Criteria: The Catholic Film Podcast

Steven Spielberg's Schindler's List - which was included on the Vatican's 1995 list of important films - is generally acclaimed as a masterpiece, yet some critics have called it a Hollywood falsification of its subject matter, either because it does not sufficiently show the brutality of the Holocaust, because the story  is told from the point of view of a German, because it has (in some respects) a happy ending, or because (according to the critique of Shoah director Claude Lanzmann) any fictional portrayal whatsoever of the Holocaust is necessarily a transgression. It is true that while Schindler's List conveys not a little of the horror of the Holocaust, it is also the work of a master entertainer, Steven Spielberg. For a 3 hour, 15 minute drama about genocide, it is remarkably watchable; and indeed, compared with many other movies of the same length, it positively flies by. Shouldn't a film about the Holocaust be a bit more...unbearable? In this discussion of the film, James and Thomas take these questions seriously, while ultimately vindicating Spielberg's work. While there are things a popular Hollywood drama is not going to accomplish, it is legitimate to portray terrible events in a way that is honest and yet does not actually traumatize the viewer. A film that exercises more restraint will perhaps be more successful in carrying on the memory of the dead to future generations than one which is such an unrelenting immersion in evil that few can bear to watch it. Meanwhile, the film, while not being unwatchably brutal, offers a real spiritual challenge to the viewer, one which will especially resonate with those who study to imitate the lives of the saints. Those who object to telling the story from the perspective of a real-life German savior of eleven hundred Jews are missing the point. DONATE to make this show possible! http://catholicculture.org/donate/audio Music is The Duskwhales, “Take It Back”, used with permission. https://theduskwhales.bandcamp.com

It’s time for another lively discussion of the wildly popular Christian TV series The Chosen, following on the release of its third season, which stretches from the sermon on the mount to the feeding of the five thousand. Since the show is written by Evangelical Protestants, Thomas and James make a point of keeping an eye out for any doctrinal errors, and Br. Joshua Vargas joins to share his knowledge of Scripture and ancient Jewish and Christian culture and practices. The good news is that season three (unlike the 2021 Christmas special) is The Chosen’s least doctrinally problematic season yet. By this time the show has hit its stride, having established a consistent set of strengths and weaknesses. The chief strength, as always, is Catholic actor Jonathan Roumie’s performance as Jesus. As Jesus’ conflict with the Pharisees becomes more open, we get to see him in a more provocative and even stern mode than before The show’s portrayal of the spiritual value of suffering and the importance of Peter as head of the apostles both tend in a more Catholic direction as well. And its unashamed faith in the supernatural aspects of Jesus’ earthly ministry continues to edify, with the apostles themselves now being given authority to perform signs and wonders. After somewhat holding back their non-doctrinal criticisms while The Chosen got off the ground in its first two seasons, James, Thomas, and Br. Joshua now critique the show’s aesthetic weaknesses, which may be as much a product of today’s pop storytelling as of Evangelical Protestantism. Often this takes the form of “telling” rather than “showing”. The least interesting moments are when character drama takes the form of bickering, in which we are expected to believe the stakes are high despite the apparent pettiness of the conflict. In general, there is a lack of faith in subtext, so that while often the show’s expansion of the terse Gospel accounts is illuminating, at times it actually diminishes their impact, especially when extended fictional backstories are allowed to overwhelm real Gospel moments. There are also moments when the show’s emotional tenor keeps it from portraying large-scale scenes such as the feeding of the five thousand in an appropriately awe-inspiring way. As Br. Joshua puts it, “The show excels much more at making intimate scenes feel epic than at making large scenes feel epic.” Finally, the writing, while good in many ways, frequently resorts to jarringly anachronistic language, at times betraying a lack of sensitivity to how different ways of speaking reveal different ways of thinking. The writers seem to think that while people in the ancient world may have had different opinions from us, their basic emotional experience of reality was the same as ours. It was not. Certain quips put into these first-century characters’ mouths are self-aware and self-referential in a way unmistakably a product of the age of mass entertainment and social media. DONATE at http://www.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

Earlier on this podcast was discussed Carl Theodor Dreyer's silent masterpiece, The Passion of Joan of Arc. Another of Dreyer's films was also included on the Vatican film list, this one from the sound era: Ordet (The Word), based on a play by the Lutheran priest Kaj Munk, who was later martyred by the Gestapo. The film centers on the Borgen family, land-owning farmers in a small village in Denmark. The patriarch, Morton Borgen, is a religious man, but his oldest son Mikkel has lost his faith, while his second son Johannes, while studying theology, has gone mad and believes he is Jesus Christ Himself. Ordet can be viewed as a provocative critique of a modern Christianity that no longer believes in miracles. Its astonishing conclusion throws down the gauntlet, forcing us to consider what it really means to have faith. 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

