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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

Category Archives: God

FIRST REFORMED second time round

14 Tuesday Aug 2018

Posted by Tim Cawkwell in Bresson, God, literature and film, resurrection, spiritual cinema, Uncategorized

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Bernanos, First Reformed, Port Townsend

This film (see previous entry) continues to stick in my mind. At the end of July I attended a service at St Paul’s episcopal church at Port Townsend, in Washington State (tip of NW corner of USA, looking out on Puget Sound). My Anglicanism is very much Catholic But Reformed, but this Rite 1 communion service was emphatically Protestant, very much focussed on the Word. Just like First Reformed I thought. The church even looks a bit like the one in First Reformed.

St Paul's Port Townsend

Subsequently I dreamt up a Stem of Bernanos, like the stem of Jesse:

Stem of Bernanos PDF [click to open]

http://www.timcawkwell.co.uk

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

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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

 

IN SEARCH OF ONENESS

26 Monday Mar 2018

Posted by Tim Cawkwell in cinema and culture, documentaries, God, monastery films, nuns on film, spiritual cinema

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convents, Harold Palmer, Into Great Silence, monasteries, Oneness, Shepherds Law, Stephen Platten

If the cinema more than any other art is a barometer of current concerns, hopes, preoccupations, anxieties and aspirations, then the fact that there has been a spate (well, a small spate) of cloister films is significant. I do not mean dramas in monasteries, of which there are many juicy examples that tell us much more about humans than about God, but documentaries, for want of a better word, that use the camera to go inside cloistered spaces quite outside our experience and which are yet part of our history and culture. Here are some of them:

  • Into Great Silence (Philip Gröning 2005) – La Grande Chartreuse near Grenoble, France
  • The Presentation Sisters (Tacita Dean 2005) – convent near Cork, Ireland
  • No Greater Love (Michael White 2009) – nunnery in London
  • Jennifer (Nina Danino 2015) – Carmelite monastery in Ronda, Spain
  • three slow-TV documentaries (screened in 2017 on the BBC) about life in the British monasteries of Downside, Pluscarden and Belmont.

Into Gt Silence - procession    Into Gt Silence - mending shoe

The outstanding film in this group is Into Great Silence (above), for the making of which Gröning had to wait 14 years. The result therefore has a premeditated feel from a long engagement with the idea but also a quality of delight in what he found to film once he was inside the monastery. It also has a weight to it from its 2½ hours in length, ‘bleeding chunks’ of cloister, church and cell time.

This reflection is sparked by reading ‘Oneness’, a collection of essays edited by Stephen Platten (SCM Press 2017) about the rediscovery of monasticism in Britain, and linked by the editor to Shepherds Law in Northumberland. Shepherds Law is as much eremitical as monastic (i.e. more hermit than monk), as far as I can gather, and is being rooted in its place by the creation of a remarkable set of buildings, a work still in progress (see photographs on Google Images). The inspiration for the site came from Brother Harold Palmer, and both he and the site already appear to be becoming places of pilgrimage.

In this country religious faith is on the decline (it is alleged) and the church, like so much of our common life, seems to be suffering from a loss of confidence. The rediscovery of the monastic virtues offers a new, more encouraging side to the way we live now, and it is good that the cinema has a part in this.

For a fuller discussion of cloister films, see my book ‘The New Filmgoer’s Guide to God’ chapter 9, available from Troubador Publishing and on Amazon.

 

 

SLOW TELEVISION

04 Saturday Nov 2017

Posted by Tim Cawkwell in documentaries, God, metaphysical film, monastery films, painting and photography, silent cinema, spiritual cinema

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Belmont, Downside, Father Alex, Groning, Pluscarden

Monasteries and slow television are a natural fit. That was proved by three programmes on BBC4 shown over three nights in October (24th, 25th and 26th). The three-hour series was called Retreat: Meditations from a Monastery and gave us a look inside the three Benedictine monasteries of Downside (Somerset), Pluscarden (Moray, Scotland), and Belmont (Herefordshire). There was special emphasis on work as a form of prayer – activities like joinery, garment-making, bee-keeping and painting an icon. This made sense in television terms because these are visual activities, when sitting meditating is less so, unless the viewer is capable of an empathetic stillness, or unless the film finds ways of getting inside a monk’s head, not to my mind impossible. You need to find visual equivalences for stillness and emptying the mind.

