Category: Film

Favorite Films of 2023, Part 2

Victoria Emily Jones2 Comments

Read part 1 here.

11. Oppenheimer, dir. Christopher Nolan. Based on the biography American Prometheus by Karl Bird and Martin J. Sherwin, Oppenheimer chronicles the role of nuclear physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer (Cillian Murphy) in developing the world’s first atomic bomb. Recruited by the US Army in 1942, Oppenheimer heads up the new Manhattan Project lab in Los Alamos, New Mexico, assembling a team of leading scientists. While some decline the invitation or, over the next few years, drop off the project for ethical reasons, Oppenheimer persists with the self-justification that if the US didn’t make the bomb, Germany would. The film grapples with moral responsibility and guilt when it comes to applying advanced scientific knowledge toward destructive ends.

12. The Holdovers, dir. Alexander Payne. It’s December 1970, and Angus Tully (Dominic Sessa) is looking forward to getting away from his New England boarding school for Christmas break, especially from his ornery classical studies teacher Paul Hunham (Paul Giamatti). But when his mom calls to say she and her new husband need some alone time, Angus is left under the begrudging care of Mr. Hunham for the holidays. Mary Lamb (Da’Vine Joy Randolph), the school cook whose son died earlier that year in Vietnam, also stays on campus to make meals. We learn about these three unlikely companions as they learn about one another and confront their griefs, anger, and disappointment. The Holdovers is a warm and charming film that’s destined to become a new Christmas classic.

Streaming on Peacock.

13. Godland, dir. Hlynur Pálmason. In this slow-burning mood piece set in the late nineteenth century, a young Lutheran priest named Lucas (Elliott Crosset Hove) is dispatched from his home country of Denmark to a remote part of Iceland to establish a church. Led by the gruff but spiritually curious local guide Ragnar (Ingvar Sigurðsson), Lucas treks through the country’s rugged wilderness. But the deeper he travels, the more his sense of purpose and morality falters. The film explores the physical and mental challenges of international mission work, opposing approaches to nature (as something to be dominated versus something to work with in humility), and the interlocking histories of two nations, one under the political control of the other.

A title card at the beginning of the film says Godland was inspired by seven wet-plate photographs found in a wooden box, the sole documentation of a Danish priest’s odyssey to the southeast coast. What an intriguing concept!, I thought: to invent a narrative out of this anonymous set of historical photos (a girl playfully posing on a horse, a nascent church congregation seated outside its new building, etc.), which are re-created throughout the film. It turns out there were no photos; the writer-director made that up. But the strength of the concept still stands. In addition to serving a religious vocation, Lucas is a photographer, and his journey is made all the more rigorous by his having to lug his heavy camera equipment over the terrain. He photographs what he values—and refuses to photograph what he doesn’t, which leads to a climactic altercation. The frames of the film have a 4:3 aspect ratio and rounded corners to further evoke vintage photography.  

I found it hard to get a handle on Lucas’s character, as he seems so ill suited to pastoral ministry. He’s generally closed off, uncharitable (even spiteful), and easily annoyed, and he has a sense of superiority over Icelanders, refusing to learn their language and to recognize the glory of their land and culture. I think he starts off more optimistic and open, but when he suffers a loss and his feelings of isolation and frustration increase, he becomes a reluctant prophet, like Jonah. I read the muddy scene near the end as him finally acknowledging his guilt (Ragnar’s barking dog piercing his conscience), but others have interpreted it differently. If you watch it, I’m curious to know what you think.

Streaming on Kanopy.

14. The Eight Mountains, dir. Felix van Groeningen and Charlotte Vandermeersch: Adapted from the best-selling 2016 novel by Paolo Cognetti, The Eight Mountains is a tale of friendship and making peace with the past. Eleven-year-old Pietro meets Bruno one summer while vacationing in the Italian Alps with his family. Pietro’s dad, Giovanni (Filippo Timi), becomes a father figure for Bruno, whose own father neglects him. As a teen Pietro becomes estranged from his family while Bruno maintains a relationship with them. Pietro doesn’t return to Bruno’s village until some twenty years later, when he learns that his father has died. Pietro and Bruno (played by Luca Marinelli and Alessandro Borghi as adults) reconnect over restoring a dilapidated cabin that the father had always dreamed of living in. Over the next decade, the two support each other in their griefs and letting go: Pietro over the years he lost not knowing his father, and Bruno over the loss of the dairy farm that has been in his family for generations but that is no longer viable, and with it the loss of a simple, rural way of life in the mountains he loves.

