Afleveringen
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The Criteria crew continue their journey through the works of today's most significant Christian filmmaker, Terrence Malick. The New World is an underrated masterpiece about Pocahontas and the founding of Jamestown in 1607. Starring the 14-year-old Q'orianka Kilcher as Pocahontas, Colin Farrell as John Smith, and Christian Bale as John Rolfe, Malick's retelling of the story remarkably combines realism and historical accuracy with poetry and romance, as all three protagonists explore not just one but multiple new worlds, geographical and interior.
With The New World, Malick definitively entered a new stage in his career, particularly in his unforgettable collaboration with cinematographer Emmanuel Lubezki. The result is an aesthetic that is humble and receptive rather than magisterial. Rather than dominating reality, the camera seems to enter into it, so that we can contemplate something the camera cannot exhaust.
James, Thomas, and Nathan discuss Malick's style extensively in this episode, and make the case for why Catholics studying or making art should not focus only on "themes" to the neglect of form, because style itself conveys a vision of reality.
Note: make sure you watch the extended cut or the 150-minute "first cut", not the theatrical cut.
This film contains brief ethnographic nudity.
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Music is The Duskwhales, “Take It Back”, used with permission. https://theduskwhales.bandcamp.com
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In occupied France during World War II, a Communist woman named Barny (Emmanuelle Riva) enters a confessional for the first time since her first Communion. She is there not to confess but to troll the priest by saying “Religion is the opiate of the people.” To her surprise, Fr. Léon Morin (Jean-Paul Belmondo) is not thrown off balance, but offers a compelling response to each of her critiques of Catholicism. Barny starts to see Fr. Morin regularly for a mix of intellectual tête-à-tête and spiritual counsel, and is gradually drawn back to the Church—but mixed in with her spiritual attraction to the Church is a romantic attraction to the man.
This, combined with subplots about the experience of wartime France, is the premise of the 1961 film Léon Morin, Priest, and it may on first summary sound like the sort of sensational and irreverent story no Catholic wants to touch with a ten-foot pole. But Fr. Morin does not break his vows. Instead, this is one of the best priest movies ever made, a realistic, tasteful (and not excessively cringe-inducing) treatment of a real problem that arises in priestly life. From the priest’s point of view, it’s a thought-provoking study of pastoral prudence; from the female protagonist’s point of view, it deals with the necessity of gradually purifying one’s motives in the course of conversion
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Music is The Duskwhales, “Take It Back”, used with permission. https://theduskwhales.bandcamp.com
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Zijn er afleveringen die ontbreken?
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Thomas and James discuss two classic Hollywood films dealing with the moral problems of overweening ambition - specifically in the context of show business. All About Eve (1950), which won six Oscars and features razor-sharp dialogue and an unforgettable performance by Bette Davis, is set in the world of the theater, while The Bad and the Beautiful (1952) is a (perhaps more honest) self-examination of Hollywood itself. The latter contains the more perceptive observations of artistic genius and its operations, which tend to subordinate everything to the work to be done. More broadly, it's a study of leadership, in both its positive and its more self-serving forms.
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Music is The Duskwhales, “Take It Back”, used with permission. https://theduskwhales.bandcamp.com
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Continuing our trek through the filmography of Terrence Malick, the world's greatest living Christian filmmaker, we arrive at The Thin Red Line (featuring Jim Caviezel in his breakthrough role). This film came in 1998 after Malick's twenty-year hiatus from directing movies, after which he never took such a long break again.
Focused on the experiences of U.S. soldiers during the battle for Guadalcanal during World War II, The Thin Red Line is remarkable in that it features all the poetry, interiority, and dreamy aesthetics we have come to expect from Malick, while still being, in Nathan Douglas's words, "a fully functioning war movie" - conveying the physical chaos as well as the psychological sufferings and moral challenges of war - challenges of leadership, sacrifice, compassion for one's enemies, and how to meet one's death with calm and dignity.
The Thin Red Line is arguably Malick's first masterpiece - and his first film focused on metaphysical themes, or as James Majewski says, a "preamble" to the more explicit Christian faith found in his later work, using voiceover extensively to ask questions about the origins of good and evil, the unity of human experience, and most of all, how one can maintain faith in the transcendent in the midst of evil, ugliness and disorder.
