Criteria: The Catholic Film Podcast

The great Italian director Roberto Rossellini made what is generally regarded as the best movie about St. Francis of Assisi. Its original Italian title is Francesco, giullare di Dio ("Francis, God's jester"), but in English it is known as The Flowers of St. Francis - the film being based on a 14th-century Italian novel with the same title. As the Italian title suggests, Rossellini wanted to focus on the whimsical aspects of the saint's personality. He sought to capture “the merrier aspect of the Franciscan experience, on the playfulness, the ‘perfect delight,’ the freedom that the spirit finds in poverty, and in an absolute detachment from material things," all elements he had found in the book on which the film was based. The film faithfully imitates the simple poignant and amusing charm of its source material, right down to its structure as a series of vignettes with no overarching plot. Like the book, it is about St. Francis's followers as much as the saint himself, and particularly focuses on the misadventures of Brother Juniper, as found in the Life of Brother Juniper, a text associated with The Little Flowers of St. Francis. In keeping with Rossellini's prior work as one of the founders of Italian neo-realism, the film uses almost no professional actors: all the Franciscan characters are played by real Franciscan monks. This too contributes to the film's purity and simplicity - an appropriate tribute to St. Francis. The film is one of two about St. Francis that were included on the Vatican's 1995 list of important films. The next episode will be about the other: Liliana Cavani's Francesco (1989). 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

Continuing through the Vatican's 1995 list of important films, in the section of Art we find the universally beloved 1939 musical The Wizard of Oz. The film is undeniably delightful and magical, but suffers from the attempt to provide a moral of dubious coherence. The film is about a band of characters seeking various virtues, but at the end we aren't quite sure where virtue comes from, and are left with a sense of disillusionment both within Oz (the Wizard being a phony) and with regard to the whole story (having been a dream). Nearly half a century later, Wizard got a sequel in Walter Murch's Return to Oz (1985) - but a sequel in plot terms only, with a very different spirit and style. For one thing, Return is more faithful to its source material in the stories of L. Frank Baum, who was inspired by Lewis Carroll's insistence that children stories don't need a lesson at the end. This approach too has its liabilities, because while a shoehorned theme is bad, so is realizing halfway through a movie that the series of events one has been watching, while charming and inventive, doesn't have much of a point. Return is also significantly scarier than Wizard, as one of a number of whimsical but dark fantasy films made in the mid-80s (alongside Labyrinth and The Dark Crystal). The films can also be contrasted in their visual concepts, each compelling in its own way. Where Wizard opts for overtly artificial yet delightful sets, Return offers a more fully realized world, appropriately since the film rejects the idea that Oz is a dream. 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

Thomas Mirus, James Majewski, and Nathan Douglas discuss the new Amazon series, The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power. The show thus far is not so much offensive as it is bland in ways similar to much popular film and television today. This discussion attempts to understand why the show generally fails to move, focusing especially on its frequent small-mindedness or arbitrariness in characterization and writing, and on its habit of “telegraphing” or signalling emotion rather than genuinely conveying it. (We apologize for the lip-syncing problems in this episode!) Topics and timestamps: 0:00 Introduction 3:27 The “Game-of-Thronesification” of character motivation 9:34 Galadriel, Valinor, and the elves’ artistic motivations 18:01 A graceless Galadriel and small-minded writing 29:02 Contrasting performances: Galadriel vs. Elrond 35:21 Failure to trust that virtue is interesting 37:59 “IT’S A SNOW TROOOOOOLL!” The “John-Wickification” of action 41:00 Generic tough girl face; telegraphing emotion rather than living it 52:44 Arbitrary conflict and fussy dwarves 59:06 Starting at level 1: the “video-gamification” of character development 1:06:00 Too much harfoot-talk: cliché TV dialogue with a hobbity skin 1:15:09 The political conversation around the show 1:25:40 Shallow and arbitrary diversity is self-defeating 1:37:07 Erasing womanhood in the pursuit of “strong female characters” Links Read Nathan Douglas's film writing here https://vocationofcinema.substack.com 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

