Little Criminals

If the name "Bulger" rings a bell to Americans, it's Whitey Bulger, the notorious Boston crime boss played by Jack Nicholson in Martin Scorsese's overrated film The Departed. To Brits, however, the name Bulger more likely conjures up a 2-year-old boy who was the victim of one of the most terrible crimes ever committed. On Feb 12, 1993, little James was with his mother in a busy shopping center in Bootle, near Liverpool. His mother lost sight of him for only a moment and he was gone. Two 10-year-old boys, John Venables and Robert Thompson, took him to an isolated spot and beat him to death, using bricks and an iron bar. They then placed his body on railroad tracks and left the area. A short time later a train cut his body in half, but forensics proved the train hadn't been the cause of his lethal injuries. During the search for the boy, CCTV footage revealed one of the boys leading James away by the hand through the shopping center. It was the last time James was seen alive.

The boys were arrested and charged with murder. The trial was conducted - just after the boys turned 11 - under unprecedented scrutiny for the trial of underage defendants. Angry crowds gathered and tried to attack the police van carrying the children to court. But Britain's legal system could do nothing to the two boys except sentence them to juvenile detention until they turned 18. In 2000, under the strictest security, Venables and Thompson were given new identities and returned to society under lifelong parole.

The reason why all these terrible details are being dredged up again is because of a film called Detainment made by Vincent Lambe that uses court documents to re-create the trial of Venables and Thompson. It's been nominated for an Academy Award for Best Live Action Short Film, which Denise Bulger (now Fergus) is denouncing in the press as "disgusting." Critics of the film are also wondering about the necessity of going over the same awful ground again when, they say, it tells us nothing new.

I brought up the subject eight years ago in a post I called Juvenile Offenders in which I wrote: 'In law, the "age of majority" separates children from adults and is usually (and arbitrarily) the age of 18 (in Japan it's 20). But under criminal law, such a standard is not consistently observed or enforced. In the U.S., individual states can decide, depending on the severity of the crime committed, whether an offender can be tried as a "juvenile" under the Juvenile Justice System, or as an "adult"'.

It's quite surprising that AMPAS, the American Academy of Motion Picture Arts & Sciences should single out this particular short film for praise, since the treatment of the boys would certainly have been radically different in the States. They would most likely have been charged as "adults" for their crime, kept in juvenile detention until the age of 18, at which time they would've been transferred to a federal prison for the rest of their lives. That would probably be the only sentence that would satisfy Americans, some of whom would maybe even have called for the death penalty when the offenders turned 18. What would be the use, they would probably have argued, to incarcerate them (assuming there was no possibility of parole) for perhaps 50 or 60 years?

But the British have a different understanding of these matters, based on a broader - and much longer - experience of a civilized society. The boys' release was made after it was determined they were no longer a threat to society. Despite the fact that, since his release, Jon Venables has been jailed twice for violation of his parole due to child pornography in his possession, the system has been shown to have worked. The new film, however, has renewed the old "punishment versus rehabilitation" criminal justice argument. In two Guardian op-eds I've read (in the British press the Guardian has always been a progressive bastion), the issue is examined in detail. In one article, Gaby Hinsliff wrote about the changing nature of crimes committed by minors: "Children as young as nine have been found carrying knives. Gangs organising so-called 'county lines' operations, running drugs from the inner city deep out into rural towns, have been known to recruit from primary schools."(1) Such information is meant, I suppose, to educate those people who argue that no child should ever be in a prison cell.

Another article, published after Jon Venables was arrested a second time for possession of child pornography, pondered that

"Liberals like to believe in the perfection of the newborn
human as much as Christians do. It’s one of the irritations
of humanism. For them, environment is all. Condemners,
however, tend to be big on moral responsibility. This guy
had a much worse childhood than that guy, they’ll say, and
he did OK. They’re Old Testament. They love the idea of evil
and wickedness, of full human choice and the full human
choice of darkness. Even the word dyslexia, for them, is like
a red rag to a bull."

In my post from 2011, I wrote about a fiction film called Boy A (in their trial, Venables and Thompson were referred to as Boy A and Boy B), that sensitively examined the release of a boy from juvenile detention for a crime similar to the Bulger murder. The boy (played beautifully by Andrew Garfield) was provided with a new identity and a job, but whatever chances be may have had of leading a purposeful life were destroyed by elements of society (the media) that was determined to expose his true identity.

"My initial reaction to seeing the film, after my surprise
that it was made at all, was that such an uninsistent,
scrupulously neutral film could never have been made
in the U.S. - for one thing, since Americans are not nearly
as convinced of the rock-bottom decency of human beings,
they would never assume that anyone who committed a
crime such as the one committed by the two boys in the
film, could be redeemable in a million years. Or that a
minor should be protected by certain rights that make
him immune to prosecution as an adult no matter what
the crime was. Revenge is never very far from an
American's understanding of justice. So when a heinous
crime is committed, someone, no matter if they're children
or mentally incompetent, has to pay."

But something else is going on with the film Detainment that is downright infuriating - far more infuriating than that Vincent Lambe failed to "consult" James Bulger's parents. As Fintan O'Toole has just pointed out in The Irish Times, a petitioning campaign is ongoing at the change.org website demanding that the Oscar nomination be withdrawn and that the British Prime Minister apply pressure (whatever form that might be in) on the Academy, whilst Lambe is being demonized in the British press. This is especially odd because Detainment is an Irish film.

But O'Toole has come to the film's defense, both as an esthetically satisfying achievement and as a powerful moral statement:

"More than 2,000 years ago, the Roman dramatist
Terence, who as a former slave knew exactly what
it is like to be dehumanised, wrote: “I am human
and I consider that nothing human is alien to me.”
It is easy enough to say but very hard to feel. Much
that is human does feel alien – indeed, should and
must feel alien. Humans can do such terrible things
that we find ourselves wishing that there were
another species altogether lurking alongside our
own one. We reach for words that distance us
biologically from this evil genus: beasts, animals,
monsters. And we are both right and wrong to do
this. It is a necessary but falsely comforting fiction
and from time to time we have to be reminded
that this fiction is not real, that the monsters are
all too human.