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Music is The Duskwhales, “Take It Back”, used with permission. https://theduskwhales.bandcamp.com
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There are many ways to make a movie. Only a few of those ways fit within the Hollywood mold. We believe that rather than taking pop culture as their sole model, Catholics and Catholic filmmakers should be open to a wide variety of artistic approaches. Thus, in this episode James and Thomas discuss the early career of the great Iranian director Abbas Kiarostami, who came up with an approach to filmmaking that is not just different from Hollywood, but different from anyone else in world cinema.
Kiarostami spent the first two decades of his career working for the Center for the Intellectual Development of Children and Young Adults in Tehran, making a plethora of fascinating movies either for or about children (fiction, documentary, and educational). In addition to exploring his concerns with childhood and education, he developed a great ability to direct non-professional actors and this allowed him to blur the line between documentary and fiction in his later films - or, perhaps, just to be honest about how human behavior is affected by the presence of a camera, even in a documentary setting.
If you only watch one of the films discussed in this episode, you might pick his 1987 feature Where Is the Friend’s Home?, an beautifully simple story about childhood, friendship and conscience. Through its patient attention to detail, this film allows us to rediscover a child’s-eye perspective on the world.
Where Is the Friend’s Home? is the first in a sort of trilogy of films Kiarostami shot in the region of Koker in northern Iran. That first installment, while one of his best works, is not actually typical of the unique style he developed soon after, which can be seen even within the trilogy itself. The simplicity of the first story is succeeded by two films that take on multiple perspectives and blur the line between fiction and real life. In a word, things get meta.
In the second film, …And Life Goes On, the director of the first film (played by an actor, not the real director) and his young son search for the two boys who acted in the first film, after the Koker region was devastated by a real-life earthquake that killed 50,000 people. Investigating real-life events through a fictional road trip, we get a new perspective on the simple fictional perspective of the first movie.
The third film, Through the Olive Trees, gets very complex (but in a most entertaining way). While shooting a scene in the second film, Kiarostami noticed some tension between the two young actors playing a married couple. So he invented a love story about these two actors, and the third film is about this story that takes place while that scene from the second film was being shot. Shot, we should add, by a director who is directing scenes involving the character of the “director” from the 2nd film – so we have two different actors playing directors, both of which represent the real director, Kiarostami. As avant-garde as this sounds, it’s a highly entertaining story that never could have been done as well by a director hewing to commercial instincts.
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You may be surprised to hear that one of the more morally profound new movies we’ve seen recently is a Godzilla reboot! The original 1954 Godzilla had its own ideas, being a way of processing Japan’s nuclear trauma and the ethical implications of superweapons. But the new Godzilla Minus One goes even deeper, examining not only the trauma of the war but the psychological and spiritual fallout of a culture that produced the kamikaze phenomenon. The film confronts the culture of death that dominated WWII-era Japan and its corruption of the idea of self-sacrifice, and shows how our sacrifices in war should be rightly ordered to preserving the value of human life rather than seeking a heroic death for its own sake.
Visual artist Erin McAtee, co-founder of the Catholic arts organization Arthouse2B, joins to discuss the themes of the film as well as the director’s choice to produce a black-and-white version.
00:00 Intro
06:15 Black-and-white version
14:18 Story and themes
Links
Godsplaining episode featuring James Majewski and Erin McAtee https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kimE7ob1QKY&ab_channel=Godsplaining%7CCatholicPodcast
Erin K. McAtee https://www.erinkmcatee.com/
Arthouse2B https://www.arthouse2b.org/
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Widely considered one of the greatest films ever made, Yasujiro Ozu's Tokyo Story is a quiet, gentle yet tragic family drama about the distance that can grow between elderly parents and their adult children. It's a critique of the transformation of culture and mores in postwar Japan, particularly the loss of filial piety, but it's not just specific to Japanese culture. The film holds a mirror up to both parents and children, and if it is critical of those who fail to honor and love their elderly parents, it also shows that this is often a result of the parents having failed their children when they were younger. Tokyo Story should provoke an examination of conscience in viewers of every generation.
Irish Catholic multimedia commentator Ruadhan Jones returns to the podcast to discuss this canonical work of Japanese cinema.
