Martin Scorsese's SILENCE, adapted from Shûsaku Endô's novel of monks in 17th-century Japan, starring Liam Neeson, Andrew Garfield, Ken Watanabe, and Adam Driver

i appreciated how cynical they were, "it's just a formality" etc

(the trailer was for that Sam Worthington-Octavia Spencer jawdropper, right? what church/greeting-card empire paid for that?)

no, but that was there too! looks super terrible

my viewing companion was pretty unhappy with it, thought it was near unconscionable that we have a pro-missionary movie in the year of our lord 2017, that the japanese were either faithful bumpkins or autocratic torturers. i didn't really argue but i didn't think it was *that* bad, or not bad in that way.

last preview was for the nolan dunkirk, which, heaven help me, i'm kind of looking out for

yeah and it's remarkable how much of the high drama of the movie (if you are moved by it like i was) revolves around mere "formalities"--the kind of paradoxical difference/continuity between worldly professions of faith and the inner silent (ahem) presence of it. so it's totally cynical and yet indubitably true to say it's just a formality, who really cares? in a lot of ways this made me think of the climactic moments of 1984, in that an authoritarian regime of the kind in this movie is content with the formalities but a radically (perhaps fantastically) totalitarian regime
in Orwell needs to penetrate all the way down into the soul, so to speak, so that any possibility of resistance is not just quashed but impossible. so in some ways Silence dramatizes the emergence of a notion that there is something beyond the formalities, beyond the reach of power, as i quoted from Gauchet above.

also suffice it to say (as i think
i said above) that i think the movie/novel is highly ambiguous about missionary work--in effect the one "heroic" deed he performs is to renounce his mission.

not sure if Scorsese has discussed Black Narcissus in relation to this -- not sure that Silence is truly more "pro-missionary" than that film.

the final narration leaves rodrigues' final disposition a mystery but the final shot doesn't. what's the book like?

The final shot is an invention of Scorsese. In the book, he is begged to perform rites in secret, but he declares that it would be sacrilege to do so as a fallen priest - which is a nice paradox, kinda. Which the book screws up, and it's one part where it feels as if Scorsese doesn't really understand the argument that is put forth by the book.

i saw this and liked it. it's very hypnotic. how many times do we see the ritual of apostasy? and each time there's a slightly different consequence, a different dilemma.

there were several very modern-feeling grimaces or reactions from garfield and i laughed each time, WITH him though, i thought they were great touches.

interesting to have a movie whose hero is almost entirely impotent throughout. (i suppose there is a christian resonance to this)

i didn't notice any cgi, fwiw

xp. glenn kenny noted that the final shot is kinda the same as the last shot of citizen kane--perhaps with all attendant questions about it. my feeling now is that it's unambiguous but i'd be open to an interpretation that saw it as repeating the central dilemma (formality vs the real experience of faith).

interesting to have a movie whose hero is almost entirely impotent throughout

hence its kinship to... Life of Brian

lol

to me the dilemma in the movie is actually a pretty standard dramatic arc. when faced with this paradox: renounce the most important thing in the world to you, or see innocent people suffer, you must choose one, cackles the villain as he dangles spidey's girlfriend off one side of a bridge and a subway car full of civilians off the other - rodrigues redefines the dilemma by redefining his relationship with jesus. he enters into a purely personal relationship (jesus is actually speaking directly to him!!). in this way he can spare others (finally!) and this actually creates and strengthens his new relationship w jesus. that much is clear. his wife knows this, or something of it. she's kept this little cross all this time, squirrelled away in the roof or something. he doesn't care, it's not important to him, but SHE does. so she puts it in his hand. which in broad strokes is pretty consistent with what we've seen. but the way the scene is directed it's this big AHA! moment which seemed pretty hokey and out of keeping with what we'd seen so far.

That seems to be the reading that Scorsese is going for, but it's kinda the opposite of the point of the book - and I suspect a 1600s priest wouldn't feel the possibility of a 'personal relationship' with Jesus was at all possible if he had committed apostasy. That's the wonderful paradox: It's exactly because he believes too much in Christianity that he can't go on being a Christian. It's this weird argument, we're the Japanese are sorta the modern ones, claiming that it's all relative anyway, and it's just about power, and he can carry on being Christian inside, and Rodrigues claiming pre-modernly that truth is absolute, and that his version of Christianity is the only right one. And it does become a bit unbalanced when Scorsese then allows Rodrigues to co-opt the Japanese argument in the end.

i thought the Jesuits were generally comfortable with allowing outer lies to protect inner truths tbh

it was a little confusing. rodrigues is like "pfft, trample!" and then, well, not so much.

doing a season of all the marty & bobby films, considering going to all of it

― wins, Sunday, 5 February 2017 13:09 (two weeks ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

pass on Cape Fear

― Supercreditor (Dr Morbius), Sunday, 5 February 2017 16:25 (two weeks ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

haha oh yeah

― wins, Sunday, 5 February 2017 16:26 (two weeks ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

update: I'm now considering boycotting the whole thing after I learned they're showing them all EXCEPT new york new york

no idea if this is intentional but i was struck how inarticulate he was; his japanese inquisitors had pretty good arguments!

