• About

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

Category Archives: crucifixion films

FIRST REFORMED, SCHRADER REINVENTED

17 Tuesday Jul 2018

Posted by Tim Cawkwell in Bible on film, Bresson, cinema of hyperbole, Creation, crucifixion films, Doubt, God, metaphysical film, Pascalian cinema, predestination, redemption, spiritual cinema

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

apocalypse, Bergman, Bresson, Schrader, Tarkovsky

Paul Schrader was born in 1946, so he is 72 years old and maybe feeling the chariot of death pressing on behind. While there is time he needs to make not just another film, but to revisit his youth in all its intensity: the rigour of his Calvinist upbringing, the life-changing discovery of moving images, the heady atmosphere of radicalism engendered by US involvement in the Vietnam War.

So, obviously, he must go back to Robert Bresson and Ingmar Bergman, art-house deities of his youth. Schrader belongs to that cine-literate Hollywood generation that emerged in the 1970s – Scorsese, Spielberg, De Palma, Lucas and others – only his cine-literacy was as much in the European arthouse film as in commercial or pulp film-making. As a measure of his precocious obsession, he published a book on Dreyer, Bresson and Ozu in 1972 at the age of 26, and when he got down to script-writing and later directing, their intensity informed his narratives. His main protagonists are ulcerous, and it seems in character that Schrader started his script for Taxi Driver while hospitalised for ulcer treatment in 1972. Travis Bickle wrestles on behalf of us all.

First Reformed draws on two particular films, Bresson’s Journal d’un curé de campagne/ Diary of a Country Priest and Bergman’s Nattvardsgästerna/ Winter Light, and the Reverend Toller is in a lineage that begins with the young curé of the Journal, and moves to Pastor Ericsson in Winter Light. (Bergman claimed to have been tremendously fond of Bernanos’ original novel, and had seen Bresson’s film of it seven or eight times before he made Winter Light.) Watching First Reformed, I felt blissfully happy to see that this noble line had not been extinguished.

First Reformed

So – First Reformed consciously, deliberately and imperiously starts from Bresson and Bergman, and in the Facebook age, Schrader asserts a deeper historical continuity about human corruption and the compelling need for salvation. The film is Pascalian just when I thought we had forgotten how to be so. Big question: do you believe in the environmental apocalypse to come? Big answer: it is better to say yes, since if you’re right you will do something about it. Anyway, can you dare bet it won’t happen in view of what we are doing to the planet? This is a version of Pascal’s Wager, and, as Bresson said in 1965, “Pascal is for everyone.” We are predestined for destruction, and although Toller argues that humans cannot predict the future, you have a sense that having wrestled like Jacob with the angel in the person of the young environmental activist Michael, he cannot get rid of the idea that the future is determined for us, and it is grim. This engenders not doubt about the existence of God (as with Pastor Eriksson), but doubt that he can ever forgive us.

For a Hollywood film, it is extremely spare. Admittedly Ethan Hawke plays Toller, well known to audiences from a lot of films, especially those of Richard Linklater, but, to give him the benefit of the doubt, he manages to offload this baggage. At any rate to me the rest of the cast are unknowns, and certainly unfamiliar. Although Schrader is closer to the Bergman mantra, “Actors are trained to express complexities” than to Bresson’s idea of the actor as ‘model’ who is “involuntarily expressive”, yet with his small cast of characters Schrader manages to echo in an authentic manner the whole society Bresson conjures up in Journal.

I watched the film wondering whether it would end with Bernanos’/Bresson’s “All is Grace” but Schrader steers it convincingly in his own non-slavish direction. And the boldest, super-contrarian move he makes is to film his story in the 4:3 format of classical cinema, which in an age of hyperbolical wide-screen film-making especially catches us out, reminding us that this format has not been bettered for allowing the intense, microscope-like gaze of the camera.