Big pluspoint: no stifling music, except for the monks’ chanting in church.

In 2014 I published ‘The New Filmgoers Guide to God’ and included a section on the current fashion for taking the camera into the monastery:

“If the certainties of a rock-solid belief in the Almighty no longer seem appealing that is one reason why indirections are an attractive route to the heart of religious cinema, as if it was a maze whose centre was hidden, full of false turnings and dead ends, as if we were to keep running into emptiness. Yet there is no doubt that stories of faith and hope still inspire large audiences. What is missing is the sense of a guiding hand, of an imaginative divine universe; in effect we have become disconnected. This only makes it the more extraordinary that in the last few years, documentaries about monks and nuns have commanded a small but committed audience as if a glimpse into the monastic universe offered some key, if vicarious, insight into the proper form of human living.”

The outstanding example in this genre is Matthias Gröning’s Into Great Silence from 2005, made at La Grande Chartreuse near Grenoble in France, and of an imposing length of 2 1/2 hours, a tiny but potent window into the spiritual world that the monastery is able to create.

Medns fm a monastery - Belmont

The third of the three BBC television programmes did deliver a coup de cinéma. Father Alex is shown creating an icon: drawing the outline, applying gold leaf, and painting it. The programme ends with him taking the finished picture into the abbey church to place it on a side altar. However, despite our own impulse to see the finished result, we are denied a proper view of it, but are instead given glimpses of it in a mirror, or from a distorting side angle in order to whet our appetite. We see it placed in the chapel in a long-distance view. Then we get a sideways close-up of Father Alex asperging it, i.e. sprinkling it very lightly with water, in order to bless it. He then lays it horizontally to kiss it and puts it back in place. Only now does the camera look at it full on, but we are still denied a view because Father Alex’s backside is between us and the painting. Then it comes: the monk kneels and we see revealed his icon of the Archangel Michael, glowing richly with its blue and gold, and showing a piercingly handsome face. It is breathtaking, and this was a magical way of bringing the film to a close.

Executive Producer: Nikki Parrott

Producer/Director: Luke Korzun Martin

Production Company: Tigerlily Productions

*

The television programmes are still available to watch on BBC iPlayer, till around the third or fourth week of November.

*

You can buy ‘The New Filmgoer’s Guide to God’ on Amazon.

http://www.timcawkwell.co.uk

DESCENDING TO HADES part 1: BUÑUEL’S ‘EXTERMINATING ANGEL’ AT THE ROYAL OPERA HOUSE, LONDON

05 Friday May 2017

Posted by Tim Cawkwell in cinema and culture, God, opera and film, surrealism

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Ades, Bunuel, Exterminating Angel, Royal Opera House, Tom Cairns

It is the late 1960s: Buñuel’s Exterminating Angel is on at the cinema, and I am drawn to it like a moth to a flame. Half a century on, I am drawn from Norwich, like a lone iron filing to a far-off magnet, to the Royal Opera House in London on the 3rd  May to see the new opera ‘The Exterminating Angel’ by Thomas Adès (or Hades in certain imaginations), with a libretto by Tom Cairns drawn from the script Luis Buñuel wrote for the film.

I am preparing some treasure-able words on a comparison between the opera and the film for my next blog piece. Suffice it to write now a Trip-Advisorish comment on going to the ROH in Covent Garden.

Oh, splendiferous temple to grand opera and high art. You cannot enter the building without a palpable sense of entering a sanctum of civilisation at its most civilised. Its elegant luxury, and the emanations of power, financial and cultural, that it exudes make me gasp in admiration.