It’s rare to see a film about male friendship that doesn’t involve war, crime, or drunken shenanigans or turn into a romance. The Eight Mountains shows us two men who are a caring presence in each other’s lives, whose getting together simply involves conversation, comfortable silences, and scenic hikes. It’s a quiet film with gorgeous cinematography.

15. Return to Seoul, dir. Davy Chou. Frédérique “Freddie” Benoît (Park Ji-Min), a twenty-five-year-old French woman who was adopted as a baby from South Korea, returns for the first time to her birth country and hesitantly decides to track down her biological parents. The film follows her over the course of eight years as she tries to find who she is and where she belongs.

Streaming on Amazon Prime.

16. A Thousand and One, dir. A. V. Rockwell. After getting released from prison, the devoted and determined Inez (Teyana Taylor) kidnaps her son, Terry (played at different ages by Aaron Kingsley Adetola, Aven Courtney, and Josiah Cross), from the foster care system and sets out to build a life for him in a Harlem that is rapidly changing through gentrification. Spanning 1994 to 2005, the film is about love that we choose and that chooses us. Taylor is phenomenal in the lead role.

Streaming on Amazon Prime.

17. R.M.N., dir. Cristian Mungiu. When three Sri Lankan migrant workers are hired by a bread factory in a Transylvanian town, paranoia and violence erupt. The locals boycott the bread and demand the “outsiders” leave—and this despite the town’s already multiethnic population, consisting of Romanians, Hungarians, Germans, and Roma. Writer-director Cristian Mungiu based the film on an actual incident of xenophobia in Ditrău, Romania, in January 2020, in which ethnic resentments led to a petition that pushed the Sri Lankans out. The Christmastime setting underscores the irony of the town’s hostile response to its new residents, as the Christmas story involves strangers seeking lodging and welcome to bring the Christ child into the world.

Streaming on AMC+.

18. American Fiction, dir. Cord Jefferson. Thelonious “Monk” Ellison (Jeffrey Wright) is shopping his novel to different publishers, but they’re not interested; they say it’s “not Black enough.” Frustrated by the industry’s platforming and profiting from stereotypes of Blackness, he decides to write a new novel so outrageous in its use of tired and offensive Black tropes that the gatekeepers will be forced to confront their ridiculousness. Turns out, My Pafology becomes a smash success. This film addresses through comedy our culture’s narrow expectations of what Black art and entertainment should be—what stories Black people should tell and in what kind of voice, or what issues Black writers and filmmakers should address in their work.

19. One Fine Morning, dir. Mia Hansen-Løve. Sandra (Léa Seydoux) is a young widowed woman caring for her eight-year-old daughter (Camille Leban Martins), her aging father (Pascal Greggory), and herself, while holding down a job as a translator in Paris. Too often in film, moms are flat characters, but I love how multidimensional Sandra is—how we see her balancing motherhood, daughterhood, and her professional and romantic lives. Neither perfect nor unforgivably flawed, she is just a normal mom dealing with normal stuff, and wow, is Seydoux endearing in the role. The scene in which she’s having to size down her dad’s personal library after moving him into a long-term care facility where his neurodegenerative disease can be monitored made me cry.

Streaming on Amazon Prime.

20. Flora and Son, dir. John Carney. From the director who brought us Once and Sing Street comes another well-made feel-good movie about the power of music. Flora (Eve Hewson), a single mom, is constantly at war with her delinquent fourteen-year-old, Max (Orén Kinlan). (I’m genuinely shocked by how they talk to each other!) To keep him out of trouble, she tries to find him a hobby, and when he rejects the guitar she salvaged from a dumpster, she decides to take up the instrument herself. When she learns that Max is into making electronica and rap, she helps him turn one of his songs into a music video, and he helps her write a song for the online class she’s taking. It’s a sweet movie about a mother and son finding a way to connect with each other through music.

Streaming on Apple TV+.

HONORABLE MENTIONS: American Symphony (Netflix); Barbie (HBO); Rye Lane (Hulu); Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse (Netflix); Close (Showtime); Earth Mama (Kanopy)

Favorite Films of 2023, Part 1

Victoria Emily Jones4 Comments
Past Lives

I’ve seen over seventy films from 2023 (and there are still more I want to see!), and these are my top ten. My top eleven through twenty will be released this weekend in a separate post. Many are international, and what year to classify them as can be hazy; I go by the date on which the film was released in the US, which is when I have access to it.

