Long Pauses

Tag: Faith

  • In Their Own Words

    Iraq War Not Justified, Church Leaders Say

    The heads of more than 60 Christian organizations issued a statement opposing a preemptive war on both moral and practical grounds. They included leaders of Bush’s and Blair’s own denominations — the United Methodist Church and the Church of England, respectively — as well as other major Protestant groups, Catholic men’s and women’s orders, humanitarian agencies and seminaries.

    Evangelical Figures Oppose Religious Leaders’ Broad Antiwar Sentiment

    In religious circles, the antiwar voices are vastly outnumbering the those in favor of a war. Forty-eight Christian leaders, including the heads of the Episcopal Church, the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America, the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.), the United Church of Christ and the National Baptist Convention, an African-American denomination, have sent a letter to the president opposing military action.

    U.S. Church Leaders Oppose Bush-proposed Iraq Pre-emptive Strike

    We oppose on moral grounds the United States taking further military action against Iraq now. The Iraqi people have already suffered enough through more than two decades of war and severe economic sanctions. Military action against the government of Saddam Hussein and its aftermath could result in a large number of civilians being killed or wounded, as well as increasing the suffering of multitudes of innocent people.

    Bishops toughen opposition to war

    The government’s hopes of achieving consensus for a pre-emptive war against Iraq were dealt a blow last night when the bishops of the Church of England significantly hardened their opposition. In a submission to the Commons foreign affairs select committee, the bishops say: “To undertake a preventive war against Iraq at this juncture would be to lower the threshold for war unacceptably.”

    Uniting Church plans civil disobedience over Iraq

    “They’re not fanatics or anything like that – they’re just church people, farmers, business people, ministers, young people, old people, men, women just feeling grave concern and feeling somewhat powerless in the

    face of all the saber-rattling that’s going on,” Reverend McCray said.

    51 Protestant, Orthodox, Catholic, Evangelical Leaders Petition President Bush To Reconsider Iraq Invasion

    Fifty-one heads of American Protestant and Orthodox churches and organizations and of Roman Catholic religious orders today announced opposition to U.S. military action against Iraq. In a letter to President Bush, the church leaders acknowledged that “Mr. Hussein poses a threat to his neighbors and to his own people, [but] we nevertheless believe it is wrong, as well as detrimental to U.S. interests” to launch an attack on Iraq.

    Minnesota Church Leaders Oppose War with Iraq

    At the time of publication, the member denominations of the Minnesota Council of Churches who have publicly declared opposition to immediate war with Iraq include: the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America, the United Methodist Church, the Presbyterian Church (PCUSA), the Episcopal Church (ECUSA), the United Church of Christ, and the Christian Churches (Disciples of Christ). Other state councils of churches who have taken similar stands include those in California, Kentucky, North Carolina, Ohio, Oregon, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin.

  • All We Are Sayin’

    Liza Featherstone’s article, “Peace Gets a Chance,” provides a helpful overview of the various coalitions being formed to protest America’s regrettable foreign policy decisions of late. The largest gathering in America so far was on October 6 in New York City, where 20,000 assembled as a response to Bush’s call for war. Strange that such a large gathering took place and I’d heard nothing of it, particularly when I live in a culture dominated by the liberal media. I guess it’s true what they say about a tree falling in a forest.

    To me, the most interesting part of the piece is this quote from Global Exchange‘s Jason Mark, who claims that the challenge now is to oppose “the idea of American empire without sounding like 1970s leftists. People don’t want to sound off-the-wall, but the words ’empire’ and ‘imperialism’ are fair game because they’re using them.” With the failures of, first, the New Left, then the collapse of Communism, the left has been struggling for some time now to find a practical approach to global issues, one that acknowledges the potentially positive influence of capitalism without surrendering its progressive stance on humanitarian issues. As a child of the 80s, I’m beginning to feel something like excitement for the first time, guarded but hopeful that a popular movement — one with a moral foundation and genuine political substance — might coalesce in response to America’s economic (and now militaristic) imperialism.

    On a whim, I googled “Christian peace movement,” which returned a fascinating assortment of sites. Of particular note are Pax Christi: The International Catholic Movement for Peace and The Quaker Peace and Social Witness Programme. Both links will take you to statements on Iraq — both from a British perspective and both well worth reading. The following is the final paragraph from Pax Christi’s statement:

    It is our considered view that an attack on Iraq would be both immoral and illegal, and that eradicating the dangers posed by malevolent dictators and terrorists can be achieved only by tackling the root causes of the disputes themselves. It is deplorable that the world’s most powerful nations continue to regard war and the threat of war as an acceptable instrument of foreign policy, in violation of the ethos of both the United Nations and Christian moral teaching. The way to peace does not lie through war but through the transformation of structures of injustice and of the politics of exclusion, and that is the cause to which the West should be devoting its technological, diplomatic and economic resources.

    By the way, Stark hasn’t been the only person making noise on Capitol Hill. I seldom find the motivation to watch C-Span, but lately I’ve been riveted by Senator Robert Byrd’s eloquent, impassioned speeches in defense of the Constitution and its separation of powers. I’ve grown quite fond of that man, who seems now to be the only member of the Senate (on either side of the aisle) that respects history and understands the inevitable consequences of recent decisions. Here’s a tasty snippet from his comments of October 3:

    As James Madison wrote in 1793, “In no part of the constitution is more wisdom to be found, than in the clause which confides the question of war or peace to the legislature, and not to the executive department. Beside the objection to such a mixture to heterogeneous powers, the trust and the temptation would be too great for any one man….”

    Congress has a responsibility to exercise with extreme care the power to declare war. There is no weightier matter to be considered. A war against Iraq will affect thousands if not tens of thousands of lives, and perhaps alter the course of history. It will surely affect the balance of power in the Middle East. It is not a decision to be taken in haste, under the glare of election year politics and the pressure of artificial deadlines. And yet any observer can see that that is exactly what the Senate is proposing to do. . . .

