ingmar bergman has died

Read about it here. I appreciate Bergman. His films resonate. I worry that he never saw the light, though I think Fr Kimel has disagreed with me on this point.

the most beautiful film ever made?

Quite possibly. I am, of course, talking about Into Great Silence, which Fr Nelson has just reviewed over at Theology of the Body, and has been receiving critical plaudits and accolades left and right. That's as it should be.

I didn't say it was the "best" movie ever made, but possibly the most beautiful. I stand by that. Mainly because a film depicting people so utterly given to the Lord can't help but be beautiful, because the lives depicted are beautiful. Another striking thing about the film is how normal the brothers seem, and how happy.

Mainly I second everything Fr Nelson said. I would also add that you need to be ready to see this movie. Don't expect a typical popcorn-gobbling, grab-you-by-the-throat cinema experience. This film seduces you. First of all, there is no soundtrack. In fact, as the title suggests, there are long stretches (maybe ten minutes) with hardly a sound. And there's maybe a grand total of seven or so minutes of actual dialog in the whole, nearly three hour thing.

I lived in monasteries for a year. Watching the film felt like life in a monastery. You get antsy. You get introspective. Little details take on real or imagined significance. Periodically something intensely beautiful (usually something chanted) breaks onto the scene. You notice the weather. You become aware of being forced into a slow, subtle rhythm.

Formally, the film reinforces this "feeling of monasticism" (for lack of a better phrase). There are little passages of scripture and the Fathers periodically thrown onto the screen, e.g. "You seduced me... and I was seduced" or "Whoever does not renounce all that he has... cannot be my disciple." These sorts of passages are repeated from time to time, without commentary, and without obvious relevance to what is on the screen immediately before or after they appear. Their effect in the mind is sort of like an antiphon in the psalter. The meaning is not immediately obvious, or directly relevant to the psalm or canticle being recited. You must sit with it, and let the connections form themselves in your consciousness very slowly.

The film begins in darkness, and moves to the chapel. You notice a red light in the distance. It flickers. You come to realize, as the brothers begin to chant Mattins, that it is the sanctuary lamp, symbolizing the sacramental presence of the Lord in the tabernacle. Again, there is no commentary. You are left to percolate in the slow realization of the significance of this flickering red lamp: that Christ is literally in this place, and in this singing. Again at the end of the film, as the credits roll, there is no sound but the occasional creaking of the floor as the brothers adore Christ in darkness; and again, there is nothing on the screen but the flickering red sanctuary lamp in the distance, formally announcing the mystery of Emanuel, God with us.

The film can be frustrating to watch. But what I realized is that the experience of frustration and impatience was a manifestation of a defect in me, not the film.

The whole thing is breathtakingly beautiful and very, very moving. I saw it first on Good Friday and was blown away. Whatever you have to do to make it happen: get ready, and go see this movie.

into great silence

I have been itching to see this since I first heard about it. The New Liturgical Movement has held out the possibility of offering the DVD to those interested. It seems to be the end of their interest-gathering time period. I urge you, if you are interested, to inform them of the fact.

"*** save the queen"

I have just returned from seeing "The Queen," which has been, as I understand, been nominated for several Aacademy Awards. Since there has been such a dearth of worthwhile movies of late, I hope this gets something. Helen Mirren, no doubt, deserves the Best Actress trophy for her portrayal of Elizabeth II R. Overall, I'm pleased that the movie was so nuanced: much more than they tend to be in these days of cheap emotions and shrill polemics.

The film raised some interesting associations in my mind while I was watching with the ideas of René Girard, my intellectuel du jour. To understand this parallel, one must remember that the movie is set against the events that unfolded in the wake of Diana Spencer's death following a car accident in a Paris tunnel. The death of the "people's princess," as PM Blair (regrettably) called her at the time, brought out the populace in droves who put on a tremendous, spontaneous display of communal grief. HRH, duly noting that Diana was no long a member of the royal family, and even as a member, a particularly difficult one, restrained from taking action, preferring to let the Spencer family handle the affair. In the movie, this is portrayed as essentially a political mistake, since it she failed to recognize and capitalize on the "mood" of her subjects, the monarchy lost face and was diminished in the hearts and minds of the British. Be that as it may, I believe that more importantly it effectively illustrates and even substantiates the arguments of Girard as to the development and continued operation of culture.

