "Chesterton was very entertaining and insightful, but, you knaow, you can't really take him seriously...."
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Post by pugio on Mar 27, 2015 15:06:05 GMT
I finally watched CALVARY on Netflix and was thoroughly disappointed.
Were we supposed to be guessing who the would-be killer was? We heard his voice at the beginning; it was rather obvious. The climax of the final scene (pardon my cold-heartedness) was cheesey, melodramatic and gratuitous (I think we saw the event happen over and over from about 4 different angles, with an orchestra blaring in the background).
Gleeson excelled insofar as his role allowed. And the film did make the point that criticism of the Church sometimes is used as a cover for one's own moral failings. However, whatever social insight it offered was marred by the fact that the dialogue and the characters - the entire town in fact - were so implausible that it was impossible to suspend disbelief... The rural townsfolk who sounded like cheeky undergraduates trying to scandalise and impress with their interminable witticisms, the whole town showing up for Mass to receive communion on the tongue when they're clearly not believers (that really doesn't happen anymore), the dopey young orthodox priest who appears to arrived by time travel from the 1940s, the token black man who's a bit rough with the ladies, the pub patrons openly smiling in satisfaction as the wooden church (a wooden church??) went up in flames, the local Garda sergeant living in an Edwardian mansion with his obnoxious Bostonian rent-boy... the whole thing was absurd.
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Post by maolsheachlann on Mar 27, 2015 20:08:02 GMT
Pugio, I got the impression that the entire thing was meant to be rather surreal-- the dialogue was so florid that it's hard to believe it was meant to represent actual speech. I think it was meant to be set in a kind of never-never village that was a symbol of modern Ireland. (Even if it is named as a definite place.)
I still hated it. That movie made me sick.
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