Criteria: The Catholic Film Podcast

Watch on YouTube: https://youtu.be/nKZ61DojBQY Krzysztof Kieślowski's DEKALOG (1988) is a series of 10 short films inspired by the Ten Commandments. With this episode we discuss the third film in the series, which deals with the third commandment: "Remember the Sabbath day, to keep it holy."

When a former mistress arrives at his doorstep on Christmas Eve, seeking help to find her missing husband, Janusz must decide whether to remain at home with his wife and children or else to assist his erstwhile lover in her desperate search. What results is a mystery tale that unfolds almost as a Dickensian odyssey, unearthing layers of discovery that force the two to grapple with ghosts of their past.

Filmmaker Nathan Douglas joins the show once more to discuss this thought-provoking film.

Dekalog can be difficult to find. It can be streamed online with a (relatively cheap and surprisingly legal) subscription to https://easterneuropeanmovies.com — the best viewing experience, however, will be the recent restored edition on Blu-Ray/DVD from Criterion https://www.criterion.com/films/28661-dekalog Older editions on Blu-Ray and DVD are available for considerably cheaper on Amazon and elsewhere, and you may have luck borrowing Dekalog from your local library. Next up on Criteria: F.W. Murnau’s Dracula adaptation Nosferatu (1922), found easily on YouTube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e7p3ct5hcks We are also discussing Werner Herzog’s 1979 adaptation, Nosferatu the Vampyre, which was shot both in German and in English. The German version is on Criterion Channel and the English version is on YouTube with ads: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WOTLurSgkYU Links

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Music is The Duskwhales, “Take It Back”, used with permission. https://theduskwhales.bandcamp.com/

Watch on YouTube: https://youtu.be/uYdtpAoLjo8

This film makes us confront on a visceral level the horror of taking a human life, even the life of someone we might find despicable. It is the fifth installment of Dekalog, the famous Polish TV series inspired by the Ten Commandments.

Dekalog: Five, which was expanded into the feature-length A Short Film About Killing, coincided with an intense debate over capital punishment in Poland, and in the year of its release (1988) the nation finally suspended use of the death penalty.

Catholic film scholar Maria Elena de las Carreras often uses Dekalog: Five to teach her students at Cal State Northridge about the value of life. She brings a lively energy to the discussion along with a deep knowledge of Polish cinema and, in general, the work of filmmakers living in totalitarian regimes.

Thomas tracked Maria Elena down because of an article on Kieslowski she wrote for Crisis magazine twenty years ago—which, she tells us, she sent to Pope John Paul II, and received a letter from his secretary saying it had been read “with great interest”.

Next in our discussion of the Vatican film list: William Wyler’s epic Ben-Hur (1959), starring Charlton Heston.

Links

Watch A Short Film About Killing https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rKqmukHCGUQ

Maria Elena de las Carreras article on Kieslowski https://www.crisismagazine.com/2000/filming-the-10-commandments-kieslowski-as-a-catholic-director

Her writings on film at Crisis Magazine https://www.crisismagazine.com/author/kuntz

More writings https://csun.academia.edu/MariaElenadelasCarreras

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Music is The Duskwhales, “Take It Back”, used with permission. https://theduskwhales.bandcamp.com/

James improvises an impassioned dramatic monologue about the inadequacies of Joel Coen's new adaptation of The Tragedy of Macbeth, starring Denzel Washington and Frances McDormand. Orson Welles's 1948 version, he argues, is aesthetically similar but far superior. Thomas sits and listens. Watch the Orson Welles Macbeth: https://archive.org/details/macbeth.-1948.-orson.-welles.-103-min

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

0:00 The prosecution

39:15 The defense

With the release of his new film Asteroid City and with memes imitating his cinematic style going viral on social media, Wes Anderson is having a real moment in the zeitgeist almost thirty years into his career.

In Asteroid City , Anderson drives further into the immediately identifiable and somewhat polarizing style he has cultivated for the past decade, characterized by meticulous framing, camera moves and blocking, a certain color palette, and deadpan writing and acting. One is always aware of the director's hand tightly controlling a cute, harmonious little world of his own creation.

The Criteria hosts look at Anderson's career and try to figure out what he's trying to achieve by making his movies so aggressively, well, Anderson-y. James Majewski calls it downright decadent and pretentious, style for its own sake to the point of self-parody. Thomas Mirus is concerned that the increasingly airless and emotionally closed-down aesthetic may be a reflection of Anderson's belief that life has no discernible meaning, and so there is nothing much to do other than create aesthetic illusions (an idea explicitly alluded to in more than one of his films). Nathan Douglas defends Anderson's style as sincere, in service to something more than shallow visual pleasure.

But we all agree on one thing: Wes Anderson is in despair.

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Today it's taken for granted that we as Christians are called to "engage the culture" in order to evangelize. Often "engaging the culture" means paying an inordinate amount of attention to popular commercial entertainment in order to show unbelievers how hip we are, straining to find a "Christ-figure" in every comic book movie, and making worship music as repetitive, melodically banal, and emotionalistic as possible. Past a certain point, "cultural engagement" begins to seem like a noble-sounding excuse to enjoy mediocrity - and Christians, unfortunately, are as much in love with mediocre entertainment as anyone else.

The novel doctrine of "cultural engagement" is just one subject covered in Joshua Gibbs's challenging and entertaining new book, Love What Lasts: How to Save Your Soul from Mediocrity. Joshua joins Thomas Mirus for a wide-ranging conversation about how we choose to spend our free time and why it matters.

Topics include:

• The dangers of artistic mediocrity
• The importance of boredom
• Why streaming has been terrible for music
• The different kinds of Christian "cultural engagers"
• Uncommon and common good things and how both are threatened by the mediocre
• How the "special" apes the holy
• The meme-ification of art

Links

Gibbs, Love What Lasts: How to Save Your Soul from Mediocrity https://circeinstitute.org/product/love-what-lasts/

Gibbs, "Film As a Metaphysical Coup" https://circeinstitute.org/blog/film-metaphysical-coup/

Thomas's favorite episode of Gibbs's podcast, Proverbial https://shows.acast.com/proverbial/episodes/how-to-buy-a-bottle-of-wine

www.GibbsClassical.com

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