    The President is using the Oval Office as a bully pulpit to sound the call to arms, but it is from Capitol Hill that such orders must flow. The people, through their elected representatives, must make that decision. It is here that debate must take place and where the full spectrum of the public’s desires, concerns, and misgivings must be heard. We should not allow ourselves to be pushed into one course or another in the face of a full court publicity press from the White House. We have, rather, a duty to the nation and her sons and daughters to carefully examine all possible courses of action and to consider the long term consequences of any decision to act.

    And finally, congrats to Karen, et al, on the relaunch of Beyond Magazine. Good luck.

  • Evangelical Fallacy

    This morning I received one of those e-mails that tend to make the rounds every week or two. This one concerns an address to Congress delivered by a man whose daughter was killed in a school shooting. I googled the first line of his speech and found that it has since been appropriated as a prayer of sorts by certain gun rights activists. (I don’t feel like reproducing the speech here. If you’re curious, follow the Google link.) Both Snopes and Urban Legends confirm that, on May 27, 1999, Darrell Scott did, in fact, testify before a House judiciary sub-committee, but they also debunk the hyperbolic claims often added to the e-mail, claims that the liberal media prevented “the nation from hearing this man’s speech.”

    To be honest, I responded to this e-mail the same way I respond to all of its ilk: I read the first line, then deleted it. I didn’t give it another thought until a friend — a friend who happens to be on the same person’s forward list — sent me this fascinating analysis, which I’m posting here with his permission:

    It’s the typical evangelical fallacy: it’s true that the most fundamental problem is not guns and their availability (or poverty, or whatever) but people’s fallenness and sinfulness; but the mistake is in thinking that we should only attempt to treat — that is, pray for — the fallenness and sinfulness without dealing with their symptoms. In this line of thought the problem’s not poverty but people’s immorality, so we shouldn’t have welfare because until people’s hearts are changed it won’t do any good, etc.

    The parent says that metal detectors wouldn’t have stopped the shooters — but, um, why not? Does their sinfulness act as some kind of cloaking device? As far as I can tell, the only exception to this logic in the sphere of evangelical political thought, is, of course, abortion — according to the standard logic, we shouldn’t attempt to stop people from having abortions, but should rather pray that their hearts would be changed (in school, I suppose). But no one’s advocating that…

    The “evangelical fallacy” — I like that.

  • This American Irony

    Knowing that I’m a fan, a friend just sent me this link to an interview with Ira Glass. I’ve always been struck by Glass’s even-handed treatment of Christianity, which is somewhat surprising for two reasons: 1) he broadcasts on National Public Radio (I’m an NPR-o-holic, but I know evangelicals who refuse to listen to it on principle – sigh) and 2) he is outspoken about his own atheism. The interview is conducted by re:generation, a Christian publication that I’ve only just discovered. Looks interesting.

    There’s much to admire in Glass’s attitudes toward religion, ideas, stories, and people. He’s done much to encourage a dialogue between the sacred and secular and has approached that divide with a rare and open-minded curiosity. A few choice snippets:

    Irony is just boring, and it’s also played out; it’s done elsewhere and it doesn’t shed light. I feel like it’s dull. And I feel like it also prevents one from seeing, and it prevents the kind of empathy that I feel like makes for a more engaging movie, story—anything! We view our work as more of a ministry of love. (Laughs.) We feel like the thing that we’re about is empathy, and in fact, the few stories that I regret us ever doing (and there aren’t many) are ones where the writer wasn’t achieving an appropriate level of empathy with the characters in the story. . . .

    As soon as you are in that territory, you have left the realm of mainstream reporting, and you have entered a realm that only Christian journalists report on. But I would meet people and they would tell me their stories, and I would talk to their friends and families, and the stories would check out. Their relationship with God had completely changed their lives in a completely undeniable and positive way.

    It’s my job to report that. And to report it in a non-dismissive way: this is their experience, so take it or leave it, but this is it. Doing that made me awake to how bad most reporting on religion is. Both in the news and in the fiction we create as a culture, Christians are always portrayed as these intolerant right-wing nuts, as people who are not awake to others. That is so different from any of the Christian friends I have or the people who work here at the office that are Christians. It’s exactly the opposite. Of all the people I know, they’re the most awake, the most interested in the world. It was so crazy to me, it was exactly the opposite, and it seemed so inaccurate. So I found myself always wanting to do variations on that story again and again.

  • Dorothy Day

    Apparently this is going to be an unusually “religious” blog today. It had been several days since I last visited Sightings, so I had missed both excellent entries from last week. In “Your Two Cents,” Martin Marty gives voice to the many recent responses by Sightings readers. Then, in “A Just War?” James Evans summarizes the fundamental questions at stake, before concluding:

    No one questions the legitimacy of the American government to make the decision, it’s the other criteria that are more difficult to establish. Is our country under a direct threat, or are we dealing with a potential threat, or even a likely threat? In short, do we have a just cause for waging war? And what is our intent? The stated purpose of the war is to remove Saddam Hussein from power. Is that a legitimate cause? Is any part of our action motivated by revenge for the events of September 11?

    If we are to be faithful to the ideals of our faith, before we consent to the killing of our declared enemy, we should strive diligently to be sure our cause is just. If we determine it is not, then we should not pursue it. Even if we determine our cause is just, we may only submit to war with a somber spirit, and with repentant hearts. No cause is so just that we may kill without sorrow.

    On a related note, I’m becoming somewhat obsessed with this photo of Dorothy Day. Taken in 1924 in Staten Island, it shows her at rest on a front porch, her legs curled to one side, her hat resting against a bare foot. There’s something remarkable in that stare, the sly smile, the ease of her posture. She was younger then than I am now — already a published novelist and a once arrested suffragette; still a decade removed from the birth of The Catholic Worker and even further distanced from her later civil rights protests and week-long fasts for peace.

    I stumbled upon the photo while investigating “personalism,” the first philosophy I’ve found that builds upon the radical politics of the Gospels. That phrase will no doubt make some uncomfortable, and perhaps it should. I’ve always joked that Christ was a socialist — joking makes it easier for both my audience and myself to ignore the practical consequences of such a statement — but I’m feeling more at ease now with the thought of saying the same with a straight face.

