Hope and resilience

One of the five aspects of the Presbyterian Church of Aotearoa New Zealand's mandate is justice. We possibly don't focus on it as much as we might on this blog, so here is an extract from a blog (Never Mind the Bricolage) that itself doesn't usually focus on justice issues either.

In this post, the writer (whose name doesn't appear on the blog that I can find) has recently seen a documentary called Wasteland about the world's largest landfill on the edge of Rio, in Brazil. Whole communities live in and around this landfill, and the film shows how there is both hope and resilience amongst these people. The writer's comments are worth reading in full, but the following paragraph is significant.

Without reaching too far, it might be that there is a shift in consciousness occurring, a growing sense that materialism is not sufficient and that finding some to contribute to the well-being of others is integral to our humanity. If it is not a shift in consciousness, it is a trend for sure. It could be that the economic downturn has had some effect, but think it is beyond that. Another signal that we have experienced a move away from, or are past, post, after or entering some new phase of the modern project--can't be bothered with terming it postmodern, post-secular, hyper-modern, liquid modernity or whatever other characterization has been put forth---things have shifted, we don't live in the same world anymore, new values and ethics are emerging and Muniz [the film's director] embodies some of them in this film. Or perhaps they are old values being incarnated differently--just watch the film and make up your own mind.

art, theology, marxism, atheism, the mix!

One of the blogs I read regularly is entitled 'Never mind the bricolage' and is written by someone who calls himself 'Superflat'. There was a point when I had an actual name, but I can't just track it down on the blog at present. He works with students doing courses in which he discusses art and theology, (at least these topics come up regularly in his blog), and in his latest post, Criticism of Heaven he begins by writing the following...

In the Art, Cinema and Theology class we have been exploring the role of women in the arts and particularly women painters and their general absence from Western Art History. We found our way to a discussion about Frida Kahlo, inspired by the movie about her starring Selma Hayek and directed by Julie Taymor.

I think that there are rich conversations to be had around her life and work, but a question came up during class about how to 'do theology with someone who is a communist and an atheist'--points that I actually think are favourable for a conversation, but somehow seemed to be a stumbling block to at least one person. I guess it all depends on how one understands what theological discourse might be--for me it encompasses at least some aspect of bringing things (anything) into dialogue and conversation. While I part company with the conclusions of the Radical Orthodoxy mob, I do like Graham Ward's idea that doing theology somehow means 'reclaiming the world'--bringing all the things once ceded to the wider culture back into contact and conversation with sacred communities and with theology. So for me Frida Kahlo offers up some major theological potentials: sexuality and gender; socialism/Marxism, theism/a-theism, pain and brokenness just to name a few.

I like that idea of 'reclaiming the world' in relation to art/theology -it resonates with a number of different writers on art and theology I've read.

Superflat has a little more to say....here.

[Bricolage is a term used in several disciplines, among them the visual arts, to refer to the construction or creation of a work from a diverse range of things that happen to be available, or a work created by such a process. The term is borrowed from the French word bricolage, from the verb bricoler, the core meaning in French being, "fiddle, tinker" and, by extension, "to make creative and resourceful use of whatever materials are at hand (regardless of their original purpose)". In contemporary French the word is the equivalent of the English do it yourself, and is seen on large shed retail outlets throughout France. A person who engages in bricolage is a bricoleur. Thanks, Wikipedia!]

The Insatiable Moon finally seen

The Insatiable Moon is a film that needs to be seen twice. First time around you're trying to take in the way things work in this particular world, and how the story all fits together. A second viewing gives you more time to reflect.

Arthur (played by Rawiri Paratene) believes he's the 'second son of God.' He lives in a boarding house with a bunch of other people with mental health issues, and is by far the most outgoing and positive of them all. The story explores whether his ability to discern other people's inner turmoils, his belief that God is benevolent to his children, his prophetic words and other insights, are truly charismatic gifts, or merely part of his brain dysfunctions. It challenges us to believe in miracles, in the need for a true belief in God and not just a religious one, and of course, most of all, it challenges us to see people with mental health issues as people loved by God.

The 'villains' of the piece might be a bit too black and white, but they're mostly minor characters: the really interesting people in this movie are those who have a sense of the spiritual and are willing to follow it even if it causes them pain, or requires them to change long-held attitudes.

