Welcome! This is a conversation board hosted by
The Film Forum, Decent Films and Looking Closer,
and sponsored by Promontory Artists Association, for a little more
personal interaction and dialogue. Take advantage of it.
Ask questions, offer opinions, and enjoy the flow of ideas.

PLEASE OBSERVE THESE BOARD GUIDELINES.
1. Be courteous, respectful, and avoid potentially offensive language.
2. Stay close to the thread subject or else start a new thread.
3. If tempers rise, move your debate into personal e-mails.
4. SPAM or marketing-oriented e-mails are strictly forbidden.
5. If you're going to post a "spoiler" information about a movie's ending
or facts that could "spoil" elements of a story), type (SPOILERS) before you proceed.
Logins may at any time be suspended by Administrators.


The Promontory Film & Spirituality Conversation
Register | Update Profile | F.A.Q. | Admin Control Panel

Topic: easter viewing Return to archive
04-21-03 12:30 PM
Peter T Chattaway Lest the first paragraph seem out-of-date, I posted this yesterday in another forum.

- - -

Today is Easter Sunday. It is also Hitler's birthday. So, naturally, I watched a couple of German films and a Jesus movie this weekend.

The two German films I caught are probably a few months or even years old by now, but they are currently both having their first run in Vancouver theatres. One was Nowhere in Africa, the recent Oscar winner for Best Foreign Language Film, and it's about a Jewish family that moves to Kenya shortly before World War II begins; the other was The Tunnel, a riveting, suspenseful, true-story thriller about Germans in West Berlin digging under the Berlin Wall in the early 1960s in order to help their East German friends and family escape. (The Tunnel just confirms for me what many people have said before, namely that the best Hollywood films these days are made outside of Hollywood; it's not a "foreign" film in the sense of being arty or anything, it's more like a really well-made, dramatic, entertaining film like, say, The Great Escape.)

Both films are well worth watching, and both films surprised me by moving me to tears, though for very different reasons. Nowhere in Africa is striking in that the married couple at the heart of that story is NOT one of these ideal couples that bravely faces the struggles of being forced out of their homeland and into a new culture -- rather, from the beginning, the film lets us know that theirs is a more, shall we say, conventional marriage which does not seem especially solid even BEFORE the pressures of history come bearing down on it. (In one early scene, the husband's father tells the wife that there is always ONE partner in a marriage who is less in-love than the other, and that this makes the more-in-love partner vulnerable. Those words are never repeated, but I think they hover over much of what follows.) There is also a young daughter in this family, who seems to be about five years old when the film begins; she bonds instantly with one of the African men who works for the family, and I found their scenes together very, very moving, partly because it had that young-child-whose-fate-is-marked-by-forces-beyond-her-comprehension thing that, say, the first half of An American Rhapsody had, but also because I've become such a sap lately when it comes to stories about adults and children who aren't related to each other; in addition to a host of other reasons, I blame Monsters, Inc.

As for The Tunnel, wow. I don't know how much of the story is true and how much of it has been pumped up for dramatic purposes, but the film itself is great -- apart from the technicalities of digging the tunnel, and apart from all the complications that arise from that (e.g. the tunnel is flooded at one point because a pipe on the East German side of the Berlin Wall has broken ... so how will they get the East Germans to shut off that pipe?), the film devotes a LOT of time to developing the characters and their relationships with one another. The main character in the film is a champion swimmer (played by Heino Ferch, who reminds me of Bruce Willis -- he was in both Run Lola Run and Wintersleepers, but I can't remember who he played) who escapes from East Berlin fairly easily, just after construction on the Wall has begun, and then enlists the help of several friends to dig a tunnel back to the eastern side, so that his sister and perhaps her family can escape as well. (Already I have to like this film -- movies about adult brother-sister relationships are all too rare.) But many of the supporting characters are handled quite compellingly as well, and there is one very moving sequence in which an East German is shot by his own country's soldiers as he runs to the Wall, and he is left to die while people on the West German side of the wall try to save him or speak to him; one of many striking features about this scene is the way the camera lingers just enough on the soldier who shoots the would-be escapee; you can see how distraught HE is by the fact that he shot one of his fellow Germans, yet at the same time you can see how determined he is to follow his orders and defend the Wall. Little details like that matter, and this film handles them very well.

In fact, that scene was made all the more powerful for me when I reflected on the fact that an EARLIER scene in the film had shown a movie crew dismantling a fake Berlin Wall in the middle of a different street. (The movie set the characters stumble upon is that of Tunnel 28, a 1962 film which, according to the IMDB, was itself based on a true story.) So the film actually draws our attention to the moviemaking process by which tunnel-escape movies are made ... and then, later on, when this scene by the real Berlin Wall comes along, the film overcomes our awareness of the moviemaking process and moves us with the skill of its own filmmaking.

And then there is the token Jesus movie. I was browsing through a local store recently when I noticed that King of Kings, the 1961 film starring Jeffrey Hunter, was out on DVD now, so I snapped it up. Hoo-boy. Believe it or not, this was the FIRST major Hollywood film about Jesus to be released after the invention of talkies in the 1920s -- one theory has it that nobody in Hollywood was willing to make a full-fledged Jesus movie while Cecil B. DeMille, the esteemed director of the silent classic The King of Kings, was still alive -- and, uh, hoo-boy, it's inadequate.

