Film & Spirituality: A Unique Invitation

I'm very excited about an event I'm co-facilitating in the Los Angeles area in a couple of months, to which you're all invited.  This post presents the first published information about the retreat we're calling 'Film & Spirit'.  Dr Barry Taylor - theology and design professor, musician, user of fountain pens, snappy dresser and elegant cultural critic - and I will be hosting screenings of some amazing films, conversations that we hope will shed light on the movies and ourselves, and an opportunity to get to know other people who think that cinema might be a resource for living better in our world.

On the evening of Friday 22nd, and all day and evening Saturday 23rd January 2010, we'll watch several movies, have conversations with fascinating people, eat good food, and be treated to insights from special guests who, we can assure you, will surprise, entertain and enlighten.

We're thrilled to announce that our first evening will include an exclusive private screening of the as-yet-unreleased film 'Gaia' - which will be reviewed on The Film Talk soon, but I'm happy to say is, in my view, a masterpiece and the finest film I've seen this year.  We'll be joined by director Jason Lehel and I'm sure the conversation after watching this astonishing film about healing and the interaction of cultures in the United States will be a highlight of our time together.

The rest of the programme will be revealed in the coming weeks - but the basic schedule is as follows (all details and costs tbc):

Friday 22nd January

Introductions, screening 1, conversation

Saturday 23rd January

AM: Screening 2, special guest, conversation

Lunch break (on your own)

PM: Screening 3, special guest, conversation

Dinner (provided)

Evening: Screening 4, special guest, final conversation

We're trying to take a risk with this gathering in that we want to facilitate a spiritual experience for people, and to open the invitation to everyone, regardless of background, faith perspective, or philosophy.  Barry and I might both consider ourselves to be somewhat at home in the progressive Christian tradition, and are aware that there are many manifestations (and perceptions) of the lens through which we view things.  We want 'Film & Spirit' to be a welcoming space for everyone who wants to take time out to allow cinema to be the mystical experience it can often become.  We will offer creative ways to express and experience the miracle of cinema, to encounter the life-changing work that occurs in honest conversation, and to find some inspiration for each of our journeys.  But it will be neither a 'religious retreat' nor will we pretend that you have to be consciously religious to be interested in spirituality.  We'd love you to join us - as I've said, I'll post more details soon - for now, save the date, and if you'd like to sign up to make sure you receive updates, please use the form here.

The Beginnings of What Happens Next

My friend Dawn Purvis has made a surprising intervention in a debate about the causes of the conflict in northern Ireland.  Henry Kelly writes about it here - if you're interested in the politics and peacemaking of my home society, I'd encourage you to read this article.  If you're not, but you care about how we handle history, and especially how it has become almost impossible for truth to get past party interests, I'd recommend it just as much.  Are we willing to remember things that make us look bad if it helps other people to heal?

'New' Irish Cinema - The Paradox of 'Turning Green'

You know, we like to be friendly round here, but if you've been in the neighbourhood for any length of time, you'll also know that I often grieve the lack of imagination in most films.  Robots kill some people/people kill more robots; abs-ridden guy meets cute girl/conflict/unification; bloke changes, you know the deal.  So it's a pleasant surprise to see 'Turning Green', your none-too-typical American boy grows up in a small West of Ireland village/competes with the local gangster by selling porn magazines (illegal in the eyes of the State and shameful in the eyes of the Church)/and makes witty comments about what's wrong with the land of my birth while Timothy Hutton, an actor I like a great deal, snarls at him from under a pork pie hat.

'Turning Green' was made four years ago - a runner up in the first season of 'Project Greenlight' - and is only now being released, with the absurdly misleading poster above.  To tell you the truth, it's one of the strangest films I've seen - on the one hand trying to make a decent job of assessing Ireland's paradox, or at least its paradox thirty years ago, when the film is set: the fecund literary culture and freedom narratives of Beckett, Joyce, and Heaney co-mingling with the obsessive puritanism enshrined by the State; on the other, it offers a series of cliches about 'Oirishness' - the angry priest, the aul fella who seems glued to the end of the bar, the visions of Mary turned into a kind of foreplay.  It doesn't help that the movie seems unsure of its tone - is it a dramatic entertainment in the tradition of 'The Quiet Man', a comedy in the style of 'Waking Ned', or a gangster thriller that should have been re-titled 'Mystic O'River'?  You get parts of all three here; with a shade or two of Tarantino, and a little Woody Allen neurotic cynicism in the voiceover.