The scene towards the end, when the suburb of Ponsonby rallies for and against having a boarding house for people with mental health problems in its midst, is the climax, but the more important scene comes earlier, at the funeral of one of the boarding house residents. This is where Arthur comes into his own as a prophetic voice, a man who speaks the words of (first) Son of God.

The other interesting character is the man - Bob - who runs the boarding house: foul-mouthed and short-fused, he nevertheless cares deeply for the men he feeds and cleans up for (seemingly single-handed). This is a vocation for him, rather than a job, although it's unlikely he regards himself as a spiritual man. The 'spiritual' man in the story, the Anglican priest, is at odds with himself and his spiritual life, and seems rather wet by comparison with Bob. It's not that he's meant to represent institutional religion; that would be too simplistic. Rather he's a man in the wrong job, and wisely, by the end of the movie, he's realised it.

Mike Riddell, the author of the original book and the scriptwriter for the movie, doesn't give us all the answers - although he teases us with possible answers at times. His seven years of effort (along with a host of other supporters, including his wife, who directed the movie after the original director had to pull out) in getting this movie off the ground have borne good fruit.

Worship as a possible circus

In many church circles the only gifts that are valued for worship are musical ones (and even then of a small range of music) or the ability to speak well (preferably in a good English accent). This attitude needs shattering, and opening up so that poets, photographers, ideas people, geeks, theologians, liturgists, designers, writers, cooks, politicians, architects, movie-makers, storytellers, parents, campaigners, children, bloggers, DJs, VJs, craft-makers, or just anybody who comes and is willing to bounce ideas around, can get involved.

Jonny Baker, from his recent book, Curating Worship

Some more about the book here.

One Size Fits All?

Movie distribution being what it is, it's unlikely you'll have seen or heard of the Canadian documentary, One Size Fits All? It came out last year, and there's information about it on the Net (although not, as far as I could see, on the movie site, imdb.com, which is usually the oracle of oracles when it comes to movies).

The movie has its own website, which has a number of different segments, including this note on the homepage (they don't do capitals, apparently)

it’s official! we’re sold out of dvds.

after barely a year since its release, our little independent film has done and continues to do the job it was intended to do: inspire, encourage and stimulate conversation. the feedback i’ve received over the last year has been overwhelming and i’m humbled that an idea that hatched on an innocent walk in kingston blossomed into a catalyst for so many. thanks to everyone who’s played a part so far.

The DVDs they're referring to are the second lot, the first having sold out. So it may be difficult even to get a copy of this movie. However, if you can, you'll find that it looks at a wide range of Canadian non-traditional churches (and some trad ones, too, I think), and shows that while the Americans make a lot of noise about doing church differently, the Canadians just get on with it. (Sorry, couldn't resist that!)

The 'web shorts' section of their website has half a dozen videos relating to the movie; the first couple are from a television interview, but I think the others are all clips.

Gran Torino

I watched 79-year-old Clint Eastwood's latest (and probably last) movie on DVD last night. He plays a stolid, grumpy character with flint in his bones who, at the beginning of the movie, has just lost his beloved wife, and now lives alone with his dog. He's the only white person in a neighbourhood where various other ethnic groups have moved in, and lives right next door to a Hmong family - the teenagers speak English, but the mother and grandmother have no English at all.
The movie takes a while to wind up: the first twenty minutes or so set up Eastwood (who plays Kowalski, so ironically he comes from a family that were immigrants themselves at one point) as the sole survivor of the white people in the neighbourhood, at odds with his neighbours (or at least wanting to avoid them), and at odds with the '27-year-old virgin' Catholic priest who insists on keeping his promise to Eastwood's deceased wife, that he'd get the man to confession.
Then there's a turnaround, and he begins to befriend - or mentor - the young Hmong boy from next door, who's in line to get caught up in a gang that does nothing but cause trouble.
The relationship is a surprise - for both the characters - and for the audience. And the outcome of their relationship is also a surprise, with an intriguingly Christian parallel underpinning it.
I won't spoil the story for you, but it's worth seeing. You'll have to put up with Kowalski's often foul and blasphemous mouth (though some of his use of language is quite funny), but if you can get past that, this is a movie that has considerable integrity at its heart (as Eastwood's late period movies mostly have). And it's an interesting parable in its own way.