Links
Ruadhan Jones links https://linktr.ee/ruadhanjones
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Music is The Duskwhales, “Take It Back”, used with permission. https://theduskwhales.bandcamp.com
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There must be something in the water – everyone’s talking about the Vatican Film List! Just after the Criteria crew concluded three years going through the list, Word on Fire has published their own book about it, Popcorn with the Pope: A Guide to the Vatican Film List, with essays on all 45 films by David Paul Baird, Fr. Michael Ward, and Andrew Petiprin. The three authors join the show to compares notes with James and Thomas about their overall evaluations of the list, great religious films made by non-religious directors, what makes a good saint movie, and their personal favorite items on the Vatican Film List.
Links
Popcorn with the Pope: A Guide to the Vatican Film List https://bookstore.wordonfire.org/products/popcorn-with-the-pope
Buy it on Kindle https://www.amazon.com/Popcorn-Pope-Guide-Vatican-Film-ebook/dp/B0CP6H5KV3/
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Music is The Duskwhales, “Take It Back”, used with permission. https://theduskwhales.bandcamp.com
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This is the first episode of a series covering the complete filmography of Terrence Malick, who is arguably both the most important Christian filmmaker working today and the most important filmmaker working today, period.
What sets Malick apart from a number of other directors whose work deals with a religious search, is that his films are not just about searching indefinitely with no answer, but they come from the perspective of a sincere believer who actually has a positive proposal about life's meaning.
Some of his best-known movies in which this positive proposal is evident are A Hidden Life, The Tree of Life, and The Thin Red Line. But we are starting from the beginning, with Malick's first two films, Badlands (1973) and Days of Heaven (1978).
In these two films we already see Malick's personality on display: his gorgeous visual style with a heavy focus on the beauty of the natural world, his use of voiceover narration and classical music, his improvisational approach, and the impressionistic rather than plot-driven nature of much of his work.
His philosophical interests (Malick spent time as a philosophy professor and even translated a work by Heidegger) are also evident in both films but the second feature, Days of Heaven, is the first to introduce the extensive Scriptural references featured in all of his films since.
James and Thomas are joined by Catholic filmmaker and critic Nathan Douglas for this series.
0:00 Introduction to Terrence Malick
32:10 Badlands
1:08:54 Days of Heaven
Nathan Douglas's website https://nwdouglas.com/about
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Katy Carl, fiction writer and editor-in-chief of Dappled Things, joins the show to discuss the 1979 film adaptation of Flannery O'Connor's novel Wise Blood, directed by John Huston and starring Brad Dourif.
Links
Katy's short story collection, Fragile Objects https://www.wisebloodbooks.com/store/p136/Fragile_Objects%3A_Short_Stories_by_Katy_Carl.html
Dappled Things https://www.dappledthings.org/
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Introducing a director you almost certainly haven't heard of - but who is well worth getting to know. Lijo Jose Pellissery is one of the major artists of a new movement that has developed over the last decade in the Malayalam film industry - that is, the cinema made in Kerala, the region where India's Christians have lived for many centuries.
All of Pellissery's films are set within Indian Catholic or Orthodox communities. Indeed, while the director is clearly influenced by Western movies, much of his films' vitality comes from how regionally rooted they are, not just in Kerala but even in specific cities and villages.
Pellissery's films show a remarkable level of craft, artistry and experimentation considering their mainstream success in India - indeed, as James Majewski says by contrast with contemporary Hollywood, this seems to be what an "alive film culture" looks like. Within the Malayalam film industry, Pellissery is known as the "Master of Chaos", presumably due to the spontaneous feeling of his scenes, often featuring large, rambunctious crowds, and perhaps also the way situations in his stories tend to spiral out of control. His films keep you riveted in a way that is not manipulative, and they are unpredictable without being dependent on contrived twists.
James and Thomas feature three of Pellissery's films in this discussion, in order to explore his diversity of genre:
Jallikattu is an off-the-wall action movie about villagers trying to chase down an escaped bull - framed within quotations from the book of Revelation which seem to indicate that the bull represents Satan. Ee.Ma.Yau (which means "Jesus, Mary, Joseph")) is about a son struggling to provide a good funeral for his father, but constantly being frustrated by his own limits. Pellissery's most recent film, Like an Afternoon Dream, is a slow, surreal drama - arguably a ghost story - about a man who suddenly takes on another man's identity.