    The examples of people like Day and Peter Maurin make it easier, for they were willing to embrace the Marxist critique of capitalism and bourgeois complacency — and at a time when doing so went completely against the American grain — while tempering their politics with a deep love of Man and the truths of Christianity. More importantly, they put that faith into practice, improving the lives of thousands by their efforts.

    Casa Juan Diego is one product of Day’s and Maurin’s work. CJD’s Website provides a host of information and insightful commentary. I’ve spent hours and hours and hours there over the last few days, marveling at the consequences of lives lived in imitation of Christ.

  • Cries and Whispers (1972)

    Cries and Whispers (1972)

    Dir. by Ingmar Bergman

    Images: Striking contrast between lush, sun-drenched exteriors and the claustrophobic interior of the manor. Bergman has said that red represents, for him, the color of the soul, which he puts to extensive use here, most memorably in the film’s constant fades-to-red (rather than black) and in the side-lit close-ups that mark the beginning and end of each “dream” sequence. Favorite images: Anna holding Agnes in the pieta; Agnes gasping for breath; Karin recoiling at Marie’s touch; Agnes swinging in the final scene.

    • • •

    Cries and Whispers is built from the simplest of premises: two wealthy women, both trapped in loveless marriages, return home to the family estate to comfort their dying sister. Agnes (Harriet Andersson), a beautiful artist in early middle-age, is ravaged by a cancer that sends her into fits of agony. For Bergman, the approach of death is a terror. His camera lingers uncomfortably on Agnes, forcing us to watch her body convulse and her lungs gasp for breath. In the final throes of excruciating pain, she screams out for comfort: “Can’t anyone! Can’t anyone help me?”

    She receives little solace, though, from her sisters, Karin (Ingrid Thulin) and Marie (Liv Ullman). Both characters are archetypal: the former is cold, distant, and intellectual; the latter childlike, irresponsible, and sensual. Neither is capable of the empathy and selflessness necessary to truly comfort their sister or to find earthly salvation in Bergman’s world. The director establishes their personalities visually in early shots. When we first see Marie, she is asleep in her childhood bed, her face framed by the dolls of her youth. She is an adult in arrested development — a slave to her spontaneous desires, incapable of (and uninterested in) offering herself wholly to another. In her “dream” sequence — the first of three in the film — we see Marie seducing the family doctor (Erland Josephson), a betrayal that leads her husband to attempt suicide. The psychological significance of the act is obvious: too self-absorbed to consider the consequences of her behavior, Marie has destroyed any possibility of discovering meaningful human contact and has only hurt those closest to her in the process.

    When we first see Karin alone, she is sitting rigidly at a table, examining financial records. She seems to have also abandoned the quest for love or connection in her life, focusing her energies, instead, on the pursuit of superficial success. Her marriage to a vindictive ambassador has traumatized Karin in unspoken ways. In her dream we see her performing the loathsome rituals of their marriage: the two sit down to dinner, where she (and we) are subjected to the annoying tedium of his bites and swallows. When the two retire to bed, she takes drastic measures in order to escape the inevitable. In a brutally graphic scene, Karin inserts a shard of glass into her vagina, then rubs the blood on her face. Again, by treating the marriage and Karin’s past in a dream, Bergman is allowed a vocabulary of archetypal and psychological imagery. Marriage, “love,” and sex — or at least the rigid, institutionalized versions of them — seem to bring fallen man only greater pain and isolation.

    Organized religion, as personified by the bishop who administers last rites, is utterly irrelevant. After we have witnessed Agnes’s brutal struggle with death, the bishop’s familiar words sound inhuman: “God, our Father, in His infinite wisdom, has called you home to Him still in the bloom of your youth. In your life He found you worthy of bearing a long and tortuous agony.” He is not far-removed from Tomas, the minister whose crisis of faith is portrayed in Bergman’s Winter Light. Like Tomas, he is tormented by his own human doubts in the presence of his more faithful parishioners. As he addresses the family, he becomes deeply moved, not by the loss of his friend, but by the meaninglessness of it all. “Pray for us who have been left behind on this miserable earth,” he begs of Agnes. “Plead with Him that He may make sense and meaning of our lives.” Then, turning to Marie and Karin: “Her faith was stronger than mine.”

    Only the fourth woman in Bergman’s drama, the servant Anna (Kari Sylwan), is able to genuinely comfort Agnes. Their relationship is represented visually in what is perhaps the film’s most memorable image. When Agnes calls out to Anna in the middle of the night, shaking from cold, Anna comes to her, then lifts the dying woman’s head and places it on her bare breasts. The image returns in Anna’s dream, now filmed in a long shot, making Bergman’s allusion to the pieta unmistakable. It’s interesting to me that Bergman, the atheist, returns to Christian imagery for this most important moment of human contact. Perhaps it can be explained away as Anna’s fantasy — the fulfillment of her motherly duties after her child’s death — but, regardless, the image resonates beautifully.

    After Agnes’s death, the two remaining sisters discover a need for human contact. Marie comes to Karin and asks her why they never speak, why two people who have shared so many memories are so distant from one another. It’s a complicated scene. Karin is, at first, almost violently resistant to Marie’s approaches. “No. Don’t come near me. Don’t touch me,” she demands. “I don’t want you to be kind to me.” But her defenses slowly erode, as Marie caresses Karin’s face.The two collapse on a bench, sharing themselves for the first time since childhood. The reconciliation, however, is short lived. When they part company at the end of the film, Marie turns cold toward her sister, reproaching her for her sentimentality and returning to the comfortable routine of her life.

    Despite the devastating farewell between Karin and Marie and the total failure of the church to bring solace, Cries and Whispers does have a happy ending, or at least by Bergman’s standards. In the coda, we watch and listen as Anna takes Agnes’s diary delicately from a drawer, unwraps it, and begins to read. The entry initiates a flashback to a beautiful day when the three sisters and Anna gathered together in high spirits, enjoying each other’s company on an outdoor swing. As Bergman’s camera tracks forward into a close-up of Agnes’s lovely face, we hear the voice of her diary: “I received the most wonderful gift anyone can receive in this life, a gift that is called many things: togetherness, companionship, relatedness, affection. I think this is what is called ‘grace.’”

