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Post by assisi on Jul 8, 2011 14:38:52 GMT
Here is an interesting article about the increasing lack of serious treatment of religious belief in European art cinema, by Philip Jenkins - as always worth reading to get a sense of what's going on in the world: EXTRACT If the Vatican ever tore itself away from its present troubles long enough to compose a similar list [to its 1995 recommended films list], I wonder if its clerics could find a comparable range of offerings. The question resonates far beyond the world of film trivia. Some 50 or 60 years ago, the great filmmakers treated religious themes seriously and placed those themes firmly on the cultural landscape. These auteurs created brilliant studies of Christian sanctity, and sometimes presented the churches and their clergy in heroic roles (like the indomitable Resistance priest in Roberto Rossellini's 1945 film Open City). While these films might have been critical of orthodoxies or hierarchies, they presented Christianity as something demanding respect and inquiry [even if the auteurs themselves were finally unbelievers like Ingmar Bergman or Luis Bunuel, and concluded faith was untenable or misguided, they nonetheless saw the question as important - HIB]. Faith mattered. But what would a culturally literate person take from European films made in the past decade or so? One major problem is the lack of films that address mainstream or institutional religion as opposed to general "spirituality." Looking only at films with a particular ecclesiastical setting, one finds a simple and almost uniform message: the church is a model of organized hypocrisy, dedicated to the repression of individual freedom, above all in sexual matters.... [Cites examples of perverted clerics in various recent films, including THE MAGDALEN SISTERS] The apparent evils of Christianity are not confined to explicit sexual abuse. Churches also conspire to rape the mind. The Danish production Worlds Apart (2008) describes a teenage girl brought up in the Jehovah's Witnesses faith but ostracized when she tries to live the life of an ordinary young European. As a study of life in a strict religious sect, the film is excellent, but it stands out as one of the very few treatments of everyday Christian life of any kind in contemporary Europe. [It seems from this that the film is bleakly straightforward about the emotional cost both to the individual psyche and in terms of broken family ties and friendships involved in leaving a rigorist sect, as compared to films such as the British SON OF RAMBOW and the Northern Irish THIS IS THE SEA in which characters who have been brought up in the ultra-strict Exclusive Brethren abandon it almost instantly on exposure to modern popular culture without any apparent doubts, guilt, or ambivalence - HIB] In Europe, far more than in the U.S., religion appears in cinema as a problem, and the solution to that problem is usually liberated sexuality. Consider the 2000 film Chocolat: it was set in a grossly repressed Christian village, and the two adjectives are close to synonymous.
If modern Europe has produced major Christian films, their settings are so exceptional that they can have little relevance to ordinary religious practice. One personal favorite of mine is the 2006 Russian film The Island, a biography of a fictional Orthodox monk, a charismatic saint of immense spiritual power. ... Equally neomedieval was Into Great Silence, a visually stunning 2005 documentary about the lives of French Carthusian monks. The recent Vision explored the life of Hildegard of Bingen. Like The Island, these films were critically acclaimed, but what does that reception say about contemporary attitudes to faith? Religion, it seems, may be a vital and transforming force, but it is the preserve of highly trained mystics dedicated to life apart. Religion is a matter for trained professionals. Ordinary people are firmly being told: don't try this at home. [This might be applied to OF GODS AND MEN as well; one feature which the everyday piety of the Algerian Muslims and the life of the monks have in common is that the everyday viewer will not see these as something which might be emulated in their own world but as something exotic - HIB.] END
www.faqs.org/periodicals/201102/2277062181.htmlAnother manifestation of religion in popular contemporary television/cinema is what I would call the 'symbolic' representation - in reality reducing the power of belief and faith to the symbols while rarely touching upon the moral or sacramental. The holy water and crosses in vampire movies for example. In the recent TV series 'Lost' the theme of redemption is central and the Christian/Catholic images are plenty - the statues of the Virgin Mary, the ending in the Church and the white light of the afterlife, the hint at a type of purgatory for some of those left behind. It is good to see the existence of the supernatural in the denouement but the bulk of the series will be morally centered in the secular with only a symbolic nod to God. Maybe we should be happy at that level of representation and conclude that cinema and TV will be concerned with drama foremost. But there is a nagging feeling that this type of portrayal is an easy way out, a superficial representation of Christianity by evocative symbols but without any reference to the sacrifices and humility that is also part of belief.