Here are links to view the films in their original Malayalam language with English subtitles:
Jallikattu https://www.amazon.com/Jallikattu-Antony-Varghese/dp/B07ZQMQ9TT
Ee.Ma.Yau https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mZNDgzLsPZ8&ab_channel=OPMRecords
Like an Afternoon Dream https://www.netflix.com/title/81676305
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Music is The Duskwhales, “Take It Back”, used with permission. https://theduskwhales.bandcamp.com
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The Age of Innocence may come as a surprise to those who associate Martin Scorsese with movies about gangsters. Based on Edith Wharton's novel, it's a sumptuous period romance set in late-19th-century Manhattan high society. Intriguingly, Scorsese described it as his "most violent film", though not so much as a punch is thrown: the violence portrayed is interior and social, not physical, in this depiction of a romance thwarted by the constricting social norms of the upper class.
Scorsese faced the challenge of depicting a society in which, as the narrator puts it, "the real thing was never said or done or even thought, but only represented by a set of arbitrary signs" - and so the director cannot rely on characters stating things outright. His great accomplishment is that the film nonetheless reaches an operatic pitch of emotion, keeping the viewer on seat-edge. This is done not only through outstanding performances (Daniel Day-Lewis, Michelle Pfeiffer, Winona Ryder), but also by camera movements conveying repressed passion, by light and color, and by the gorgeous Elmer Bernstein score.
For all that, if the film merely depicted the cruelty of social norms and mores stifling forbidden love, it would be of limited interest. Yet as the story develops, it doesn't allow itself to be reduced to a critique of the past. Indeed, though not without ambiguity, it shows the value of strong social rules and institutions - because often, if we follow our passion, we destroy ourselves and others.
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Today it's taken for granted that we as Christians are called to "engage the culture" in order to evangelize. Often "engaging the culture" means paying an inordinate amount of attention to popular commercial entertainment in order to show unbelievers how hip we are, straining to find a "Christ-figure" in every comic book movie, and making worship music as repetitive, melodically banal, and emotionalistic as possible. Past a certain point, "cultural engagement" begins to seem like a noble-sounding excuse to enjoy mediocrity - and Christians, unfortunately, are as much in love with mediocre entertainment as anyone else.
The novel doctrine of "cultural engagement" is just one subject covered in Joshua Gibbs's challenging and entertaining new book, Love What Lasts: How to Save Your Soul from Mediocrity. Joshua joins Thomas Mirus for a wide-ranging conversation about how we choose to spend our free time and why it matters.
Topics include:
The dangers of artistic mediocrity The importance of boredom Why streaming has been terrible for music The different kinds of Christian "cultural engagers" Uncommon and common good things and how both are threatened by the mediocre How the "special" apes the holy The meme-ification of artLinks
Gibbs, Love What Lasts: How to Save Your Soul from Mediocrity https://circeinstitute.org/product/love-what-lasts/
Gibbs, "Film As a Metaphysical Coup" https://circeinstitute.org/blog/film-metaphysical-coup/
Thomas's favorite episode of Gibbs's podcast, Proverbial https://shows.acast.com/proverbial/episodes/how-to-buy-a-bottle-of-wine
www.GibbsClassical.com
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Mel Gibson's Apocalypto is one of those works of art whose reputation has suffered from its circumstances. Its release in late 2006, two years after The Passion and six month after Gibson's infamous DUI, more or less coincided with the director's blacklisting from Hollywood. Thus Apocalypto tends to be overlooked by critics, despite having been hailed as a masterpiece by the likes of Scorsese, Tarantino, Edgar Wright, and Spike Lee.
Apocalypto has also been attacked for its portrayal of "first peoples". Set in Mesoamerica immediately before first contact with the Spanish, it features a protagonist from a small forest tribe who is captured by Mayans for the purpose of human sacrifice (depicted as the mass-scale brutality it was) and must try to escape back to his family.
Gibson's depiction of Mesoamerican peoples is sensitive and sympathetic but not PC. Rather than sneering at how terrible a pre-Columbian civilization could be, in portraying the Mayans Gibson wanted to make us reflect on the decadence of the modern West and in particular the American Empire. The film is about a culture of death not unlike our own.