    In God, Death, Art and Love: The Philosophical Vision of Ingmar Bergman, Robert Lauder writes:

    The human journey is toward death. As God’s presence dissolved, the human person had to look elsewhere for some meaning in human existence, some hope to cling to in the face of death. Art offers hints of explanations, but without God’s animating presence and the superstructure of meaning that religion once provided for the artist, art’s “answers” can never be adequate. The only hope we have, according to Bergman, is human love. There is no heavenly hope. To make loving contact with one other human being or perhaps with many others is the only salvation available to us.

    It’s a refreshingly succinct and useful summary from what is, otherwise, a very disappointing book. It’s also, in a sense, a perfect synopsis of Cries and Whispers, the first Bergman film to knock me flat. I watched it again the other night, still mesmerized by it all, and still unable to adequately explain its power. The greatest compliment I can give Cries and Whispers is that it is a profoundly religious film, by which I mean that it is deeply concerned, first and foremost, with the struggles of the human condition in light of the presence — or, in Bergman’s case, the absence — of God. That it approaches this subject with such grace and honesty makes it a masterpiece.

  • Day of Wrath (1943)

    Day of Wrath (1943)

    Dir. by Carl Th. Dreyer

    Images: Elegant, slow tracking shots, often in combination with pans in the opposite direction. Three times during the film, the camera tracks along the row of accusers, as in The Passion of Joan of Arc. Bodies are often half-hidden in shadows while faces, particularly the eyes, remain exposed. Favorite image is high-angle shot of Martin and Anne in a rowboat. Much of the frame is devoted to the water passing underneath, a Tarkovsky-like image of nature.

    • • •

    I can’t imagine how it must have felt to sit in a crowded theater, watching Day of Wrath during its original release in 1943. Set in 17th century Denmark, when rising religious fanaticism gave church leaders the authority to execute those of “questionable” morality, the film must have mirrored, much too closely for comfort, the Nazi atrocities being waged just outside the theater door. In his liner notes of the Criterion DVD release, critic Jonathan Rosenbaum suggests that Dreyer cast the blonde actress Lisbeth Movin in a deliberate attempt to diminish the allegorical implications of Anne’s plight, thereby diffusing a potentially dangerous situation. As with Arthur Miller’s The Crucible (1953), however, it’s nearly impossible to separate fact from fiction here. Day of Wrath is a damning critique of hypocritical authoritarian power told in very human terms, a modern fable that interrogates faith and sin, love and family, desire and its consequences.

    As a fan of Arthur Miller, I must admit that comparing his play to Dreyer’s film pains me. The former was written for more explicitly allegorical purposes — a direct attack on McCarthyism and the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC). As such, its characters are comparatively two-dimensional. With rare exceptions, they operate, rightly or wrongly, as stock mouth-pieces for Miller’s political and social commentary. Dreyer’s characters, by comparison, are afforded a more recognizably human complexity and moral ambivalence. For instance, we sympathize with Herlof’s Marthe (Anna Svierkier), the old woman accused of witchcraft in the film’s opening scene, not because she is a pious, honorable, and innocent martyr (like Miller’s Rebecca Nurse), but because of her human failings. She has experimented with witchcraft, she does lack Christian faith, and most importantly, she genuinely fears her death — the pain and suffering awaiting her at the stake — rather than her eternity. Dreyer stages Herlof’s Marthe’s scenes in a manner reminiscent of many in Kubrick’s Paths of Glory: they are stark, honest, and completely free of easy sentiment.

    The family drama at the center of Day of Wrath is likewise composed of characters with whom we must sympathize despite their obvious moral lapses. Reverend Absalon Pedersson (Thorkild Roose) is, by most standards, a man of admirable faith and conviction. His piety, however, is cooled by intellectual distance. He respects his family and his God, but is incapable, until the very end of the film, of understanding the human cost of his actions. Anne, Absalon’s young wife, is his most obvious victim. She has been robbed of her youth, of joy, and of children by a man who has never even considered her need for love. Yet, despite her victimization, it is impossible to take any vindictive pleasure from her murderous curses. When she takes Absalon’s son, Martin (Preben Lerdorff Rye), as a lover, we are again forced to balance our own sympathies for the young lovers with the troubling moral consequences of their symbolically incestuous act.

    Day of Wrath‘s brilliant final scene must have offered little hope to those first audiences. Even Martin has turned from Anne, leaving her resigned to a fate that has always remained beyond her control. It’s a stunning image — the young widow leaning against her husband’s coffin, whispering a confused confession to her accusers. The critical (but superficial) question of Anne’s guilt or innocence is left unanswered, which makes a fitting conclusion to a film that brutally interrogates our lives, but refuses to offer trite solutions.

  • Winter Light (1963)

    Winter Light (1963)

    Dir. by Ingmar Bergman

    Images: Majority of dialogue is shot in tight close-ups, isolating characters from one another, as the small town and small church seem to also isolate them from the world. Discovery and removal of Jonas’ body is filmed in long shots: we see his body manipulated like lifeless flesh, exposed to the harsh elements of the snow storm. The bleak, cold exteriors reflects the inner state of the characters.

    • • •

    Critic Dave Kehr has written of Winter Light: “Routine stuff from Ingmar Bergman, the metaphysician of the middle class. . . . Much suffering, none of it very illuminating.” At the heart of Kehr’s criticism, it seems, is the assumption that for a work of art to be illuminating it must not only pose difficult questions, but provide universally satisfying answers as well. A crisis of faith, however, is a process, an on-going debate that can often seem frustratingly one-sided. Reducing such a debate to a simple question and an even simpler answer — as often happens both in the movies and the Church — only trivializes it. I’m relieved to find a film like Winter Light, which understands that at the very root of faith are those same unanswered (and perhaps unanswerable) questions. Despite its existential bleakness, watching Winter Light was, in fact, a faith-affirming experience for me.

    Tomas (Gunnar Bjornstrand) is a pastor in a small town church. We see him, in the film’s opening scene, performing mass, an act that we later learn has become a loathsome ritual for him. With the death of his wife four years earlier, Tomas became cold, both to his congregation and to God. In what is perhaps the film’s most stunning image, we see him alone in his chambers, his face framed in a close-up and backlit by the sunlight pouring in through a window. In complete silence, he whispers Christ’s words, “My God, why hast thou forsaken me?” As Bergman tracks slowly forward, the fill light on Tomas’ face dims and the sunlight behind him brightens. This motif — darkened faces against brighter backgrounds — recurs throughout as a visual representation of the spiritual crisis being played out.