Men's Group

After my brief comments the other day about What Men Want I need to mention a feature-length movie about men, their needs, their feelings, their emotions (and the inability to express them). Men’s Group takes six men and pulls their lives together through a series of meetings. It’s raw, the language is blunt and down-to-earth (they are Australians, after all) and it’s made a huge impact wherever it’s been shown. Boris Sokratov, of the Out of the Blue depression awareness campaign, wrote: Men’s Group explores dark territory: anger, remorse, fear and regret. In ‘man speak,’ Men’s Group is a story about men talking about stuff: touchy feely emotionally hard stuff. Regrettably many of those who might benefit the most by seeing the movie are unlikely to go near it. On the other hand the more of us who do go the better. Definitely worth a look.
You can see a trailer of the movie here, and the website is here (though it’s a bit thin on information about the film itself). The film has been showing on a limited release around the main centres of New Zealand in May. Hopefully it will soon be available on DVD for all those who aren't in the main centres.

Using Movie Clips

It's a big thing in some churches these days to use movie clips to add a different dimension to the service or the sermon. But one issue that churches have to deal with is that of royalties, and, on top of that, whether the church actually has permission to show the clip in the first place.

YouthTRAIN lists about a dozen sites that have movie clips for use. It provides a brief description of the kind of site - whether it provides a synopsis of the movie, whether there are study guides available, whether you have to pay a fee or a subscription, whether the clips are new or old and so on. Some of the sites have free material, and one or two are more about giving an overview of movies than providing material.

All in all, this is a useful list. Just make sure you give yourself a couple of hours to check it out!

Wanna own your own slave?

The Chicago Sun-Times columnist, Cathleen Falsani, points out that it's more than 165 years since slavery was made illegal in the USA.

It's sixty years since the United Nationas declared, in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, that: "No one shall be held in slavery or servitude; slavery and the slave trade shall be prohibited in all their forms."

Yet in 2008 there are more slaves in the world than were taken during 400 years of the trans-Atlantic slave trade, according to the documentary film, Call + Response. This film is a combination of music focusing on slavery, and images of people who are suffering in slavery around the world.

Of the 27 million slaves worldwide, half are children and 80 percent are female.
Some more stats:

• • Slave traders made $32 billion last year.

• • The average cost of a slave is $90.

• • More than one-third of all prostitutes in South and East Asia are children.

• • More than 17,500 people are trafficked as slaves to the U.S. each year.

• • Fifty percent of slaves in the U.S. work in agriculture, manufacturing or domestic work.

For more information go to the Call and Response website. A question worth asking: how many slaves are there in New Zealand?

Fame

Even as we gobble up the latest gossip, those of us living in the televised culture of the 21st century intuitively understand fame's corrosive effects--after all, they're spilled all over screens and magazines almost everywhere we look. I can't help but wonder, however, whether there's anything normative about fame.... I mean really good, not just in a what-not-to-do kind of way. Like money and power, I think fame is a gift that comes with great responsibility and an obligation to stewardship. And it emerges out of our God-given tendency to commune with one another--to tell stories, to know and be known, to connect.

Kirstin Vander Giessen-Reitsma
From "Fame on film"
an article in the May edition of catapult magazine.

Entering into the mind of others

I'm grateful for Christianity at the Movies' e-letter for alerting me to the following quote, in which C S Lewis basically follows through on Paul's comments about being a Jew to the Jews and a Greek to the Greeks (my rough paraphrase), and shows that the arts can help us understand (but not necessarily agree with) the mind that doesn't have a Christian worldview.
In his book, An Experiment in Criticism, Lewis writes, "We therefore delight to enter into other men's beliefs ... even though we think them untrue. And into their passions, though we think them depraved ... And also into their imaginations, though they lack all realism of content."

[Lewis is writing mostly in the context of reading books and poetry, but his thoughts on criticism apply just as well to film—or any art form, for that matter. He continues:] "This must not be understood as if I were making the literature of power once more into a department which existed to gratify our rational curiosity about other people's psychology. It is not a question of knowing (in that sense) at all. It is connaître not savoir; it is erleben; we become these other selves. Not only nor chiefly in order to see what they are like but in order to see what they see, to occupy, for a while, their seat in the great theatre, to use their spectacles and be made free of whatever insights, joys, terrors, wonders, or merriment those spectacles reveal ...

