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Tim Cawkwell

~ currently publishing my poetry and verse. Blog entries on film and painting going back to 2014. My main website is www.timcawkwell.co.uk

Tim Cawkwell

Monthly Archives: November 2014

The sun is God

28 Friday Nov 2014

Posted by Tim Cawkwell in Creation

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JMW Turner, Mike Leigh, Stan Brakhage, Sun is God

‘The sun is God.’ These are the alleged last words of the painter JMW Turner before he died, a summation of his life’s work. It sounds pagan, I know, but I believe it contains a truth about a divinely created universe, that there is a spirit moving through all created things, in Turner’s case that spirit being the light of the sun.

This thought is prompted by viewing Mike Leigh’s fine, no magnificent, Mr Turner. These last words form an affecting climax to his study of human mortality, and indeed human vanity (it made me think of ‘Ecclesiastes’), set in the context of his vivid portrait of mid-Victorian Britain. I thought also of Mahler: ‘A symphony should contain the whole world.’ In this case, a film.

I’m working on an essay linking Turner to the American independent film-maker, Stan Brakhage, chief citizen of planet Brakhage. Turner, he felt, was a kindred spirit.

See also www.timcawkwell.co.uk

How do we cope with the Day of Wrath?

18 Tuesday Nov 2014

Posted by Tim Cawkwell in crucifixion films

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Advent, Book of Zephaniah, Carl Dreyer, Day of Wrath, Dies Irae, witchcraft, WW1 battlefields

Advent Sunday is 12 days away as I write. To get our systems cleansed for it last Sunday there were three readings about judgement and hell. This is tricky because as the Cardinal told Marcel Proust, “I believe in hell because it is a dogma of the church, but I also believe there’s no one in it.” That states a contemporary position neatly.

Zephaniah 1.15 has: “That day [the great day of the Lord] is a day of wrath, a day of trouble and distress, a day of wasteness and desolation, a day of darkness and gloominess, a day of clouds and thick darkness.” My ears pricked up at ‘day of wrath’ because I thought of Dreyer’s 1942 film, VREDENS DAG/ DAY OF WRATH. I had always thought the title echoed the mediaeval hymn, the Dies Irae – or ‘day of anger’ – but the phrase, I now realize, presumably comes from Zephaniah.

If the ‘day of wrath’ of the film, which is about the suppression of witchcraft in 17th-century Denmark, is sanctioned by God, then the version of God becomes a cruel one, and the world has been created cruel. What can humans do about it? For we take the side of Anne (see image below) in the film, only to find her denounced by the end as a witch.

Day of Wrath 2

And read that text of Zephaniah, not in the light of forthcoming Advent but as part of the centenary remembrance of the First World War: they become a powerful description in words of what some of the WW1 battlefields came to look like. So did God intend such events in order to pass judgement on us? I cringe at the thought, I side with the Cardinal, and then am troubled: hell and judgement have been a key part of Christian thought from the beginning, so who am I to jettison them as unnecessary ballast just like that?

For details of THE NEW FILMGOER’S GUIDE TO GOD, go to: http://bit.ly/TroubadorPress

Gangster films and God – and the absence of God

11 Tuesday Nov 2014

Posted by Tim Cawkwell in gangster films

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Bad Lieutenant, Gangster films, Jean-Pierre Melville, Le Samourai, The Big Heat, The Funeral, The Godfather, Westerns, White Heat

In chapter 4 of THE NEW FILMGOER’S GUIDE TO GOD I write about gangster films, introducing the subject in this way:

“If damnation comes from the judgement of humans, we can only look to God for salvation. It is a key strand in Christian thought that there is a profound version of justice beyond the ability of humans to order themselves, and if that is the case, we must therefore rely on a divine mercy if we are to escape the risk of damnation. Hence the human soul awaiting the advent of grace (chapter 1), hence our individual experience of resurrection (chapter 6). Hence the importance of the gospel story (chapter 2) in offering two ways out: resurrection in order to overcome Jesus’ cruel and unjust execution, and through the sacrifice of his innocence, redemption from the pain of human sin.

“The notion of sacrifice is a long way from clear-cut American justice in the movies. In Westerns, the hero makes law with the gun settling matters not through any judicial procedure but by natural intuition of how corruption is to be dealt with, a gift that both sanctifies his violence and as it were lends him the necessary skill with a gun. Moral superiority translates into a practical one. But Hollywood has created another version of this myth, that of the gangster who uses violence to assert his difference from, and antagonism toward ordered society. He is the dark doppelgänger of the Western hero, and the central protagonist of dozens of films.

