Criteria: The Catholic Film Podcast

Introducing a director you almost certainly haven't heard of - but who is well worth getting to know. Lijo Jose Pellissery is one of the major artists of a new movement that has developed over the last decade in the Malayalam film industry - that is, the cinema made in Kerala, the region where India's Christians have lived for many centuries.

All of Pellissery's films are set within Indian Catholic or Orthodox communities. Indeed, while the director is clearly influenced by Western movies, much of his films' vitality comes from how regionally rooted they are, not just in Kerala but even in specific cities and villages.

Pellissery's films show a remarkable level of craft, artistry and experimentation considering their mainstream success in India - indeed, as James Majewski says by contrast with contemporary Hollywood, this seems to be what an "alive film culture" looks like. Within the Malayalam film industry, Pellissery is known as the "Master of Chaos", presumably due to the spontaneous feeling of his scenes, often featuring large, rambunctious crowds, and perhaps also the way situations in his stories tend to spiral out of control. His films keep you riveted in a way that is not manipulative, and they are unpredictable without being dependent on contrived twists.

James and Thomas feature three of Pellissery's films in this discussion, in order to explore his diversity of genre:

Jallikattu is an off-the-wall action movie about villagers trying to chase down an escaped bull - framed within quotations from the book of Revelation which seem to indicate that the bull represents Satan. Ee.Ma.Yau (which means "Jesus, Mary, Joseph")) is about a son struggling to provide a good funeral for his father, but constantly being frustrated by his own limits. Pellissery's most recent film, Like an Afternoon Dream, is a slow, surreal drama - arguably a ghost story - about a man who suddenly takes on another man's identity.

Here are links to view the films in their original Malayalam language with English subtitles:

Jallikattu https://www.amazon.com/Jallikattu-Antony-Varghese/dp/B07ZQMQ9TT

Ee.Ma.Yau https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mZNDgzLsPZ8&ab_channel=OPMRecords

Like an Afternoon Dream https://www.netflix.com/title/81676305

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Music is The Duskwhales, "Take It Back", used with permission. https://theduskwhales.bandcamp.com

The Age of Innocence may come as a surprise to those who associate Martin Scorsese with movies about gangsters. Based on Edith Wharton's novel, it's a sumptuous period romance set in late-19th-century Manhattan high society. Intriguingly, Scorsese described it as his "most violent film", though not so much as a punch is thrown: the violence portrayed is interior and social, not physical, in this depiction of a romance thwarted by the constricting social norms of the upper class.

Scorsese faced the challenge of depicting a society in which, as the narrator puts it, "the real thing was never said or done or even thought, but only represented by a set of arbitrary signs" - and so the director cannot rely on characters stating things outright. His great accomplishment is that the film nonetheless reaches an operatic pitch of emotion, keeping the viewer on seat-edge. This is done not only through outstanding performances (Daniel Day-Lewis, Michelle Pfeiffer, Winona Ryder), but also by camera movements conveying repressed passion, by light and color, and by the gorgeous Elmer Bernstein score.

For all that, if the film merely depicted the cruelty of social norms and mores stifling forbidden love, it would be of limited interest. Yet as the story develops, it doesn't allow itself to be reduced to a critique of the past. Indeed, though not without ambiguity, it shows the value of strong social rules and institutions - because often, if we follow our passion, we destroy ourselves and others.

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Today it's taken for granted that we as Christians are called to "engage the culture" in order to evangelize. Often "engaging the culture" means paying an inordinate amount of attention to popular commercial entertainment in order to show unbelievers how hip we are, straining to find a "Christ-figure" in every comic book movie, and making worship music as repetitive, melodically banal, and emotionalistic as possible. Past a certain point, "cultural engagement" begins to seem like a noble-sounding excuse to enjoy mediocrity - and Christians, unfortunately, are as much in love with mediocre entertainment as anyone else.

The novel doctrine of "cultural engagement" is just one subject covered in Joshua Gibbs's challenging and entertaining new book, Love What Lasts: How to Save Your Soul from Mediocrity. Joshua joins Thomas Mirus for a wide-ranging conversation about how we choose to spend our free time and why it matters.

Topics include:

• The dangers of artistic mediocrity
• The importance of boredom
• Why streaming has been terrible for music
• The different kinds of Christian "cultural engagers"
• Uncommon and common good things and how both are threatened by the mediocre
• How the "special" apes the holy
• The meme-ification of art

Links

Gibbs, Love What Lasts: How to Save Your Soul from Mediocrity https://circeinstitute.org/product/love-what-lasts/

Gibbs, "Film As a Metaphysical Coup" https://circeinstitute.org/blog/film-metaphysical-coup/

Thomas's favorite episode of Gibbs's podcast, Proverbial https://shows.acast.com/proverbial/episodes/how-to-buy-a-bottle-of-wine

www.GibbsClassical.com

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Mel Gibson's Apocalypto is one of those works of art whose reputation has suffered from its circumstances. Its release in late 2006, two years after The Passion and six month after Gibson's infamous DUI, more or less coincided with the director's blacklisting from Hollywood. Thus Apocalypto tends to be overlooked by critics, despite having been hailed as a masterpiece by the likes of Scorsese, Tarantino, Edgar Wright, and Spike Lee.