If the film is streaming for free with a subscription service, I’ve noted that at the bottom of the entry. Otherwise, most are available for digital rental (Google Play is my preferred vendor), and a few are still in theaters. You might also see if your local library has any on DVD, as that’s how I watched several of these.

Please be aware that the following films have either PG-13 or R ratings, for various reasons. I don’t have a personal policy of “no x” or “no y” in the movies I watch, but if you do, please consult the MPAA rating descriptors or a more detailed content advisory before deciding whether to view the film.

1. Past Lives, dir. Celine Song. Kind, gentle, and empathetic, this semiautobiographical indie drama by debut director Celine Song follows Na Young, or Nora (Greta Lee), over the course of twenty-four years, from her young adolescence in South Korea to her emigration to Canada and then the US. Act 1 introduces us to Nora’s childhood sweetheart, Hae Sung (Teo Yoo), whom she reconnects with virtually twelve years later in act 2, shortly before meeting and befriending a white American man named Arthur (John Magaro) at a writers’ retreat. After another twelve years of not interacting, Nora and Hae Sung find each other again in act 3 at age thirty-six, when the single Hae Sung visits Nora, who’s now married to Arthur, in New York.

What I love about this film is how it subverts all the tropes associated with the romantic triangle. The characters aren’t possessive, conniving, or competitive. There are no heroes or villains here. The film is about bonds of love and culture, and especially about what trust, support, constancy, maturity, and love look like in a marriage. In an interview on the DVD special features, Song says Past Lives is at its core a love story between Nora and Arthur. It’s also a story of navigating a bicultural identity—living between two worlds, mourning the piece of oneself that’s lost with the adoption of a new home country, and integrating elements of one’s “past life” into one’s new life, continuing to be shaped by both.

The opening scene and closing scene are perfect. Song’s skill as a storyteller, honed over her years as a successful playwright, really shines through in her screenplay.

2. The Zone of Interest, dir. Jonathan Glazer. This chilling Holocaust drama centers on a Nazi family living their dream life in the literal backyard of the Auschwitz concentration and death camp. Rudolf Höss (Christian Friedel)—who is an actual historical figure—is the commandant of the camp; having risen through the ranks, he seeks to provide his wife, Hedwig (Sandra Hüller), and their five children a comfortable and idyllic life. It’s a risky choice to tell this story from a German perspective, but Glazer and the two lead actors more than succeed. We never actually set foot inside the camp; most of the scenes happen within the confines of the villa or at the nearby river where the family goes on outings. Nor do we directly see any of the horrors; we see merely hints, like smoke rising from a crematorium chimney in the background. But even more, we hear these intimations: a train pulling into the station, a tussle, a chase, a barking dog, a gunshot, screaming. All of this happens just over the wall, while Hedwig tends to her flower garden or her son plays with toys in his bedroom. (Props to the sound designer, Johnnie Burn.)

What is so disturbing about the film is the banality of evil that it reveals. Rudolf isn’t the type of villain who sneers or snarls or has violent outbursts. He brings his kids kayaking and reads them bedtime stories; he sips coffee with his wife. He could be us. “I wanted to show that these were crimes committed by Mr. and Mrs. Smith at No. 26,” Glazer said. Sanitization is one of the themes explored—lots of scrubbing.

3. Four Daughters, dir. Kaouther Ben Hania. Blending documentary and fiction, this film tells the true story of a Tunisian Muslim mother—Olfa Hamrouni—and her four daughters, the elder two of whom became radicalized by ISIS as teenagers and ran away to Libya to engage in jihad. In 2016 Kaouther Ben Hania saw media segments of Olfa calling out local authorities for their indifference and inaction and knew she wanted to make a film about the disappearance, to understand how a tragedy like this can happen in a family. She originally wanted to do a straight documentary but soon realized it would be more powerful, and more feasible, to have Olfa and her younger daughters, Eya and Tayssir Chikhaoui (born in 2003 and 2005), reenact their memories onscreen. Because daughters Ghofrane and Rahma Chikhaoui are still absent, actors Ichrak Matar and Nour Karoui were hired to portray them, and actor Hind Sabri stepped into the mother role for the scenes that took too high an emotional toll on Olfa.