But then, what is this? We paid £72 for our two seats, admittedly not at all a bad price by London standards for a theatre seat, but we were seated on the Left Balcony, which means that by the design of the building – extraordinary when it was first built and even more extraordinary now – you only see two thirds of the stage. We’ve encountered this problem before but never until now have we been so short-changed. The stage design is brilliant in every way, except that a lot happens at the side of the stage and is therefore out of sight to spectators in the left-side balcony. To rub it in, the ROH has ditzy little wall lights all way round which no doubt were le dernier cri when it was built but when you lean over the balcony to see better (thus blocking the view of the person behind you) these pesky objects get in the way. Banish them, I say. Replace them with flat lights from John Lewis.

The photo was taken before the performance began when the sheep that feature in the opera (yes, sheep) were paraded on stage. You can see what I mean about the lights.

ROH 2 - May 2017.jpg

The real story however is the opera, which is a drama about a group of wealthy socialites at a dinner party held after an evening at the opera (‘Lucia di Lammermoor’) that all goes wrong, the dinner party from Hades you might say. When it finished and we were seeking to leave, I had a curious feeling: will we in fact be able to? But that is for the next post . . . coming soon, I hope.

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ASSASSINATION STORIES

17 Monday Apr 2017

Posted by Tim Cawkwell in Bible on film, cinema and culture, gangster films, God, Italy, literature and film

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Book of Judges, Coppola, Don Ciccio, Eglon, Ehud, Mario Puzo, Robert Alter, Vito Corleone

Consider two narratives. One is from the Modern World: a car travels up a drive to a house and two men get out. They ascend the steps to a balcony to talk to the man of power, bloated with age and the fruits of living, who is taking his siesta. His gunmen see there is no threat and retire. The first man is very respectful and asks to introduce his friend – as a mark of respect. The second man steps forward and asks for the man of power’s blessing, and receives it: the man offers his hand to be kissed, and the second man kisses it. The man of power asks for his name, the second man gives it. But the man of power ‘don’t hear so good’, so the second man leans forward and tells him again, and then adds, ‘And this is for you.’ With that he takes the knife hidden under the coat draped over his left arm and rips open the man of power’s belly. The second man steps back and with the first makes his escape, not without gunfire.

The other narrative is from the Ancient World, indeed the very ancient world. A man goes to a king’s house, to the upper chamber, in order to deliver the tribute of the people under his charge. Those with him then retire, and the man says, ‘A secret word I have for you, King.’ So the king in turn sends away his courtiers. The man says, ‘A word of God I have for you,’ so the king stands up. And the man, with his left hand, takes the double-edged sword strapped secretly to his right thigh, and plunges it into the king’s belly. The king was a very fat man, we are told, and the fat of his belly closed over the blade. The assassin went out, locked the doors, and made his escape.

Speculum Humanae Salvationis, 1360

The first, as you have spotted, is from Godfather 2, a flashback to the episode in which Vito takes revenge on Don Ciccio for having murdered his father, his elder brother, and finally his mother. Aged nine at the time Vito only just escapes with his life – to New York and Godfatherhood.

The second is less familiar. For Lent I read the Book of Judges in the translation by Robert Alter. Not your normal reading, but there it is: the Bible and Lent go together. Choice episodes include the Israelites chopping off the arms and big toes of Adoni-Bezek (‘master of Bezek’): Jael driving a tent-peg through Sisera’s head; Gideon harrowing (literally) the men of Succoth with thorns and thistles; Abimelech burning a tower filled with 1000 men and women; Abimelech killed by a millstone flung from a tower that shatters his skull; a Levite man and a concubine ‘abused all night long until morning by Benjaminites’; not to mention the story of Samson which includes slaying the Philistines, being seduced and blinded, then acting the force of an earthquake in the Philistine temple. The Book of Judges does not just contain death but cruel, violent and degrading death. It is the shockingest kind of pulp fiction.

