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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: Nativity

A REMBRANDT CHRISTMAS CARD

10 Sunday Dec 2017

Posted by Tim Cawkwell in Bible on film, Nativity, painting and photography, spiritual cinema, Uncategorized

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angel appearing to shepherds, Francesca Vanke, Giorgia Bottinelli, Norwich Castle Museum, Rembrandt

Rembrandt etching of shepherds

You could make a film of the Life of Christ based on Rembrandt paintings and etchings. Here is ‘The Angel Appearing to the Shepherds’ from 1634 (when Rembrandt was 28) etched and engraved, plus some drypoint. One of his larger etchings, by the way, but still only 26 x 22 cm.This episode from the Nativity of Christ, often portrayed rather statically, is here full of movement, movement which makes the moment seriously exciting. Naturally it contrasts brightness with shadow and darkness, Rembrandt’s speciality. In order to enhance the brightness round the angel, he has enlarged the piercing in the cloud and filled it with putti. Pity really, as I could have done without them, and I feel it breaks the Rembrandt rule of making the ordinary extraordinary. Instead he makes the extraordinary more so, thus achieving a diminishing return. However the shepherds are terrific, and the animals too, achieving a gothic level of fright. Overall the effect is of a fantastic landscape in which a fantastic event occurs.

41.1.52

What a contrast to the 1651 etching ‘The Flight Into Egypt: a night piece’ (13 x 11 cm), in which the darkness presses in on the Holy Family as they flee from King Herod. Seventeen years on, at the age of 45, Rembrandt has a fuller sense of the sombreness of the ordinary world, a world that remains extraordinary.

I learnt all this from ‘Rembrandt: Lightening the Darkness’, Norwich’s current contribution to civilization. It is an exhibition of the significant holding of Rembrandt etchings in the Norwich Castle Museum, running until 7 January 2018. It has a good catalogue by Giorgia Bottinelli and Francesca Vanke too.

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Epiphany

03 Saturday Jan 2015

Posted by Tim Cawkwell in Nativity

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Christmas, Epiphany, Messiah film, Rossellini

Now, Epiphany approacheth. So after the Pasolini version of the three kings for Christmas, here’s Rossellini’s take on it:

Rossellini Messiah 2 (300x204) Rossellini Messiah 5 (300x208) Rossellini Messiah 6 (300x206)

The images are ropey because they are taken from a VHS tape I have of Rossellini’s Messiah (dubbed into German, without subtitles – luckily I know the story). It baffles me why there isn’t a decent DVD version available. Ditto Rossellini’s Acts of the Apostles.

I write about Messiah in ‘The New Filmgoer’s Guide to God’ because I regard Rossellini as being central to its story.

Christmas

18 Thursday Dec 2014

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Gospel according to St Matthew, Pasolini, Renaissance painting, the magi

Christmas approacheth. It feels an appropriate moment to refer to Pasolini’s version of Matthew’s gospel, made with a striking fidelity to the text. Like the Renaissance painters to be counted among his forebears, Pasolini knew the story intimately.

The Nativity in Matthew just involves the kings, or better magi, so no shepherds. The second image shows a touching moment, a scene imagined by the film-maker without contradicting the spirit of the words, in which Mary passes her baby to one of the magi for him to hold.

Pasolini gospel 005 (300x167) Pasolini gospel 002 (300x167)

Here is an extract from what I wrote about the film in THE NEW FILMGOER’S GUIDE TO GOD:

“What are the qualities of Il Vangelo secondo Matteo, in English The Gospel according to St Matthew (although Pasolini was strongly irritated by the addition of ‘saint’)? At first sight it has an astonishing closeness to the text, so that for the Christian believer the sacredness of the book is profoundly respected, but it also is the work of a literary man with a remarkable gift for visual images. In this ability to combine the worlds of words and of pictures Pasolini echoes his Renaissance fore-runners such as Da Vinci, Michelangelo and Alberti: besides writing novels and poems, he was an intellectual and semiologist, he wrote a book about Italian paintings, he drew (an exhibition of his drawings was held after his death), he had a passion for music. The Gospel brings these elements together more than any other of the many creations in the packed fifty-three years of his life.

“In order to visualize the Gospel, he first thought to film it in Palestine but after a visit rejected this as unsuitable, settling instead for the rugged landscapes of Apulia, Calabria, Basilicata and Catania in southern Italy. For Jerusalem he used the old part of Matera near Taranto. This unfamiliar, impoverished Italy is arresting in itself, and its buildings made an archaic and intangibly appropriate setting when compared to the papier mâché and plywood buildings of the Hollywood epic. But his creative imagination did not insist on some documentary adherence to the dress of the first century AD (assuming that such dress, whether military, royal or peasant, could be objectively determined). Instead he sought inspiration in painting, especially of the Renaissance: hence the Pharisees’ hats and the garb of the Roman soldiers are from the paintings of Piero della Francesca, the pregnant Mary is a Renaissance Madonna, and, so Pasolini claimed, ‘Giotto and Norman sculpture were in the background.’ He even adopts the visual trick of showing people with their bodies foreshortened by the camera (Herod on his deathbed, John in prison) as if the Renaissance fascination with perspective could become the film-maker’s as well.

“When the film appeared, its music aroused particular admiration, in its variety and its use: the opening of Mozart’s Dissonance Quartet for the healing of the leper, breaking into the Gloria from the Congolese Missa Luba as the miracle is achieved; the slide guitar of blues-singer Leadbelly whose stretched-out notes exaggerate the shuffling gait of the cripple as he approaches Jesus; for the massacre of the innocents Prokofiev’s stabbing music for the film Alexander Nevsky; a grave Negro spiritual to solemnize the Nativity. Bach is particularly favoured, including Webern’s arrangement for chamber orchestra of the Ricercare from ‘The Musical Offering’. Pasolini makes explicit use of Bach’s ‘St Matthew Passion’: an orchestral version of the chorus, ‘Wir setzen uns mit Träner nieder’, is used not just at the end as it is in Bach’s Passion, but at other points as well. The breadth of both the visual and musical references in the film embody Pasolini’s intention to tell the story and in doing so, encompass 2000 years of story-telling about the life of Christ.”

Next entry will be on Rossellini’s Messiah.

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Recent Posts

  • RICH MAN, POOR MAN, DEAD MAN – a Covid ode
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  • 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…
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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
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  • predestination
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  • revivalism
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  • sewer films
  • silent cinema
  • spiritual cinema
  • surrealism
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  • Tim's poems 2020
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