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Post by hibernicus on Feb 16, 2018 23:51:34 GMT
The 2014 Russian film LEVIATHAN, directed by Andrei Zvyagintsev. I did not see it at the time so when there was a one-off showing I decided to go. I had seen a good deal of discussion of its portrayal of corruption in provincial Russia under Putin, so I already knew the basic outline of the plot and this made me more aware of certain symbolic points in the text itself. THOSE WHO WISH TO AVOID SPOILERS FOR THE PLOT OF LEVIATHAN SHOULD NOT READ ANY FURTHER.
The film is very loosely based on the Book of Job and to a lesser extent on the story of Naboth's Vineyard. In a small coastal town in Northern Russia (on the White Sea a bit south of Murmansk; from time to time whales are seen at sea and a whale skeleton on the beach is a recurring image; the place is also littered with derelict factory buildings, presumably closed because Soviet-era industry couldn't survive in the world market) a middle-aged mechanic finds that the municipality (run by a mayor who is basically a gangster) wishes to compulsorily acquire his house and property at a miserably inadequate price. The mechanic believes the mayor wants to build a mansion for himself.
During his military service as a conscript, about 20 years earlier, the mechanic made a friend who is now a hot-shot lawyer in Moscow. The lawyer comes to the town to help his friend, and has succeeded in digging up enough dirt on the mayor, and acquiring enough official backing, to make the mayor momentarily hesitate and consider paying the mechanic a fair price for his property. However, the mayor is encouraged to persevere by a powerful ally, whom I will describe later on.
Meanwhile the mechanic's much younger wife (whose marriage is deteriorating and who is being driven demented by working all day filleting fish in the local fish plant which seems to be the main employer) flings herself at the lawyer out of sheer desperation and they begin an affair. When the mechanic takes them (and some of his friends) on a drunken shooting party they sneak off together and are discovered (off camera) in flagrante - the husband beats them both up.
The lawyer keeps his appointment with the mayor but is beaten, subjected to a mock execution, and told that if he values his life he will go straight back to Moscow, which he does. The mechanic's wife returns to her husband, who subjects her to further brutality; she drowns herself, and the local police (under the control of the mayor) seize the opportunity to frame him for murder. He vanishes into the prison system, and his house is demolished.
During the film we see that the local teenagers spend their evenings boozing and taking drugs in the ruins of an old church (presumably destroyed by the Bolsheviks). There is a sequence in which the mechanic, drinking heavily after his wife's death, encounters an Orthodox priest who seems to be distributing bread to the poor and appears sincere (though his trite attempts at consolation mark him as the film's equivalent of Job's comforters) and who has a shabby little church made of corrugated iron. At the end of the film there is a long sequence in which an Orthodox bishop preaches at the consecration of a splendid new Orthodox church, holding forth on the recovery of national dignity and moral purpose.
The problem with this sermon is that we have previously seen the bishop (sitting in the mayor's office under a portrait of Putin; the mayor also has icons in his office) encouraging the mayor to stand firm and proceed with the dispossession of the mechanic, telling him that he (the mayor) is doing God's work and that God has given him power. He seems to be invoking the Orthodox concept of the separate spheres of church and state, separate but cooperating in "symphonic" harmony - but there is a real touch of horror when he tells the mayor to keep on going to confession and communion weekly and he will be given strength. For an unbeliever this would mean that the bishop is treating the sacraments as nothing more than social conformity - for a believer he is desecrating the body and blood of Christ and actually leading the mayor to his damnation, whatever may be the subjective state of his conscience. (In the last sequence the mayor is seen pointing out the dome of the church to his young son and saying happily - "Look - God sees you". He seems to be quite sincere and to have no doubt that God must be pleased with what He sees of the mayor's actions.)
Later we have seen the mayor, in a moment of triumph, talking on his mobile phone to someone whom we subsequently realise must have been the bishop, declaring that everything nowadays is a brand and that "your brand" can be worked for their mutual benefit. The big reveal at the end of the film is, of course, that the new church in which the bishop talks of truth, dignity and morality is built on the land taken from the mechanic at the bishop's encouragement. (Incidentally, the priest who tried to comfort the mechanic is shown participating in the ceremonies at the new church, emphasising that he too is morally compromised - he may not have been a participant in the crime, but he - and everyone present - must know what happened.)
This post is long and I'm getting tired -when I get back to this - soon, hopefully - I'll offer some further reflections on the film.
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Post by assisi on Feb 20, 2018 20:19:46 GMT
Watched the movie ‘Risen’ (2016) recently.
It centres around a Roman soldier and tribune, Clavius, played by Joseph Fiennes who has to find the body of the crucified Jeshua (Hebrew for Jesus) so that he can quash the rumours of the messiah’s resurrection.
