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 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.

i’ve been thinking about this movie lately

maybe need to see it again

My boring opinion is it's my favourite he done

It's one of his best

final shot is all-time

I'd totally given up on him after hugo and the wolf of shite street, then he directs two career-best movies in a row.

the Masahira Shinoda version is up there with Marty's too

I tried watching this but bailed out halfway through. Somewhat tedious.

Give it another chance.

I just read the entire thread, it was ten times more enlightening than watching the film.
Scorsese's interest in religious topics is painfully sincere and obvious but I don't think his skill set matches his aims, none of the three religious films he's made work. The final shot in this is warmed-over Tarkovsky.
Stylistically, Scorsese tries to restrain his expressionist tendencies, but what results looks like a particularly slow "serious" European co-production directed by someone like Roland Joffé.

How does the painful sincerity and obviousness show itself in Silence?

I’m sure I said this earlier in the thread, but Silence moved me.

top 5 Scorsese

How does the painful sincerity and obviousness show itself in Silence?

Just that it's obvious that he's working over deeply considered beliefs and trying to communicate them, the film wasn't made just to win a bunch of awards or to kill time.