Girard's main thesis explores the concept of mimetic desire as the origin of human culture. According to him, people are fundamentally mimetic (that is, imitative) creatures. We learn and develop by copying each other. This same propensity for imitation results in conflict and violence when two desire the same thing, the second simply because the first wanted it. The conflict quickly escalates because it is not centered around the contested object at all but on the other person. Then more and more people, following suit, become entangled in the initial conflict. Acts of violence beget imitative reprisals, and soon violence threatens to destroy a fragile community. The violence is stopped, however, by the devolving of blame on one individual by the community, who then receives the punishment for the initiation of violence in order to expiate it from the community. In this manner, order is restored and culture is born through the introduction sacrificial rites. What is important here is that at some point the community unites against a common enemy, a scapegoat whose death will cease the violence which endangers their society. Furthermore, the community is able to exempt itself from any guilt in the spread of violence because it successfully projects its guilt onto the scapegoat. In Girard's scheme, this scapegoat is also the origin of law. Since the scapegoat's power in the community to stop violence which forever looms over them gives this individual special status and a surplus aura and is usually attendant with special privileges in the community, the delay of time between the selection of the scapegoat-victim and the execution of punishment can give the scapegoat the opporunity to consolidate power and privilege into a more permanent position, thus giving rise to kingship. For Girard, a monarch is never more than a paroled victim. Another key moment is that community is united and consolidated by its opposition to an individual who is necessarily excluded from it. As I believe he put it, the community belongs to the victim, but the victim does not belong to the community. In effect, the victim creates the community.

What matter all this? Well, the effects of this idea become far reaching, in personal and public spheres, although that is not what I want to explore here. However, Girard's theory about the formation and operation of culture must first be validated, and I believe that "The Queen," although without at all meaning to do so, does just this. In fact, because it is inadvertent, its proof necessarily takes on more weight than an intentional proof does, since it confirms that this is indeed a natural and inevitable mechanism of human societies. How does it do this? In "The Queen" (and here I am generally assuming it accurately represented the general events as they occurred), an act of violence, in this case the death of Diana Spencer, threatens the community with disintegration by grief, and even a public uprising, which is intimated by Tony Blair. The community, the general mass of Britons, seeking justice, does not lay the blame at the feet of the paparazzi who drove her car into the ground, nor at Diana herself--who perhaps justly reaped the rewards of her wanton and frivolous lifestyle--nor even itself, for its relentless consumption of the tabloids that paid the photographers who hounded her to death, but on the royal family, who failed to see what a "saint" she was. The cards among the flowers left at Buckingham Palace crystalize this, explicitly citing the queen as the author of Diana's demise. While rationally, this is absurd, in the Girardean scheme, the queen must get the blame because she is the monarch and thus the scapegoat. This allows the excess of violence in the community to be cathartically channelled into the victim for the preservation and consolidation of the community, here represented by the resounding applause given to Diana's brother's milquetoast eulogy.

This is all far too sketchy, I am sure to adequately cover the ground, but I hope it whets appetites for closer reading of Girard (who is a Christian, by the way). His thought and writings, I find, are deeply rewarding. As a postscript, though, I think this same parallel can be seen in the public response to our president. Suddenly and swiftly, Bush is being abandoned by everyone. He is losing support because he must. In order to channel our fears concerning the state of the world, Bush is being blamed for not only Iraq, but the environment and every other global crisis. By villifying him--and given the tone of bumperstickers I see these days, even murdering him--people are able to exempt themselves from their own role in the perpetuation of violence in the world. In less than two years, Bush will no longer be in office, and will no longer affect the problems which he inherited from his predecessors. And lo, the problems will not vanish in his passing.

As a post-post script, the asterisks in the title refer to the (accidental) bleeping of the word "God" from the version of "The Queen" shown on commercial airlines. Nevertheless, God save the Queen.

which brings me to my next point...

The Best Movies of 2006 that I Saw (in no particular order):

Munich - Spielberg's "quiet masterpiece." Indeed. Its greatest quality is moral ambiguity, a quality I believe to be inherent in secular points of view. I applaud Spielberg's honesty in emphasizing it.

Children of Men - See below.

Crash - Complex, sensitive, heartbreaking.

Infamous - Far and away the better of 2006's two movies about Truman Capote. It delves considerably deeper into the psychological issues at play between Capote, In Cold Blood, and the killers.

Babel - If it had had a worse, or a less happy, ending (up to which it seemed to be building), I felt it would have been more essentially Christian.

The Departed - Incredibly bleak; incredible nonetheless.

Caché - Technically released in 2005, but not until toward the end, and in any case I didn't see it until 2006. This movie gets under your skin.