Now the movie revolves around the central character Clavius, who is becoming jaded and tired of his work and the killing it involves. He reports to an equally jaded Pilate who is trying to keep an uneasy peace. The search for the body of Jesus takes him closer to the apostles and eventually to Jesus himself. The portrayal of Jesus and the apostles is done quite well and doesn’t wander into cheesy emotion or cynically detachment.
Most of the scenes concerning Jesus and the apostles are loosely faithful to the bible apart from the fact that there is this Roman soldier in pursuit. However the whole piece is sympathetic, the scenery is spectacular at times and the characters interesting. There are a few hard to take scenes at the crucifixion but other than that, the movie is worth a watch.
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Post by hibernicus on Feb 21, 2018 23:21:21 GMT
Some more thoughts on LEVIATHAN: Zvyagintsev is seen as heavily influenced by the Soviet-era filmmaker Andrei Tarkovsky (who was a Christian believer) but whereas there is a strong element of beauty and joie de vivre in Tarkovsky (an element, not the whole thing - Tarkovsky can be quite dark) Zvyagintsev seems to have a much darker overall view of life. He repeatedly uses wide-angle shots, so that characters in the middle distance are dwarfed and overwhelmed by their surroundings. When the wife is standing on the cliff edge about to kill herself, she sees a huge whale break the surface of the sea. This is obviously a reference to the Book of Job where God responds to Job's questioning by asking him whether he can catch the sea monster Leviathan with a hook, hence the title; but the scene seems nihilistic in a way Job is not. In LEVIATHAN God seems utterly inscrutable, perhaps indifferent (whereas Job seems to say that God has a purpose even if it is incomprehensible to us). It might even be possible to read a blasphemous subtext into the film, with the bishop and the mayor as God and the Devil deciding the fate of Job/the mechanic. (BTW Zvyagintsev says he is a believer.)
The above is perhaps a bit too dark - what is being questioned is not God's purpose but the claim of the bishop and the mayor to embody that purpose. (The film was dedicated to the Pussy Riot demonstrators who got arrested and tried for invading a church sanctuary as part of an anti-Putin protest - in one sequence they appear on screen in a TV news bulletin - and the implication is that the church's alliance with Putin is more blasphemous than anything the demonstrators came up with.) The bishop in the film has clearly succumbed to the third temptation of the devil - to pay him homage in return for the kingdoms of the world. In some respects Orthodoxy is particularly susceptible to this, but of course they are not the only Christian body to have done so. (I do not mean by this that the church should not seek to embody the faith in law and society, but that this should not take the form of - say - having priests quietly let off drink-driving and other charges, or blessing corrupt machine politicians and military dictators.) One of my favourite novels, James Hogg's MEMOIRS AND CONFESSIONS OF A JUSTIFIED SINNER, deals with this very theme so acutely that it hurts.
The USSR appears in the film only as the whale's skeleton - something irretrievably dead, leaving an enormous gap. (There is a scene in which some characters, lacking targets for shooting practice, use pictures of late Soviet leaders instead.) The old church destroyed by the USSR and the closed factories doomed by its demise are signs of a destructive past, but there seems no suggestion that life was any better when it existed - it has simply left a vacuum filled by the mayor and the bishop, who are hardly likely to be any more successful in the long run. (The mayor BTW comes across as more like Yeltsin - an aggressive drunk - than the reptilian, self-controlled Putin.)
I wouldn't draw too close a comparison with our own grand national projects of past decades - but there is a certain family resemblance nonetheless, which we need to bear in mind.
ADDENDUM: Here's a sobering thought. After a process of discernment guided by his spiritual adviser, the mayor in the film determines that his sinful behaviour is unavoidable and should not exclude him from receiving Communion. Remind you of anything?
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Post by hibernicus on May 8, 2018 20:57:54 GMT
The current set of Irish Rail ads in which a passenger finds their experience of rail travel so enjoyable they refuse to leave the train at their destination even though their weeping spouses and children are waiting on the platform outside their window seem to me to be singularly repulsive. It's inviting consumers to luxuriate in other people's suffering and to hurt their nearest and dearest for the sake of self-indulgence. I remember the alcoholic drinks company WKD running a similar campaign some years back, but that, though disgusting in itself, was at least aimed at adolescents who are emotionally immature. Rail is a much more mainstream product, and it's running ads glorifying cruelty. There's something very wrong with a culture which does that.