    Also suffering are Marta (Ingrid Thulin) and Jonas (Max von Sydow). Marta is Tomas’ some time lover, a woman who was raised without the church, but who seems to have found something resembling faith in her selfless love for the pastor. She makes her love known to him in a letter that contains one of the most devastating lines any Christian could hear. “Most of all,” she tells Tomas, “I was struck by your extraordinary indifference to your Jesus Christ.” Jonas is a father and farmer who suffers anxiety over the constant threat of nuclear annihilation. When he visits Tomas for counsel, the pastor is of little help, able only to speak from his own personal disillusion.

    What little change occurs in Tomas throughout the film, however, is not the result of Jonas’ suicide. He seems, finally, to be moved by the words of the church sexton, a crippled man of great faith, who talks to the pastor of Christ’s suffering — not the physical suffering of the cross, but the frustration and loneliness he must have felt when the disciples slept at Gethsemene, and the doubt and pain he must have suffered when God “forsook” him just before his death. Tomas appears to finally relate to Christ as a man who also felt God’s “silence.” I say “appears” because the film’s final image is appropriately ambiguous: Tomas returns to the empty sanctuary to perform another rite, perhaps changed by the events of the day, perhaps hopelessly resigned to simply playing his role.

  • My Night at Maud’s (1969)

    My Night at Maud’s (1969)

    Dir. by Eric Rohmer

    Images: Complete lack of shot/reverse-shot. Instead, much of the dialogue is framed in static medium shots, some lasting more than a minute. Speaker doesn’t address camera directly, but the effect is the same, involving the viewer as an active participant. “Our” voice is heard from off screen.

    • • •

    Jean-Louis (Jean-Louis Trintignant), a young engineer, spies his ideal woman at Sunday Mass. Francoise (Marie-Christine Barrault) is young, attractive, blonde, and, most importantly, a practicing Catholic. Before they have even met, Jean-Louis determines that Francoise will be his wife. His pursuit is interrupted, though, when he happens upon Vidal (Antoine Vitez), a childhood friend who he has not seen in 14 years. The two spend an evening discussing religion and philosophy, then agree to meet again the following day at the home of Maud (Francoise Fabian), a beautiful divorcee who Vidal has been seeing. When the three meet, their conversation again turns to philosophy and religion, particularly the consequences of Pascal’s wager.

    My admittedly superficial understanding of Pascal’s wager: Given even overwhelming odds against the existence of God (say, 100 to 1), we must bet on that one chance. For if God does not exist, and we lose the bet, then our loss is inconsequential. But if God does exist, then our lives gain meaning and our reward is eternal.

    The three main characters are an interesting study in contrast. Vidal sees the wager as a logical tool for explaining everything, from religion to politics. For Jean-Louis, Pascal is too strict, a logician who has sacrificed sensual pleasure (“Pascal never said, ‘This is good,’” Jean-Louis tells his companions). His stance on Pascal is one of the many contradictions in Jean-Louis’ ideas, as he himself adheres strictly to (or at least claims to) the mores of Catholicism. Maud is a sensual being and an atheist, who tires of Jean-Louis’ pretenses and deftly dissects them. When left alone with Maud, Jean-Louis is forced to test his principles, to overcome his temptation in order to remain faithful to Francoise, a woman he has not yet met.

    I have seen several of Rohmer’s films over the last few months, and they never fail to elicit from me the same response. Thirty minutes into them, I’m typically annoyed, either by the characters or by Rohmer’s style. His film worlds are populated by self-absorbed “navel-gazers” (a common criticism) and his use of voice over narration often seems redundant. But, without exception, I have eventually fallen into Rohmer’s rhythms and become fascinated by those same characters. Most impressive is his ability to build a logical dramatic tension into his finales. The end of My Night at Maud’s — a coda that takes place years later, in which we learn that Jean-Louis and Francoise are married and that she may have had an affair with Maud’s husband —felt more forced than most, but the result is the same: despite the film’s slow pacing (or, more likely, because of it) I became anxious for the film’s conclusion, unaware of which way the story would turn until it did.

  • Sculpting in Time

    Sculpting in Time

    By Andrei Tarkovsky

    My hope is that those readers whom I manage to convince, if not entirely then at least in part, may become my kindred spirits, if only in recognition of the fact that I have no secrets from them. — Tarkovsky

    I’ve never read another book like Sculpting in Time. In it Tarkovsky speaks as eloquently about art as he does faith and philosophy, and does so in a remarkably kind, concerned voice. To him, his subject —the unique ability of the cinematic image to touch the soul and inspire spiritual improvement — is quite literally a matter of life and death. “The goal for all art,” he writes, “unless of course it is aimed at the ‘consumer’, like a saleable commodity, is to explain to the artist himself and to those around him what man lives for, what is the meaning of his existence. To explain to people the reason for their appearance on this planet; or if not to explain, at least to pose the question” (36). And again: “The aim of art is to prepare a person for death, to plough and harrow his soul, rendering it capable of turning it to good” (43).

    That we understand the gravity of this statement is more than a simple intellectual or rhetorical exercise for Tarkovsky. Throughout the book (but most notably in its “Conclusion”) he speaks in the voice of a trusted elder, as if determined to pass along the wisdom gained from experience and inspiration while time allows. That he was already suffering from terminal cancer when completing the book makes it all the more affecting.