Catholic art historian Elizabeth Lev returns to Criteria to discuss two films about Michelangelo. The Agony and The Ecstasy (1965), directed by Carol Reed and starring Charlton Heston as Michelangelo and Rex Harrison as Pope Julius II, is what Italians call an "Americanata" - an unapologetically bombastic, colorful Hollywood transformation of Italian or Roman history. It focuses on the conflict and collaboration between Michelangelo and his papal patron in the project of painting the Sistine Chapel. Sin (2019), directed by Andrei Konchalovsky, gives us a gritty, filthy Renaissance Florence and Rome and a Michelangelo who is something like a lovable hobo, outstandingly performed by Alberto Testone. Sin takes place in the fallow period of Michelangelo's career immediately after he painted the Sistine ceiling, in which his work was stalled by the conflict between his two patrons, the Della Rovere and Medici families. Rather than showing Michelangelo making art, it shows his spiritual and economic struggles during this period. As hesitant as the title Sin might make us, Elizabeth Lev praises it for correctly identifying avarice and pride as Michelangelo's sins, rather than focusing on the question of his sexuality as many do today. (Though the film is not free of sexual content involving other characters.) Fifty years ago, Konchalovsky co-wrote the greatest film about an artist: Andrei Rublev (directed by Andrei Tarkovsky). He identifies Sin as a continuation of the themes of Rublev. Indeed, both of these films about Michelangelo share with Rublev the tension between artistic/religious integrity and working for patrons who may be commissioning religious works for worldly motives. Links https://www.elizabeth-lev.com 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

In his book on film noir, Arts of Darkness, Catholic philosopher Thomas Hibbs writes: "Subverting the rationality of the pursuit of happiness, noir turns the American dream into a nightmare. Noir also undercuts the Enlightenment vision of the city as the locus of human bliss, wherein human autonomy and rational economics could combine to bring about the satisfaction of human desire." Sweet Smell of Success is a sterling example of this theme in noir. "Success" is one of the great American idols, and the two acid-tongued protagonists of this film entertainingly embody the dark side of success in the seeking and the finding, as desperate publicity man Sidney Falco (Tony Curtis) eats dirt instead of gravy from the train of ruthless gossip columnist J.J. Hunsecker (Burt Lancaster). It's almost like Wormtongue and Saruman in Times Square, if Saruman's main goal were to stop his kid sister from marrying a jazz guitarist. But we don't want to spoil it for you... 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

Bicycle Thieves, the most beloved classic of Italian neo-realist cinema, would be too easily explained as depicting the crushing pressures of poverty and societal dysfunction in Rome immediately following World War II. But the film transcends any sociological analysis: it has something spiritual to say about how those in poverty can respond to their situation. James Majewski argues that the film is about trust or the lack thereof. It shows how quickly things get worse when we act as though we are in control of our circumstances. The film also defies any suspicion that something with the name “neo-realism”, which uses real locations and non-professional actors in order to better document social realities, will necessarily be drab, materialist and undramatic. Screenwriter Cesare Zavattini’s neo-realist slogan, “Life as it is”, is clarified by director Vittorio de Sica’s explanation of why he decided to make a film about the theft of a bicycle: “Uncovering the drama in everyday life, the wonderful in the daily news.” Bicycle Thieves is included on the Vatican’s 1995 list of important films, in the category of Values. 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