"The real disturbance of Detainment is that once
you put Venables and Thompson on screen, played
by kids around the same age they were when they
murdered Jamie, you do something genuinely
terrifying: you humanise them. The film is not
sympathetic towards them. It does not excuse them.
It does not sentimentalise them. It merely shows
them: two children, one frightened and weepy,
one defiant and cold. But it shows them in the
flesh precisely as children – not beasts but little
humans.

And we are forced to ask: is this humanity alien to
me? I wish it were and I completely understand why
anyone would want to say that these creatures are
not us. But we know the truth that humans get
damaged early and that damaged humans are
dangerous humans. Lambe’s film is restrained,
serious and to me profoundly moral. He has done
something and it’s true."(3)

Whether the film Detainment wins an Oscar or not, I wonder how people in the country I now live in - the Philippines - would react to the story it retells. Legislation in this country has been proposed that would lower the age of criminal liability to 9. As barbaric as that may sound, it is simply the latest step by an old and ailing president in his murderous war on drugs that has caught the attention of the International Criminal Court. As I try to point out to Filipinos, a great majority of whom approve of the president's tactics, I have to contend with two views of their president - the local one that looks, at best, somewhat bewildered at his questionable use of power, hopeful of a positive outcome, and the view of the international press that is resoundingly disapproving of his avowed contempt for his country's own constitution as well as standards of legality and jurisprudence. Since it has become obvious to him that he can no longer prosecute his war on drugs with impunity, by "slaughtering" every drug offender, he is resorting to legal means, further crowding an already grossly overcrowded and overburdened justice system. But perhaps Filipinos believe that they are exceptional and that standards of civilized society don't apply here. Given their string of presidents in the past 50 years, two of which had to be driven from office through People Power uprisings, I honestly can't blame them.


(1) "Did we really need a film about the James Bulger murder?" by Gaby Hinsliff, The Guardian, 25 Jan 2019.
(2) "Society did right by James Bulger's killers" by Deborah Orr, The Guardian, 25 Nov 2017.
(3) "Jamie Bulger film a serious and moral piece of work" by Fintan O'Toole, The Irish Times, February 5, 2019.

Trespassing Bergman

In the documentary Marcello Mastroianni: I Remember (1997), the great Italian actor describes how, in the 1960s, busloads of foreign tourists would stop outside the house of Federico Fellini in Rome to maybe catch a glimpse of the great filmmaker. Fellini was as much a part of their Roman itinerary as the Colosseum, the Spanish Steps, and the Trevi Fountain. Fellini's life was a part of the show.

But Ingmar Bergman's life was nobody's business. Once he had become world famous, he sought to protect his privacy from goofball fans who trekked all the way to his home on the remote island of Fårö to catch a glimpse of him. In 2013, five years after Bergman's death, a documentary was released called Trespassing Bergman. The title of this curiously mocking documentary comes from the garrisoned house on Fårö (off Götland, if that is any help) to which some of the people in the film - all filmmakers - come to visit, where Bergman lived and worked (on and off) for forty years. To any true cinephile who ever held the work of Ingmar Bergman in high esteem (and I don't believe it's possible to be one and to not do the other), the film lurches from touching reverence to effrontery and back again.

There is a quite bizarre fetishism at work here, almost as if Bergman's corpse was in the room while some of the people invited inside were poking around his inner sanctum (his study, his movie-viewing room), rifling through his books and collection of videos. Daniel Espinosa confesses that he feels like he is "trespassing" in Bergman's home, and Claire Denis becomes strangely spooked and has to leave the house. But a number of them had clearly shown up to bury Bergman rather than praise him. And what a very odd bunch of people they assembled to trespass on Bergman! Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu, Michael Haneke, John Landis, Lars von Trier, Tomas Alfredson, Daniel Espinosa, Claire Denis, Wes Craven, Ang Lee, Thomas Vinterberg, Isabella Rossellini, Harriet Andersson, Zhang Yimou, Woody Allen, Laura Dern, Francis Ford Coppola, Takeshi Kitano, Holly Hunter, Wes Anderson, Robert De Niro, Martin Scorsese, Ridley Scott, Pernilla August, Alexander Payne - all of them have something to say about Bergman's films, sometimes illuminating, sometimes not.

Ask your average movie fan today to name a "great" director and you might get answers like Steven Spielberg, James Cameron, or Ridley Scott. Further down the scale you might get J. J. Abrams, James Gunn, or Matthew Vaughn. Ask them to name a great foreign director and you would probably get the name of one of the many foreign directors who, early in their careers, defected to Hollywood. Like Alejandro G. Iñárritu, Denis Villeneuve, or Alfonso Cuarón.

Well, none of these "great" directors comes even close to my standard of greatness - a standard established by Ingmar Bergman and a handful of other filmmakers. I simply can't use the word in connection with them without putting it between quotation marks. Some of them have made good films. Michael Haneke, Claire Denis, Ang Lee, Zhang Yimou. And I got the feeling that the makers of Trespassing Bergman at least sensed this as well. At one point, John Landis calls The Seventh Seal, the film that made Bergman almost a household word, a "joke" and Alexander Payne claims that it "doesn't hold up" and its once "profound" qualities are now "laughable." One of the problems that The Seventh Seal presents to the viewer is its solidity and concreteness. It isn't in the least abstract, which was Bergman's point. He wanted to show how, in the Middle Ages, things like death and hell weren't just concepts but extremely real, and he used medieval church paintings that represented death and the devil almost as everyday, familiar objects, as his jumping off point. Just because the film has been parodied so much doesn't diminish its power. People can parody the pared-down writing style of Ernest Hemingway without diminishing the greatness of The Sun Also Rises.