The big theme of the film is apocalypse. The narrative not just reinvents the curé’s psychosomatic cancer in Journal, but Michael’s pessimism about the environment rhymes with Persson’s fear of nuclear destruction in Winter Light. It rhymes too with the central idea of Bresson’s most pessimistic film, Le Diable probablement / The Devil Probably, which in the face of man-made environmental catastrophe rejects the church, Marxism, outright libertarianism – and other nostrums – in favour of suicide. Is this too melodramatic? But then so many powerful dramas and films hinge on a melodramatic premise, and in First Reformed the idea makes for compelling viewing. It poses too a central challenge for theists. A director as Bible-literate as Schrader manages deftly to bring in the counter-arguments to outright pessimism: the apostle Paul’s “The whole of creation is groaning for release from bondage” (Romans 8.22) and God’s words in Job chapter 38.4: “Where were you when I laid the foundations of the earth?” But are they a sufficient counterweight?

How all this comes to a climax should be discussed as well, but I shall refrain for fear of revealing the ending. Suffice it to say that Schrader unexpectedly moves into Tarkovskian territory with the levitation from Offret / The Sacrifice, but then goes beyond it, and miles too beyond the Bressonian universe, with a magical sequence of digital film-making. You almost wish he had done the whole film in 3-D.

Bresson, Bergman and Tarkovsky are central figures in my New Filmgoers Guide to God, published by Matador in 2014, available on Amazon.

http://www.timcawkwell.co.uk

 

How do we cope with the Day of Wrath?

18 Tuesday Nov 2014

Posted by Tim Cawkwell in crucifixion films

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

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

‘Rome Open City’ as a religious film

03 Friday Oct 2014

Posted by Tim Cawkwell in crucifixion films

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

crucifixion, Guttuso, Rome Open City, Rossellini

Rome Open City has an important place in the history of the cinema as the harbinger of Italian neo-realism, an honour which strictly should go to Visconti’s Ossessione made a year or so earlier. But while Ossessione is a gritty verismo melodrama, Rome Open City is a big film the subject of which is nothing less than the crucifixion of Rome – and Rome here stands for the whole nation. That means it is important as a religious film, although it never seems to get on those ’10 best faith film’ lists.

It should do. Here’s how I describe the climax of the film in THE NEW FILMGOER’S GUIDE TO GOD:

“Above all, the key relationship of the film is that between Manfredi and the priest Don Pietro. Manfredi is a communist, arrested in 1928 for conspiring against the state, and condemned to twelve years in prison. Having escaped, he rises to membership of the Committee for National Liberation. When this hard-line resister first meets Don Pietro, he sets aside any antipathy in favour of forging the necessary links at the human level. Don Pietro is no different, for when Bergmann [head of the gestapo in Rome] demands why he should consort with an atheist, he responds that both of them fight for justice and freedom, for ‘the ways of the Lord are infinite’. This conception of God is of one who can make sense of conflicting human activity.
The final sequences of the film bring this relationship into complete focus. After his arrest, Manfredi is tortured to make him divulge his resistance contacts but both ‘afraid and calm’ he says nothing, the clarity of his hatred giving him the strength not to betray. Bergmann forces Don Pietro to watch and at the close of the scene blurts at him: ‘Satisfied with your Christian charity?’ He then lifts Manfredi’s face up for Don Pietro, and us, to see: it is ravaged with blood and the marks of torture. Bergmann pronounces him ‘your brother in Christ’ as Pilate had pronounced ‘ecce homo/behold the man’ in John (19:5). Manfredi is dead, and Don Pietro says, ‘It is finished’, Jesus’ last words on the cross in John (19:20). During Manfredi’s torture his arms are pinned to the wall above his head like the crucified Jesus, and it has been suggested by David Forgacs that Rossellini has in mind a painting of the crucifixion by Renato Guttuso of 1940-1, in which the three crosses on Calvary are surrounded by distraught women and indifferent men, all naked, while in the foreground are the instruments of the Passion: knife, nails, vinegar. The presence of horses suggests the influence of Picasso’s Guernica of 1937 on Guttuso, and both paintings order the horror of war in an expressive new way. In echoing the painting, Rossellini uses the chief tool of cinema, the supposedly objective camera, to order and direct in a similarly expressive way how the viewer should interpret the banal facts of suffering.

