the Great event of this season’s film, Silence chronicles the odyssey the tragedy of the jesuit fathers the Portuguese in Japan century XVII. For Scorsese, is the prolongation of a reflection of the radical on the relations between the human and the sacred.
it is Not everyday that a film manages to escape the routines installed in the market, whether they are promotional in nature are induced by the fuss in the media. Silence, Martin Scorsese is one of those movies (a debut in the next Thursday, day 19): an object is persistent and obsessive, oblivious to trends, fashions or styles are dictated by factors external to his own thought – there will, after all, their amazing universal appeal.
There, in Silence, a dimension that is genuinely Portuguese who could not stop touching us. Inspired by the novel of the same name of the japanese Shusaku Endo, released in 1966 (edited between nodes by Dom Quixote), the film focuses on the odyssey of two jesuit priests, Portuguese. Sent to Japan in the second half of the SEVENTEENTH century, Sebastião Rodrigues (Andrew Garfield) and Francisco Garupe (Adam Driver) have a mission to discover the whereabouts of Christopher Ferreira (Liam Neeson), who, after being tortured, you have denied your faith. This apostasy – accomplished by stepping on a fumie (image of Jesus Christ or a figure sanctified) – involves a radical challenge to the Church: how to spread his doctrine in the territory of asia? More than that, we are faced with a question subtly political: how to deal with the peculiar system of powers and beliefs of japanese society?
For Scorsese, the adaptation of the book of Endo has never been a trivial task of “reconstituting” historical, much less the chance of making a blockbuster inhabited by heroes or super-heroes. His relationship with the novel was the same, lived as a saga technology: the turning point, the inherent reflection on the ways of the catholic faith. In such a way that the idea of filming Silence accompanied him since 1989, when he discovered the novel, interestingly in full Japan (where it was to interpret the character of Vincent van Gogh in one of the episodes of the movie Dreams, by Akira Kurosawa).
The shooting came to be scheduled for 2009, with the names of Daniel Day-Lewis, Benicio Del Toro and Gael Garcia Bernal lead the cast. Certain, it is that Scorsese chose to achieve Shutter Island (2010) and The Invention of Hugo (2011), thereby opening up a conflict with the Italian producers of Cecchi Gori Pictures, resolved in the courts at the beginning of 2014 (through an agreement whose terms were never disclosed). Shortly after, was decisive in the inclusion of Irwin Winkler in the production team, he already had been linked to several titles of Scorsese, including Raging Bull (1980), and All Good Men (1990). The essential filming would take place between January and may of 2015 in Taiwan.
“Why me?”
Silence comes close to what, from now on, we may designate as the “trilogy of religious” of the author, The Last Temptation of Christ (1988) and Kundun (1997) the first two moments. What binds them is the recognition of a tragic and poignant disproportion symbolic. Such as the priests of the Silence, Jesus and the Dalai Lama, figures, nuclear of these two films, experience the vertigo of being summoned for a mission, is itself the sacred – the assumption of a truth that transcends the data of ordinary existence – that they raise a radical doubt: they will be able to meet the designs of the deity that they serve?
There is another way of saying this: the work of the bearers of the words of the faith cannot stop dealing with the common life, and returning to the earth, to the social tensions, the upheavals of the policy. Or still: the protagonists of the divine mission you will have to recognize the limits inherent in the human condition. A bit like the Jesus of The Last Temptation of Christ, which at some point turns to the sky proclaiming an inevitable anguish: “Why me?”
Needless to say that Scorsese does not lose sight of the paradox of formal and philosophical as well if you install: on the one hand, the expansion of the faith refers always, by definition, for any “thing” that is beyond the visible; on the other hand, the cinema is the art of “primitive” that aims to confront the unseen, imagining it, or better, by reverting to the world of images. You will need to remember that Georges Méliès, a pioneer of absolute power encantatório of the images, was exuberantly honored in The Invention of Hugo?
Hence the peculiar suspense if you will be installing in the development of Silence. It is true that the faith of the protagonists is to there of images (fumie) that illustrate your belief. But it is not less true that what the japanese authorities they require involves a denial of the symbolic value of these images (literally espezinhadas). More than this: they are going to have to choose between this act of defilement of the image and the death – the death of their brothers in faith or your own death.
Celebrate the body
In the cinematographic universe of Scorsese, the vanishing point of all this is always so intensely physical, the body. You will need to also remember that a movie like Raging Bull if developed as an epic, intimate in that the boxer Jake LaMotta is defined as someone who leads a religious celebration of your own body?
Precisely, in Silence, the question of the body contaminates all of the elements of the mise en scène. From the outset, because the gesture that confirms the apostasy (stepping on the fumie) implies the violentação of a desire that challenges the values inherent to the body language. Then, because the various elements of the narrative are doing it to feel the violence of the voltage that is established between the bodies in the west and the organization of the spaces of japanese. It should be noted, in this respect, the fundamental importance of the direction photo of Rodrigo Prieto and assembly of Thelma Schoon-maker – in the first case, treating the space, even in your seats more bright, like a maze of lights and shadows that repels those who arrive from abroad; in the second, creating rhythms and connections, continuities and discontinuities that express the solitude of the look of the jesuit fathers in the face of a reality that ignores their values and codes.
In the limit, the work of Scorsese chooses also a space of expression of fascinating ambiguity. Thus, even through their singularities narratives, we encounter in Silence with the memory symbolic of the great superproduções bible that marked, in particular, the years 1950/60 Hollywood (Scorsese was 13 years old when, in 1956, he made his debut in the United States the iconic The Ten Commandments, Cecil B. DeMille). At the same time, in his geometric construction of space and time management, this film is also an heir of sophistication of the master japanese Kenji Mizoguchi (1898-1956), author of the legendary Tales of the Moon Wave (1953).
Perhaps that the cinema is “only” an art of questioning our ways of seeing and hearing, to observe the world around us, by listing your evidence as far as their masks. Here is a movie that leads this art, the supreme challenge of facing the silence with which God covers the activities of humans.
Believers or unbelievers, with Scorsese we understand that through this challenge we can perceive the possibility of the sacred.
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