The worst offender by far is Lars von Trier, the Danish imbecile who appears to lack the ability to control the puerilities coming out of his mouth. After showing off an obscene figurine on his desk, he asserts that, because Bergman supposedly claimed to be in a constant state of sexual arousal, even into old age, he must have been masturbating nonstop. Coming from someone who has by now made several quite ineffective hardcore pornographic films, Trier's remarks are merely asinine.

Martin Scorsese speaks about his first encounters with Bergman's early films, especially Summer With Monika, but then points out that, for a Roman Catholic like him, Bergman was on the "condemned list." And Robert de Niro appears briefly to inform us that, because he was too busy to watch the Bergman films with which the filmmakers provided him, he wasn't able to comment on them. Wes Anderson, whose Paris home is shown off to no purpose, makes some remarks about the lack of "comedians" among Bergman's actors. Anderson is becoming somewhat legendary for producing the longest string of totally pointless films on record. He should be in the Guinness book by now.

But before we're halfway through the film, the focus shifts abruptly from Bergman's work to Bergman's women. One of the things that the film points out is how Bergman was attacked by a new generation of Swedish filmmakers and critics and how Bergman responded to them in The Silence and Persona, radical departures from conventional narrative films. Bergman could have easily ignored the new generation and relax in his renown, without making another film to stand alongside Smiles of a Summer Night and The Seventh Seal. The fact that he continued to make films that challenged viewers, like Winter Light and A Passion attests to his stature as an artist.

The 1970s were by far the most turbulent and difficult years for Bergman. He gave up asking difficult questions about God and death and focused instead on marriage and family. He had to flee charges of tax evasion in Sweden and work in Germany. I think his work during this period began to parody itself. When Woody Allen, who has always revered Bergman, made Interiors, which was released almost simultaneously with Bergman's Autumn Sonata, Vernon Young suggested that Bergman was copying or even parodying the style of Allen's film, rather than vice-versa. Isabella Rossellini makes the pertinent point that Bergman's portrayal of a successful woman ( Ingrid Bergman is a concert pianist in Autumn Sonata) who neglects her children and her family obligations is quite sexist, not to mention outdated.

Finally arriving at Fanny and Alexander, which was the most expensive film ever made in Sweden, earning the Swedish Film Institute some criticism for spending its entire budget for the year on one film, some actresses mention their nervousness working with Bergman, but Lars von Trier expresses his - justified, I think - outrage about how "blasphemous" Fanny and Alexander is because it is little more than a travesty of his life's work.


The film returns repeatedly to shots of Fårö, its stark landscape and stony beaches, its occluded horizons. You get a sense of how much it might have inspired Bergman, looking out on that denuded island, blasted by Baltic winds. It doesn't seem lonely so much as it might be populated by ghosts. There is a starkness that is beautiful, even lyrical, that only someone like Bergman would notice. After covering so much ground, the film closes with a touching moment when, in still photographs, a very old Bergman embraces Ang Lee. It offers us a kind of forgiveness for the trespassing we have all committed by watching this exasperatingly uneven documentary.

Hidden Christians

The making of Martin Scorsese's film Silence was, in various ways, an act of faith. Its first act of faith was relying on the film's audience to know the history of the Jesuits in Japan. The Jesuit priest Francis Xavier first arrived in Japan in the year 1549 when Japan was a disorganized collection of clans at war with one another. His mission was successful far beyond his wildest expectations, and succeeding missions to Japan resulted in the conversion of thousands of Japanese people to Christianity and establishing churches. But the many "daimyos" - or fiefdoms - in Japan were being consolidated into a single centralized government which regarded the Jesuits and the Christian religion as a threat to its power. By 1614, when there were an estimated 300,000 Christians in Japan (out of a total population of twenty million) along with Christian colleges, seminaries, hospitals and a growing local clergy, Tokugawa Ieyasu ordered the immediate expulsion of the Jesuits and the suppression of the Christian faith. By the time the action of Silence begins in 1643, most of the Christians in Japan had been slaughtered by government authorities or run to ground (the so-called kakure kirishitan or hidden Christians). News of one particular priest in Japan, Padre Ferreira, has caused special concern in Macao, the center of Christian leadership in Asia, and two priests are dispatched to Japan to discover Ferreira's fate.    

By the time I encountered Silence a few weeks ago, I knew how special it should be, since it took more than two decades for Scorsese to finally make it. In all that time, the film took shape in Scorsese's imagination - plenty of time to arrive at a precise shooting script and storyboard. Watching the film certainly gives one a sense of the exactitude of its conception and construction. I knew that Dante Ferretti, who designed the sets and costumes for the film, was brought on board to Scorsese's plans quite early. As it turned out, he was prevented from realizing his project until two years ago. I think it is a formidable achievement, but one fraught with problems that arise from its conception as a statement of Scorsese's own Christian faith.

Shusaku Endo's novel Chinmoku (Silence), published in 1966 and published in English translation in 1969, is a carefully-wrought and moving memorial to the people who were converted in the 16th & 17th-centuries by waves of Portuguese Jesuits. Losing ground in Europe to Martin Luther's Protestant faith, the Jesuits expanded the Catholic Church's reach to North and South America and Asia. The results of this attempted expansion, as Silence but also the Roland Joffé film The Mission (set in Portuguese South America) dramatically show, were a disaster for the native populations. Both novels/films are tacitly critical of the Jesuits' zealotry, inflicting a foreign religious dogma on people living, albeit precariously, under dogmas of their own. But Endo's novel has a broader reach: Christianity in Japan survived two centuries of suppression and persecution.