Writer-directors John G Hoffman and Michael Aimette do enough to make this northern Irish writer laugh - sometimes; but also enough to make me feel condescended to, sometimes.  Ireland has been poor, sure; Ireland has been oppressive for some, absolutely; Ireland has a long string of little villages where everybody knows everybody else, of this there is no doubt.  But the lack of any empathetic characters in 'Turning Green' has the effect of suggesting there's no reason to care; and for me, Ireland needs a vision of what we can be, rather than yet more dwelling on what's wrong with us.

And yet, I found myself almost beguiled by the depiction of my home; and grateful that I wasn't watching another 'Troubles' film or a 'Ryan's Daughter'-style over-romanticisation - there's a smart little film trying to escape from 'Turning Green', one in which the double standard of moral hypocrisy is the heart of the story.  It's not a stretch to say that cultures that freak out over nudity while people are being killed in their name need a mirror; 'Turning Green' offers a very blunt one in an exchange of dialogue that, for me, was worth the weaknesses of the rest of the movie.  When an old man is having trouble describing the package he's gone to pick up from the post office, the domineering priest in line behind our anti-hero James (played with appropriate detachment by Donal Gallery) huffs and puffs about how ridiculous it is to be wasting his time.  James responds with a line that one imagines was the writers' intended motto for the whole film:

'If these people aren't bombing women and children or starving the homeless, they're making small talk at the post office'.

Despite the fact that the film doesn't hang together, glimpses of this coruscating raised eyebrow can be seen throughout; 'Turning Green' seems not be a complete work, but it has signs of moving in the right direction.  And it's a better film than I'd make right now.  (For what it's worth, 'Turning Green' pales in comparison to another film that carries similar themes - the far superior 'Garage', Lenny Abrahamson's Tarkovskian/Rohmeresque film about an Irish petrol station attendant and the encroachment of the Celtic Tiger.)

Meantime, in other Irish news, 'Prods and Pom-Poms', the lovely short documentary about Sandy Row cheerleaders will get its local TV debut for Northern Ireland viewers tomorrow night - you can see it on UTV at 10.35pm, Friday 6th November; and if you're outside the reach of northern Irish television transmitters, DVDs are still available from its makers.

Goodbye Solo: The Best Film Released This Year (So Far)

'Goodbye Solo' (I know I've mentioned it before - but it's now out on DVD in the US and just released to cinemas in the UK and Ireland) is the most frustrating film I’ve seen in ages, and also the best film I’ve seen released this year.  Ramin Bahrani, recently anointed by no less a credible source than Roger Ebert as ‘the great new American film-maker’ had a lot to live up to after his stunning movies about the economic fringes of the US immigrant experience.  ‘Man Push Cart’ and ‘Chop Shop’ tell human, and humane stories about the most mundane of circumstances – the need to make money to survive; but they do it in a way that conveys such urgency, and is completely without cliché that they take on the propulsive force of the most exciting action films.

‘Goodbye Solo’ is set in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, a tobacco town not far from where I live, enervated by the collapse of other industries, and now home to, among others, a large contingent of African men, many of whom drive taxis.  As in so many other cities, many of these taxi drivers are highly qualified individuals, who occupied a very different social stratum in their homeland.  Coming to America may have granted them a better life – but America has not been as good to them as they hoped.

And so, Souleymane from Senegal (Solo for short) drives folk around Winston-Salem, and picks up William, an elderly white man, who makes an unusual request.  He wants to be driven to a mountain range in two weeks’ time, and be left there, no questions asked.  He will pay handsomely for the journey, and for the silence.  It is obvious that he intends this to be a one way trip for himself.  Solo – and we – can’t stand it.  Who is this man, William?  Why does he want to die?  Why does he go to the movies so often?  Why does he become violent when queried?

And who is Solo?  What happened in Senegal to make him want to leave?  Does he love his girlfriend?  Will he stay with her?  What are his dreams?  What does he believe?