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Post by maolsheachlann on May 8, 2018 21:57:16 GMT
The current set of Irish Rail ads in which a passenger finds their experience of rail travel so enjoyable they refuse to leave the train at their destination even though their weeping spouses and children are waiting on the platform outside their window seem to me to be singularly repulsive. It's inviting consumers to luxuriate in other people's suffering and to hurt their nearest and dearest for the sake of self-indulgence. I remember the alcoholic drinks company WKD running a similar campaign some years back, but that, though disgusting in itself, was at least aimed at adolescents who are emotionally immature. Rail is a much more mainstream product, and it's running ads glorifying cruelty. There's something very wrong with a culture which does that. Oh, come on. It's a joke! I saw tut-tutting about it on Facebook, too. It's not seriously suggesting people would or should react this way.
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Post by hibernicus on May 16, 2018 21:44:09 GMT
I know it's a joke,but a lot of jokes have an element of cruelty. (I worry about this a bit because I habitually use black humour to come to terms with some horrific event, and this has sometimes caused me to unintentionally offend people). Christopher Lasch's analysis of the tendency of modern life to anaestetise strong feelings and promote cynicism and flippancy comes to mind. (The secular critic of pornography,David Holbrook,had some interesting remarks on this in the 60s as well.)
I've sometimes seen racist jokes that were quite funny (in terms of wordplay,for example) if - and only if - you forget their horrific real-life implications. Some jokes just shouldn't be told.
And the rail ads aren't even funny IMHO.
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Post by maolsheachlann on May 17, 2018 14:28:43 GMT
I don't think everything should be a grounds for humour, but I do think there is certainly an over-sensitivity when it comes to any ethnic or racial humour.
Interestingly, folklorists have found that sick joke cycles about disasters and atrocities very often begin with the emergency response teams who are first at the scene.
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Post by hibernicus on May 17, 2018 21:28:59 GMT
The same is true of doctors - that's why medical students have a reputation for grisly dissection humour; they need to desensitise themselves to do their job.
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Post by hibernicus on Jul 27, 2018 21:35:06 GMT
Siobhan Fenton's new book on the Good Friday Agreement twenty years on. It's quite interesting to read a book on events I lived through in my late 20s/early 30s written by someone who was born in 1993 (and who gets certain details wrong because she didn't live through them - for example, she seems to think there was some uncertainty about whether the 1998 Omagh bombing was carried out by the Real IRA or the Provos, when in fact it was clearly part of a series of carbombings for which the RIRA had claimed responsibility, and only some fringe unionists and right-wing British journalists suggested -sincerely or not - that the PIRA might be involved). Two points worth noting. The first is that despite professions of fairness, the author quite clearly "gets" the nationalist viewpoint and completely fails to "get" the unionist one - for example she notes the unionist habit of insulting the Irish language as a way to offend nationalists, but she doesn't notice that Sinn Fein often uses Irish to provoke unionists (please note I am NOT saying that there is not an authentic language revival movement, which includes some Protestants/unionists, or that all, or even most, Irish-language activists are deliberately setting out to provoke). The second is her coverage of social issues, particularly abortion. (She has a lot on same-sex "marriage" as well, but that is less serious, so I won't discuss it now.) Not only does she complain about the abortion ban being enforced in the courts, and have a lot about the sufferings of women who self-abort (and those sufferings are often real and we need to address them) she remarks that for most civilised people in most civilised places outside Northern Ireland, talk of "committing" abortion is like "committing" a heart by-pass. Note the complete denial of any moral issue, any recognition that there's a second life involved, or that that might even be thinkable as a possibility. She notes incidentally that the majority of unionist voters disagree with the DUP position but support the party nonetheless because of the Union. This is something anyone ought to bear in mind who is inclined to be excessively hopeful about the position of Ulster Protestants and the DUP on the issue. The book was written before our recent infamous "Give us Barabbas" referendum, which makes it even more difficult for pro-lifers in Northern Ireland to hold the line. Deeply depressing.
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Post by hibernicus on Sept 4, 2018 21:27:53 GMT
Roger Buck's COR JESU SACRATISSIMUM is a book of two halves - the discussion of New Age and its limitations is fascinating (and I might add quite free from the hysteria of some Christian treatments which imply everyone involved is possessed by the Devil, though he does believe there was demonic influence behind Blavatsky). It is also a very fine exposition of the power of the Sacred Heart devotion as expressing incarnational/sacramental faith, as distinct from the bodiless gnosticism and arrogance of New Age syncretism. (I happen to have been doing some research recently which touches on theosophy, and I see the resemblance to this very clearly.) On the other hand, I think his account of the French Catholic-monarchist tradition is very idealised, and some of the occultists from that tradition whom he cites may be more dangerous than he realises (because he encountered them when he was moving towards faith and found them an assistance in that context). I'll try to do a longer review somewhere when I find time.