There are two accounts of how Scorsese was introduced to Endo's novel, but he must have known that it had already made its way to a film adaptation in 1971 by Masahiro Shinoda. Whatever Endo's intentions in writing the novel were, an important qualification is the fact that he was a Catholic. Some critics (without a trace of irony) called him the Japanese Graham Greene. Shinoda, a non-Catholic, was one of the best filmmakers of the Japanese New Wave. Writing his script with Endo's collaboration, Shinoda evidently approached the novel as a work of historical literature rather than as a work of religious art. This would account for the closing scene (in stark contrast to Scorsese's), in which Padre Rodrigues, now living as a Japanese named Okada San'emon, forces himself on his Japanese wife as Ferreira (now Lord Sawano) peeps in on him. Endo reportedly hated Shinoda's ending. All Endo gives us of Rodrigues's fate is from a fictional contemporary Japanese diarist who describes how Rodrigues lives out his final days in Nagasaki. Scorsese follows this account in his film's last scene, but includes what is known as an "auteur's touch" by showing us Rodrigues's body as it is being cremated with a tiny crucifix enclosed in his hands. Some critics even called it a "Rosebud moment." No one bothered to ask Scorsese how the crucifix got there.

Looked at objectively as films, the two versions of Silence both suffer from the sheer lack of spectacle. In fact, the action of the story, if it can be called action at all, is restricted to confined spaces, to huts and prison cells. It makes one wonder what could possibly have attracted either Scorsese or Shinoda to adapting the novel in the first place. It seems strange to me, given the similarities between the two films (the pacing of each scene and the framing of individual shots, even the buzzing of the cicadas) and the qualities to be found in Shinoda's film, why Scorsese wanted so badly to cover the same ground again.

Shinoda's film, photographed by Kazuo Miyagawa, famed cinematographer of such classic films as Rashomon and Ugetsu, is handicapped by its use of two unknown foreign actors, David Lampson and Don Kenny - chosen, I suppose, because of their command of Japanese. Neither actor is the least bit compelling in their roles, and their style of acting clashes unflatteringly with that of the Japanese actors. This clash in acting styles reaches its climax when Rodrigues is finally confronted by Padre Ferreira, played by none other than Tetsuro Tamba, whose false beard and bushy eyebrows fail to conceal the Japanese actor beneath. Further, the role of Kichijiro, the man who is in a perpetual cycle of informing and begging forgiveness, is played by the Japanese-American actor Mako Iwamatsu, better-known as simply Mako from such American films as The Sand Pebbles and a well-known face on 1960s & 70s American television.

Shinoda's film has, I think, the right tone of remoteness and abstraction, and his use of music composed for the film by Toru Takemitsu further diatances us from the action.  He clearly wasn't trying to bring the world of Endo's characters any closer. And for all the comments about Scorsese's depiction of the tortures inflicted on the faithful, Shinoda includes a quite hair-raising scene of torture in which a Christianized samurai is buried up to his neck and a man rides a horse back and forth over his exposed head while his wife is forced to watch. Only her placing her foot on the holy image (fumi-e) makes the horse and rider stop. But her sacrifice doesn't prevent her husband from being stabbed to death moments later. This same woman, played by Shinoda's wife Shima Iwashita, is given to Rodrigues as his wife after he himself apostatizes.

Two threads run through Silence, intersecting and intertwining: identity and faith - or nationality and religious allegiance. Significantly, at the start of the film, Kichijiro is asked two questions, Are you really Japanese? and Are you really a Christian? At the end of the film, with apostatized Padre Rodrigues adopting a Japanese identity and a Japanese wife, he knows that he is neither Japanese nor Christian.

As much as I dislike end-titles curtly announcing people's subsequent fates, I expected to see them at the end of Scorsese's film. I think it is significant that he excluded an historical note telling us of the astonishing survival of Christianity in Japan. All he gives us is a kind of dedication: "For the Japanese Christians and their pastors Ad Majorem Dei Gloriam." It's the motto of the Jesuits and it means, To the Greater Gloria of God.

In his translator's preface to the English edition of Endo's novel, William Johnston wrote: "in 1865, when Japan was reopened, the crypto-Christians came out from their hiding, asking for the statue of Santa Maria, speaking about Christmas and Lent, recalling the celibacy of the priests. They are still there in  their thousands, in Nagasaki and the offshore islands, clinging tenaciously to a faith that centuries of ruthless vigilance could not stamp out. Some of them are united with the world-wide Church; others are not. In their prayers remain smatterings of the old Portuguese and Latin; they preserve pieces of the soutanes and rosaries and disciplines  that belonged to the fathers whom they loved; they retain their devotion to Santa Maria. And it was while living among them that Shusaku Endo wrote Silence."(1)

I think that Scorsese excluded this information deliberately because he wanted to concentrate our attention on Rodrigues and Ferreira. In so doing, I think that Scorsese has misread Endo's novel, because it isn't about Father Rodrigues or Ferreira and their strange transformations into ordinary Japanese men and their subsequent fates. Nor, indeed, is it the story of Christianity and the remarkable cruelty with which it was inflicted on uneducated and unsuspecting peasants. Silence is the story of the Japanese, and how they managed to cling so tenaciously and steadfastly to their faith in a foreign religion, a foreigner's religion.

The film that Scorsese's Silence reminded me of almost immediately was a half-forgotten film made by the Australian Bruce Beresford in Canada in 1991 called Black Robe. It, too, tells a story of a 17th century Jesuit missionary. Also based on historical accounts of the native Americans' first encounters with Christianity and its disastrous effects on their lives, it, too, ends with a sense of the futility of it all. Father Laforgue has at last arrived in the remote Huron village in the dead of winter only to find the inhabitants are afflicted with smallpox, one of the foreign diseases introduced to the natives along with Christianity. The villagers plead with Father Laforgue to baptize them, hoping perhaps that God will cure the disease. The film closes on the baptismal service and a title informs us of subsequent events:

"Fifteen years later, the Hurons, having accepted Christianity, were routed and killed by their enemies, the Iroquois. The Jesuit mission to the Hurons was abandoned and the Jesuits returned to Quebec."

