Post by pim on Oct 23, 2017 12:29:35 GMT 10
I'm putting this on the Religion board because like the other Scorsese movies such as The Last Temptation of Christ and Kundun it raises disturbing and challenging questions about faith. I realise the thread will be trolled and fortunately I've blanked out posts from the troll-in-chief so I'll just scroll past those posts. The people I'd really like to hear from are Occam and Fat. I know Fat stays away but he's still on the list of members and maybe he'll post something.
Now to the movie Silence: it's based on a Japanese novel (i.e. written by a Japanese author so read by us in English translation) and it concerns the persecution of Christians in Japan during the 1600s. I have only a nodding acquaintance of Japanese history but I do know that the 1600s was a period during which Japan was ruled by a "Shogun" who was a military-style dictator. This is the notorious "Tokugawa Shogunate" during which time Japan tried to close itself off from the West - the "West" in the 1600s being the Dutch, the Spanish, the Portuguese and the English. The Portuguese had arrived in Japan before the other Westerners and among them was a Spanish Jesuit called Francis Xavier who is credited (or blamed!) with having begun the missionary work leading to widespread conversions to Christianity among the Japanese. The reaction of the Tokugawa Shogunate was swift and brutal. They correctly saw Christianity as the spearhead of unwelcome foreign influence in Japanese life, culture and power structures and suppressed it in a bloodbath which the movie graphically portrays.
Typical of Scorsese movies this movie doesn't paint a black 'n' white picture of good guys and bad guys with the Christians as the good guys. The movie unpacks the persecutions and, while the scenes of torture and brutality are confronting, and the mind games of the Japanese Buddhist inquisitors are as evil and as diabolical as anything practised by the Spanish Inquisition, nevertheless the movie gives you a handle on why Christianity was viewed as a threat in Japan with the Japanese authorities taking the strongest measures to wipe it out.
But the movie goes deeper and unpacks the nature of faith itself. We see the two earnest young Portuguese Jesuits who are smuggled into Japan to search for a Jesuit priest (Ferreira - played by Liam Neeson) who's been unheard of for 15 years, and also to minister to Japanese Christian villagers who practise their faith clandestinely. I'll try to keep the spoilers to a minimum but the cruelty of the Japanese inquisitors is shown by the way they try to force one of the Portuguese Jesuits (played by Andrew Garfield) to renounce his faith by treading on an image of Christ by torturing and beheading villagers until he does. The horror deepens when we learn that these aren't Christian villagers but villagers who'd already renounced Christianity and who would happily stone the priest to death, but whose lives are nevertheless placed in the priest's hands. They go on being tortured and executed for as long as the priest refuses to apostatize - or renounce his faith.
The title of the movie "Silence" refers to God who remains silent in spite of the suffering and the prayers. I don't think it's an atheist movie. In fact I'd strongly argue the contrary. As one critic puts it: "When Ferreira finally appears and we learn the truth about where he's been all this time, it further serves Scorsese's central theme about the conflict between adhering to one's sacred vows and traditional beliefs and doing the right thing, the prudent thing, the moral thing, on a very pragmatic level" and from another critic: "Silence is a monumental work, and a punishing one. It puts you through hell with no promise of enlightenment, only a set of questions and propositions, sensations and experiences... This is not the sort of film you 'like' or 'don't like.' It's a film that you experience and then live with."
Which means it's a bloody good movie.
Now to the movie Silence: it's based on a Japanese novel (i.e. written by a Japanese author so read by us in English translation) and it concerns the persecution of Christians in Japan during the 1600s. I have only a nodding acquaintance of Japanese history but I do know that the 1600s was a period during which Japan was ruled by a "Shogun" who was a military-style dictator. This is the notorious "Tokugawa Shogunate" during which time Japan tried to close itself off from the West - the "West" in the 1600s being the Dutch, the Spanish, the Portuguese and the English. The Portuguese had arrived in Japan before the other Westerners and among them was a Spanish Jesuit called Francis Xavier who is credited (or blamed!) with having begun the missionary work leading to widespread conversions to Christianity among the Japanese. The reaction of the Tokugawa Shogunate was swift and brutal. They correctly saw Christianity as the spearhead of unwelcome foreign influence in Japanese life, culture and power structures and suppressed it in a bloodbath which the movie graphically portrays.
Typical of Scorsese movies this movie doesn't paint a black 'n' white picture of good guys and bad guys with the Christians as the good guys. The movie unpacks the persecutions and, while the scenes of torture and brutality are confronting, and the mind games of the Japanese Buddhist inquisitors are as evil and as diabolical as anything practised by the Spanish Inquisition, nevertheless the movie gives you a handle on why Christianity was viewed as a threat in Japan with the Japanese authorities taking the strongest measures to wipe it out.
But the movie goes deeper and unpacks the nature of faith itself. We see the two earnest young Portuguese Jesuits who are smuggled into Japan to search for a Jesuit priest (Ferreira - played by Liam Neeson) who's been unheard of for 15 years, and also to minister to Japanese Christian villagers who practise their faith clandestinely. I'll try to keep the spoilers to a minimum but the cruelty of the Japanese inquisitors is shown by the way they try to force one of the Portuguese Jesuits (played by Andrew Garfield) to renounce his faith by treading on an image of Christ by torturing and beheading villagers until he does. The horror deepens when we learn that these aren't Christian villagers but villagers who'd already renounced Christianity and who would happily stone the priest to death, but whose lives are nevertheless placed in the priest's hands. They go on being tortured and executed for as long as the priest refuses to apostatize - or renounce his faith.
The title of the movie "Silence" refers to God who remains silent in spite of the suffering and the prayers. I don't think it's an atheist movie. In fact I'd strongly argue the contrary. As one critic puts it: "When Ferreira finally appears and we learn the truth about where he's been all this time, it further serves Scorsese's central theme about the conflict between adhering to one's sacred vows and traditional beliefs and doing the right thing, the prudent thing, the moral thing, on a very pragmatic level" and from another critic: "Silence is a monumental work, and a punishing one. It puts you through hell with no promise of enlightenment, only a set of questions and propositions, sensations and experiences... This is not the sort of film you 'like' or 'don't like.' It's a film that you experience and then live with."
Which means it's a bloody good movie.