    In the closing paragraph of Sculpting in Time, Tarkovsky makes his final appeal, speaking to us as confidants:

    Finally, I would enjoin the reader — confiding in him utterly — to believe that the one thing that mankind has ever created in a spirit of self-surrender is the artistic image. Perhaps the meaning of all human activity lies in artistic consciousness, in the pointless and selfless creative act? Perhaps our capacity to create is evidence that we ourselves were created in the image and likeness of God? — Tarkovsky

    In the margin of my copy I scribbled, “Now that is how to finish a book.” Although my own appreciation of his sentiment is due, in large part, to our shared religious faith, I trust that such a faith is by no means a prerequisite for his readers. I can’t stress enough how refreshing it is to read a filmmaker speak of his craft using terms like “truth,” “love,” “sacrifice,” and (especially) “beauty.” Tarkovsky writes, “We have almost totally lost sight of the beautiful as a criterion of art” (168). It’s a criticism of the commercial cinema that is both blatant and absurd — in an era when weekend box office grosses have become the stuff of water-cooler conversations, the word “beauty” is as alien to “movies” as Tarkovsky himself is to most American movie-goers.

    The greatest compliment I can give Sculpting in Time is to say that when I finished reading it I took a deep breath and watched his film, The Mirror, three times. Forgive my hyperbole, but Tarkovsky has quite honestly challenged me to adjust my entire understanding of film and of its potential.

    Much of Sculpting in Time is devoted to Tarkovsky’s fascinating and detailed explanation of his methods as a filmmaker. He addresses both his stylistic techniques and, more specifically, how he put them into practice in each of his seven films (Ivan’s Childhood, The Mirror, and The Sacrifice are given the most attention; Stalker and Solaris the least). Chapter V is the longest chapter and should probably be the starting point for anyone who is interested in Tarkovsky, but not in reading the entire book. The chapter is broken into six film elements:

    The Film Image

    Tarkovsky begins the chapter by acknowledging that a concept like “artistic image” could never be “expressed in a precise thesis, easily formulated and understandable” (104). And that is precisely the point. For him, the potential of cinema lies in the unique ability of the film image to communicate Truth more effectively (or affectively) than language. The image is able to reveal the totality of the universe and allows the viewer to experience simultaneously complex and contradictory feelings.

    Tarkovsky argues that such an image is captured only when the director abandons all attempts at objectivity, building instead from his own personal storehouse of memory and experience. The Mirror is the most obvious example of this principle put to practice — it is a film filled with images from Tarkovsky’s own childhood. His approach to the film image (in a nutshell) is that an image based on Truth (even a completely subjective truth) will resonate much more strongly with an audience than will a cliched image that comes pre-loaded with supposedly objective symbolism. Works for me. I can barely make it through The Mirror without crying.

    Time, Rhythm and Editing

    “Sculpting in time” is Tarkovsky’s metaphor for the construction of a film’s rhythm. Notice that the emphasis is put on time and rhythm, rather than on editing, which Tarkovsky considers little more than an assembly process. This distinction clearly separates him from his Soviet predecessors like Eisenstein, Pudovkin, and Kuleshov, whose experiments in montage Tarkovsky refers to as “puzzles and riddles,” intellectual exercises that require too little of the audience.

    Instead, he writes, “rhythm . . . is the main formative element of cinema” (119). He uses a short film by Pascal Aubier to illustrate his point. The ten-minute film contains only one shot: the camera begins on a wide landscape, then zooms in slowly to reveal a man on a hill. As the camera gets closer, we learn first that the man is dead, then that he has been killed. “The film has no editing, no acting and no decor,” Tarkovsky writes. “But the rhythm of the movement of time is there within the frame, as the sole organising force of the — quite complex — dramatic development” (114). Like the Aubier example, Tarkovsky’s films are marked by long takes (most notably in the bookends of The Sacrifice) and slow, beautifully choreographed camera movements.

    Scenario and Shooting Script

    For Tarkovsky, the greatest challenge associated with developing a script is maintaining the integrity of the film’s inspiration — “it almost seems as if circumstances have been deliberately calculated to make [the director] forget why it was that he started working on the picture” (125). For this reason, he argues that the director must also be the writer, or he must develop a partnership that is founded on complete trust. The majority of this section is devoted to The Mirror — Tarkovsky uses it as a case study of his method. Fascinating reading.

    The Film’s Graphic Realisation

    This section offers a glimpse of how Tarkovsky worked on set, describing his approach to collaboration. “It is essential that [the crew] should not be in any way mere functionaries; they have to participate as creative artists in their own right, and be allowed to share in all your feelings and thoughts” (135). He talks specifically about his relationship with the camera-man, who he refers to as a “co-author,” and explains how he worked with Georgi Rerberg and Vadim Yusov. This section is featured prominently in Directed by Andrey Tarkovsky, the documentary that is included on The Sacrifice DVD.

    The Film Actor

    Again, Tarkovsky’s approach (in this case, to directing actors) is a distinct break from the Soviet tradition, particularly that of Stanislawski. While he sees much value for the theater in what has become known as method acting, he argues that film actors, like their directors, should find inspiration in subjective experience. “The one thing the film actor has to do is express in particular circumstances a psychological state peculiar to him alone, and do so naturally, true to his own emotional and intellectual make-up, and in the form that is only right for him” (141). Free to perform without restraint, the actors then provide the director true experience from which he selects the “stuff” of his film.

    Music and Noises

    Tarkovsky’s discussion of sound, not surprisingly, begins with its relationship to the cinematic image: “But music is not just an appendage . . . It must be an essential element of the realisation of the concept as a whole . . . it must be so completely one with the visual image that if it were to be removed from a particular episode, the visual image would not just be weaker in its idea and impact, it would be qualitatively different” (158). As is often the case when one attempts to write about music (who said it’s like “dancing about architecture”?), Tarkovsky slips more noticeably here into poetic (rather than hard, practical) language. It makes for wonderful reading, but I’m still unsure about his exact approach: “Above all,” he writes, “I feel that the sounds of this world are so beautiful in themselves that if only we could learn to listen to them properly, cinema would have no need of music at all” (162).

    My function is to make whoever sees my films aware of his need to love and to give his love, and aware that beauty is summoning him. — Tarkovsky

    As I mentioned above, I realize that I’ve slipped occassionally into hyperbole here, but since finishing Sculpting in Time last week, I’ve found myself viewing film (and all art in general) from a new perspective. We see this debate all the time: Film as “just entertainment” vs. film as “something more.” I’d been leaning towards the latter for several years; this book has completed that shift.