When Roger Ebert reviewed the film, he concluded: "I will not reveal the conclusion of the film, other than to say that when it was over, I sat there in a state of depressed suspension, wondering if that could possibly be all there was."

Heavens, is that all there is to the story? What uplifting conclusion was he expecting? I wonder which film version of Silence Ebert would've been more gratified by - Shinoda's, in which Padre Rodrigues is last seen "making the beast with two backs" with his Japanese wife, or Scorsese's, in which Rodrigues's dead body is secretly revealed to be clutching a crucifix? 


(1) Silence by Shusaku Endo, William Johnston, translation (New York: Taplinger Publishing Company, 1969).
(2) see https://www.rogerebert.com/reviews/black-robe-1991

Martin's Lists

What is the role of the critic? This is a question that demands an answer today more than ever before. The vast majority of readers, concert-, theater- and movie-goers couldn't care less, since they obviously have no use for criticism. Their likes and dislikes are matters of entirely personal importance. They're never exactly sure why, but they certainly don't want a professional type like a critic explaining to them why they're right or wrong. Since they lead unexamined lives, why should they bother to examine their tastes?

But a few people, including artists, actually pay attention to what critics say, whether they put it into practical application or not. Last week I singled out one artist who thought so much of a critic's remarks about his latest work that he took the time not only to comment on them but to rebut them in a rather passionate essay of his own. Such a reaction from an artist to address his critics personally is always unwise. The reasons are quite straightforward, as I will try to explain.

Everyone should know by now that, aside from being one of the two or three best American filmmakers of the past 50 years, Martin Scorsese is also an avid student of film whose knowledge of the medium rivals that of any film scholar. He has been directly involved in various film restoration projects and is a tireless advocate of film preservation. 

For the past five years Scorsese has been a quite vocal critic of the current state of the motion picture medium, of the manner with which his own films, as well as the films of the past, are being mistreated and trivialized by a critical establishment that only seems to care about blockbusters and box office returns. Scorsese, who turns 75 in November, clearly loves the best that film has to offer, even if his career has had its share of commercial work.

In 2012, Scorsese was asked by the British Film Institute through its venerable film magazine Sight & Sound to participate in a poll by contributing a list of what he considered to be the Top Ten Films Of All Time. Scorsese was among hundreds of film directors to submit a list and the results of the poll were published as an adjunct to another poll compiled from lists submitted by hundreds of contemporary film critics. 

There has been a critics' poll every ten years since 1952 and a directors' poll since 1962. The first poll I became acquainted with was the 1972 poll. The results of the seventh and latest poll were published in 2012. I had my say about the polls in my blog pieces "Sight Unsound" in 2008 and "Poll Position" in 2012. I'm not altogether sure why the poll is conducted once a decade, but the results don't hold out much hope for the future of the medium since, as I've pointed out, the newest film on the list was made in 1968. I can't blame the majority of film critics who submitted their choices for having conservative, "safe" standards, but film art appears to be increasingly a thing of the past.

It's the critics' poll that gets all the publicity, with the directors' poll appearing as a kind of dutiful afterthought, leaving some readers wondering which one is more authoritative. Obviously, the fact that the polls are so different should signify something? For instance, why is La Régle du Jeu ranked the 4th greatest film on the critics' poll but tied for 22nd on the directors' poll? Why is Scorsese's own Taxi Driver ranked #5 on the directors' poll and #31 on the critics' poll? The biggest lapse is Eisenstein's Battleship Potemkin, #11 for the critics, but tied with fifteen other films (including There Will Be Blood, The Shining, and Jaws!) for #75 for the directors (this is especially unforgivable coming from a group of so-called filmmakers). The Directors' Poll is a Tale of the Ties: 7 films are tied for #30, 7 tied for #37, 11 tied for #48, and 16 films tied for #75 as well as #91.  

Since 2012, Martin Scorsese has been in a list-making mood of his own. After publishing the essay, "The Persisting Vision: Reading the Language of Cinema" in The New York Review in 2013, Scorsese published a list of his twelve favorite films on the Miramax website, "The 85 Films You Need to See to Know Anything About Film" in Fastcompany Magazine, and, in response to a request from a film student, "39 Essential Foreign Films."

Though there is some unavoidable overlap in these three lists, they each seem shaped to a quite different purpose. Of the films on Scorsese's "85 films" list, which are, we are told, the "films that most influenced" him, only 13 are foreign films, and they're all directed by either Roberto Rossellini and Luchino Visconti. It's an odd, idiosyncratic list, dominated by B-movie film noir like Gun Crazy and T Men, films by Robert Altman, Vincente Minelli and his contemporary Francis Ford Copolla.  

While the list made it clear that Scorsese was never much influenced by foriegn films (with the exception of Rossellini), he responded to a letter from a young filmmaker named Colin Levy with a list of "39 Essential Foreign Films" that partially compensates for the lacunaes in the 85 Films list. Scorsese's "85 Films" list is a revealing glimpse not just into the origins of his taste in films but how it shaped his choices in subject matter. It is a far better tool for understanding his approach to filmmaking than a critical guide. The same can be said for Sight & Sound's Directors' Poll. It provides us with the background from which contemporary film emerged. It tells us what films inspired a generation of directors, while making us wonder where the new Ozu, the new Welles, or the new Fellini may be hiding.

Some observers, including the directors themselves, believe that the Directors' Poll is more authoritative, since it is an insider's view. But what qualifies Scorsese to be an artist disqualifies him from being an effective critic. In his essay, "The Persisting Vision," Scorsese paints an illuminating picture of the time when he caught the film "disease":

My parents had a good reason for taking me to the movies all the time, because I had been sick with asthma since I was three years old and I apparently couldn’t do any sports, or that’s what they told me. But my mother and father did love the movies. They weren’t in the habit of reading—that didn’t really exist where I came from—and so we connected through the movies.