“In the portentous words of the hard-boiled American director, Samuel Fuller, pronounced in Jean-Luc Godard’s Pierrot Le Fou (1965), ‘film is like a battleground: love, hate, action, violence, death . . . In one word, emotion.’   This is a wonderfully concise description of the gangster film, one of America’s notable contributions to popular culture, so popular that many other countries have now taken up the genre.  Yet, while being a battleground, it offers a context to explore the suffering of the world not just by the willed evil in living and dying by the sword, but also in ideas of guilt, redemption from evil, and ultimate salvation.  Although we shall look at examples where these themes are touched on, it is a feature of the genre that they have been largely ignored, perhaps as a result of necessity since the mechanisms of revenge and the conclusion of justice have to be kept at the forefront, as if directors and scriptwriters by and large feel that any consideration of whether these people have any human dignity is an irrelevant one. Questions of right and wrong have been sidelined into formulas of ‘good guys’ (the cops, at least some of the time) and ‘bad guys’ (the gangsters most of the time), and because the films’ purpose is to seduce the viewer into an involvement with the story regardless of rights and wrongs, their creators are most focussed on entertaining adults in an adult world.  One side-effect has been that they have not had any hesitation about putting the gangster film at the forefront of portraying violence on screen, to the point where there seem, over a hundred years on from the invention of the cinema, to be no taboos left as to what is permitted, and the images of violence seem drained of moral meaning.”

Among the films I then discuss or refer to in passing are: The Godfather films, White Heat, The Big Heat, Bad Lieutenant, The Funeral. That leads into a consideration of the ‘atheist’ gangster films of Jean-Pierre Melville, especially Le Samourai.

Samurai

For details of the book, go to: http://bit.ly/TroubadorPress

For my film website, go to: www.timcawkwell.co.uk

enter The Apostle . . . shouting

03 Monday Nov 2014

Posted by Tim Cawkwell in revivalism

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revivalism, Robert Duvall, The Apostle

From pages 92-3 of THE NEW FILMGOER’S GUIDE TO GOD:

“Robert Duvall’s film The Apostle (1997) mines the idea of revivalist shouting to the full. Right at the beginning it shows Sonny Dewey as a young white boy listening to a black revivalist preacher. The child is father of the man: Sonny devotes his life to ministry in the proper style, which accepts no authority but that of God as it is expressed in scripture. Made at the end of the twentieth century, The Apostle is a valuable depiction of contemporary religion in a corner of America. Yet it is also a critique of that religion: Sonny’s religious convictions come from a character in which inner human complexity and outward certainty struggle in tension with each other. He seems to be in total control but the narrative hinges on a moment when he loses self-control.

The Apostle

“Sonny strides through the film like a colossal monster. The whole focus is on him so that while the rest of the cast is well drawn, they are slightly pale by comparison. Jesse is frightened of him; Horace is just a ‘puny-arsed Youth Minister’; Brother Blackwell’s ministry has been defeated by two heart attacks; Sonny’s loyal friend Joe is in awe of him; Toosie, the woman whom Sonny courts in Bayou Boutté, is coy and uncommitted. The only comparable figures are the black preachers from whom Sonny has learnt how to shout. When Blackwell offers him his old church, now a shack in a field, Sonny comments ‘I could do some shouting in here’. His approach to radio preaching is to tell people that the eleventh commandment ‘Thou shalt not shout’ does not exist.”

For details of the book, go to: http://bit.ly/TroubadorPress

For my website, go to: www.timcawkwell.co.uk

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Recent Posts

  • RICH MAN, POOR MAN, DEAD MAN – a Covid ode
  • VERSE EPISTLE TO Mr DOMINIC CUMMINGS . . .
  • EMPIRE – WITH CHINESE CHARACTERISTICS
  • yearning for the sixties
  • FILM PORTRAITURE 4: Bob Fleischner Dying

Recent Comments

Sarah Cawkwell on FILM PORTRAITS 2: TACITA …
Antonioni: more De C… on Antonioni’s Metaphysical…
Tim Cawkwell on Ferrara made me (1): Anto…
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Categories

  • Antonioni
  • artists' film
  • avant garde
  • Bible on film
  • biopics
  • Brakhage
  • Bresson
  • British cinema
  • cinema and culture
  • cinema of hyperbole
  • costume narratives
  • courtroom dramas
  • Creation
  • crucifixion films
  • crucifixion on film
  • diary films
  • disaster movies
  • documentaries
  • Doubt
  • film noir
  • film portraiture
  • gangster films
  • God
  • Hitchcock
  • humanism
  • Ireland
  • Italian gardens
  • Italy
  • John Ford
  • Kieslowski reflection
  • Kieslowski reflections
  • literature and film
  • metaphysical film
  • monastery films
  • Nativity
  • nuns on film
  • opera and film
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  • Pasolini
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  • predestination
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  • revivalism
  • Rohmer
  • Russian cinema
  • self-publishing
  • sewer films
  • silent cinema
  • spiritual cinema
  • surrealism
  • talkies
  • Tim's poems 2020
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