Spiritual Films: The Secular Approach

Copyright 2013, 2014 James Piper.

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ISBN: 978-1-4669-9616-8 (e)

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Contents

About the Book

The Agency of Art

Il Postino (The Postman)

Vier Minuten (Four Minutes)

Hustle and Flow

Tous les matins du monde (All the Mornings of the World)

An Angel at My Table

Frida

The Agency of Aging

Away from Her

Up

Zorba the Greek

About Schmidt

The Agency of Poverty

Umberto D

Lamerica

Born into Brothels

Killer of Sheep

The Agency of Nature

Never Cry Wolf

The Wild Parrots of Telegraph Hill

Walkabout

Into the Wild

The Agency of Women’s Issues

Sans toit ni loi (Vagabond)

Antonia (Antonia’s Line)

Thelma & Louise

Gas Food Lodging

The Agency of Kindness

Central do Brasil (Central Station)

Hotel Rwanda

Sleepwalking

City Lights

The Agency of War

All Quiet on the Western Front

Letters from Iwo Jima

Before the Rain

Shichinin no samurai (The Seven Samurai)

Casualties of War

The Agency of Starting Over

American Beauty

WALL-E

Der Himmel über Berlin (Wings of Desire)

Tender Mercies

The Pawnbroker

The Agency of Food

Waitress

Como agua como chocolate (Like Water for Chocolate)

Babettes gaestebu (Babette’s Feast)

Tampopo

The Agency of Redemption

On the Waterfront

Schindler’s List

Roman Holiday

Dead Man Walking

L’enfant (The Child)

About the Book

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F or decades, centuries even, when people thought of spirituality , they thought only of religion. I aim to stretch the tent of spirituality in this e-book to include secular experience.

My particular approach to secular spirituality is through the medium of film. Characters in the 43 films I discuss come to spirituality without religion.

In some of these films, religion nibbles at the edges of events, as when, in the Brazilian film Central Station, Dora, the cynical letter writer, leaves hard-bitten Rio with a boy she hopes to return to his father and finds herself surrounded by evangelicals, shrines, and churches. She does not have any kind of religious conversion, but there is no denying that the piety of the countryside softened her and escorted her into spirituality.

Now and then I quote assorted Buddhists, Muslims, Christians and Jews, but usually only when their remarks throw light on secular matters. I have avoided relying on muddled mystics who write about the Great Turning Cosmic Oneness of Everything. I don’t know what they are talking about.

People like Anne Van Dusen with Congregational Research provide a definition of secular spirituality which I find out of reach:

I’m spiritual but not religious is shorthand for a search for the meaning of life, a sense of transcendent connection, or deeper growth and understanding. Spirituality revolves around the intangible components of human life—often connecting thoughts, emotions, and experience with something beyond the self. Traditionally explored through organized religion, this search is now fair game in a variety of non-religious settings.

Most of the film characters I write about do not strive for transcendental connections or bother with experience … beyond the self. How boring would that be? They just do the right thing for their little world and within their limitations. They don’t think they are spiritual.

I witness little scenes of spirituality every day. Few people call them spiritual, though I hope by the time I am through with you, you will too. I see a willful child in a supermarket break lose from her mother and run down an aisle, scattering cans and boxes left and right. The embarrassed mother runs after her. A clerk appears and kindly lets the child run into him. The child looks up and laughs. The mother catches up. The clerk smiles. The mother says she is so sorry. The clerk says, No big deal. And starts picking up the boxes. Soon the child is helping. Everyone is lifted out of everyday existence for just a minute. It’s enough.

Back to everyday experience

Everyday experience figures in most of the films I write about. Examples of people in films I discuss achieving spirituality without benefit of religion:

•  In Killer of Sheep, a slaughter-house worker is weary and depressed but still finds resources to lend a helping hand to his impoverished friends.

•  In The Pawnbroker, a bitter Holocaust survivor learns, finally, that he has to get in touch with his past before he can start to heal.