This method of storytelling better reveals the story’s complex layers, as the three women are both inside and outside the scenes. They’re telling the past, but they’re also questioning it. They’re reflecting on their motivations as they discuss their memories with each other and Ben Hania—many of them traumatic, but others warm or simply ordinary, as when they talk about their first periods! Olfa, the mother, is a particularly complex character, as she is fiercely protective of her daughters but also perpetuates on them some of the patriarchal oppression that she herself suffered. The film is about motherhood, sisterhood, zealotry, rebellion, and violence, and it has left a searing impression on me.

4. Anatomy of a Fall, dir. Justine Triet. In this courtroom drama set in the French Alps, Sandra (Sandra Hüller) is suspected of her husband Samuel’s (Samuel Theis) murder. As the police investigate and the prosecution launches its interrogations, they uncover details about Sandra and Samuel’s conflicted relationship, and the couple’s visually impaired eleven-year-old son, Daniel (Milo Machado Graner), is forced to testify. Hüller’s performance is riveting—she gets my vote for Best Actress of the Year.

5. Saint Omer, dir. Alice Diop. Another French courtroom drama, this one based on the real-life story of Fabienne Kabou. Laurence Coly (Guslagie Malanda), a Senegalese immigrant to France, is on trial in Saint-Omer for the murder of her fifteen-month-old daughter, Lili, an action she blames on sorcery. Intrigued by the case as potential source material for the novel she’s working on, Rama (Kayije Kagame), pregnant, travels from Paris to attend the trial. But when Laurence’s motives prove inscrutable and mental illness is put on the table, Rama begins to worry about her own ability to mother. The testimony dredges up emotions for Rama surrounding her troubled relationship with her mother—also a Senegalese immigrant, who appears, from the flashback sequences, to suffer from depression—and sharpens her sense of cultural alienation. Rama is an analogue for the filmmaker, Alice Diop, who, as a documentarian and expectant mother at the time, attended the Kabou trial, and it forced her to face her own difficult truths.

Streaming on Hulu.

6. Dream Scenario, dir. Kristoffer Borgli. Paul Matthews (Nicolas Cage) is an evolutionary biologist teaching at a small-town college and living a quiet life with his wife and two daughters, when out of nowhere, he starts appearing in the dreams of strangers around the world and becomes instantly famous. An absurd comedy with elements of horror, Dream Scenario satirizes the fickle nature of celebrity in today’s internet age, in which even the most unremarkable people can become an overnight sensation, and the adoration of fans can turn to hatred at the drop of a hat. I was laughing out loud a lot at this one—and cringing too!

7. Fremont, dir. Babak Jalali. Donya (Anaita Wali Zada) is a young Afghan immigrant working at a fortune cookie factory in the Bay Area of California. Formerly a translator for the US Army in Afghanistan, she is ostracized by many of her fellow Afghans as a traitor, and she struggles with loneliness. But the film has an uplifting tone; it’s about survival, hope, and connection. The first full-length feature by the Iranian British filmmaker Babak Jalali, it is in English, Dari, and Cantonese.

Streaming on MUBI.

8. Monster, dir. Kore-eda Hirokazu. When her eleven-year-old son, Minato (Soya Kurokawa), starts behaving strangely and she hears that a teacher hit him, Saori (Sakura Ando) demands answers from the school. The story is told in three parts, each from a different narrative perspective: first the mom’s, then the teacher’s, then the boy’s. The truth gradually emerges with each shift, and a stormy finale brings things to a close.

9. Plan 75, dir. Chie Hayakawa. In a near future, the Japanese government launches a voluntary but coercive program encouraging the nation’s elderly citizens to terminate their lives in order to nobly reduce the burden on society. Having been forced to retire from her job as a hotel maid after one of her coworker peers slips in a hotel shower, Michi (Chieko Baishô) is considering signing up. The film focuses on her but also develops side stories for two Plan 75 employees: a Filipino migrant whose daughter back home needs an operation, and a man whose estranged uncle becomes a client.