The Leopard was one of the most popular Italian novels of the 20th century. An historical epic about a Sicilian prince who must navigate the social upheaval that came with Italy's unification in the mid-19th century, it was written by a man who was in a position to know about fading aristocracy - Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa was a Sicilian aristocrat and the last Prince of Lampedusa, and his novel was inspired by his great-grandfather. This novel, which paid tribute to the old order while taking a decidedly pessimistic view of liberalism's promise of a new dawn for mankind, was adapted into a classic film starring Burt Lancaster and directed by Luchino Visconti. Though Visconti was a Communist, he was also the descendant of Milanese nobility, and made a film which treats the old nobility with sympathy, yet without rose-colored glasses. The Leopard (1963) was included on the Vatican's 1995 list of great films, under the category of Art. Joining the podcast to discuss this film is David Paul Baird, co-author of a book on the Vatican film list forthcoming from Word on Fire. 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

Andrei Tarkovsky’s final film, The Sacrifice, is a deeply personal work, made while the director was dying of cancer. It deals, in Tarkovsky’s words, with "the theme of harmony which is born only of sacrifice, the twofold dependence of love. It's not a question of mutual love: what nobody seems to understand is that love can only be one-sided, that no other love exists, that in any other form it is not love. If it involves less than total giving, it is not love." For this reason, perhaps, it was included in the 1995 Vatican film list, in the category of Religion. To put it simply, the film’s protagonist, a middle-aged Swedish man, realizes that he must make a sacrifice to God in order to avert the onset of nuclear war. In its concrete plot, The Sacrifice is rather mysterious and surreal. Yet even if it doesn’t totally work as a literal story, its themes of love, faith, fatherhood, and the dire spiritual situation of modern man are handled economically and intelligibly. Still, guest host Nathan Douglas suggests that The Sacrifice should not be the first film you watch by Tarkovsky—perhaps it should even be saved for last. Letterboxd review mentioned in discussion https://letterboxd.com/kilo_orange/film/the-sacrifice/ Behind-the-scenes footage from the house-burning scene (1:13:39-1:27:00)  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S-Rd6PbSmHM Music is The Duskwhales, “Take It Back”, used with permission. https://theduskwhales.bandcamp.com 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

Animation director Timothy Reckart (The Star) joins Criteria to discuss his theory that the greatest action movie of recent years, Mad Max: Fury Road, is best viewed in light of Pope St. John Paul II's theology of the body. Themes of the discussion include: The film's depiction of a society based on use of persons as objects How the story reverses the very mechanisms of that use and domination and transforms them into means of self-giving love Storytelling through action rather than dialogue How this apparently feminist film complicates an ideological reading Complementarity rather than enmity between the sexes Note: This discussion contains adult themes. Music is The Duskwhales, “Take It Back”, used with permission. https://theduskwhales.bandcamp.com This podcast is a production of CatholicCulture.org. If you like the show, please consider supporting us! http://catholicculture.org/donate/audio  

The Tree of Wooden Clogs, by Catholic director Ermanno Olmi, depicts a year in the life of four peasant families living on a tenant farmhouse in late 19th century Lombardy. The actors are non-professionals, real local peasants speaking their Bergamasque dialect, recreating their normal life on camera (even if in the trappings of a century earlier). The result is a stunning vision of a now-bygone culture that grew out of close contact with the land. Though the film is not nostalgic in longing for the good old days, Olmi (himself a son of Lombard peasants) did say, “I firmly believe that peasant culture in the world is, at this moment in the history of humanity, the only ‘culture’ worthy of that name.” This film can be seen as a culmination of the neo-realist movement that had developed decades earlier with films like Bicycle Thieves and Rome, Open City; but Tree of Wooden Clogs is more neo-realist than the neo-realists, with an almost documentary quality and a purer commitment to depicting a way of life rather than a plot. Olmi was not part of the elite, Marxist-dominated establishment of Italian cinema, and Wooden Clogs drew heavy criticism for depicting peasants who did not revolt against their economic situation. In fact, though the film does not shy away from showing that the peasants' relation with their landlord is marked by injustice, it also shows them quite indifferent to the revolutionary goings-on we glimpse at the margins of this film. Olmi instead wanted to “tell history outside the official channels”, and find wisdom in a less "clamorous" history, by listening to the “whisper of the generations”. This "whisper of the generations" very much includes the simple Catholic faith of the peasants. The great beauty amidst hardship is depicted in a most unassuming way, with Olmi allowing reality to unfold itself through contemplation rather than imposing a stylized structure on the film. He described his approach to filmmaking thus: "There is something in reality that is stronger than you. So what are the terms of the conflict? Am I the one who must tame reality? But it’s so good to be tamed by reality. Because it’s always surprising. This also happens with love." The Tree of Wooden Clogs was included in the Vatican's 1995 list of important films under the category of Values. A little later, Ermanno Olmi and his film school were given a papal medal by St. John Paul II. In discussing this film, James and Thomas are joined by film scholar Maria Elena de las Carreras and filmmaker/critic Nathan Douglas. Music is The Duskwhales, “Take It Back”, used with permission. https://theduskwhales.bandcamp.com This podcast is a production of CatholicCulture.org. If you like the show, please consider supporting us! http://catholicculture.org/donate/audio