"This, so far as I can see, is the specific value or good of literature considered as Logos; it admits us to experiences other than our own. ... Those of us who have been true readers all our life seldom fully realise the enormous extension of our being which we owe to authors." [Or, I might add, movie directors.] "We realise it best when we talk with an unliterary friend. He may be full of goodness and good sense but he inhabits a tiny world. In it, we should be suffocated. The man who is contented to be only himself, and therefore less of a self, is in prison. My own eyes are not enough for me, I will see through the eyes of others. Reality, even seen through the eyes of many, is not enough. I will see what others have invented. ... In reading great literature I become a thousand men and yet remain myself. Like the night sky in the Greek poem, I see with a myriad eyes, but it is still I who see. Here, as in worship, in love, in moral action, and in knowing, I transcend myself; and am never more myself than when I do."

Lars and the Real Girl

The following 'conversation' comes from Christianity Today's February movie e-letter.

"Seen any good movies lately?"

"Yeah. There's this one movie that is a wonderful, beautiful picture of the body of Christ, of the power of unconditional love, forbearance, and grace."

"Sounds great. What's it called?"

"Lars and the Real Girl."

"What's it about?"

"Well"—gulp—"it's about a sweet young man named Lars who has some, um, mental health issues. He's kind of strange, and a bit lonely. He goes online and"—gulp—"orders a life-size, inflatable sex doll, which he introduces as his girlfriend Bianca. And ..."

At this point, my listener's eyebrows shoot up, and he or she might take a step backward while giving me a look like I'm out of my mind. Can you say, Awkward?

But it's true. Lars and the Real Girl really IS a wonderfully redeeming film—and Lars' "relationship" with Bianca is quite chaste. It truly is a heartwarming portrait of the church in action, as believers in the local congregation reach out to Lars and love him right through his challenges.

At CT Movies, we liked it so much that we named it one of our Ten Most Redeeming Films of 2007. It's an eclectic list, including films with stories about everything from monks, kites, unwanted pregnancies, a 19th century abolitionist, and an animated rat who might just be the finest chef in all of France.

For a more homegrown and more recent comment on the same movie, check out this post.

Expelled again

Some comments relating to this blog don't actually make it onto the site. Henry Neufield, to whom I referred readers in regard to the film, Expelled - No Intelligence Allowed, wrote to me personally, and we had a bit of email chit-chat back and forth. He told me he "was most impressed since you are the first person in many moons to call me "pretty sane"!"

I take that as a compliment. ! (For those who haven't picked up on this movie yet, the Intelligence bit is a play on words regarding the intelligence of some of those interviewed in the movie, the intelligence of some of the Universities that have denied certain professors the right to speak about Intelligent Design, and of course, Intelligent Design itself. But you'd already figured all that out, hadn't you?)

Anyway, more on the movie itself. CT at the Movies has a fairly lengthy but worth reading review of it here. They're perhaps a little more middle of the road about it than Henry was, which is okay, and have some positive things to say about it. And I'd like to quote a short section of the review, which might give some of you a laugh:

Stein, in his inimitable way, tries to corner [Richard]Dawkins into acknowledging the possible existence of God — or at least some sort of intelligent designer behind it all. At first, Dawkins doesn't budge, and is incredulous at Stein's line of questions. But Stein, deadpan yet persistent, latches on to Dawkins' comment that he's 99 percent certain there's no God — and runs with it. "Why not 97 percent?" Stein asks. "Why not 49 percent?"

Stein continues to press until a clearly irritated Dawkins says something quite astonishing. "Okay," he says in essence (I'm paraphrasing, because I don't have the precise quote), "maybe there is an intelligent designer. But if there is, I can guarantee that that intelligent designer is a life form that evolved elsewhere and came to earth and seeded life here."

Huh? So that's his concession to the ID camp? That if they're at all right, that we were designed by aliens who evolved somewhere else in the universe? Yowza.

Trivial

Many Christians place great legalistic, spiritual importance on abstinence from relatively trivial things (from dancing to movies to swearing to card playing to mowing the lawn on Sundays). This is because Christians aren’t much different from others in relation to important things (basic values and behavior concerning wealth, power, prestige, justice, security, peace, work, time). Christians know they should be different from the world in some way — otherwise, what would Christianity mean? So, in an effort to establish some kind of Christian distinctiveness, they focus on the trivial. And the trivial is that which does not require us to make difficult changes in our lives… Like the Pharisee, we “strain out the gnat and swallow the camel.”

From Christian Smith's book: Going to the Root: Nine Proposals for Radical Church Renewal (published 1992, so probably a bit hard to get. Let me know by email if you'd be interested in a copy and I'll see what I can do.)