10. Killers of the Flower Moon, dir. Martin Scorsese. Based on the best-selling nonfiction book by David Grann about the serial murder of members of Osage Nation in the 1920s, Scorsese’s Killers of the Flower Moon depicts the criminal ugliness of white greed and laments a grave historical injustice. When the Osage discover oil on the reservation they’ve been displaced to in Oklahoma, they become very wealthy, and white men from the outside move in to try to steal that wealth. The white crime boss and master of deception William Hale (Robert De Niro)—the movie uses all the real names—has ingratiated himself with the Osage over decades and has secretly been carrying out a plan to gain control of Osage headrights by killing off inheritors.

The movie focuses on Hale’s nephew Ernest Burkhart (Leonardo DiCaprio), a simpleton whom Hale compels to marry the young Osage woman Mollie Kyle (Lily Gladstone) and further manipulates to manipulate others. The movie suggests that the love been Ernest and Mollie is genuine but complicated, and I didn’t quite grasp what bound them together (was it just physical attraction?) or how much either of them knew about what was going on (was Ernest really that naive? did Mollie never suspect him or his uncle of foul play earlier on?). But I was engrossed for the full three-and-a-half-hour runtime, all the way to the gutsy final scene of the radio play and the beautiful, defiant coda.

Streaming on Apple TV+.

Read part 2.

Roundup: Yom Kippur tune, DITA concert, Lilias Trotter, and more

Victoria Emily Jones1 Comment

SPOTIFY PLAYLIST: September 2023 (Art & Theology): Another monthly gathering of good, true, and beautiful music of a spiritual bent from a variety of sources, ranging from a Victorian lullaby to a hymn revamp by Ike and Tina Turner to a traditional Yom Kippur melodic motif reimagined to a bluesy saxophone prayer to an old-time song about Noah from the southern US to a Christian praise song sung by a Miskito church community in their native tongue. Two selections from the playlist are below.

>> “Abodah” by Ernest Bloch, performed by Sheku Kanneh-Mason: Ernest Bloch was a Swiss-born American composer who drew heavily on his Jewish heritage in his work. Abodah (עֲבוֹדָה) (more commonly transliterated avodah) is Hebrew for “service,” “work,” or “worship,” a word often used in relation to the ritual service that used to be performed by the Jewish high priest in Jerusalem each year on Yom Kippur (the Day of Atonement), before the temple was destroyed; described in Leviticus 16, it involved confession of sin and animal sacrifices.

“May the offering of our lips be accepted as a replacement for the sacrifice of bulls,” the rabbis now say—and thus present-day Yom Kippur liturgies feature poetic recitations from Leviticus 16 and related Mishnah texts, “an expression of the Jewish people’s yearning both for spiritual liberation and redemption,” writes Neil W. Levin. More conservative congregations will vocalize prayers for a rebuilding of the temple and the restoration of sacrificial worship. But for an example of a seder avodah from the Reform tradition, see here. Yom Kippur is celebrated on September 24–25 this year.

Bloch’s Abodah composition is based on a tune, part of a canon of tunes known as the missinai (lit. “from Sinai”), that originated in the Ashkenazi communities of medieval Germany and that is still used today in Ashkenazi synagogues on Yom Kippur. Bloch composed the piece for piano and violin, but it’s arranged here for solo cello and performed by the internationally acclaimed Sheku Kanneh-Mason [previously].

For Christians, the atonement rituals from Leviticus find their fulfillment in the once-for-all self-sacrifice of Jesus, and though this solemn tune has its roots in the Jewish faith tradition, its meditation on human sin and divine forgiveness can cross religious boundaries.  

>> “I’ll Fly Away” (Yo volaré) from We the Animals: This spare, a cappella performance of a 1929 southern gospel song by Albert E. Brumley plays during the opening credits of the film We the Animals (2018), sung by Josiah Gabriel, one of the three main child actors. I’m interested in how and why religious songs are employed in nonreligious films, and this one was really effective in establishing not only the tone of the movie but also its theme of freedom.

Based on a semiautobiographical novel of the same name by Justin Torres, We the Animals follows three Puerto Rican brothers ages seven and up navigating a volatile family life in rural upstate New York. There’s violence and tenderness, depression and joy, and I appreciate its exploration of complicated masculinity, and how nuanced the character of the father is. (Torres has said that the process of writing the book was partly about finding empathy for his father who was abusive, and that the story is really about love and grace in a family.) In the film, flying is used as a visual metaphor for the youngest son’s, the narrator’s, rising above captivity (mainly psychological) and coming to a place of existential flourishing. The film is excellent, as is the book, though beware the R rating. Streaming on Netflix and Hulu.