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Post by maolsheachlann on Sept 4, 2018 22:09:45 GMT
Roger Buck's COR JESU SACRATISSIMUM is a book of two halves - the discussion of New Age and its limitations is fascinating (and I might add quite free from the hysteria of some Christian treatments which imply everyone involved is possessed by the Devil, though he does believe there was demonic influence behind Blavatsky). It is also a very fine exposition of the power of the Sacred Heart devotion as expressing incarnational/sacramental faith, as distinct from the bodiless gnosticism and arrogance of New Age syncretism. (I happen to have been doing some research recently which touches on theosophy, and I see the resemblance to this very clearly.) On the other hand, I think his account of the French Catholic-monarchist tradition is very idealised, and some of the occultists from that tradition whom he cites may be more dangerous than he realises (because he encountered them when he was moving towards faith and found them an assistance in that context). I'll try to do a longer review somewhere when I find time. I'm not competent to comment on the historical accuracy. But I will say it's a book I love to take off the shelf and dip into, every now and again.
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Post by Account Deleted on Sept 5, 2018 11:02:16 GMT
Just reading the earlier chapters of Roger's book myself now too.
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Post by hibernicus on Sept 14, 2018 21:33:40 GMT
You may be interested in Peter Hitchens' review of the original GAME OF THRONES novels on which the TV series is based. I looked at these some years ago (partly out of curiosity, given the current Northern Ireland connection, partly because I have an interest in romanticisation and debunking of the Middle ages, having had a bad adolescent dose of Chesterbellocian mediaevalism which led to a painful crashlanding when I studied some actual mediaeval history) and I agree with Hitchens that they leave a nasty taste - not because they dwell on the cruel and bloody nature of feudalism and mediaeval warfare (which is fair enough) but because they are all too obviously based on the adolescent combination of sentimentalism and nihilism which marks a lot of American popular culture, and because the author is unhealthily fascinated by the evils he describes and ostensibly condemns (which is one reason why the books have swelled far beyond their original proportions). Hitchens gets some details wrong (he seems unaware that the series is not complete and some of the more egregious villains are probably due a comeuppance), but he is absolutely right about how it encapsulates the cynicism, darkness and cruelty of a post-Christian neopagan wordview. hitchensblog.mailonsunday.co.uk/2018/09/a-song-of-vice-and-fire.html#comments
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Post by Account Deleted on Sept 14, 2018 22:42:27 GMT
You may be interested in Peter Hitchens' review of the original GAME OF THRONES novels on which the TV series is based. I looked at these some years ago (partly out of curiosity, given the current Northern Ireland connection, partly because I have an interest in romanticisation and debunking of the Middle ages, having had a bad adolescent dose of Chesterbellocian mediaevalism which led to a painful crashlanding when I studied some actual mediaeval history) and I agree with Hitchens that they leave a nasty taste - not because they dwell on the cruel and bloody nature of feudalism and mediaeval warfare (which is fair enough) but because they are all too obviously based on the adolescent combination of sentimentalism and nihilism which marks a lot of American popular culture, and because the author is unhealthily fascinated by the evils he describes and ostensibly condemns (which is one reason why the books have swelled far beyond their original proportions). Hitchens gets some details wrong (he seems unaware that the series is not complete and some of the more egregious villains are probably due a comeuppance), but he is absolutely right about how it encapsulates the cynicism, darkness and cruelty of a post-Christian neopagan wordview. hitchensblog.mailonsunday.co.uk/2018/09/a-song-of-vice-and-fire.html#commentsGeorge R.R. Martin and Philip Pullman both specifically set out to construct atheistic counter-pieces to the works of Tolkien and C.S. Lewis respectively. Pullman resented so much the fact that Lewis allegorically "evangelized" his world-view (Christianity) to children that Pullman went and DID THE SAME THING HIMSELF, only with atheism (correction: anti-theism and anti-clericalism)! I find the hypocrisy of that hard to take, especially when he modeled (or corrupted) the very successful childrens' tales of Lewis, and didn't bring anything newly creative or insightful to the genre. Atheist fantasy writer George R.R. Martin was brazen enough to copy the format of J.R.R. Tolkien name, and frequently comments on Tolkien and compares his work to his own, and so (by disingenuous association) piggy-backs onto Tolkien's reputation to kick start sales of his own subversively anti-Tolkien nihilistic fare. His TV series is essentially a vehicle for pornography, violence and recidivism of personal values. But .. it's only escapist entertainment, isn't it? And the CGI is good. And the Northern economy is benefiting greatly from it. What harm? This is what many minds are being fed.
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Post by maolsheachlann on Sept 15, 2018 7:50:57 GMT
His Dark Materials just seemed like a dull, pretentious, petulant trilogy to me. The final glimpse of "the Authority" being the crowning moment. As you rightly suggest, these anti-Lewis and anti-Tolkien works are parasitic, derivative,reactionary in the purest sense.
There seems to be something incongruous about writing fabulous fiction from an atheistical point of view, from the very start.
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