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Post by hibernicus on Jul 9, 2011 21:36:26 GMT
Actually there is a tendency in recent vampire movies (even the ones which are not explicitly sympathetic to the vampires) to deny or play down their being vulnerable to Christian symbols. I believe the TV series BUFFY THE VAmpire slayer was re-vamped, so to speak, in this manner after having featured crucifixes etc in its first season.
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Post by hibernicus on Jul 11, 2011 21:12:05 GMT
Terence Mallick's new film THE TREE OF LIFE may be of interest for this thread. The family depicted in the film are meant to be 1950s Catholics, but the portrayal of Catholic practice (even allowing for the fact that it is seen through a child's eye) is somewhat watered down in the interests of accessibility to a wider audience. Thus for example, all the prayers are in English (although Latin chant is used as accompaniment in the God's eye sequences of the creation of the earth, the death of the dinosaurs etc); the church art (statues and stained glass) is either abstract or shows Jesus only (whereas a 1950s Catholic church might be expected to have statues and pictures of saints and the Virgin - whose portrayal might be particularly relevant given that the actress who plays the mother says she was encouraged to model her appearance on traditional portrayals of the Madonna); at one point a priest preaches a detailed sermon on the BOok of JOb, whereas i suspect a 1950s provincial Catholic preacher would not take much interest in the Old Testament. It's certainly a visually beautiful film, and a lovely re-creation of childhood and its fragmented and sheltered perception of the word, but I have two problems with it:- (a) The contrast set up between nature and grace is overdone - in a way that is found in certain forms of both Catholic and Protestant piety but which is particularly characteristic of Evangelicalism and its offspring American Transcendentalism - the material world is seen as utterly divorced from God, whose realm is confined to the psyche and a distant spiritual world. This is a view of God and man which seems to overlook the concept of incarnation. (b) The child in the film grows up to be a man haunted by depression and feeling himself cut off from the natural world and from God, but we don't get a sense of how he came to be like this (nor do we see any of the compensations of adulthood - at one point he is with a woman but we don't know if she is his wife, a girlfriend, or just a casual pickup [addendum - the significant thing about her is that her silence and melancholy expression suggest she cannot 'get through' to him, perhaps has never been able to, that their relationship has no future, and that his adult alienation from the world of nature includes emotional alienation from women, seen as closer to that world -HIB] ; the question of whether he himself has children is never raised - it's as if he only exists inside his head and in his workplace). It has both the beauty and the same problem as Wordsworth's ODE ON THE INTIMATIONS OF IMMORTALITY RECEIVED IN EARLIEST CHILDHOOD: Heaven lies about us in our infancy! Shades of the prison house begin to close Upon the growing boy; But he beholds the light, and whence it flows He sees it in his joy. The youth, who daily farther from the east Must travel, still is nature's priest And by the vision splendid Is on his way attended. At length the man perceives it die away And fade into the light of common day. In other words, even though childhood is shown to have its fears and traumas, the film seems almost to suggest that our real life takes place in childhood and adulthood is a sort of living death. I don't think this is a good attitude - but it is certainly a mood we all get sometimes, and the film is worth a look for how it captures it. Here are a couple of different takes on the film: www.jamesbowman.net/reviewDetail.asp?pubID=2103www.ncregister.com/daily-news/sdg-reviews-the-tree-of-life/ [PS - It has just occurred to me that the decision to present the family as Catholics and the mother as a Madonna figure contrasted with a grim and harsh father might be influenced by the well-known tendency to see God as a vengeful and punitive ruler restrained only by the loving influence of Mary. THis is both a common Protestant misunderstanding of how Catholics see Mary and an actual tendency in some forms of unbalanced Marian devotion.
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Post by hibernicus on Jul 12, 2011 10:45:46 GMT
I have now read Graham Green's original BRIGHTON ROCK novel and I see that my comments on the recent film were slightly distorted by my assumption that the 1940s film was a faithful representation of the original novel. In fact, the novel does not present Pinkie as a psychopath (as in the older film) but as a sociopath, someone whose life has been warped by childhood poverty and who is capable of doubt and remorse as the Richard attenborough character in the 1950s film is not. It remains the case, however, that the new film makes excuses for Pinkie in ways the novel does not - Greene still makes it clear that Pinkie is a premeditated murderer whereas the new film presents him as killing unpremeditatedly during a fight, or in desperation on the spur of th moment. I may try to present a revised and extended post on this a bit later.