Apocalypto has also been attacked for its portrayal of "first peoples". Set in Mesoamerica immediately before first contact with the Spanish, it features a protagonist from a small forest tribe who is captured by Mayans for the purpose of human sacrifice (depicted as the mass-scale brutality it was) and must try to escape back to his family.

Gibson's depiction of Mesoamerican peoples is sensitive and sympathetic but not PC. Rather than sneering at how terrible a pre-Columbian civilization could be, in portraying the Mayans Gibson wanted to make us reflect on the decadence of the modern West and in particular the American Empire. The film is about a culture of death not unlike our own.

Filmed, like The Passion, in a language most people have never heard, Apocalypto is a stunningly ambitious recreation of a lost civilization, but also a thoroughly entertaining chase movie. Gibson is known for his singular approach to cinematic violence, and Apocalypto gives ample opportunity to discuss the specific artistic choices that are overlooked when we wave off all movie "blood and guts" as the same.

Links

Essay by the film's historical consultant https://www.researchgate.net/publication/288187016_Relativism_Revisionism_Aboriginalism_and_EmicEtic_Truth_The_Case_Study_of_Apocalypto

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0:00 The prosecution

39:15 The defense

With the release of his new film Asteroid City and with memes imitating his cinematic style going viral on social media, Wes Anderson is having a real moment in the zeitgeist almost thirty years into his career.

In Asteroid City, Anderson drives further into the immediately identifiable and somewhat polarizing style he has cultivated for the past decade, characterized by meticulous framing, camera moves and blocking, a certain color palette, and deadpan writing and acting. One is always aware of the director's hand tightly controlling a cute, harmonious little world of his own creation.

The Criteria hosts look at Anderson's career and try to figure out what he's trying to achieve by making his movies so aggressively, well, Anderson-y. James Majewski calls it downright decadent and pretentious, style for its own sake to the point of self-parody. Thomas Mirus is concerned that the increasingly airless and emotionally closed-down aesthetic may be a reflection of Anderson's belief that life has no discernible meaning, and so there is nothing much to do other than create aesthetic illusions (an idea explicitly alluded to in more than one of his films). Nathan Douglas defends Anderson's style as sincere, in service to something more than shallow visual pleasure.

But we all agree on one thing: Wes Anderson is in despair.

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Jim Caviezel's latest project, The Sound of Freedom, is a harrowing but thrilling look at the fight against the global sex trafficking of children. Caviezel's intense but nuanced performance plays well into both the serious subject matter and the film's mainstream appeal. The film's spiritual relevance is increased by the choice to include not only protective fathers, but a repentant exploiter among its protagonists.

Though the film isn't about Hollywood, one of its best scenes offers what may as well be a portrayal of how the entertainment and modeling industries sexualize children. The impact is all the more unsettling for how subtly and tastefully the scene is handled.

Though they praise the film, Thomas and James express some reservations about the "you must see this movie for the cause" style of promotion.

Since we started Criteria: The Catholic Film Podcast in May 2020, we've been hosting in-depth discussions of movies from the Vatican's 1995 list of important films. Now, after three years, we've finished discussing all 45 films - and in this episode, together with Catholic filmmaker Nathan Douglas, we're taking a look back at the list as a whole.

After discussing how and why the Vatican film list (actually titled "Some Important Films") was made, and putting it in the context of several decades of concern from the highest levels of the Vatican about the social and moral influence of cinema, we talk about our favorite and least favorite films on the Vatican's list, as well as the movies we think should be added in a hypothetical future update of the list.

Ultimately, watching through the entire Vatican film list is not only an education in the classics of world cinema, but also gives important perspective on the strengths and weaknesses of past cinematic engagement with religion, allowing us to see both the potential fruit that could be borne and the dead ends that should be avoided in the Catholic cinema of the future.

0:00 Introduction 11:31 History behind the Vatican film list 43:34 What films should be removed from the list? 1:24:10 Our favorite films on the list 1:55:30 What films should have been included that weren't? 2:34:09 What post-1995 films would we add? 3:00:19 The most Catholic/edifying films on the list

Links

Pope St. John Paul II's address on the 100th birthday of cinema https://www.vatican.va/content/john-paul-ii/en/speeches/1995/march/documents/hf_jp-ii_spe_19950317_plen-pccs.html

"100 Years of Cinema" document from the Pontifical Council of Social Communications with model curriculum https://www.vatican.va/roman_curia/pontifical_councils/pccs/documents/rc_pc_pccs_doc_19960101_100-cinema_en.html

Below is the 1995 list by the Pontifical Council for Social Communications, "Some Important Films" (with links to our episode on each film):

