Show Notes
Into Great Silence is one of the great documentaries from an artistic point of view, and surely the best ever made on a Catholic subject. Filmmaker Philip Gröning contacted the Grande Chartreuse monastery in the French Alps in 1984, asking if he could come and film the Carthusian monks in their way of life. They responded saying that it was not yet the right time. Sixteen years later, they got back to him saying they were ready to receive him, a single cameraman with no fancy lighting or sound equipment. Gröning spent six months filming the monastery, sharing the monks' silent way of life. The film that resulted is as different from other documentaries as the Carthusian rule is from life in the world: the intent was for the film itself to become a monastery. No music, no voiceover, just (mostly) silently and slowly observing the monks' way of life, as the seductive beauty of life with God is gradually revealed underneath the austere self-denial. Catholic documentary filmmaker Manny Marquez joins the podcast to discuss Into Great Silence, as well as the documentary genre in general, and his own beautiful film Make Peace or Die, which can be viewed on PBS Passport.
SIGN UP for Catholic Culture's newsletter: https://www.catholicculture.org/newsletters
DONATE to make this show possible! http://catholicculture.org/donate/audio
Music is The Duskwhales, "Take It Back", used with permission. https://theduskwhales.bandcamp.com
More from Criteria: The Catholic Film Podcast
James and Thomas discuss the new film Fjord, a quiet but extremely tense drama based on the real-life case of a conservative Christian family from Romania who moved to Norway and had their children taken away by the Norwegian Child Protective Services, ostensibly for using light spanking to discipline their children, but seemingly motivated by anti-religious bigotry. Fjord won the highest prize at the Cannes Film Festival this year, which angered many liberal critics because of the film's sympathies with the Christian parents against the repressive liberal bureaucratic state. DONATE to make this show possible! http://catholicculture.org/donate/audio SIGN UP for Catholic Culture's newsletter: https://www.catholicculture.org/newsletters Music is The Duskwhales, "Take It Back", used with permission. https://theduskwhales.bandcamp.com
In the 1960s, the Soviet film industry decided to make an adaptation of Tolstoy's War and Peace that would blow any Hollywood epic out of the water. They gave it a virtually unlimited budget, with battle scenes using over 12,000 Soviet soldiers trained using the historical French and Russian drill manuals from the time of the war with Napoleon, using real period paintings and furniture borrowed from Russia's museums. The result was the most epic film ever made, divided into four installments taking over seven hours in total. But War and Peace has something more than a big budget and battle scenes on a mind-blowing scale. It is also one of the most creative and poetic films ever made, a very faithful adaptation of the novel yet using all the tools of cinema in the most unexpected ways to bring Tolstoy's vivid prose to life in scenes of dancing, hunting, dueling, love, betrayal, forgiveness, and spiritual awakening. Links Watch War and Peace for free on the official Mosfilm YouTube channel https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLaTJrWP-PVcB-kpfOvzzp_7m4RdJPc0MC DONATE to make this show possible! http://catholicculture.org/donate/audio SIGN UP for Catholic Culture's newsletter: https://www.catholicculture.org/newsletters
Thomas Mirus's keynote address at the first annual conference of the Thomistic Artists Guild, on May 30 at the parish of St. Vitus in Los Angeles, CA. Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gH5KBsOIz_Y Thomistic Artists Guild: https://thomisticartistsguild.org/ DONATE at http://www.catholicculture.org/donate/audio SIGN UP for Catholic Culture's newsletter http://www.catholicculture.org/newsletter
Nathan Douglas and Thomas Mirus review Christopher Nolan's adaptation of Homer's Odyssey. It is not necessarily a bad thing if an adaptation doesn't reproduce the precise worldview of its source material - an artist makes his own work of art, not a scholarly translation. The movie is not a deliberate subversion of its source material, as many assumed. It is Nolan's honest personal reflection on what the poem means to him. But he does view the story through the lens of modern concerns which, while by no means false or unworthy of exploration or even totally incompatible with Homer's story, result in a less interesting version of Odysseus and a less coherent but overly didactic interpretation of the events depicted. Links Clip about diversity casting from previous episode https://youtu.be/5EEe-ogUXMI Music is The Duskwhales, "Take It Back", used with permission. https://theduskwhales.bandcamp.com SIGN UP for Catholic Culture's newsletter: https://www.catholicculture.org/newsletters DONATE to make this show possible! http://catholicculture.org/donate/audio
James and Thomas begin a sub-series on the filmography of Andrei Tarkovsky (whose religious films Andrei Rublev and The Sacrifice they already discussed as part of the Vatican Film List). His first film, Ivan's Childhood, depicts a young boy, Ivan, who acts as a scout for the Russian army during World War II. Made precocious – and profoundly damaged – by his wartime experience, Ivan is a fascinating and tragic figure brought to life in a remarkable performance by Nikolai Burlyayev. Tarkovsky begins his career with a film that is understandably more conventional than the rest of his oeuvre – but still plenty unconventional, and in fact serving as a test run for Tarkovsky's poetic convictions. James and Thomas discuss the director's views on "poetic links" in cinema expressed in his book Sculpting in Time and instantiated in this film's dream sequences and evocative landscapes. Tarkovsky believed that poetry comes about when the objective beauty of reality is filtered through the artist's subjectivity, connected to his own personal associations and feelings, such that the authenticity and density of life somehow appear on screen, in a way that is truly poetic and allows the viewer to take part in the aesthetic experience of the artist. SIGN UP for Catholic Culture's newsletter: https://www.catholicculture.org/newsletters DONATE to make this show possible! http://catholicculture.org/donate/audio Music is The Duskwhales, "Take It Back", used with permission. https://theduskwhales.bandcamp.com