Filmed, like The Passion, in a language most people have never heard, Apocalypto is a stunningly ambitious recreation of a lost civilization, but also a thoroughly entertaining chase movie. Gibson is known for his singular approach to cinematic violence, and Apocalypto gives ample opportunity to discuss the specific artistic choices that are overlooked when we wave off all movie "blood and guts" as the same.
Links
Essay by the film's historical consultant https://www.researchgate.net/publication/288187016_Relativism_Revisionism_Aboriginalism_and_EmicEtic_Truth_The_Case_Study_of_Apocalypto
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0:00 The prosecution
39:15 The defense
With the release of his new film Asteroid City and with memes imitating his cinematic style going viral on social media, Wes Anderson is having a real moment in the zeitgeist almost thirty years into his career.
In Asteroid City, Anderson drives further into the immediately identifiable and somewhat polarizing style he has cultivated for the past decade, characterized by meticulous framing, camera moves and blocking, a certain color palette, and deadpan writing and acting. One is always aware of the director's hand tightly controlling a cute, harmonious little world of his own creation.
The Criteria hosts look at Anderson's career and try to figure out what he's trying to achieve by making his movies so aggressively, well, Anderson-y. James Majewski calls it downright decadent and pretentious, style for its own sake to the point of self-parody. Thomas Mirus is concerned that the increasingly airless and emotionally closed-down aesthetic may be a reflection of Anderson's belief that life has no discernible meaning, and so there is nothing much to do other than create aesthetic illusions (an idea explicitly alluded to in more than one of his films). Nathan Douglas defends Anderson's style as sincere, in service to something more than shallow visual pleasure.
But we all agree on one thing: Wes Anderson is in despair.
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Jim Caviezel’s latest project, The Sound of Freedom, is a harrowing but thrilling look at the fight against the global sex trafficking of children. Caviezel's intense but nuanced performance plays well into both the serious subject matter and the film's mainstream appeal. The film's spiritual relevance is increased by the choice to include not only protective fathers, but a repentant exploiter among its protagonists.
Though the film isn't about Hollywood, one of its best scenes offers what may as well be a portrayal of how the entertainment and modeling industries sexualize children. The impact is all the more unsettling for how subtly and tastefully the scene is handled.
Though they praise the film, Thomas and James express some reservations about the “you must see this movie for the cause” style of promotion.
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Since we started Criteria: The Catholic Film Podcast in May 2020, we've been hosting in-depth discussions of movies from the Vatican's 1995 list of important films. Now, after three years, we've finished discussing all 45 films - and in this episode, together with Catholic filmmaker Nathan Douglas, we're taking a look back at the list as a whole.
After discussing how and why the Vatican film list (actually titled "Some Important Films") was made, and putting it in the context of several decades of concern from the highest levels of the Vatican about the social and moral influence of cinema, we talk about our favorite and least favorite films on the Vatican's list, as well as the movies we think should be added in a hypothetical future update of the list.
Ultimately, watching through the entire Vatican film list is not only an education in the classics of world cinema, but also gives important perspective on the strengths and weaknesses of past cinematic engagement with religion, allowing us to see both the potential fruit that could be borne and the dead ends that should be avoided in the Catholic cinema of the future.
0:00 Introduction
11:31 History behind the Vatican film list
43:34 What films should be removed from the list?
1:24:10 Our favorite films on the list
1:55:30 What films should have been included that weren't?
2:34:09 What post-1995 films would we add?