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Post by hibernicus on Sept 13, 2011 11:16:05 GMT
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Post by hibernicus on Oct 11, 2011 20:59:34 GMT
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Post by Alaisdir Ua Séaghdha on Oct 12, 2011 19:47:09 GMT
Read the review, Hibernicus. It's scary.
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Post by hibernicus on Oct 12, 2011 20:39:11 GMT
I read the review, and I agree it's scary. That doesn't mean it's not interesting as well.
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Post by hibernicus on Oct 12, 2011 23:52:49 GMT
To clarify things a bit further, Alaisdir, what struck me about the piece is the suggestion that O'Toole's character Ignatius is an example of a mindset I have noticed among some Catholic trads and which has often been commented on among a certain type of Anglican ritualist - a magpie mindset of picking out theological and devotional bits and pieces that appeal to the practitioner and practising/adopting them without much regard for consistency, their deeper implications, or indeed to anyone else's view on the matter, and certainly not the church as a whole. This is a very worrying and potentially destructive attitude - the possibility that O'Toole himself may have been an example of it is indeed scary. One thing that makes me think of this is that I have just got hold of a book about a mild example of the type - Dom Aelred Carlyle, founder of the Anglican Benedictine community on Caldey Island at the beginning of the twentieth century. (The book is called ABBOT EXTRAORDINARY by Peter Anson, who was one of Carlyle's monks). Basically, Carlyle held together the community by personal charisma and made things up as he went along, picking up whatever monastic features caught his fancy. When he had exhausted the patience of the Anglican authorities (partly because he was financially reckless - not dishonest but inclined to launch grandiose projects without thinking how he would pay for them) he led his community over to Rome. Unfortunately the Roman authorities assumed that because they looked like monks and had been living in community they understood Benedictine life better than they actually did, and similar embarrassments followed. (The community moved to another location in England after Carlyle stepped down as abbot, and were replaced on Caldey by the Cistercian community which still inhabits the island.) Carlyle appears to have been a fundamentally decent and well-meaning man, despite some problematic eccentricities - he had a long and fruitful apostolate as a secular priest in British Columbia before returning to monastic life in his old age - but that sort of mindset can lead to much worse things.
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Post by Alaisdir Ua Séaghdha on Oct 13, 2011 19:56:02 GMT
The review is scary, but fascinating.
I agree with you about the types that Toole may well be describing, the theological and devotional magpies. I think the label 'traditionalist' is one which one must be careful about, both in application and adoption. There are plenty of Catholics willingly adopting and turning out just as a la carte as some of the most dedicated Tabletistas.
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Post by hibernicus on Oct 13, 2011 22:54:32 GMT
I use "traditionalist" in a broad descriptive sense (generally for people attached to the TLM and critical of some of the post-Vatican II changes, as distinct from "conservative" who are doctrinally orthodox but happy with the liturgical changes/ think it can be handled by a "reform of the reform"). I take it you mean that all who call themselves "traditionalist" are not kosher, rather than that those who are not kosher should not be called "traditionalist"? I would describe the Palmarians, for example, as broadly "traditionalist" in the sense that they appeal (or did in the beginning) to people dissatisfied with the changes and regarding themselves as traditionalist, even though they bear about as much resemblance to traditional Catholicism as Rev Sun Myung Moon does to Jesus.
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Post by assisi on Oct 22, 2011 13:09:57 GMT
Two very good novels worth reading, both with very different styles, are The Leopard by Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa and Pedro Paramo by Juan Rulfo. Both are interesting and topical as they are set in periods of history where great social and political changes are occurring or have occurred. Both take place amongst peoples in a mostly pious Catholic environment.
In The Leopard the story revolves around Don Fabrizio a Sicilian ‘Prince’ during the time of Garibaldi and the movement for Italian unification. Don Fabrizio represents the old order of minor royalty among a deferential peasantry. His friend, Fr Pironne fears for the future of the Church during this ‘Risorgimento’. In the midst of the ensuing storm that threatens to kill off his old ways, Don Fabrizio can see another alternative in the pragmatic approach to change of his cunning and charming nephew Tancredi. Fr Pirrone too shows the same kind of pragmatism in dealing with his fueding relatives when he returns home on holiday.
Although we may sympathise with Don Fabrizio’s old ways we can see that he himself is flawed in his pride and, although pious and respectful towards the institution of the Church, he is regularly unfaithful to his wife. The real attraction of the novel lies in the intelligent and profound portrayal of Don Fabrizio’s coming to terms with the new realities, to such an extent that the reader feels sympathy for the old order despite its arrogance and hypocrisy.