― goole, Tuesday, February 21, 2017 11:27 AM (one week ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

(i'm really sorry for writing so much. i'm at my worse past midnight though)

you have to remember that in a sense, endou's thought processes cannot be changed too much, so they come up in his characters, including rodrigues. while endou was a man of letters, having studied french literature, his japaneseness is deeply ingrained in him. the same way the place where we come from shapes and dictates our inner thought processes. that is to say, the japanese language has way fewer words than the english language. there are also highly specialized kanji that japanese people cannot read unless they have studied it. part of this is why the japanese interpret language indirectly. endou is writing for a normal japanese audience, and this audience lacks the words or, more accurately, kanji to articulate a western concept, so a lot of times it borrows latinate words, but very few japanese have a 'natural' understanding of them, even when written out in katakana

in terms of the arguments: i need to rewatch the movie again (i never got a chance and now i'll have to wait til it's out on dvd/bluray) but the way it's done in the book, the most poignant debate is performed between rodrigues and the interpreter (christianity vs a syncretic form of shinto)

taking each defence at its kindest interpretation, it sounds like a stale mate

endou does this weird thing where he writes in an extremely direct way embodying the beliefs of the character, and so as narrator, he feigns ignorance of japanese history. or rather, he does not impose his own beliefs when writing the dialogues and thoughts of each character. this helps keep the language simple, but it also makes the text overflow with profound symbolism that requires cultural and historical knowledge from the reader

in the book the interpreter gets upset as if irritated that he could not answer rodrigues's last question about who created gods if their belief system is based only on the material world. there is no creation story in shinto nor in the beginnings of buddhism in japan. st xavier corroborates this in his letters (page 333, if anyone's interested), in which he discusses his experiences with the japanese extensively. as a quick aside, there's an entire discussion missing on the history of the society of jesus. i would like to write more about how this isn't a pro-missionary film and explain why i think this is a long prayer, but this entire post is too long and i don't want to write a lot on ilx. but anyway...the cross-examination sounds like a stale mate to westerners because endou doesn't give background information. remember the book's readers were obviously mostly japanese at that time

endou assumes the reader understands what kami and imperial cult is. the japanese leaders imposed a religion that was half syncretic shinto and parts that they themselves made up ("state shinto") so they could rule over the peasants, who were the lifeblood of the japanese clans, because the empire relied on them to work the lands and the clans had not even conquered half of modern japan at that time. the most dominant clan from each time period claimed to be a descendent of gods, so they called themselves kami (gods), a belief that was supported by shinto monks. many 'good things' would happen to the villagers, the clansmen and monks told them, if they worshipped the kami

japanese peasants, as most peasants all over the world, such as latin american aboriginals with christianity, did not intuitively understand or know the concept of shinto. clans therefore used the influence of kannushi (kind of like shinto priests and priestesses, but i'm calling them monks) to convert the peasants. there was a huge overlap between political and religious power in ancient japan, so clansmen actually held high positions and leadership within religious ceremonies and events (as they were seen as kami), and basically forced peasants to praise them

so when rodrigues asks who created the kami (gods) and the interpretor, in the book, has no answer, this is one of those deeply symbolic moments that endou does a lot of. he doesn't really say it directly -- japanese communication is heavy on this. some would say there is a secret complexity in this plain and direct language. there's a sense that what most defines the self is that which is not mentioned. so the interpreter is actually upset that rodrigues is referring to the religion of imperial cult created, to reiterate, to actually dominate and control villagers and seize their lands. once the clans took away their 'right' to live in these barren places, the clansmen imposed forced labour, giving them benefits so long as they obeyed this new invention that westerners named state shinto. the benefits were essentially 'money', and it was taxed

a religion created to deceive the peasants into thinking they should work for the conquerers is not something new. but when it happened in, say, latin america, it was largely interpreted as corruption within the church and political figures/conquistadors. the difference is that these clans, the gods, are not generally seen as corrupt in history. i'm tempted to impart my own interpretation of japanese culture here, but it really is a difficult subject to parse

anyway, when japan first allowed christianity, christian peasants started understanding imperial cult and considered it untrue. the gods had created an environment where money was required and where peasants would inescapably struggle with it. villagers started asking "what god that is good would take so much money from us?" kind of thing. and this is when they ask rodrigues if there were taxes in heaven, and rodrigues, though thinking this was a silly question, informed them that, indeed, there is no such thing as taxes in heaven. they lived a very rough life and the promise of heaven made christianity more enticing, compared to the hardship that the imperial cult imposed