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UPCOMING CONCERT: “Beyond Measure: An Evening of Music in Celebration of Abundantly More,” dir. Jeremy Begbie, September 8, 2023, Duke Divinity School, Durham, NC: To celebrate the release of Dr. Jeremy Begbie’s book Abundantly More: The Theological Promise of the Arts in a Reductionist World, Duke Initiatives in Theology and the Arts is presenting a special concert with the New Caritas Orchestra, conducted by Begbie. It will take place next Friday at 7:30 p.m. at Goodson Chapel on the campus of Duke Divinity School, and no tickets or registration are required. The program will explore the power of music—along with words and images—to expand our theological imagination, and it will be followed by a reception and book signing.

I suspect it will be similar in format to Begbie’s “Home, Away, and Home Again: The Rhythm of the Gospel in Music” event, which I attended in 2017 and was wonderful. (View the video recording below.) In his lecture-concerts, Begbie interweaves composer biography, musical analysis, theological commentary, storytelling, and performance to help audiences truly hear and appreciate the music. In “Home, Away, and Home Again,” he discusses the technical term “tonic” (the note upon which all other notes of a piece of music are hierarchically referenced, the one that gives the piece its sense of stability), demonstrating with various examples how 90 percent of Western music starts at home, goes places, then arrives back home but changed. Along the way he discusses themes of war, despotism, (up)rootedness, loss, hope, the resurrection, and new creation. Featured composers include Béla Bartók, Antonín Dvořák, Aaron Copland, Ennio Morricone, Leonard Cohen, and Benny Goodman.

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UPCOMING CONFERENCE: “Poets of Presence: Faith, Form, and Forging Community,” October 27–28, 2023, Loyola University, Chicago: Sponsored by Presence: A Journal of Catholic Poetry and The Francis and Ann Curran Center for American Catholic Studies at Fordham University, this poetry conference will feature the keynotes “The Art of Faith and the Faith of Art” by Christian Wiman and “The Forge and the Fire: God in the Blacksmith Shop” by Angela Alaimo O’Donnell. There will be workshops on writing formal poetry, translating poetry, and an editor’s secrets for successful submissions, among others, and poetry readings. I was excited to see Paul J. Pastor [previously] on the list of presenters! Cost: $60.

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DOCUMENTARY: Many Beautiful Things: The Life and Vision of Lilias Trotter, dir. Laura Waters Hinson (2015): Available for free on YouTube, this seventy-minute documentary shines a light on Lilias Trotter (1853–1928), an English painter and protégé of the leading Victorian tastemaker John Ruskin who, instead of pursuing an art career as Ruskin had urged her to do, became a Christian missionary in Algiers for forty years—as a single woman, self-funded (all the missions agencies rejected her because she had a heart condition that made her physically vulnerable). Her ministry centered on the women in the kasbah—teaching them to read, helping them attain economic independence. She also befriended a Sufi brotherhood whose members were eager to hear her talk about God. In Many Beautiful Things, Michelle Dockery of Downton Abbey voices words from Trotter’s books, journals, and correspondence, and art director Austin Daniel Blasingame has deliciously animated her art! (See behind the scenes of that process.) Sleeping at Last supplied the original soundtrack.

While in North Africa, Trotter continued making sketches and watercolors, documenting the everyday life that surrounded her—people, bees, flowers, sunsets. These are minor works/studies, not intended for the art market, but they were for Trotter a major way of delighting in God’s creation. I don’t like how the marketing of the film leans heavily into the narrative of “Oh, look at Lilias, so selfless and heroic, sacrificing artistic fame for service, she really could have been tops if she hadn’t given it up,” as it wrongly suggests that evangelistic or nonprofit work is more God-honoring than art making, or that recognition in one’s field is not something a Christian should desire. The film itself mostly avoids that way of looking at it, focusing instead on Trotter’s faithfulness in responding to a call that was particular to her and then finding ways to integrate art, as an avocation, into her new life in Algiers. “Her art . . . wasn’t lost in Algeria. If anything, it was fed,” says biographer Miriam Rockness. As viewers, we’re asked to reexamine our conception of success.