One gets the impression that Hollywood really didn't have a clue HOW to go ahead with a head-on portrayal of Jesus, so they ended up throwing lots of distractions on the screen, so much so that Jesus ends up being barely more than a supporting player in his own life story. Consider the fact that, in this nearly three-hour film, Jesus himself appears for only about twelve minutes in the first hour -- and even THEN, we often see no more than a shadow on the wall while Orson Welles recites some of Ray Bradbury's pretentious narration. In fact, it got so bad I turned on my DVD player's clock and made note of how long each scene was.

Now, of the film's 170:47 length, fully 13:27 is taken up by credits and overtures and intermission music, so that leaves 157:20. Of that, the footage in which Jesus plays any significant role (thus leaving out, e.g., the scene where Mary pats her 12-year-old son on the head before she and Joseph talk to the Roman soldier by themselves) comes down to this:

4:30 the temptation scene
1:36 the call of the disciples
2:44 the healing miracles (mostly shadow, narrated by orson welles)
3:14 a couple of teachings, the woman caught in adultery
2:31 jesus talks to lucius about visiting john the baptist
1:47 jesus visits john the baptist
1:27 jesus accepts judas as a disciple, heals madman
2:04 john the baptist hears jesus' voice before he is beheaded
13:07 the sermon on the mount
2:36 jesus wanders with disciples (mostly narrated by orson welles)
1:31 jesus visits mary before going to jerusalem
2:22 the triumphal entry (with a hint of barabbas planning a revolt)
5:47 the last supper
5:22 gethsemane (intercut with judas going to meet the troops)
6:08 trial before pilate
3:24 trial before herod antipas
1:54 jesus is scourged and tormented (intercut with scene of judas)
4:46 the via dolorosa (intercut with scenes of judas and barabbas)
3:44 the crucifixion
2:42 jesus is taken down from the cross and buried
2:02 easter sunday morning, the resurrection
1:45 an offscreen jesus casts his shadow on peter's fishing net

Which all adds up to 77 minutes and 3 seconds. Or less than half of the film. And that's about it, unless you count the relatively brief glimpses of Jesus during one of the early John the Baptist sequences (the first time we see Jesus, we're already 34:10 into the movie) or during the scene where Peter denies Jesus. But I figure the exclusion of those scenes is more than made up for by the fact that many of the scenes I've listed here already contain, within themselves, fictitious contaminants, such as all the stuff with Barabbas running around; for example, after the 2.5-minute triumphal entry, there is a 5.5-minute sequence in which Barabbas and a bunch of Jews lead an uprising against the Romans, which is violently suppressed. Elsewhere, after the 6-minute sequence in which Jesus is tempted in the wilderness and then calls his first disciples, there follows a 9-minute sequence in which Pilate and Herod are taunted by John the Baptist and decide to arrest him, while Barabbas lurks in the crowd, wondering if John might be useful to him; plus our first glimpse of the Baptist takes place within a 10-minute sequence depicting the arrival of Pilate in Palestine while Barabbas launches a guerrilla-style attack on the Roman legions (the attack itself takes up 5 minutes). There is also a 19-minute gap between the last of Jesus' healings and the sermon on the mount, during which Mary Magdalene pays the Virgin Mary a visit, while Pilate and Herod do a lot more talking and Salome dances, etc., etc.

Now, much of that time spent away from Jesus is spent watching characters TALK about Jesus, and the dialogue in those scenes DOES fill in some of the biblical data that is missing from the scenes of Jesus himself. But the overall effect is very strange. For one thing, the 10 minutes or so devoted to Jesus' trials ends up feeling like the culmination of the subplots regarding Herod and Pilate MORE than it feels like part of Jesus' own personal drama. In fact, he doesn't really HAVE a personal drama -- he's just someone that everybody else talks about. Yet, despite all the talking, we never really get a sense of WHY he is doing the things that he is doing -- what is the significance of having TWELVE disciples? what is the significance of the bread and the wine? what is the significance of the crucifixion? what does it all mean? The film doesn't really know how to address such questions. What's more, the Jesus of the film seems a bit clueless himself -- in one famous scene, when Jesus visits Mary shortly before going to Jerusalem, he says that a chair that needs fixing will have to wait until he returns, and Mary replies that the chair will never be mended; suddenly Jesus darts his eyes in Mary's direction, as though she has just revealed something to him.

Ah well. No use obsessing over it. (Though it's probably too late for THAT assessment, in my case. ) One other thing I'll mention, though, is that the DVD includes a couple of newsreels hyping the film's gala premieres, and I find it just a wee bit annoying how the announcer says that this film "brings increased stature to the industry". It just reeks of that idea that some people will cozy up to Jesus because they can profit off of him -- as the talent manager in The Guru (an otherwise utterly forgettable film) puts it, "I want to be in bed with God."
04-21-03 02:37 PM
Jeffrey Overstreet I'm wondering if "The Tunnel" is going to get wider release this year. Should we classify it as a 2003 film? Or is it making more of a special-event appearance in Vancouver?
04-21-03 03:38 PM
Peter T Chattaway Jeffrey Overstreet wrote:
: I'm wondering if "The Tunnel" is going to get wider release
: this year. Should we classify it as a 2003 film? Or is it
: making more of a special-event appearance in Vancouver?