And I realize now that the warmth of that connection with my family and with the images on the screen gave me something very precious. We were experiencing something fundamental together. We were living through the emotional truths on the screen, often in coded form, which these films from the 1940s and 1950s sometimes expressed in small things: gestures, glances, reactions between the characters, light, shadow. These were things that we normally couldn’t discuss or wouldn’t discuss or even acknowledge in our lives.

And that’s actually part of the wonder. Whenever I hear people dismiss movies as “fantasy” and make a hard distinction between film and life, I think to myself that it’s just a way of avoiding the power of cinema. Of course it’s not life—it’s the invocation of life, it’s in an ongoing dialogue with life.

Frank Capra said, “Film is a disease.” I caught the disease early on. I felt it whenever I walked up to the ticket booth with my mother or my father or my brother.

Whenever I'm asked to provide a film ezine with a list of the top films of the past year, of the decade, of the 21st Century or whatever, I always decline. I'm simply not in the position to have access to the dozens of films worth viewing every year. The best I could manage would be a list of favorites. This is in no way a capitulation - allowing pleasure precedence over principle. 

George Orwell touched on the problem in his essay on Jonathan Swift, "Politics vs. Literature":

If one is capable of intellectual detachment, one can perceive merit in a writer whom one deeply disagrees with, but enjoyment is a different matter. Supposing that there is such a thing as good or bad art, then the goodness or badness must reside in the work of art itself - not independently of the observer, indeed, but independently of the mood of the observer. In one sense, therefore, it cannot be true that a poem is good on Monday and bad on Tuesday. But if one judges the poem by the appreciation it arouses, then it can certainly be true, because appreciation, or enjoyment, is a subjective condition which cannot be commanded.

This is precisely the problem with so much of what passes for criticism today. Many critics - certainly many of those consulted for the Sight & Sound Critics Poll - are closer to what I have called fans - unable to distinguish between what they like and what they know (or perhaps don't know) is good. No one would argue with the notion that every critical judgement starts out as a subjective emotional response. But even subjectivities can sometimes agree. This is how we have managed to arrive at the general consensus that Shakespeare is the greatest poet in English, that Rembrandt is a great painter, and that Schubert is a great composer. These agreements may only be starting points for a critic, but they are the foundation of critical thought - appealing to objective aesthetic standards. 

It's fine for a filmmaker of Scorsese's stature to write about how pleasure is his guide, but it's a disaster for a critic. It's the only way I can account for the steady rise of Hitchock's Vertigo to the #1 slot on the 2012 Sight & Sound poll. Or 2001: A Space Odyssey at #6, or The Searchers at #7.    

Spinoza wrote (italics mine): "Love is the feeling of pleasure accompanied by our knowledge of its cause." Who knew that love and criticism were synonymous? If only the critics who voted for Vertigo in the 2012 poll investigated the cause of the pleasure that the film gave them, they would've realized it was nothing but a boyhood crush and not true love. In one of his last statements on the subject of film criticism, a profession he helped to make respectable in the 1960s, John Simon wrote, "Reviewing has become largely simplistic consumer guidance, with the broader, more speculative view rarely in evidence and decreasingly in demand." 

The Sight & Sound Directors' Poll provides a unique window into what inspires current cinema. Whether they manage to measure up to it or not, the poll represents to directors an ideal cinema. The trend for the Critics' Poll is clearly away from an acceptance of principle - that, far from all of our pleasure-seeking, some films will endure as examples of film art, whether anyone still likes it or not. Who knows but that Citizen Kane, which is, to so many of the younger critics, a very old and complicated movie, may disappear from the precincts of the Top Ten, to be replaced by who knows what aberration?

Suffering in 'Silence'

In keeping with one of American cinema's oldest traditions, Martin Scorsese is responsible for some of the bloodiest films ever made. Unlike the blood spilt in the films of his contemporaries, like Coppola and De Palma, it isn't Kensington Gore - the trademark artificial blood that most closely resembles, in Technicolor, the real thing. In many, if not most, of Scorsese's films, blood is in abundant evidence, flowing stanchlessly from wounds either sustained or inflicted by his protagonists.

For at least the past thirty years, Scorsese has also informed us, through his choice of subject matter, that he is a devout Catholic. He turned Nikos Kazantzakis' guilt-streaked novel, The Last Temptation of Christ, into a vividly re-imagined, intensely personal film. Willem Dafoe as Jesus, Harvey Keitel as Judas, and Harry Dean Stanton as Paul showed off Scorsese's down-to-earth casting choices and his efforts to bring the story home to his viewers. But Scorsese took some hits from the Roman Catholic establishment, including the Church's official banning of the film - which merely demonstrated that they never even bothered to watch it. Throughout a long career that includes much commercial work, work intended to appease producers who would not otherwise let him realize his most personal projects, a few of Scorsese's films have become monuments to his tenacity and to his integrity - ungainly, difficult projects practically guaranteed to lose money.

Scorsese has found it necessary, every decade or so, to scratch an old itch, to give in to his need to concentrate on subjects touching on America's rich culture, either the written (The Age of Innocence) or unwritten (Gangs of New York) or on matters of his Christian faith. His latest film, Silence, is the finished product of a thirty year fixation to realize his vision of 17th-century Japan after the Tokugawa Shogunate outlawed Christianity. In the story movingly told by Shusaku Endo (published in English translation in 1969), only certain individuals - captured Catholic priests - are spared immolation or crucifixion by being offered the choice of apostasy - renouncing their faith through some ritual like stamping on a sacred image of Christ and by abandoning celibacy by marrying a Japanese woman.

In his Times Literary Supplement piece, "Standing Up for Cinema," that I quoted from in my last post, Scorsese singled out two statements made by Adam Mars-Jones, the TLS film critic, in his review of Silence. I have since had a chance to read the review and it's clear to me that Scorsese misinterpreted and misrepresented Mars-Jones remarks.