Trotter, Lilias_Desultory bee
Watercolor by Lilias Trotter, July 9, 1907

I had never heard of Lilias Trotter before watching this documentary (thanks for the recommendation, Sarah!), but now I’m glad to know about her. Learn more at https://liliastrotter.com/, and follow the Lilias Trotter Legacy on Instagram, Facebook, and/or Twitter. Also, the current issue of Christian History magazine (no. 148) is devoted entirely to Trotter; you can download a free copy (or purchase a physical one) here.

Roundup: “The Loving Look,” Keiskamma retrospective, and more

Victoria Emily Jones1 Comment

ONLINE EVENT: “Theodicy of Beauty” by Sarah Clarkson, March 6, 2:30 p.m. ET: “The question of suffering is one of the central, aching questions of faith. Too often, we meet suffering with an argument for God’s goodness, rather than an invitation to find and discover his goodness anew. Join me for an exploration of what it means to encounter and trust the beauty of God in our times of darkness, suffering, and pain. Drawing on my own story of mental illness and depression, I’ll explore what it means to engage with God’s goodness in a radically healing way, one that restores our capacity to imagine, hope, and create. We’ll use literature, art, and poetry to discern the ways that God arrives in our darkness to heal us, and also to restore us as agents of his loveliness in the midst of a broken world.”

This Crowdcast talk by Sarah Clarkson is based on her book This Beautiful Truth: How God’s Goodness Breaks into Our Darkness. Registration is $7 and includes a complimentary downloadable copy of “Encountering Beauty,” an arts-based reader’s guide to Clarkson’s book. I have appreciated her From the Vicarage: Books, Beauty, Theology newsletter and her wise, gentle reflections on spirituality, literature, and motherhood on Instagram @sarahwanders, so I’m looking forward to hearing from her on this topic!

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LECTURES (available on podcast platforms):

>> “The Loving Look” by Dr. Elissa Yukiko Weichbrodt: In this keynote address for the 2018 Beautiful Orthodoxy conference, art historian Elissa Yukiko Weichbrodt [previously], author of Redeeming Vision: A Christian Guide to Looking at and Learning from Art, discusses how contemporary art—which can sometimes be confounding or otherwise challenging—can drive us to confession, empathy, and love. Sharing her encounters with three contemporary artworks, she talks about art as a place where we can experience sanctification and common grace; how the Incarnation further vested our material world with significance; art as an invitation to embodied knowledge; art as part of how we order and understand our physical world; artworks as mirrors and shapers of culture; and how viewers, not just artists, are called to faithfulness.

Yamamoto, Lynne_Wrung
Lynne Yamamoto (American, 1961–), Wrung, 1992. Wringer, synthetic hair, nails, string, 42 × 13 × 5 in.

She cites Esther Lightcap Meek’s Loving to Know: Covenant Epistemology, in which Meek says that all acts of coming to know are integrative; they become part of us. Knowledge is an act of covenantal care, Meek says. We don’t know in order to love; we love in order to know. Weichbrodt says, “For me, contemporary art—particularly art made by artists grappling with histories and experiences that have remained largely unseen, unknown, and unloved by the dominant culture—has served as a catalyst for faithful knowing.”

Besides Wrung, the two other works she spotlights are Outline by Lorna Simpson and From Here I Saw What Happened and I Cried by Carrie Mae Weems.

>> “The Arts as a Means to Love” by Dr. Mary McCampbell: In this lecture given for English L’Abri, Mary McCampbell [previously], an associate professor of humanities at Lee University, discusses some of the ideas from her book Imagining Our Neighbors as Ourselves: How Art Shapes Empathy. I appreciate how her writing and teaching embraces the arts of film and television alongside literature, such that not only are works like The Power and the Glory by Graham Greene, “A Good Man Is Hard to Find” by Flannery O’Connor, and Beloved by Toni Morrison explored, but so are, for example, the comedy-drama Lars and the Real Girl and the drama series Better Call Saul. Discrediting the recent odd assertion from a prominent evangelical corner that empathy is a sin, McCampbell affirms that empathy is, on the contrary, an essential Christian virtue, and one that the narrative arts are adept at forming in us, exposing us to people and stories outside our realms of experience and helping us recognize the image of God in unlikely places.