this leads into one of rodrigues's preoccupations that the villagers want to believe in heaven because their hardships are too much to handle. but as the japanese martyrs proved, and this is something ferreira is too scared to mention, their devotion to god went beyond the physical, and extended into a giving community rooted in self-worth and love

i also want to explain my views on ferreira's idea that when the 'japanese' think of god, they think of the god of the sun, which he calls 'their' god. he uses this as an excuse to justify being a non-believer. endou desires to stay so true to each character that he completely removes any third-person or narrator perspective that could hint to the reader what goes on in another given character's head. what i mean is, st xavier was the first to attempt to evangelize the japanese, but the japanese language did not have an equivalent word for god. it's worth mentioning the japanese language also did not have a lot of the words for a lot of buddhist concepts. so when st xavier introduced the concept of a creator, he did so by using a word they are familiar with (incidentally catholic priests did the same thing when converting latin american indigenous peoples) -- in this case, it was the word dainichi, which means the great sun, and does not really fully convey the meaning of the sanskrit vairocana (remember kanji was borrowed from the chinese). while st xavier used the word dainichi, the monks were happy to help, but when he changed it to deus they basically kicked him out of the country. so it was more of a clash between imperial rule, which was a mix of state shinto and politics, and christianity. in my opinion, in great part, the shinto monks were able to convert and convince the peasants because the catholic missionaries were never able to master the japanese language early on

the various strains of buddhism actually have no clear agreement on whether a creator exists. there are a few theories, and one makes reference to one ultimate god

that's a great post that makes me keener than ever to read the novel. minor quibble: my understanding is that there are (admittedly brief and obscure) creation myths in the Kojiki and the Nihon Shoki. obviously none of them have canonical nailed-downness of the Bible tho.

this is good https://owlcation.com/social-sciences/IzanagiandIzunami

most accounts of "Shinto" I've read would say it's all syncretic, a long, muddled accumulation of various animist and ancestor-worship beliefs that is only solidified by the ruling classes using it largely for the political purposes you described. and "gods" feels like an under-translation of kami because of the huge number of people, things and places that can be kami?

only asking questions, I'm not assuming everything I've read is the only, precise truth. because I'm not a Catholic missionary.

(∞)- enjoyed all that, thanks.

"endou does this weird thing where he writes in an extremely direct way embodying the beliefs of the character, and so as narrator, he feigns ignorance of japanese history. or rather, he does not impose his own beliefs when writing the dialogues and thoughts of each character. this helps keep the language simple, but it also makes the text overflow with profound symbolism that requires cultural and historical knowledge from the reader"

The way the second part is written reminded me a lot of Flaubert. Free indirect discourse. It is really weird, because the first part of the book is first person, it's letters from Rodrigues, but then when the narration goes into third person it's like we actually get closer to him, because we get his thoughts unfiltered. It also makes the first person narration in the first part unreliable all of a sudden. None of the adaptations manage to replicate this effect, though both use voice over.

cheers lads

noodle, you're partially right about gods. the word god does not convey the entire historical meaning of kami. but as you say, shinto has pretty much solidified into a more concrete and specific concept, and so has the concept of kami. in modern shinto, there is little doubt that the japanese believe kami to be a deity, and one that a person transforms into in the afterlife. the kami are their ancestors, who also serve as spirits that protect people on earth, and this is why they pray and give offerings to them at the end of the year in a shrine. in addition to this, kami, historically, have also represented something like greek "major gods;" so there's a god of the sea, god of the sun, god of the mountain, etc. the japanese words for these deities include -gami or -kami in their nomenclature

also, there are a few things that remain ambiguous in the film that the book makes quite clear, but i want to rewatch it again before commenting on it. really anticipating this dvd release later this month

decent 2006 documentary on st francis xavier narrated by liam neeson

it starts to talk about the attempts at evangelizing japan at the 36 minute mark, if you don't want to watch the whole thing. it provides some context that helps when watching silence and understanding rodrigues and ferreira

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XSZlAHaiLKk

I haven't written about this because my first screening in late December, to quote the voice-over in Network, was not auspicatory; so I watched it again this week. Agree it's Scorsese's best in two decades, since The Age of Innocence at least.

The first hour is the weakest, as if Scorsese were distracted by exposition. The heart of the movie was the imprisonment and subsequent interrogations. The idea that to save a life you have to compromise your personal relation to the Lord comes up in Montaigne and is certainly something I've thought about a lot, and I appreciated the film's even-handedness; it suggests that Rodrigues may have remained Christian by abjuring public displays and listening, as that lovely voice-over quote alluding to Elijah in the desert, to the still small voice. The film understands Christianity's savage record of evangelism -- it's steeped in it -- while accepting the savagery with which the shogun rule had o repel this incursion.