Religion

• Andrei Rublev, Andrei Tarkovsky (1969, USSR)
• The Mission, Roland Joffé (1986, UK)
• The Passion of Joan of Arc, Carl T. Dreyer (1928, France)
• Vie et passion du Christ (Life and Passion of Christ), Ferdinand Zecca and Lucien Nonguet (1905, France)
• The Flowers of St. Francis, Roberto Rossellini (1950, Italy)
• The Gospel According to Matthew, Pier Paolo Pasolini (1964, France/Italy)
• Thérèse, Alain Cavalier (1986, France)
• Ordet (The Word), Carl T. Dreyer (1955, Denmark)
• The Sacrifice, Andrei Tarkowsky (1986, Sweden/UK/France)
• Francesco, Liliana Cavani (1989, Italy/Germany)
• Ben-Hur, William Wyler (1959, USA)
• Babette's Feast, Gabriel Axel (1987, Denmark)
• Nazarín, Luis Buñuel (1958, Mexico)
• Monsieur Vincent, Maurice Cloche (1947, France)
• A Man for All Seasons, Fred Zinnemann (1966, UK)

Values

• Gandhi, Richard Attenborough (1982, UK/USA/India)
• Intolerance, D. W. Griffith (1916, USA)
• Dekalog (The Decalogue), Krzysztof Kieslowski (1987, Poland)
• Au Revoir, Les Enfants (Goodbye, Children), Louis Malle (1987, France)
• Dersu Uzala, Akira Kurosawa (1974, Japan)
• The Tree of Wooden Clogs, Ermanno Olmi (1978, Italy/France)
• Rome, Open City, Roberto Rossellini (1946, Italy)
• Wild Strawberries, Ingmar Bergman (1957, Sweden)
• The Seventh Seal, Ingmar Bergman (1957, Sweden)
• Chariots of Fire, Hugh Hudson (1981, UK)
• Bicycle Thieves, Vittorio de Sica (1948, Italy)
• It's a Wonderful Life, Frank Capra (1946, USA)
• Schindler's List, Steven Spielberg (1993, USA)
• On the Waterfront, Elia Kazan (1954, USA)
• The Burmese Harp, Kon Ichikawa (1956, Japan)

Art

• 2001: A Space Odyssey, Stanley Kubrick (1968, UK/USA)
• La Strada, Federico Fellini (1954, Italy)
• Citizen Kane, Orson Welles (1941, USA)
• Metropolis, Fritz Lang (1927, Germany)
• Modern Times, Charlie Chaplin (1936, USA)
• Napoléon, Abel Gance (1927, Italy)
• 8½, Federico Fellini (1963, Italy)
• La Grande Illusion, Jean Renoir (1937, France)
• Nosferatu, F. W. Murnau (1922, Germany)
• Stagecoach, John Ford (1939, USA)
• The Leopard, Luchino Visconti (1963, Italy/France)
• Fantasia (1940, USA)
• The Wizard of Oz, Victor Fleming (1939, USA)
• The Lavender Hill Mob, Charles Crichton (1951, UK)
• Little Women, George Cukor (1933, USA)

The new film Padre Pio, directed by Abel Ferrara and starring Shia LaBeouf, is ruined by a pornographic and sacrilegious scene involving abuse of a sacred image.

James Majewski and Thomas Mirus contend that conscientious Catholics must not see this movie. They explain the difference between portraying an act and committing that act, and how that line can be obliterated on a film set. They discuss the reality behind holy images, and the importance of making reparation for sacrilege.

First Saturdays devotion to make reparation to the Immaculate Heart of Mary: https://www.bluearmy.com/first-saturday-devotion/

Thomas Mirus wrote a summary of the arguments in this podcast for the Dappled Things blog: https://www.dappledthings.org/deep-down-things/about-that-padre-pio-film

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In this livestream, James Majewski and Thomas Mirus we discussed errors artists can fall into in pushing back against a moralistic approach to art found within the Church. Rather than reacting away from rigidity to excessive openness, the mature Catholic artist has to get over himself and be a servant.

Also discussed: The relation between order and surprise in beauty, morality and culture.

Note: the video begins abruptly in the middle of our introductory fundraising campaign pitch - because of some glitched-out audio, we cut the first 6 minutes or so.

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After three years discussing the Vatican's 1995 list of 45 important films, Thomas and James have finally reached the final movie! Made in 1927, it's a five-and-a-half-hour long, epic, technically dazzling silent film about Napoleon.

Napoleon trailer https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6504eRh5h6M

This podcast is a production of CatholicCulture.org. If you like the show, please consider supporting us! http://catholicculture.org/donate/audio

Go to Catholic Culture's website for tons of written content, including news, articles, liturgical year info, and a vast library of documents: https://www.catholicculture.org

Music is The Duskwhales, "Take It Back", used with permission. https://theduskwhales.bandcamp.com