For decades critics said Orson Welles’s Citizen Kane was the greatest film ever made. Unfortunately, that intimidating label sometimes keeps people from sitting down and watching the thing. It needn’t be so. Kane is eminently watchable and entertaining. It also definitely isn’t the greatest film of all time, but it’s one of the most technically impressive, especially considering it was directed, produced, co-written and starred in by a 25-year-old who’d never made a movie before. The titular Charles Foster Kane is a character very recognizable to Americans, the larger-than-life business mogul-turned-celebrity who dabbles in politics. Many details of Kane’s private life are known to the general public, but the film tells us that there’s more to a person than what’s said in the newspapers – perhaps especially when that person was himself a newspaperman who took pride in controlling public perception. Kane’s complicated, puzzle-like story structure suggests that fully boring down into the mystery of a man’s life may be impossible, but also makes us feel that the effort to get beneath the façade is worthwhile. Citizen Kane was included on the Vatican’s 1995 list of important films under the category of Art.

James and Thomas wrap up their series of episodes on film noir with a discussion of Billy Wilder's acerbic and vastly entertaining critique of Hollywood avarice and vanity, Sunset Boulevard. The movie business from the beginning has created some sad and grotesque figures, and this film focuses on two in particular. One is the sad and deluded has-been celebrity. Sunset Boulevard gets "meta" in its reflection of the perils of star-worship, especially in the character of Norma Desmond, a former silent film idol played unforgettably by a real-life former silent film star, Gloria Swanson. The other Hollywood type this film shows us is the ambitious loser. Film noir protagonists tend to be losers, and indeed the loser seems like a distinctly American archetype, the flip-side of the American dream with its expectation that one should always be advancing one's station in life. Perhaps no place generates losers like L.A., and in Sunset Boulevard we get our man in down-and-out screenwriter Joe Gillis, played by William Holden. Music is The Duskwhales, “Take It Back”, used with permission. https://theduskwhales.bandcamp.com This podcast is a production of CatholicCulture.org. If you like the show, please consider supporting us! http://catholicculture.org/donate/audio

There are two movies about St. Francis of Assisi on the Vatican's 1995 list of important films. The first, discussed in the previous episode, is Rossellini's well-known Flowers of St. Francis (1950). The second is quite obscure: Liliana Cavani's Francesco (1989), starring Mickey Rourke as St. Francis and Helena Bonham-Carter as St. Clare. The best thing one can say about Francesco is that despite being directed by an atheist, it attempts to take its protagonist seriously as a saint; that it is somewhat faithful to the historical trajectory of his life; and that it does not embrace the usual reductive cliches about St. Francis. Those qualities alone do not make for an interesting film, however, and Francesco would be a fairly rote biopic were it not for the casting of Mickey Rourke. But this casting choice is more of a curiosity than it is a strength of the film. For all the sincerity of Rourke's performance, the lovable personality of Francis as universally attested by early biographies is almost totally missing. This may be a deliberate artistic choice to strip St. Francis of a "superficial" charisma, in order to draw our attention to a deeper mystery at his core. But how much of the historical personality of Francis can we afford to lose before the exercise becomes fruitless? And speaking of stripping, while it's true that a few famous incidents in St. Francis's life involved nudity, the way these are handled onscreen is far from edifying... In this episode, James Majewski, Thomas Mirus and Nathan Douglas attempt to make sense of the most dubious selection on the Vatican film list. Music is The Duskwhales, “Take It Back”, used with permission. https://theduskwhales.bandcamp.com This podcast is a production of CatholicCulture.org. If you like the show, please consider supporting us! http://catholicculture.org/donate/audio