No, this is a regular theatrical release. The film was apparently released in Germany in January 2001, and a friend of mine says he saw it at the local film festival in September or October of that year, but I haven't a clue what the film's release schedule is or has been like in other cities. The IMDB says it was shown at a couple of American festivals in November 2001 and February 2002, but it says nothing about a regular North American release date.

http://us.imdb.com/ReleaseDates?0251447

Oh, wait a minute, this movie won a Bavarian TV Award as well as the German Television Award for "Best Movie Made for Television or Miniseries", and apparently the full TV version ran for about 190 minutes, or about 30 minutes longer than the version I saw in the theatre. Hmmm, maybe this film belongs in that OTHER thread ...

http://us.imdb.com/Tawards?0251447
http://us.imdb.com/AlternateVersions?0251447
04-21-03 04:49 PM
jrobert I was thinking yesterday about what would be an appropriate Easter film. I ended up seeing an Iranian movie called The Last Supper, which wasn't so great, and Rossellini's Open City, which is simply fantastic. I had never seen it before; and even though the print was bad, it was an engrossing experience. Thinking about it again this morning, I think you could make an effective case for Open City being a great Good Friday film. The final half-hour, in particular, reminds me of the arrest, torture, and crucifixion of Christ, though it's separated out into two people in the movie. Anyone else seen the movie? I'm curious to see what others think.

It struck me walking home that Dreyer's Ordet is the perfect Easter movie.

J Robert
04-21-03 04:57 PM
Peter T Chattaway jrobert wrote:
: I think you could make an effective case for Open City
: being a great Good Friday film. The final half-hour, in
: particular, reminds me of the arrest, torture, and
: crucifixion of Christ, though it's separated out into two
: people in the movie. Anyone else seen the movie?

Not since film class, 13 years ago. Lloyd Baugh mentions the film a couple times in his book on Christ figures.
04-22-03 04:22 AM
MattPage King of Kings was BBCs choice for Good Friday afternoon (seemingly the only Jesus film - or even loosely religious film) that was on British TV (including cable) over the whole Easter period. Whats more whereby in the past films such as "Jesus of Nazareth" and "The Miracle Maker" have been shown on BBC1, "King of Kings" was tucked away on BBC2. BAscially quite a sad transition IMHO.

As for the film itself, I've alwyas had a bit of a soft spot for it. I kind of love Roman films anyway, school projects on the Romans were always great & I guess the tie in with Chistianity has always meant that if there's any film on that period around I'd see it (and now I own most of them).

I know its not a great film, but I just kind of enjoy it, and I quite like what it does include.

OTOH it is a bit of a jumbled mess. I read about it in a book on Nicholas Ray and the description of the wrangles that went on behind the scenes with Bronston, Ray, other directors & writers made me very unsurprised that it comes out as such a jumble in the end.

At the same time I'd love to see it on a big screen...

Matt
04-24-03 01:32 PM
Peter T Chattaway MattPage wrote:
: I read about it in a book on Nicholas Ray and the
: description of the wrangles that went on behind the scenes
: with Bronston, Ray, other directors & writers made me very
: unsurprised that it comes out as such a jumble in the end.

Hmmm, name of the book?
04-24-03 01:44 PM
MattPage Nicholas Ray: An American Journey
Bernard Eisenschitz


or try
http://www.amazon.co.uk/exec/obidos/ASIN/0571178308/qid=1051206103/sr=1-9/ref=sr_1_2_9/026-0826664-7751654

where its much more reasonably priced

Matt
04-29-03 12:08 PM
MattPage Peter,

Thought about this thread when watching "The Godfather " at the weekend cos it occured to me that just as Jeffrey Hunter isn't on the screen much for a story about His life, Marlon Brando is in relatively few scenes in The Godfather.

Don't know why I said that but y'know.

Matt
04-29-03 12:20 PM
Peter T Chattaway MattPage wrote:
: . . . just as Jeffrey Hunter isn't on the screen much for
: a story about His life, Marlon Brando is in relatively
: few scenes in The Godfather.

That's an interesting point, though I think it's more excusable in The Godfather's case than in the case of King of Kings. For one thing, The Godfather is based on a novel of that name, and in the novel, there is a major section which fills in Vito Corleone's back-story -- basically, all the stuff that we see in the Robert De Niro scenes in Part II. But more importantly, The Godfather is not just about Brando, but about how Pacino becomes the NEW "godfather". It's about the title, or the position it represents, more than the particular individuals who bear that title or fill that position.

The first two Godfather films are also fundamentally stories about fathers and their sons -- and this is one of a number of reasons why Part III, which is pretty much exclusively about Pacino's character, just doesn't belong in the series.

[Edited by Peter T Chattaway]