Author: Breeze Richardson
My workshop this week has been a really nice experience, facilitated by Gareth Higgins (author of How Movies Helped Save My Soul: Finding Spiritual Fingerprints in Culturally Significant Films) and Warren Cooper (owner of Music Media Ministry). Titled, “How Does Pop Culture Reinforce Conflict or Encourage Healing”our time together focused on Walter Wink’s Myth of Redemptive Violence and how that false truth – that order comes from chaos – has been the key belief of all human cultures. …and how this has played out in pop culture, especially film.
I think my main take away was a new appreciation for the idea that the context in which you see something affects how you perceive it. So if you look for a message of peace, or reconciliation, or hope, or integrity… you might just find it.
Here are 7 films Gareth recommended, all which challenge this notion that violence can be a cleansing experience:
– Hero (Ying Xiong) (2002)
– The Full Monty (1997)
– The Matrix Revolutions (2003)
– Munich (2005)
– Protagonist (2007)
– ScaredScared (2004)
– Gran Torino (2008 )
Can you add to the list? Or Comment on any of these you’ve seen (or see them so you can comment!), and share your thoughts on what take-away message you found?
I’ve long been interested in the intersection of cinema and peace, but I’ve never found a satisfactory way to think or write about it. Why?
For many (most?) of us, the experience of cinema is grounded in the pleasures of the spectacle. We are trained to read the codes of dominant genres– the Western, the gangster film, war films, even domestic melodramas– all of which are fundamentally articulated through a logic of violence… an erotics of violence. Godard once said that to make a movie, “all you need is a girl and a gun.” Pauline Kael called one of her collections “Kiss Kiss, Bang Bang.”
Which suggests a hard lesson: the violence that dominates our screens is central to the stories our culture recognizes as viable, intelligible, recognizable AS narrative. It may be that simply offering alternative stories, stories that document the experience of renouncing violence, will have only a limited effect. While it’s true that such alternatives can inspire and enlighten, it may also be true that audiences won’t recognize their stories as viable (meaningful) because the domiant ideology conditions how the images are interpreted.
In this regard, I’m thinking of the well known idea (certainly debatable) that it is very difficult, at least in our culture, to make a truly “anti-war” film… because any and all depictions of combat will be recuperated and re-contextualized by the dominant ideology. Probably too absolutist a claim, but worth thinking about. Is it possible to make a film that analyzes and critiques not just “violence,” but the ideological framework that constructs violence as normative?
Finally, a film that comes to mind as worthy treatments of the idea of peace: “Le Fils” by Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne.
One of the most powerful films I’ve ever seen had an extremely important influence in convincing this not-yet-a-Quaker to register formally as a pacifist: “Five Branded Women.” It deals with an occupied society that ostracizes five women for fraternizing with the enemy–in most cases after being coerced. At no point did I feel lectured to; the story moves steadily from one inhumanity to another on both sides of the line and lets the viewer recognize truth where it lies. In its underspoken way, the movie portrays dirt as dirt. If everyone could see it through my eyes, we would have more registered pacifists.
The entire story consists of events to be morally dissected. I’ll cite just the one I found most painful. One of the outcasts is holding a German officer for a prisoner exchange. At one point she is distracted and they both realize he could have picked up her rifle and effected his escape. Instead, he assists her in completing her task (delivering a baby) and then walks quietly away, knowing his army is not keeping prisoners. She picks up the rifle and, after pleading with him to return, shoots him in the back. I don’t think I’ve ever seen life and death more vividly personified around the question “is it laudable patriotism to shoot an unarmed, humane and decent German officer in the back?”
Long before the current war, I decided I would never do that. The movie had a great deal to do with that recognition. I found it even stronger than Yul Brynner’s “The Journey” at the end of which the decent German is killed with great jubilation by the “freedom fighters.” (This German is essentially in tears as I write this, nearly five decades later.)