•  In Never Cry Wolf, a naturalist comes to the proto-Darwinian conclusion that it isn’t wolves which are decimating the caribou herd; the culprits are hunters.

Being spiritual is a state of mind out of everyday existence. The metaphor I employ most often is to soar. But there are other metaphors.

For a period, the spiritual person soars (Up) or dances (Zorba the Greek) or bakes (Waitress) and transcends everyday existence, beyond her little earthbound life. From her vantage point, she sees the landscape of positive human possibilities. She’s forgiving, knowing, achieving, selfless, redemptive, risk-taking, noble, gallant, forbearing, decent, and good—at least one of these, maybe several. She smiles, as my grocery clerk did. She is the best a human being in her circumstances can be.

She may not be spiritual for very long—five years, five days, five minutes— but her life is forever and permanently altered, even if she floats back to earth. She is also likely to affect other people for the better for her spirituality. Young Chris McCandless in Into the Wild, one of the films I write about, is spiritual for much of his life and for most of the running time of the film. He has a positive influence on just about everyone he meets during his time on the road. But Jenny in the German film Four Minutes is spiritual for only four minutes when she plays the piano in concert. In that time she affects an auditorium full of people as well as her teacher. She will probably get to you too.

Links to images, clips, and trailers

I supply hundreds. I can’t show you actual images or videos because they are copyrighted. But you can click on the link that takes you to the image or video I describe. The image or video will leap to your screen in seconds.

Missing Links

Links can be fleeting things, here today, gone tomorrow. This is why I have repeatedly tested the hundreds of links in the book, to make sure they are still active. If you find that a link has been taken down or is in error, try searching by, for example, Zorba dancing. You will land on the dancing..

More on searching

Now and then I’ll suggest you leave this book and search by an image or video I can’t link you to. For instance, if I want you to see a certain clip from the French film Vagabond, I’ll suggest you search by elliptical editing Vagabond movie. When needed, I will tell you what to search for.

About clips

These are narratively self-contained videos, with moving images and sounds. They too are largely copyrighted but the links are not. For example, here is a link to a key scene in Schindler’s List:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j1VL-y9JHuI

This scene in fact marks Schindler’s conversion from exploitative Nazi to humanitarian by saving Jews from the gas chambers.

Trailers

… as you know are advertisements for films. They jump around and invariably are driven by hyped-up narration. Some are incompehensible. Still they are useful for gaining overviews of films. I start every chapter with a trailer whenever I can.

Here is a link to a trailer for Waitress:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JZccnrYn8dA

Some clips and trailers are marred by opening commercials. Nothing I can do about that. Fortunately most are short. Some you can X out.

More pictures

To see more pictures for any film, simply type in the name of the film in your search engine, then click on Images above. Hundred of thumbnail images will spring to the screen. Click on any image to enlarge it.

Reviews

Type external reviews, then the name of the film in your search engine.

In this book I purposely discuss a variety of films:

•  Old films, newer ones

•  American films, foreign

•  Well-known and less well known

•  Hollywood and independent

•  Films that are praised and a few that have been panned.

Agencies

Characters in films achieve secular spirituality in many ways. I’ve organized the book around 10 agencies of spirituality.

Art

Aging

Poverty

Nature

Women’s Issues

Kindness

War

Starting Over

Food

Redemption

I discuss at least four films for each agency—43 chapters, or films, in all.

Each chapter includes …

•  an initial analysis of plot, characters, themes, and spiritual tendencies;

•  a further analysis of the spiritual issues of the film;

•  Film 101 feature—two or three basic filmmaking elements central to the film under discussion: cinematography, movement, editing, lighting, set dressing, color, sound. This section reads like being in an intro film class, where you would learn some basics;

•  a summary of important awards (if any) the film has won;

•  a brief bio of the director;

Websites with many images (Google Images) tend to be contaminated with images other than what you want. If you want to see a lot of images for, say, The Seven Samurai, you are likely to get a few images of a punk rock group called The Seven Samurai. Or a Japanese night spot.