I also appreciated the shot/reverse shot set-up -- Marty didn't absorb Japanese ci-ne-mah. He understood that the novelist is a Japanese man writing about Portuguese men grappling with Japan. It's way closer to Pasolini than Mizoguchi -- and closer to The Last Temptation of Christ than I thought.

tfw u been seein your man for over a year but he wont apostatize 4 u pic.twitter.com/ouhIolB0kF

— Peter Labuza (@labuzamovies) May 13, 2017

got all the feels now

Scorsese responds to a review in the TLS with a defense of cinema aesthetics:

“In a book”, writes Mr Mars-Jones, “reader and writer collaborate to produce images, while a film director hands them down.” I disagree. The greatest filmmakers, like the greatest novelists and poets, are trying to create a sense of communion with the viewer. They’re not trying to seduce them or overtake them, but, I think, to engage with them on as intimate a level as possible. The viewer also “collaborates” with the filmmaker, or the painter. No two viewings of Raphael’s “Madonna and Child Enthroned with Saints” will be the same: every new viewing will be different. The same is true of readings of The Divine Comedy or Middlemarch, or viewings of The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp or 2001: A Space Odyssey. We return at different moments in our lives and we see things differently.

I also disagree with Mr Mars-Jones’s contention that any adaptation of a novel into a film can only amount to a “distortion” or an “exaggeration overall”. Of course, in one very important sense, he is correct. Alfred Hitchcock once told François Truffaut that despite his admiration for Crime and Punishment, he would never have dreamed of making a film out of it because in order to do so he would have needed to film every single page (in a sense, this is what Erich von Stroheim tried to do when he adapted Frank Norris’s McTeague as Greed). But sometimes, the idea is to take elements of a novel and craft a separate work from it (as Hitchcock did with Patricia Highsmith’s Strangers on a Train). Or, to take the cinematic elements of a novel and create a film from them (I suppose that this was the case with certain adaptations of Raymond Chandler’s novels). And some filmmakers really do attempt to translate a novel into sounds and images, to create an equivalent artistic experience. In general, I would say that most of us respond to what we’ve read and in the process try to create something that has its own life apart from the source novel.

http://www.the-tls.co.uk/articles/public/film-making-martin-scorsese/

can't believe Adam Mars-Jones has spouted some moronic bullshit

he's new to me

he's a middling lit crit over here who is easy enough to ignore except when he writes think-pieces about his incomprehension of how cinema works, apparently

Really loved this, altho the more i turn over the particular issues of faith and freedom that it wrestles with in my mind, the more they seem unique to the often ridiculous and unique vagaries of catholicism, which are not really present in a lot of other religions (the glorification of suffering, the idolatry/emphasis on outward displays of faith, confession, proselitizing, etc). Still a beautiful and p fascinating film when u accept it on its own terms.

Unique i say

I never wrote about this at length, and while I have reservations I was ravished by it too, its concentration and severity most of all.

i probably sound like a catholic or christian apologist (im not a christian) but i think the movie becomes immeasurably richer if you take stock of what a revolutionary idea christianity was and is in certain contexts--what an incredibly disrupting force it was (for good and ill) and its radical revaluation of human life. seen in that context an image of a japanese peasant refusing to trample (refusing to renounce the meaning and value of his/her own life) and facing actual fucking crucifixion in the ocean, being burned alive ("on fire with faith"), or drowned at sea becomes incredibly powerful--to me anyway.

― ryan, Sunday, January 8, 2017 3:34 PM (eleven months ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

gd post

i wish that idea came thru more somehow but idk how itd be done

the '71 film is showing at NYC MoMA today and Sunday (albeit in 16mm, which means that's all they could get)

https://www.moma.org/calendar/events/4282?locale=en

Checked it out of the library to rewatch on this fine holiday weekend.

rewatched the original recently and have to say Scorsese did an incredible job, and maybe improved upon it. begs the question, when he can make films like this, why does he have to make things like Wolf Of Wall Street?

so he can follow it up w/ a billion-dollar deNiro-Pacino film

The Shinoda film looks beautiful but is destroyed by one of the worst performances I have ever sat through. Amazingly the guy seems not to have had a role since.

, why does he have to make things like Wolf Of Wall Street?

the grosses of WOWS and Shutter Island paid for the flop of Silence. I don't see the big deal -- dat's Hollywood, Jack.

Oh and Endō co-wrote the screenplay but did not sanction the ending Shinoda chose

I wish the novel were longer.

I was fine with the movie not being longer.

the movie was great though

Yep.

i like that the novel is compact tbh, a virtue that more writers should embrace

I've not seen this, but every time I see the thread title it reminds me of the Paul Mooney review of The Last Samauri.