The story of Ehud’s assassination of Eglon the King of Moab is as vivid and episode as any in Judges, I think because it occurs in a cool upper chamber under a veneer of formality and respect surrounding the delivery of tribute by a subject commander, a scene exploded by an eruption of violence and repulsive detail. When I read it, I instantly thought of the scene in Godfather 2 and instantly concluded that Coppola, and his screenwriter Mario Puzo, were referencing the passage in Judges. Ehud, the assassin, was a left-handed man and it was his left hand that committed the murder; when Vito approaches Ciccio he uses his right hand to kiss the offered hand, the weapon veiled under the coat draped on his left arm. But no, Vito uses the knife in his right hand to kill Ciccio, and the parallelism between the two narratives is just coincidental.

Gf 2.2

Gf 2.3Gf 2.4Gf 2.6

Yet, if one has not influenced the other, they do echo each other in their world-view, of a violence in the world that is tragic without even being cathartic. They both proclaim, “This is what the world is like,” behind our façade of civilisation and of human relations conducted with respect. The idea is so far from edifying to the extent that both stories should be shut out from our lives. Yet this is impossible to do: both of them bewitch us; we watch or read fascinated; and they have that extraordinary quality that when we have read or watched them once, we want to do so again and again, to renew our acquaintance with the ghastly detail.

The biblical narrative is paratactic, in other words an ‘and . . . and . . . and . . .’ narrative distilling it into a series of essential details. ‘Cut. . . cut . . . cut. . .’ Coppola’s film narrative has similar qualities: the sequence starting from the car arriving at Ciccio’s villa to its leaving in haste, the deed done, lasts four minutes and comprises some 45 shots, and the sequence on the balcony is a series of shots and reverse shots starting in medium shot and ending in closer shot (but not in close-up). As you watch for the first time, you are lulled with the heat of a Sicilian late summer afternoon, then you palpitate with unease – the rest of the film has taught you that something unpleasant is going to happen – and then you gasp at the sight of the knife being ripped up Ciccio’s front.

I first read Judges as a boy in the King James Version, its violence clear but the detail toned down by the obscurity of the language at certain points. Try Robert Alter’s translation, with his essential commentary, to feel the full starkness of the event.

Finally, I cannot help reflecting in a melancholy fashion that these are both religious narratives. The cultural Catholicism of the Godfather is essential to its atmosphere: the episode of Ciccio’s murder is followed by the sight of Vito and his family leaving church after Mass. And Judges? It is possibly the most violent, God-forsaken book of the Bible – but it is not really God-forsaken since the events happen within the total story of Israel, God’s chosen people. The Bible, like life, ‘contains multitudes’.

http://www.timcawkwell.co.uk

 

 

Kieslowski’s version of God

24 Friday Oct 2014

Posted by Tim Cawkwell in God

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Decalogue, East Coker, Kieslowski, Three Colours: Red, Trintignant, TS Eliot

I write about Kieslowski in the book, intrigued as I was by his version of God:

“In Decalogue 2 [1988], a doctor – experienced and world-weary, living alone and nursing the trauma of losing his family during a bombing raid in the war – plays a role suggestive of some supreme being mediating between an anxious woman and her critically ill husband, and coping with matters of life and death in a rickety hospital. The character prefigures the retired judge in Three Colours: Red [1994], who is omniscient but not omnipotent, and who finds that, because according to Kieślowski God ‘leaves us a lot of freedom’, the neighbours on whom he eavesdrops use that freedom to live a hellish existence. He reflects . . . that as a judge he had some power of action to influence people’s lives by his judgements, but that now he is retired even that has been removed.”

This always makes me think of TS Eliot’s words: “The whole earth is our hospital /endowed by the ruined millionaire . . . ” These are from East Coker section IV, a modern metaphysical poem about our disease and how we are treated in God’s hospital where Jesus is “the wounded surgeon”.

Here’s a picture of Jean-Louis Trintignant as the retired judge in Three Colours: Red who wants to play God. He has to watch the world through a glass.

three cols red 2

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