The thing is, ‘Goodbye Solo’ never explicitly tells you the answers to these questions; but when it’s over, you know.  You know that there is nothing more important than love; that love necessarily presupposes the pain of loss; that the question of will and intention is at the heart of what makes us human.  In a recent interview with the director, I asked him if his film challenges the myth of liberal interventionism – the notion that all problems can be solved by an outside force imposing its will.  His response put my all-too-fertile critical pretentions in their place.  ‘Goodbye Solo’ has no politics, he said – it just wants to ask what would happen if two very different men met at the right time, in the right place; I’d add that it wants to ruminate on the loneliness that post-modern, post-industrial life has bred for so many; most of all, it wants to tell a bloody good story, and tell it more richly, and more believably than anything else I’ve seen this year.  It upset me, but it also made me feel more alive.  I can’t recommend it highly enough.

This review was originally published in Third Way magazine - check out the magazine here.

Clint Eastwood's Moral Imagination, Or Why Glenn Beck Should Read More Speeches

It's that time of year again - you know, when Clint Eastwood releases a trailer for a movie that looks fascinating and completely different from the last thing he did, and your triple reactions run something like this: 1: Hmmm, Clint's got a movie coming out - didn't we just see 'Gran Torino' five minutes ago?; 2: Hmmm, it's got Morgan Freeman playing Nelson Mandela in it - how come no one ever thought of that before?; 3: Hmmm, it's a movie about the 1995 Rugby World Cup - how come no one ever thought of that before?  Well, no one ever thought of making a gripping film out of the ancient 'old racist bloke in Detroit has his heart melted by a Hmong family and saves the world through non-violent atonement metaphor before singing a jazz song over the early end credits' plot either.  So I'm rather excited about 'Invictus' - biopics are always a risky proposition, but there's an implication in the trailer that this one might do more than retread what we already know or think we know.

Mandela has rightly become an unimpeachable moral figure, but it's par for the course to ignore what he actually stood for.  Mandela is more than a mascot, though our culture might prefer him this way; but he actually has things to say.  Icons of moral authority who act toward the common good are often treated this way: I was astonished yesterday to see the digital wall montage that Glenn Beck uses to underline the gravity of what he's saying - accompanied by the invocation 'Speak Without Fear', an image of Dr Martin Luther King, Jr appeared, leading into Beck denouncing (yet again) concerns about climate change, and announcing his willingness to go to prison for the right to eat steak.  We might imagine Dr King would agree that particular cause doesn't exactly warrant a new letter from a Birmingham jail.

In fact, we might also imagine that a reading of Dr King's actual thoughts about the actual world would surprise Glenn Beck and his audience.  In fact, and let me not be misunderstood: it's kind of obscene for a man who recently imagined aloud his fantasy to poison Nancy Pelosi and joked about President Obama setting the people on fire to attempt to inveigle his way into the legacy of non-violence enacted by a man who, there can be little doubt, Beck would be denouncing if he were alive today.  But if his audience were being exposed to what he actually said about the world, I'd tune in every day.  Come to think of it, that's not a bad idea - maybe we could organise a campaign to encourage talk show hosts only to use images of moral leaders if they're going to spend two minutes every show actually quoting what they actually said.  Beck could begin with some reference to Dr King's 'Giant Triplets of racism, extreme materialism and militarism'; maybe he could just agree to read a paragraph a day from his 'Beyond Vietnam' speech...

Lest I get ahead of myself, let's get back to the movies - I'm hopeful that the Eastwood/Freeman Mandela is more than a cliche, and resists the urge to laze in platitudes.  Clint's last movie showed something about quiet authority, and portrayed a radical idea: that justice or peace sometimes costs its proponents a very great deal; it did this without barnstorming speeches or spelling it out; it gets better in the memory the more I think about it.  Eastwood's Walt Kowalski in 'Gran Torino' felt like the culmination of every iconic character Clint has played - a man with no name/Dirty Harry all grown up and full of regret for past mistakes, who makes a choice to invert it all, and live beyond the narrow circle of selfishness.  Mandela made that choice a long time ago - who knows what Clint's vision of a moment in his life might bring?  We might be about to see a film about an iconic figure that transcends the typical mistakes of making him unreachable to the rest of us; we might actually see a portrayal of Mandela that tells us something about leadership rather than merely represents him as a kind of political pop star.

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