Spoilers

As you probably know, people who write about film are loath to reveal the endings of films. I personally feel they have taken this prohibition too far. Many films do not turn on rip-snorting, contrived endings, and writers don’t always have to be mute about climaxes. For example, if you know anything at all about Dead Man Walking, an execution film I write about, you know, or can guess, how it ends.

My dilemma is trying to write about spirituality without revealing how films end. So often the spirituality is built into the climax. I have decided to take a half-way approach. Generally, I have avoided spelling out endings. Instead, I only hint at them or treat them generally or leave out a few turns of plot in an attempt to mask endings. I do have to give you enough of a film’s endings to explain what I feel is the spirituality of the story. This hasn’t been easy.

About me

I taught film study, filmmaking, and writing for several decades at Fresno City College in California. I have made some short dramatic and art films which won awards in festivals in the U.S., Canada, and Europe. I have published six paper books, four about film and two English texts. I serve on the board of Fresno Filmworks, a nonprofit which brings alternative cinema to town. I also write a monthly column for the site. www.fresnofillmworks.org.

The Agency of Art

Cartoon by R. Crumb:

http://www.icaphila.org/exhibitions/images/crumb-jenny.jpg

Il Postino (The Postman), Italy

Vier Minuten (Four Minutes), Germany

Hustle and Flow, U.S.

      Angel at My Table, New Zealand

            Frida, U.S.

Il Postino (The Postman), Michael Radford, 1994, Italy

Trailer

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XXCC7SdJW1o

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T his movie is about the power of poetry. It’s a bit of a stretch but not out of reach for people who believe art can change lives. It was written by Anna Pavignano and directed by Michael Radford.

The main character is Mario Ruoppolo, played by Massimo Troisi, a man past 30. He hasn’t done anything with his life. Little wonder—he came of age on an out-of-the-way Italian island which contemporary society has seemed to pass by. There is not much to do in the island’s village, nothing to aspire to, except to follow his father’s trade as a fisherman, which does not thrill him.

Then something happens which results in a total change for Mario: The world-renown poet Pablo Neruda has had to flee his native Chile because of his revolutionary politics. He happens to choose Mario’s island to hide out for a while. We learn this in a TV new flash which Mario and his father happen to see. The news story also mentions that women go crazy for Pablo poetry’s. Mario would like to have a woman in his life. Might he snag her with poetry? What is poetry anyway? the naïve Mario asks.

Pablo, played by Phillippe Noriet, is probably in his mid fifties. He settles into a house by the sea with his wife Matilde (Anna Bonaiuto). Not long after this, Mario gets a job delivering mail to one person, Neruda, who because of his fame gets lots of mail. Soon Pablo and Mario start talking poetry. Mario had no idea poetry might work spells on women. Pablo gives Mario one of his books and signs it.

Mario learns that much poetry depends on metaphors, a species of rhetoric he does not understand. He wants to know what it means. Pablo says, When you explain poetry, it becomes banal. Better than any explanation is the experience of feelings that poetry can reveal to a reader open enough to understand it. Mario eats this up.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MiGGagSRO88

Mario reads the book Pablo gave him and is transfixed. Later he tells Pablo, I was like a boat tossing around on your words. Pablo says, You’ve invented a metaphor. Mario replies, The whole world is a metaphor.

One day Mario delivers the big news from Stockholm: Neruda is being considered for a Nobel prize.

Then Mario falls for a lovely woman, Beatrice (Maria Grazia Cucinotta), who works at a restaurant in town. He tells Pablo about it. Pablo responds to the name because a real-life figure named Beatrice shows up in several poems by Dante Alighieri, Italy’s famous Renaissance poet. Pablo urges Mario to write a poem for Beatrice. So Mario starts in on a poem. He has no trouble pulling metaphors from his heart: Your laugh is a sudden silvery wave, he writes. Your smile spreads like a butterfly. Actually, at this stage, Beatrice doesn’t laugh much or smile much. She is pretty aloof. But when she gets a load of Mario’s lines of poetry, she goes for it and him.

http://goo.gl/1Yws9r

Beatrice’s aunt and guardian is a cynical woman who lectures Beatrice: When a man touches you with his words, he’s not far from touching you with his hands.