Pedro Paramo is a small novel, one that could be read in one day, and is the only novel written by Juan Rulfo. It is often cited as the originator of the ‘magic realism’ genre that later gave rise to novels like ‘One Hundred Years of Solitude’ by Gabriel Garcia Marquez. A son travels to a town, Comala, to find his father and instead finds a town of ghosts or souls in purgatory. The story of his landlord father and the local peasants unfold in a fragmented manner in an atmosphere of dominance, cruelty and harsh landscapes. The local priest is tormented by the souls he feels he has let down and the deference he has paid to the harsh landlord Pedro Paramo.
The historical context is not clear. This is a novel more about people, of their hopes being dashed and harsh realities of what is almost a feudal system. But It may also point at the end of the feudal way of life and signify the gradual depopulation of towns like Comala as the Mexican rural population flooded into the cities in the middle of the 20th century.
The power of this novel lies in the simple prose, the heavy atmosphere and the patchwork of often heartbreaking and harsh stories from what the reader presumes to be the ghosts or spirits of the people who lived there during Pedro Paramo’s reign. It is well worth a read if only for its style alone.
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Post by hibernicus on Oct 22, 2011 18:09:20 GMT
THE LEOPARD is interesting in that it represents some of the features of Catholicism in a Mediterranean ancien regime society, of a sort often idealised by traditionalists/integralists: Religious belief is seen as something which is mainly for women and which upper-class men don't take seriously beyond external observance. The Prince's wife is very devout (he justifies his going to prostitutes by claiming her piety makes her frigid) as is her daughter, who is very plain and otherwise doomed to disappointment (her cousin Tancredi, the male-line heir to the title, who would normally be expected to marry her, instead marries the daughter of the upwardly-mobile mafia boss who has enriched himself at the family's expense - in the last chapter she is a frustrated old spinster mourning her father and dealt a further blow by the announcement that the Vatican has decided most of the family collection of relics are spurious and must be discarded). Fr Pirrone's position sheds light on the career of St Alphonsus Liguori and the early history of the Redemptorists. He is not a religious order priest, or a priest in a parish - the sort of functions we would consider "normal" for priests today - instead he is private chaplain to an aristocratic household, a sort of glorified servant. St Alphonsus placed such an emphasis on austerity, obedience and group solidarity among the first Redemptorists precisely because they were expected to work among the poorest of the poor - like the hill shepherds of the Abruzzi, for whom there was little formal religious provision (the sort of background Fr Pirrone comes from) - and they would have to resist the strong temptation facing any ordained cleric in Naples - to gravitate to the big cities and look for this sort of chaplaincy or some other cushy endowment. The spiritual danger of such a position is shown when the Prince humiliates the chaplain by taking him in his carriage to the brothel and making him wait outside while the Prince is inside. The priest does have enough spirit to complain to the Prince about his behaviour, but they both know he does not have quite enough to tell the Prince's wife and risk losing his chaplaincy and being sent off to starve in some poor parish in the back of beyond. The underlying theme is the vanity of human wishes (the famous line that "for everything will have to stay the same everything will have to change" is too often quoted in isolation - the point of the novel is that the change comes in ways that even those who support it can't expect or control, and most of what they hoped to preserve is lost in the process) - this could be interpreted in nihilistic secular terms, or as a reminder that heaven cannot be found on this mutable earth, but only in eternity. One context for it which has particular relevance for us here in Ireland is the contrast between the high hopes and superheated rhetoric which accompanied the struggle for Italian unification (the Risorgimento, which not coincidentally means resurrection) and the all-too-obvious shortcomings of the state produced by it. (At the beginning of the novel, Tancredi and his associates are using the rhetoric of Garibaldian nationalism and following Garibaldi to the conquest of Sicily and Naples; by the end, they have turned their weapons on poor old Garibaldi, who made the mistake of actually believing this stuff, because his attempt to attack the remainder of the Papal States threatens a war between France and the new Italian kingdom.) The language of Italian nationalist romanticism was further discredited by its use by Italian warmongers in the First World War and by Mussolini's fascist regime - twentieth-century Italian literature has tended to be very terse, spare and understated in reaction against that overblown heritage. There is a certain affinity to the way Walker Percy's novels satirise the difference between the image of a heroic aristocratic South and the late twentieth-century suburban reality. One last thought - there is an interesting character whom Assisi doesn't mention - the sacristan Don Ciccio, who remains outspokenly loyal to the fallen Bourbons and is outraged that when he tried to vote "No" in the referendum on Italian unification his vote was not recorded. He strikes me as being the sort of person who in the present day is most likely to be a traditionalist - someone close enough to the old regime to be attached to it, but not close enough to its workings to see its seamier side or to be up to date with the latest trends. I am sorry to say that a lot of bishops in the aftermath of Vatican II were rather like the Prince (at least in his desire to go with the flow and stay in with the party in power) and a lot of trads were left in the position of Don Ciccio.