  • Sculpting in Time (1987)

    By Andrei Tarkovsky

    My hope is that those readers whom I manage to convince, if not entirely then at least in part, may become my kindred spirits, if only in recognition of the fact that I have no secrets from them. — Tarkovsky

    I’ve never read another book like Sculpting in Time. In it Tarkovsky speaks as eloquently about art as he does faith and philosophy, and does so in a remarkably kind, concerned voice. To him, his subject —the unique ability of the cinematic image to touch the soul and inspire spiritual improvement — is quite literally a matter of life and death. “The goal for all art,” he writes, “unless of course it is aimed at the ‘consumer’, like a saleable commodity, is to explain to the artist himself and to those around him what man lives for, what is the meaning of his existence. To explain to people the reason for their appearance on this planet; or if not to explain, at least to pose the question” (36). And again: “The aim of art is to prepare a person for death, to plough and harrow his soul, rendering it capable of turning it to good” (43).

    That we understand the gravity of this statement is more than a simple intellectual or rhetorical exercise for Tarkovsky. Throughout the book (but most notably in its “Conclusion”) he speaks in the voice of a trusted elder, as if determined to pass along the wisdom gained from experience and inspiration while time allows. That he was already suffering from terminal cancer when completing the book makes it all the more affecting.

    In the closing paragraph of Sculpting in Time, Tarkovsky makes his final appeal, speaking to us as confidants:

    Finally, I would enjoin the reader — confiding in him utterly — to believe that the one thing that mankind has ever created in a spirit of self-surrender is the artistic image. Perhaps the meaning of all human activity lies in artistic consciousness, in the pointless and selfless creative act? Perhaps our capacity to create is evidence that we ourselves were created in the image and likeness of God? — Tarkovsky

    In the margin of my copy I scribbled, “Now that is how to finish a book.” Although my own appreciation of his sentiment is due, in large part, to our shared religious faith, I trust that such a faith is by no means a prerequisite for his readers. I can’t stress enough how refreshing it is to read a filmmaker speak of his craft using terms like “truth,” “love,” “sacrifice,” and (especially) “beauty.” Tarkovsky writes, “We have almost totally lost sight of the beautiful as a criterion of art” (168). It’s a criticism of the commercial cinema that is both blatant and absurd — in an era when weekend box office grosses have become the stuff of water-cooler conversations, the word “beauty” is as alien to “movies” as Tarkovsky himself is to most American movie-goers.

    The greatest compliment I can give Sculpting in Time is to say that when I finished reading it I took a deep breath and watched his film, The Mirror, three times. Forgive my hyperbole, but Tarkovsky has quite honestly challenged me to adjust my entire understanding of film and of its potential.

    Much of Sculpting in Time is devoted to Tarkovsky’s fascinating and detailed explanation of his methods as a filmmaker. He addresses both his stylistic techniques and, more specifically, how he put them into practice in each of his seven films (Ivan’s Childhood, The Mirror, and The Sacrifice are given the most attention; Stalker and Solaris the least). Chapter V is the longest chapter and should probably be the starting point for anyone who is interested in Tarkovsky, but not in reading the entire book. The chapter is broken into six film elements:

    The Film Image

    Tarkovsky begins the chapter by acknowledging that a concept like “artistic image” could never be “expressed in a precise thesis, easily formulated and understandable” (104). And that is precisely the point. For him, the potential of cinema lies in the unique ability of the film image to communicate Truth more effectively (or affectively) than language. The image is able to reveal the totality of the universe and allows the viewer to experience simultaneously complex and contradictory feelings.

    Tarkovsky argues that such an image is captured only when the director abandons all attempts at objectivity, building instead from his own personal storehouse of memory and experience. The Mirror is the most obvious example of this principle put to practice — it is a film filled with images from Tarkovsky’s own childhood. His approach to the film image (in a nutshell) is that an image based on Truth (even a completely subjective truth) will resonate much more strongly with an audience than will a cliched image that comes pre-loaded with supposedly objective symbolism. Works for me. I can barely make it through The Mirror without crying.

    Time, Rhythm and Editing

    “Sculpting in time” is Tarkovsky’s metaphor for the construction of a film’s rhythm. Notice that the emphasis is put on time and rhythm, rather than on editing, which Tarkovsky considers little more than an assembly process. This distinction clearly separates him from his Soviet predecessors like Eisenstein, Pudovkin, and Kuleshov, whose experiments in montage Tarkovsky refers to as “puzzles and riddles,” intellectual exercises that require too little of the audience.

    Instead, he writes, “rhythm . . . is the main formative element of cinema” (119). He uses a short film by Pascal Aubier to illustrate his point. The ten-minute film contains only one shot: the camera begins on a wide landscape, then zooms in slowly to reveal a man on a hill. As the camera gets closer, we learn first that the man is dead, then that he has been killed. “The film has no editing, no acting and no decor,” Tarkovsky writes. “But the rhythm of the movement of time is there within the frame, as the sole organising force of the — quite complex — dramatic development” (114). Like the Aubier example, Tarkovsky’s films are marked by long takes (most notably in the bookends of The Sacrifice) and slow, beautifully choreographed camera movements.

    Scenario and Shooting Script

    For Tarkovsky, the greatest challenge associated with developing a script is maintaining the integrity of the film’s inspiration — “it almost seems as if circumstances have been deliberately calculated to make [the director] forget why it was that he started working on the picture” (125). For this reason, he argues that the director must also be the writer, or he must develop a partnership that is founded on complete trust. The majority of this section is devoted to The Mirror — Tarkovsky uses it as a case study of his method. Fascinating reading.

    The Film’s Graphic Realisation

    This section offers a glimpse of how Tarkovsky worked on set, describing his approach to collaboration. “It is essential that [the crew] should not be in any way mere functionaries; they have to participate as creative artists in their own right, and be allowed to share in all your feelings and thoughts” (135). He talks specifically about his relationship with the camera-man, who he refers to as a “co-author,” and explains how he worked with Georgi Rerberg and Vadim Yusov. This section is featured prominently in Directed by Andrey Tarkovsky, the documentary that is included on The Sacrifice DVD.