Scorsese writes: "Near the end of his review, Mr Mars-Jones contends that 'even the most relentless book filters diffusely into the life of the reader, while a film suspends that life for the duration', and that the 'transposition' from novel to film 'can only amount to a distortion'. Mr Mars-Jones’s opinion of my film aside, this strikes me as an extremely limited and limiting view of the cinema as an art form."(1)

I don't know exactly why Scorsese found these remarks objectionable, since they are an accurate assessment of how we experience a novel and a film. Mars-Jones's use of the word "duration" is important, since a film, just like music or theater but unlike literature, exists in time. Once a public screening of a film has begun, it continues inexorably until it is finished. When we read a book, we can stop, bookmark the page, continue with our lives, and return to the book later, starting where we left off. It becomes interwoven, as it were, in the fabric of our lives so that it becomes a part of it. Whenever I think of a great novel that I read many years ago, the characters and the action in the novel seem to be inextricably mixed up with events in my life that occurred while I was reading it. In contrast, we interrupt our lives to watch a film and we give our full attention to whatever is unfolding on the screen. Unless we walk out on the film, we cannot look away without missing something. Almost like a roller-coaster ride, we are committed to seeing a film through to the end once it has begun.

As for calling a film adaptation of a novel a "distortion," I think Scorsese interpreted the word in an exclusively negative sense. Most critics would agree that every translation of a poem or a novel from one language to another is a distortion. "Poetry," wrote Robert Frost, "is that which gets lost in translation." A film translates the novelist's words into images, which is an even more precarious distortion. This doesn't mean that translating a poem or a novel into another language or another medium is necessarily a mistake. Some translations, like Gérard de Nerval's translation of Goethe's "Faust" and Baudelaire's translations of Poe, are prized as great works of literature in themselves.

Many years ago, theater and film critic John Simon came up with a rule of thumb about adapting a work of literature to film (I'm quoting from memory): if it's worth doing, it can't be done; if it can be done, it wasn't worth doing. This seems like a somewhat draconian rule, but the evidence suggests that it actually isn't far from the mark. While there are a handful of quality film adaptations of estimable literary works (I think of something like Josef Heifitz near-miraculous film version of Chekhov's short story "The Lady with the Little Dog"), the vast majority of successful adaptations have been of inferior literary works (Carol Reed made a brilliant film of Conrad's minor second novel, An Outcast of the Islands). But in his "thoughtful" - Scorsese's word - review of the film Silence, Adam Mars-Jones was making another point about the differences between a novel and a film. Restored to their context, his judgement makes perfect sense:

"Even the most relentless book filters diffusely into the life of the reader, while a film suspends that life for its duration. The transposition of a novel like Endo’s Silence into film, however 'faithful', can only amount to a distortion, an exaggeration overall however many elements of the book are represented. In the same way, Jonathan Demme’s film version of Toni Morrison’s Beloved, though full of imagination and craft, was so crushingly sad as to be oppressive beyond the possibility of entertainment. In a book, too, reader and writer collaborate to produce images, while a film director hands them down. It’s not that those images can’t be richly inhabited by an audience, but their predetermined progress in a darkened space imposes mood insistently. Martin Scorsese’s version of Silence can’t fairly be called a failure, more a success in a key close to desolation."(2)

The ultimate point that Mars-Jones was trying to make was specific to Silence, both the novel and the film, and not intended as general statements about film. He was pointing out the way that the novel handled the very dark material and how Scorsese (mis)handled it. According to Mars-Jones, Scorsese's film succeeds in transposing Shusaku Endo's bleak history of the suppression of Christianity in 17th-century Japan, but in doing so it is in its final moments relentlessly, unbearably terrible to watch.

I'm not sure that Endo intended his tale to be edifying, to offer the reader some catharsis, no matter how conditional. It is an historical novel, reminiscent of Graham Greene's great novel The Power and the Glory, about a demoralized "whisky priest" in post-revolutionary Mexico. Roman Catholic Greene was telling a story about spiritual redemption, under circumstances of abject suffering. After the practice of Christianity was outlawed in 17th-century Japan, Catholic priests were smuggled in, despite the risks, because it was concluded that to abandon their Christian converts without any recourse to the sacraments would condemn them, as a consequence of their conversion, to a worse fate than they would've endured had they never been converted at all. By the end of the story, all outward evidence of the Christian religion is eradicated. Converts unwilling to renounce their faith, even after being brutally tortured, are killed. The ones who are left are forced to commit some sacrilege or other to prove their apostasy. The priests' defeat is shown to be complete. For the following three hundred years, isolated pockets of Christian believers survived, concentrated on the southern Japanese island of Kagoshima where, ironically, the second atomic bomb was dropped by the U.S., a predominantly Christian country, on Nagasaki on August 9, 1945.

In his fidelity to Endo's novel, Mars-Jones argues, Scorsese failed to offer the relief, however incremental, that Endo's novel provides from the "desolation" with which the story ends. It is almost as if Scorsese, like another devout Catholic filmmaker - Mel Gibson - was intent on creating his own Passion, a somber and brutal reminder of the man who, so the story goes, sacrificed himself so that our sins would be forgiven. Endo's novel ends with Father Rodrigues, have renounced his faith by putting his foot on an icon of Jesus, given a Japanese name and a wife, searching for some meaning to his defeat:

"I, too, stood on the sacred image. For a moment this foot was on his face. It was the face of the man who has been ever in my thoughts, on the face that was before me on the mountains, in my wanderings, in prison, on the best and most beautiful face of him whom I have always longed to love. Even now that face is looking at me with eyes of pity from the plaque rubbed flat by many feet. 'Trample!' said those compassionate eyes. 'Trample! Your foot suffers in pain; it must suffer like all the feet that have stepped on this plaque. But that pain alone is enough. I understand your pain and your suffering. It is for that reason that I am here.'"(3)