Still, Beatrice can’t resist. Nobody else on this island is up to wooing her by words. Mario can’t stop:

Naked you are simple as one of your hands, smooth, terrestrial, tiny, round, transparent. You have moon-lines, apple paths. Naked, you are as thin as bare wheat. Naked you are blue like a Cuban night. There are vines and stars in your hair. Naked, you are enormous and yellow, like summer in a gilded church.

This is getting close to over the top, but it’s heartfelt. It’s not yet cut up into lines or made to rhyme. It’s proto-poetry. Still, Beatrice likes it. She wants to marry Mario. Her aunt reads the poem and immediately storms off to Pablo’s. She demands he stop teaching Mario to write filthy poetry.

The priest won’t marry them because Mario wants Neruda to be his best man—but Neruda is a communist, and Mario writes filthy poetry, as the priest sees it. Communists and porno writers aren’t allowed in the church. So Mario and Beatrice start a life together without benefit of marriage. Less uptight people in the village throw the couple of gala party at the restaurant.

Soon Mario is involved in local politics, as Neruda had been back in Chile. Mario runs into trouble, but he keeps writing. Here is another rough-hewn poem he wrote.

And it was at that age … Poetry arrived

in search of me. I don’t know, I don’t know where

it came from, from winter or a river.

I don’t know how or when,

no, they were not voices,

not words or silence

but from a street I was summoned,

from the branches of night,

abruptly from the others

among violent fires

or returning alone

there I was without a face

and it touched me.

Not bad. At least Mario is getting the hang of dividing his poetry into lines.

Pablo wins the Nobel Prize and returns to Chile.

(I could not find the name of the person who wrote Mario’s poetry.)

Spirituality

Il Postino is about innocent art making. It’s based on a belief that worthy art may issue from unsophisticated people lacking formal education. We used to call it primitive art but that term had a condescending ring to it.

Today the preferred term is probably naïve art. Two such naïve painters are the American Grandma Moses (Anna Mary Robertson Moses) and the French woman Séraphine de Senlis who scrubbed floors for most of her life. Here is a link to Grandma Moses’ painting A Beautful World.

http://goo.gl/NW319V

And a video of Seraphine’s paintings:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hP5mhTE7Bgg

The French made a movie based on the life of Seraphine. Trailer:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HpK_qugNHCM

Naïve artists have impacted trained artists down the decades and all over the world. Wikipedia lists hundreds of them. I deem it exceedingly spiritual if naïve artists have potential to make art that ordinary people respond to while also exerting a positive influence on sophisticated artists. The naïve artists are often purer, more in touch with what art is supposed to be about and far less pretentious.

Once I knew a man who made beautiful, heart-felt home movies. He just had a knack for it. But as he was shooting he did not think I am making art films. He never took a film class or a photography class. He just worked fast and loose, intending only to entertain family and friends in his living room of a Saturday night. I know a lot about making films and even home movies. I have written professionally about both. I’ve also taken lots of home movies. But nothing I did could match Loren’s ingenuous pans and frames, his deft editing in-camera, his spontaneity and sense of simply being in the right place at the time. I was flat-footed; Loren was transcendent doing his despised art. I never achieved spirituality shooting Pin the Tale on the Donkey. Loren could make the cutting of the birthday cake seem like a sacred moment—because it was.

The famous Watts Towers of Los Angeles is a collection of 17 remarkable sculptures that serve no purpose but to be beautiful. Two rise to 99 feet. They are sturdily constructed of steel girders, pipe, scrap metal, and pieces of broken colored glass. They’ve been standing since 1954. They were put together single-handedly by Simon Rodia who immigrated to Los Angeles from Italy in the 1920s. Rodia was a manual laborer with no formal training in engineering or architecture.

http://graphics8.nytimes.com/images/2011/02/08/us/WATTS-1/WATTS-1-articleLarge.jpg

There have been antecedents to Mario’s poetry. Ernest Herbeck, an uneducated German with no formal training in literature or writing, spent nearly his entire life in a mental hospital where he wrote thousands of poems, which now reside in an Austrian museum. Here is a poem by Herbeck.