    The Film Actor

    Again, Tarkovsky’s approach (in this case, to directing actors) is a distinct break from the Soviet tradition, particularly that of Stanislawski. While he sees much value for the theater in what has become known as method acting, he argues that film actors, like their directors, should find inspiration in subjective experience. “The one thing the film actor has to do is express in particular circumstances a psychological state peculiar to him alone, and do so naturally, true to his own emotional and intellectual make-up, and in the form that is only right for him” (141). Free to perform without restraint, the actors then provide the director true experience from which he selects the “stuff” of his film.

    Music and Noises

    Tarkovsky’s discussion of sound, not surprisingly, begins with its relationship to the cinematic image: “But music is not just an appendage . . . It must be an essential element of the realisation of the concept as a whole . . . it must be so completely one with the visual image that if it were to be removed from a particular episode, the visual image would not just be weaker in its idea and impact, it would be qualitatively different” (158). As is often the case when one attempts to write about music (who said it’s like “dancing about architecture”?), Tarkovsky slips more noticeably here into poetic (rather than hard, practical) language. It makes for wonderful reading, but I’m still unsure about his exact approach: “Above all,” he writes, “I feel that the sounds of this world are so beautiful in themselves that if only we could learn to listen to them properly, cinema would have no need of music at all” (162).

    My function is to make whoever sees my films aware of his need to love and to give his love, and aware that beauty is summoning him. — Tarkovsky

    As I mentioned above, I realize that I’ve slipped occassionally into hyperbole here, but since finishing Sculpting in Time last week, I’ve found myself viewing film (and all art in general) from a new perspective. We see this debate all the time: Film as “just entertainment” vs. film as “something more.” I’d been leaning towards the latter for several years; this book has completed that shift.

  • New Seeds of Contemplation (1961)

    By Thomas Merton

    Like “Making Peace,” the Denise Levertov poem that inspired this site, Thomas Merton’s New Seeds of Contemplation is concerned with the destructive influences of greed, superficiality, and passivity on our hectic, disjointed lives. Levertov’s poem is a call to both the poet/artist — whose duty, she argues, is to inspire an “imagination of peace” — and to us, her readers. For making peace is active, a deliberate decision that each of us must make in order for us to affect change, first in our lives, then in the world. Although Levertov never explicitly identifies whose “voice from the dark” calls out, the humanist, the aesthete, and the Christian in me are all in perfect agreement: if that voice is not divine, then why should I listen?

    For Merton, a 20th century American monk, making peace is a lifelong project through which we find perfect communion with God. Sanctification — or, “contemplation,” as he calls it — is the only source of genuine peace, for it is the only means by which we may escape our natural state of alienation. Merton actually sounds a bit like Lacan at times, critiquing Man for his futile attempts to “clothe his false self” in power and pleasures. The obvious difference, of course, is that Merton posits a solution, selfless submission to God’s will, where Lacan and other Post-Modern seekers of meaning can find only nihilism. “The real purpose of meditation,” Merton writes, “is this: to teach a man how to work himself free of created things and temporal concerns, in which he finds only confusion and sorrow, and enter into a conscious and loving contact with God” (217).

    New Seeds of Contemplation is an impressive book, and one that has effected me more profoundly than any other contemporary theological study. In an age when “Christian literature” is sold in bulk at Sam’s Clubs, Merton’s book is refreshingly intelligent and devoid of the empty rhetoric that plagues so much of the dialogue in Christian America (and its churches) today. This deliberate move away from “old worn-out words, clichés, slogans, rationalizations . . . hackneyed analogies and metaphors that are so feeble that they make you think there is something the matter with religion” is actually an important stage in every contemplative’s life, Merton claims, a step that can be quite unnerving. “The worst of it,” he writes:

    is that even apparently holy conceptions are consumed along with the rest. It is a terrible breaking and burning of idols, a purification of the sanctuary, so that no graven thing may occupy the place that God has commanded to be left empty: the center, the existential altar which simply “is.” In the end the contemplative suffers the anguish of realizing that he no longer knows what God is.

    I can picture the Christians who would recoil at such a suggestion, as they would at many of his other claims, including his equating of the work of the Church with an ideal communism and his belief that God may have blessed us with wealth in order that we “might find joy and perfection by giving it all away.” (I’ll be sure to look for that plank in the platform of the next politician who claims to be representing my Christian interests.) I would label Merton a radical if he weren’t simply reflecting the mission of the early Church as described in Acts.

    But we’re Americans, and Americans don’t care for selflessness. To aid in this radical reordering of our priorities, Merton, like Levertov, points to our need for solitude (meditation or long pauses) as a temporary but necessary escape from the “social machine” in which we’re trapped. I love his description of this trap — it would have made a perfect epigraph for Don DeLillo’s White Noise:

    The constant din of empty words and machine noises, the endless booming of loudspeakers end by making true communication and true communion almost impossible. Each individual in the mass is insulated by thick layers of insensibility. He doesn’t care, he doesn’t hear, he doesn’t think. He does not act, he is pushed. He does not talk, he produces conventional sounds when stimulated by appropriate noises. He does not think, he secretes clichés. . . . But to live in the midst of others, sharing nothing with them but the common noise and the general distraction, isolates a man in the worst way, separates him from reality in a way that is almost painless.

    Every time I read that, I think of Bruno Dumont’s L’Humanite, a film that erodes, quite uncomfortably at times, those layers of insulation and forces us to patiently experience the pain of another’s life. (Unfortunately, very few Christians in America will see L’Humanite, both because it is French and because of its explicit sexual content.) Of course, when I read Merton’s description, I am also struck by my own pain-free isolation. But that is precisely the point of this web site. I am learning, as Merton suggests, to “meditate on paper . . . to contemplate works of art.” I am trying to “keep still, and let Him do some work.”

    This response has been a bit erratic, little more than a steady stream of quotations. As this is a site dedicated largely to the arts, I’ll finish with one more, then do my best to refrain from adding sarcastic comment:

    A Catholic poet should be an apostle by being first of all a poet, not try to be a poet by being first of all an apostle. For if he presents himself to people as a poet, he is going to be judged by people as a poet and if he is not a good one his apostolate will be ridiculed.

    Good advice. I wish I could name more Christian artists who follow it.