For the final sequence, he resorts to the prosaic: Don Pietro is taken to some open ground at the Forte Bravetta, tied in a chair and shot by firing squad. To the priest accompanying him he comments, ‘It is easy to die; the difficulty is to live decently.’ Rossellini deliberately films his dignified death in a matter-of-fact way. It is the torture sequence in the Gestapo HQ that he dramatizes, and the Crucifixion is reserved for the atheist Manfredi, his death being made a symbol for the murder of justice and freedom.”

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…
Donato Totaro on Ferrara made me (1): Anto…
Tim Cawkwell on Ferrara made me (1): Anto…

Archives

  • December 2020
  • November 2020
  • May 2019
  • January 2019
  • November 2018
  • October 2018
  • September 2018
  • August 2018
  • July 2018
  • June 2018
  • May 2018
  • April 2018
  • March 2018
  • February 2018
  • January 2018
  • December 2017
  • November 2017
  • October 2017
  • September 2017
  • August 2017
  • July 2017
  • June 2017
  • May 2017
  • April 2017
  • March 2017
  • February 2017
  • January 2017
  • December 2016
  • November 2016
  • October 2016
  • September 2016
  • August 2016
  • July 2016
  • June 2016
  • May 2016
  • April 2016
  • March 2016
  • February 2016
  • January 2016
  • December 2015
  • November 2015
  • October 2015
  • September 2015
  • August 2015
  • June 2015
  • May 2015
  • April 2015
  • March 2015
  • January 2015
  • December 2014
  • November 2014
  • October 2014
  • June 2014
  • May 2014
  • April 2014

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
  • painting and photography
  • Pascalian cinema
  • Pasolini
  • poetry & verse
  • Polish history
  • predestination
  • redemption
  • resurrection
  • revivalism
  • Rohmer
  • Russian cinema
  • self-publishing
  • sewer films
  • silent cinema
  • spiritual cinema
  • surrealism
  • talkies
  • Tim's poems 2020
  • time puzzles
  • Topaz
  • travel
  • Uncategorized
  • underground film
  • War
  • White Ribbon
  • Zweite Heimat

Meta

  • Register
  • Log in
  • Entries feed
  • Comments feed
  • WordPress.com

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…
Donato Totaro on Ferrara made me (1): Anto…
Tim Cawkwell on Ferrara made me (1): Anto…

Archives

  • December 2020
  • November 2020
  • May 2019
  • January 2019
  • November 2018
  • October 2018
  • September 2018
  • August 2018
  • July 2018
  • June 2018
  • May 2018
  • April 2018
  • March 2018
  • February 2018
  • January 2018
  • December 2017
  • November 2017
  • October 2017
  • September 2017
  • August 2017
  • July 2017
  • June 2017
  • May 2017
  • April 2017
  • March 2017
  • February 2017
  • January 2017
  • December 2016
  • November 2016
  • October 2016
  • September 2016
  • August 2016
  • July 2016
  • June 2016
  • May 2016
  • April 2016
  • March 2016
  • February 2016
  • January 2016
  • December 2015
  • November 2015
  • October 2015
  • September 2015
  • August 2015
  • June 2015
  • May 2015
  • April 2015
  • March 2015
  • January 2015
  • December 2014
  • November 2014
  • October 2014
  • June 2014
  • May 2014
  • April 2014

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
  • painting and photography
  • Pascalian cinema
  • Pasolini
  • poetry & verse
  • Polish history
  • predestination
  • redemption
  • resurrection
  • revivalism
  • Rohmer
  • Russian cinema
  • self-publishing
  • sewer films
  • silent cinema
  • spiritual cinema
  • surrealism
  • talkies
  • Tim's poems 2020
  • time puzzles
  • Topaz
  • travel
  • Uncategorized
  • underground film
  • War
  • White Ribbon
  • Zweite Heimat

Meta

  • Register
  • Log in
  • Entries feed
  • Comments feed
  • WordPress.com

Blog at WordPress.com.

Cancel
Privacy & Cookies: This site uses cookies. By continuing to use this website, you agree to their use.
To find out more, including how to control cookies, see here: Cookie Policy