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Post by hibernicus on Nov 23, 2011 22:16:13 GMT
There are some interesting affinities between THE LEOPARD and the works of the historical novelist Alfred Duggan (1903-64). Unlike Lampedusa, whom I believe was a religious sceptic, Duggan was a practicing Catholic (at least in maturity; he led a wild life as a young man at Oxford). He was born into a wealthy Irish-Argentine family but raised as an English aristocrat after his widowed mother married Lord Curzon. His novels are haunted by the twentieth-century decline of the British Empire and its traditional ruling class, even though they are set in the mediaeval and classical worlds. (This in itself is unusual; historical novels generally tend to be best when set in the relatively recent past - it is generally agreed, for example, that Walter Scott's mediaeval novels are less successful than his tales of the Jacobite wars. It helps that Duggan was a professional historian and archaeologist.) I read him first as a romantic teenager and I must say I didn't like him - both because he is very pro-Norman and because his ironic treatment of his protagonists sat awkwardly with the romanticised view of the Middle Ages I picked up from GK Chesterton. Now in a somewhat sadder middle age I find him very insightful though sometimes perhaps a little dry. He is not an outspokenly religious writer, except in his novels about St Edward the Confessor and St Thomas Becket, where miracles are presented as events like any other recorded in the chronicles. A brief check on the historical background will show that where events are uncertain he inserts speculations which present his heroes in the most favourable light, but he does produce convincing portrayals of Edward as a gentleman of genuine humility who sees himself as God's unworthy instrument even when he works miracles, and of Becket as someone who has to struggle to control a savage temper but is all the more saintly because he (mostly) succeeds, whereas his nemesis Henry II is always indulging his temper with disastrous consequences. It is possible, however, to detect a certain religious thread in his portrayals of the vanity of human wishes. A recurring theme is a protagonist who sees him/herself as noble, clever and wise and quite fails to realise that they are being gradually corrupted by compromises and helping to destroy civilisation - until they fall through to disaster. (A variant is the character of Cerdic, in THE CONSCIENCE OF THE KING, a novel which will be greatly appreciated by mislikers of the British Royal Family for it presents their ancestor as an apostate, fratricide, traitor, mass-murderer and generally sociopathic opportunist who concludes his candid narrative of his crimes with the reflection that if what he was taught in his childhood was true he will certainly burn in Hell forever, but it was fun while it lasted. Cerdic, a Romano-British aristocrat who deserts to the invading Saxons and carves out a kingdom for himself, knows quite well that he is helping to destroy civilisation but goes ahead and does it anyway, and his first-person narrative is really chilling.) An alternative - a narrative of salvation - can be found in his first novel KNIGHT WITH ARMOUR, describing the first Crusade through the eyes of a young knight attached to the Duke of Normandy. He is not too bright, he quite honestly and naively sees no contradiction between his religious fervour and his hope to get a nice estate in the East, and he loses everything through a combination of honesty, ill-fortune and insensitivity. By the time he dies fighting on the walls of Jerusalem everyone who knew him, loved him or might have told his story is dead or has deserted him - yet his fundamental integrity comes through very strongly, and when he cries with his last breath "Ville Gagnee" (the city is won) it is clearly implied that he has gained not the earthly but the heavenly Jerusalem. The story certainly brings home how, for all their faults and horrors, mediaevals could see the Crusades as mirroring the difficult journey through life and the Crusades as symbolising life's pilgrimage. Perhaps I read too much into this, but it is worth reading Duggan to decide for yourself. I was sad to see the Central Catholic Library sell off their copies of his books recently, even though this enabled me to buy a couple I didn't have myself.
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Post by Deleted on Nov 23, 2011 22:53:52 GMT
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