Like an Eagle.

Like an eagle the smoke of the cigarette flees.

Steady the head and alone the eye.

Like an eagle is the cry therefrom.

gladly to lift off the eagless.

Like an eagle the wolf looks past.

and imagines its litany.

Like an eagle gladly I would like to be.

that is the world for me alone.

(Translated by Oya Ataman and Gary Sullivan)

There is another theme in El Postino bearing on spirituality: anti-art. People who are opposed to sensuality in the arts, as are the aunt and the priest, do not become spiritual. They live limited, stingy lives with their feet firmly planted on the ground. They lack an ascendant view of human nature. But Mario, with all his poetry’s guiltless references to nakedness, intuitively understands the connection between art and sexuality.

Film 101

This film needs no elaborate photography. Overall the color tones of the film, especially the beach scenes and the village, are warm and bracing. Interiors are muted as characters move in an out of window light or exit into sunlight. The film overall has a postage-card quality with subdued, rather than saturated, colors.

Much of the film—probably half—consists of dialog between Pablo and Mario. To film these scenes, Radford’s cinematographer, Franco Di Giacomo, used three camera set ups (one camera positioned three times) to capture Mario and Pablo: a medium shot of both actors, and close-ups of each. Here is the way scenes like this are rehearsed and shot:

The medium shot is a kind of master shot. The way Mario and Pablo worked out their lines and their movements in the medium shot dictated how they moved during their close-ups. They repeated the lines they gave in the medium shot in the close-ups. If Mario turned to the left at a certain point in the dialog in the medium shot he had to turn his head in exactly the same way in close-up and at the same word of dialog.

These elementary acting and filming techniques assure continuity, or shot-to-shot smoothness. Also, covering the action three ways gave editor Roberto Perpignani many choices. He might start with a medium shot of Mario and Pablo then cut to Mario’s close up. Or the other way around. Or two close ups in a row. Or begin and end with the medium shot. This is the standard way of making movies when two actors dominate—working from a medium shot and two close-ups.

Visual variety is important too. Mario reads Pablo’s book in several locations and positions—at his table in his home, at the window sill, and on the beach. Radford films him at the table from the side and the front. He films him in side angle at the window and from outside the window shooting in. He films him in long shot at the beach with the surf behind him, and he films him frontally in a tighter frame. Again, this gives Perpignani much leeway in editing the scenes.

Though Mario’s reading of Pablo’s book takes place on the screen in but three minutes, the suggestion is that he spent the whole day, maybe longer, reading and pondering the book of poetry. When film editors compress time this way they are drawing on the technique of montage.

The music of the film too is lyrical, dominated by a romantic harmonica and strings, evoking the idyllic feel of the island and the story. Luis Enriquez Bacalov composed this music.

About Radford and Troisi

Michael Radford was born in New Delhi, India in 1946. His recent films include Flawless (2007), The Merchant of Venice 2004), and Ten Minutes Older: The Cello (2002). Massimo Troisi acted in 14 films with Italian titles, wrote eight films, and directed six. Troisi was a well-known Italian writer and film director who had a bad heart. He died the day after Radford finished shooting the film.

http://goo.gl/R3dL5G

Awards

Il Postino won an Academy Award for best score and was nominated for four other Oscars for a foreign film—acting (Troisi), picture, writing, and direction. It won or was nominated for many awards in both the U.S. and around the world.

jkp21@live.com Comments too are welcome.>

Copyright 2013 Jim Piper

~Vier Minuten Vier Minuten (Four Minutes),

  Chris Kraus, 2006, Germany

Trailer

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k0kUHEl72eA

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T his is a hard and dark film from Germany, written and directed by Chris Kraus. It’s based on