3:00:19 The most Catholic/edifying films on the listLinks
Pope St. John Paul II's address on the 100th birthday of cinema https://www.vatican.va/content/john-paul-ii/en/speeches/1995/march/documents/hf_jp-ii_spe_19950317_plen-pccs.html
"100 Years of Cinema" document from the Pontifical Council of Social Communications with model curriculum
https://www.vatican.va/roman_curia/pontifical_councils/pccs/documents/rc_pc_pccs_doc_19960101_100-cinema_en.htmlBelow is the 1995 list by the Pontifical Council for Social Communications, "Some Important Films" (with links to our episode on each film):
Religion
Andrei Rublev, Andrei Tarkovsky (1969, USSR) The Mission, Roland Joffé (1986, UK) The Passion of Joan of Arc, Carl T. Dreyer (1928, France) Vie et passion du Christ (Life and Passion of Christ), Ferdinand Zecca and Lucien Nonguet (1905, France) The Flowers of St. Francis, Roberto Rossellini (1950, Italy) The Gospel According to Matthew, Pier Paolo Pasolini (1964, France/Italy) Thérèse, Alain Cavalier (1986, France) Ordet (The Word), Carl T. Dreyer (1955, Denmark) The Sacrifice, Andrei Tarkowsky (1986, Sweden/UK/France) Francesco, Liliana Cavani (1989, Italy/Germany) Ben-Hur, William Wyler (1959, USA) Babette’s Feast, Gabriel Axel (1987, Denmark) Nazarín, Luis Buñuel (1958, Mexico) Monsieur Vincent, Maurice Cloche (1947, France) A Man for All Seasons, Fred Zinnemann (1966, UK)Values
Gandhi, Richard Attenborough (1982, UK/USA/India) Intolerance, D. W. Griffith (1916, USA) Dekalog (The Decalogue), Krzysztof Kieslowski (1987, Poland) Au Revoir, Les Enfants (Goodbye, Children), Louis Malle (1987, France) Dersu Uzala, Akira Kurosawa (1974, Japan) The Tree of Wooden Clogs, Ermanno Olmi (1978, Italy/France) Rome, Open City, Roberto Rossellini (1946, Italy) Wild Strawberries, Ingmar Bergman (1957, Sweden) The Seventh Seal, Ingmar Bergman (1957, Sweden) Chariots of Fire, Hugh Hudson (1981, UK) Bicycle Thieves, Vittorio de Sica (1948, Italy) It’s a Wonderful Life, Frank Capra (1946, USA) Schindler’s List, Steven Spielberg (1993, USA) On the Waterfront, Elia Kazan (1954, USA) The Burmese Harp, Kon Ichikawa (1956, Japan)Art
2001: A Space Odyssey, Stanley Kubrick (1968, UK/USA) La Strada, Federico Fellini (1954, Italy) Citizen Kane, Orson Welles (1941, USA) Metropolis, Fritz Lang (1927, Germany) Modern Times, Charlie Chaplin (1936, USA) Napoléon, Abel Gance (1927, Italy) 8½, Federico Fellini (1963, Italy) La Grande Illusion, Jean Renoir (1937, France) Nosferatu, F. W. Murnau (1922, Germany) Stagecoach, John Ford (1939, USA) The Leopard, Luchino Visconti (1963, Italy/France) Fantasia (1940, USA) The Wizard of Oz, Victor Fleming (1939, USA) The Lavender Hill Mob, Charles Crichton (1951, UK) Little Women, George Cukor (1933, USA) -
The new film Padre Pio, directed by Abel Ferrara and starring Shia LaBeouf, is ruined by a pornographic and sacrilegious scene involving abuse of a sacred image.
James Majewski and Thomas Mirus contend that conscientious Catholics must not see this movie. They explain the difference between portraying an act and committing that act, and how that line can be obliterated on a film set. They discuss the reality behind holy images, and the importance of making reparation for sacrilege.
First Saturdays devotion to make reparation to the Immaculate Heart of Mary: https://www.bluearmy.com/first-saturday-devotion/
Thomas Mirus wrote a summary of the arguments in this podcast for the Dappled Things blog: https://www.dappledthings.org/deep-down-things/about-that-padre-pio-film
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In this livestream, James Majewski and Thomas Mirus we discussed errors artists can fall into in pushing back against a moralistic approach to art found within the Church. Rather than reacting away from rigidity to excessive openness, the mature Catholic artist has to get over himself and be a servant.
Also discussed: The relation between order and surprise in beauty, morality and culture.
Note: the video begins abruptly in the middle of our introductory fundraising campaign pitch - because of some glitched-out audio, we cut the first 6 minutes or so.
We're a week into CatholicCulture.org's May fundraising campaign. Generous donors have offered a $50,000 matching grant, so any donation you make by May 24 will double in value! You can donate on our website or PayPal (tax-deductible).
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