According to Mars-Jones, Scorsese failed to properly estheticize the suffering depicted in Endo's novel - suffering that Endo presented without leaving the reader in a state of distress. Another novelist, Hungarian Imre Kertész, survivor of a Nazi Death Camp, addressed the problem of approaching a relentlessly somber subject:

"I am somebody who survived all of it, somebody who saw the Gorgon's head and still retained enough strength to finish a work that reaches out to people in a language that is humane. The purpose of literature is for people to become educated, to be entertained, so we can't ask them to deal with such gruesome visions. I created a work representing the Holocaust as such, but without this being an ugly literature of horrors."(4)

I can't say for certain if Scorsese actually intended the experience of watching his film to cause discomfort. Quite disingenuously, Mel Gibson defended the unrelenting cruelty he depicted in The Passion of the Christ by insisting he was merely telling the story as St. Matthew presented it in his Gospel. But shouldn't an artist, like Martin Scorsese, find a way to distance the viewer from such brutalities? Isn't that the function of art, to avoid graphic, documentary-like realism in the representation of human suffering, to depict violence without doing violence to the viewer? Given Scorsese's apparent penchant for violence, on the infliction of pain and the spilling of blood, despite the fact that Silence is clearly meant to be taken more seriously, I have my doubts.

(1) Martin Scorsese, "'Silence,'" Letters to the Editor, The Times Literary Supplement, March 15, 2017.
(2) Adam Mars-Jones, "Subtle Absolutisms," The Times Literary Supplement, January 4, 2017.
(3) Shusaku Endo, Silence, William Johnston, translator (New York: Taplinger Publishing Company, 1969).
(4) "The Art of Fiction No. 220," The Paris Review No. 205, Summer 2013, Luisa Zielinski, interviewer.

The Greatest Living American Film Director

I have always thought that, for any fledgling American film director with enough talent and brains, the horizons must seem limitless. On film, the country and its history are virtually unexplored in any imaginative sense, and abstracting from the American experience some semblance of life as it is lived has hardly even been tried, let alone achieved. What few authentic depictions of the American scene that have made it to film are, sadly, almost invariably about criminals. And while there will always be an attraction to the people who break laws and - another American fixation - who get away with it, there is a filmmaker who has chosen to explore the other side. Not just crime, but its consequences, the thankless and too often fruitless pursuit of justice, when it can be found, by people accustomed to seeing justice cheated or perverted.

For more than twenty years a consensus has been building among film critics regarding the position of Martin Scorsese atop the always very short list of great American film directors. But, for me, Scorsese will always be the second best American film director as long as Sidney Lumet is alive and kicking.

After working in television, much of it live, from 1951, Lumet, who turns 85 today, made his feature debut with 12 Angry Men in 1957. It had all of the ingredients of his later work: a controversial subject handled fearlessly, telling people truths they didn't want to hear; powerful acting, this time from a once in a lifetime ensemble cast, and confidence in a less than happy ending. Lumet's theme was the fragility of justice, over prejudice, stereotypes, and all short cuts to the truth about human beings who are poor, underprivileged, and Puerto Rican - the ethnicity of ethics, long before To Kill a Mockingbird made a big deal out of it.

From the beginning he was distinguished as an actors' director. His work, for example, with Sean Connery definitely demonstrated that he was too good to be wasted on James Bond.(1) He proved that Sharon Stone could be a genuine actress when she felt like it in Gloria (1999). And as recently as 2006 he proved that he could make a slab of meat, Vin Diesel, act, in Find Me Guilty. But the films for which Lumet will be remembered are all about crime and punishment: Serpico (1973), Dog Day Afternoon (1975), Prince of the City (1981), The Verdict (1982), and Q & A (1990). The first, third, and last of these films form a kind of trilogy on a favorite theme of Lumet's: policing the police. In all three a young, principled cop struggles against his corrupt fellow cops, in Serpico and Prince of the City, and against one powerful, dirty cop in Q & A.

Lumet never, thank goodness, developed a "style" that he imposed on all of his material. For this he doesn't get high marks from the auteurists. But what makes so much of his work truly distinctive is how it always manages to rise above genre. Even his whodunits are paradigms: Murder on the Orient Express (1974) is easily the best film based on Agatha Christie, even if Peter Ustinov was a better Poirot than Albert Finney. Lumet made the most of Paddy Chayefsky's overblown script for Network (1976). And he even managed to make his film of Equus (1977), Peter Shaffer's preposterous love letter to insanity, as good as it could've been.

Of course, the fate of a commercial film director who is as versatile as Lumet is to occasionally find himself marking time with material that is beneath him. And in a career spanning five decades and nearly fifty films, Lumet might well have balked at certain projects. Fail-Safe (1964) was intended to be an intelligent look at the nightmare of nuclear war, but it was completely overshadowed by Stanley Kubrick's Dr. Strangelove, released earlier the same year and with which it bears an uncanny resemblance. Luckily, Last of the Mobile Hot Shots (1970) has been forgotten, since it was based on one of Tennessee Williams' terrible late plays. I don't suppose anyone short of Rene Clair in his prime could've redeemed The Wiz (1978) from being moribund.

Besides returning to TV for awhile in 2001, Lumet has directed two more feature films, is in production with another, tentatively titled Getting Out, and, as I write this, has another film "in development". I see from his credits at the Internet Movie Database (2) that Martin Scorsese isn't slowing down either. Scorsese's finally winning an Oscar for Best Director for his overrated The Departed (2006) has perhaps given him some kind of vindication. Lumet was nominated four times, but never won. He was given one of those odious "honorary"Oscars in 2005, which is usually a kiss of death (Robert Altman). But Scorsese had better not plan on retiring any time soon. Lumet obviously won't.




(1) In The Hill (1965), The Anderson Tapes (1971), The Offense (1972), Murder on the Orient Express (1974), Family Business (1989)
(2) http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0000217/