On the morning of January 15, 1944, Nazis raided a boarding school for boys in Avon, France. The Carmelite monks who ran the school had been hiding some Jewish boys there under false names. As a number of the children and teachers watched, three of their classmates were led away by the Nazis, along with the headmaster, Pere Jacques, who turned back to say only, "Au revoir, les enfants" ("Goodbye, children"). The three boys died in Auschwitz, and the priest went to Mauthausen, dying only a few weeks after the camp was liberated by US forces. Among the children standing by on that unforgettable day was the future French film director Louis Malle. Decades later in 1987, he would memorialize the experience, the boys and the priest (whose cause for canonization was opened in 1990). The film is included on the Vatican's 1995 list of important movies under the category of Values. But Au Revoir les Enfants is about much more than the Holocaust. The bulk of the film is a kind of slice-of-life experience of a French Catholic boarding school. The children in the story don't know what is going on behind the scenes, and Malle proves deft at developing the plot in an unemphatic and invisible manner until the end. It is a coming-of-age story, a Holocaust story, and the story of a heroic priest-martyr all in one. Note: In this episode, we mistakenly referred to the main character as “Lucien”. His name, in fact, is Julien. Article about Pere Jacques: https://www.criterion.com/current/posts/1781-au-revoir-les-enfants-p-re-jacques-and-the-petit-coll-ge-d-avon This podcast is a production of CatholicCulture.org. If you like the show, please consider supporting us! http://catholicculture.org/donate/audio

James and Thomas introduce one of the most influential genres of Hollywood’s golden age: film noir. Noir’s distinctively moody chiaroscuro look, suspense-laden plotting, and clever, “hard-boiled” dialogue deriving from popular crime fiction make it a most entertaining style. But why did a genre exploring the cynical, seedy and criminal side of American life thrive in the optimistic years of the late 1940s? Here we explore the stylistic elements, as well as the strange morality and psychology, of film noir. James suggests that its popularity in the late 40s has to do with the breakdown of the relationship between men and women which was already taking place. A central aspect of noir is often the hero’s seduction and betrayal by a scheming femme fatale. This episode focuses on an outstanding example of the genre from 1947: Out of the Past, starring Robert Mitchum, Jane Greer, and Kirk Douglas. Mitchum plays a former private eye who used to be involved in the seedy underworld of New York City, but has now retreated to a quiet life in rural California. As the title indicates, his past reaches out and threatens to pull him back in. 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

James and Thomas attempt to discuss the 1933 film adaptation of Little Women, without the help of a female guest. The film, directed by George Cukor and starring Katharine Hepburn as Jo March, was included on the Vatican’s 1995 list of important films, in the category of Art. 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

A mere eight years after the 1920 canonization of Joan of Arc, and in the midst of her great popularity as a French national hero, Danish director Carl Th. Dreyer made The Passion of Joan of Arc. It is widely regarded as one of the greatest films of all time, and is included on the Vatican film list. Two aspects in particular put this film in the canon: first, Renee Maria Falconetti's transcendent performance as Joan, which some consider the greatest work ever done by a film actor. And second, the film's radical visual style, eschewing establishing shots and even a clear sense of place to focus entirely on the actors' faces, combining with fast-paced editing to put what Dreyer called the "close-quarter combat" between Joan and her judges front and center. The film combines a historical approach - based almost entirely on the real transcripts of Joan's trial - with non-realistic acting and cinematography, to arrive at "the ecstatic truth" about St. Joan (to borrow a phrase from Werner Herzog). The Passion of Joan of Arc feels much less dated than many silent films, and would make a great introduction for those unfamiliar with this era of cinema. Like many silent films, it has existed in various versions and states of disrepair over the decades - but Joan's history is more remarkable than most. After the original negative was destroyed in a studio fire the year after it was shot, Dreyer reconstructed it shot-for-shot using alternate takes. The second version of the film was then destroyed in a different studio fire. In 1981 a print of the original film was discovered in the janitor's closet of a Norway mental institution, providing the fairly pristine version we can view today. But we still have various frame rates and soundtracks to choose from, which gives rise to a broader discussion about what constitutes, and who decides, the "definitive" version of a work of art. Links Read Nathan Douglas at The Vocation of Cinema https://vocationofcinema.substack.com/ 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