Casino Royale - Rehabilitating Bond after years of the franchise's mere plodding toward increasingly facile nonsense (with bigger explosions). This managed to be moderately facile, with few big explosions and one incredibly tedious poker game.

Also Good (though I wouldn't say "best") Were:

Little Miss Sunshine
The Last King of Scotland
The Queen
The Illusionist
Jesus Camp

Movies from 2006 which I have not seen, but intend to:

Brick
Match Point
Half Nelson
The Prestige
Letters from Iwo Jima
Apocalypto
The Good German
Inland Empire
The Good Shepherd
The Science of Sleep
Old Joy
The Painted Veil
Blood Diamond
Pan's Labyrinth

Movies Pointedly NOT on Any List of Mine:

Snakes on a Plane
Clerks, part 3
V for Vendetta
And let's not forget... The da Vinci Code

All in all, I think 2006 was a little lackluster filmwise.

children of men and a reflection on current affairs

I went to see Children of Men last night. It reminded me a good deal of Apocalypse Now: A cynic on a weird redemptive journey through apocalyptic weirdness and violence. Unlike Manolha Dargis of the NY Times, I'm not naive (or unobservant) enough to think that there is no ideology behind the movie. It does sort of masquerade as mere reporting. But as with V for Vendetta (which I found intensely irritating in this respect), the clear implication of the movie is that the policies of the governments of America and Britain (today) are on a path leading civilization to the brink. This is implied mainly by the ubiquitous stylistic and thematic elements of Children of Men that were taken directly from the news media's coverage of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

For example, in Children of Men, the cynical protagonist (Theo played by Clive Owen) is caught in the crossfire between a misguided government and a misguided resistance. We are left to guess at the particulars of what drives the resistance, apart from their vague and vaguely benevolent concern for immigrant rights (in the movie, immigrants are distractingly referred to as "fugees"). Moreover, the resistance is a make-believe group called "The Fishes." By contrast, the implied continuity of the government with its real world counterparts is more than evident in constant references to "The Department of Homeland Security" (this time in Britain), whose thugs dress like American soldiers and parade around with vicious German Shepherds, rounding up immigrants, beating them indiscriminately, and dressing them à la Abu Ghraib torture victims (complete with sacks over their heads, etc.). Further continuity with reality is implied by little touches like anti Iraq war memorabilia in the home of one of the movies unambiguously good guys: an old hippy played well by Michael Caine.

Technically - and overall - the movie was impressive. Certainly much better that 90% of today's cinematic schlock. One action sequence in particular, which has Clive Owen running through an urban battlefield while bullets and rockets zing around him, is very impressive indeed - it felt real, and really violent, without being especially gory. And the actual theme of the movie (overlying its Bush-critical subtext) is taken straight from the pages of our culture's Christian mythos: a child is miraculously born in disadvantaged circumstances, and brings with it to the world the hope of peace, righteousness, joy, etc. And you can't help liking a protagonist (Clive Owen) who's only motivation is to protect a helpless mother and child. Who doesn't like helpless mothers and children?

Okay, so what's my problem? Its not that I am a big fan of the Iraq War or of some particular set of immigrants or immigration policies. What I do dislike, however, is ham-fisted criticism of any of the above, though it be implied. The challenges facing contemporary society (particularly the challenge of Islam - what is called in public "radical" Islam) are multifaceted and incredibly deep and complex. Does this mean the Bush Administration is engaging them wisely? Not necessarily. But I don't see a cultural or political consensus on a viable alternative. I see myriad potential alternatives (e.g. more troops in Iraq, fewer troops in Iraq, no troops in Iraq, etc.), the viability of any of which are to my mind far from demonstrable. And over and over again I see in the media reductionistic accounts of the conflicting ideologies which, in their grossest form, usually go something like this: the American government wanted to steal oil, so they invaded Iraq; this has provoked radical Muslims to rage against the West.

Piffle. The media occasionally reports with indignation that many in the American Government don't know the difference between Sunnis and Shiites. I don't doubt this, and its a horrifying fact. But who in the media knows the difference? You can't begin to understand the West's conflict with Islam until you understand something about Islam. And no one seems to. It looks to me like Alfonso Cuarón (the director of Children of Men) is buying into the notion, pervasive in Western culture, that prophecy consists of one part recognition that there is, in fact, a conflict going on, and one part inculpation of our side's leaders for their role in it. Again: piffle. Mordacious criticism, to my mind, is made credible only in being accompanied by a constructive alternative to the object of criticism.

But in the meantime, notwithstanding its subtextual punditry and minor flaws, Cuarón has made an interesting, compelling, and visually very impressive movie. Go see it.