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EXHIBITION REVIEW: “Mourning and Perseverance Stitched into South African Tapestries” by Alexandra M. Thomas: Through March 24 at Constitution Hill in Johannesburg, you can see Umaf’evuka, nje ngenyanga, dying and rising, as the moon does, a major retrospective of the work of the Keiskamma Art Project. Founded in 2000, the project archives the collective memory and oral histories of the rural Eastern Cape of South Africa through textile artworks, mainly by Xhosa women. Monumental and small-scale works tell stories of trauma, grief, hope, faith, resilience, and celebration. One of my favorite art research projects has been the one I did on the Isenheim-inspired Keiskamma Altarpiece in 2015, which resulted in the article “Sewing seeds of hope in South Africa”; this altarpiece is one of the many works on display. Let me call out just two others. The photos are from the current exhibition.

Keiskamma Guernica
Keiskamma Guernica, 2010. Mixed media, including appliqué, felt, embroidery, rusted wire, metal tags, beaded AIDS ribbons, used blankets, and old clothes, 3.5 × 7.8 m. Collection of Javett Art Centre at the University of Pretoria, Tshwane, South Africa. Photo: Anthea Pokroy / Keiskamma Trust.
Creation Altarpiece (Keiskamma)
Creation Altarpiece, 2007. Mixed media, including felt, embroidery, photographs, beadwork, wirework, and appliqué, 3.8 × 5.2 m (open). Collection of Unisa Art Gallery, Tshwane, South Africa.

Keiskamma Guernica, after Picasso’s famous antiwar painting, laments the limited access to HIV treatment in rural South Africa in the 2000s and the negligence of government hospitals, which resulted in many HIV/AIDS deaths. The piece repurposes the blankets and clothes of the deceased and serves as an expression of outrage as well as a form of commemoration. Creation Altarpiece, modeled loosely after the Ghent Altarpiece, exults in the region’s abundant wildlife and natural resources and in life-giving initiatives like Hamburg’s music education program, its capoeira group (a dance-like martial art), and the memory boxes made by orphaned children to remember their parents. The three top central panels depict a fig tree eating up an old hotel built by colonialists (a real-life scene observed in the nearby village of Bell!), and the bottom three show villagers of all kinds gathering around Christ, represented as a bull (whereas lambs were commonly sacrificed in ancient Israelite religion, traditional Xhosa religion calls for bull sacrifices).

View the beautiful exhibition catalog here.

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SONG: “Kyrie” by Ngwa Roland: Ngwa Roland is a composer and the director of De Angelis Capella [previously], a Catholic choir from Yaoundé, Cameroon. Here is his choral setting of the Kyrie eleison (Greek for “Lord, have mercy”), an important Christian prayer used in liturgies around the world.

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ARTICLES:

>> “To One Kneeling Down No Word Came” by Jonathan Chan, Yale Logos: Jonathan Chan is a Singapore-based poet and essayist who graduated with a master’s degree in East Asian Studies from Yale in 2022. In this personal essay he reflects on the poetry of R. S. Thomas, a twentieth-century Anglican priest from Wales, particularly as it relates to the toil of prayer—prayer as a discipline requiring persistence and solitude. Thomas’s poems often express a sense of alienation from God, which is not what we might expect from a pastor, but, as Chan remarks, “God’s absence cultivates a desire for God’s presence.”

>> “Stabat Mater: How a 13th Century Lament Resonates Today” by Josh Rodriguez, Forefront: Back in July 2020, composer Josh Rodriguez [previously here and here] published this article on four modern settings of one of the most celebrated Latin hymns of all time, the twenty-stanza Stabat Mater Dolorosa (lit. “The sorrowful mother was standing”), about Mary mourning the death of her son Jesus. Written in the Middle Ages, it continues to inspire composers today, and it remains “a powerful vehicle for ‘grieving with those who grieve,’” Rodriguez writes. He spotlights the settings by James Macmillan, Julia Perry, Hawar Tawfiq, and Paul Mealor, analyzing some of the musical elements of each and quoting the composers in regards to the piece’s meaning to them.

Favorite Films of 2022, Part 2

Victoria Emily Jones1 Comment

Read part 1 here.

11. After Yang, dir. Kogonada. Set in the near future, After Yang is a patiently minimalist, transcendent film about learning to treasure those moments of mundane beauty that make up our lives. When Jake (Colin Farrell) and Kyra (Jodie Turner-Smith) adopt their daughter Mika (Malea Emma Tjandrawidjaja) from China, they purchase a preowned “technosapien,” a humanoid robot, named Yang (Justin H. Ming) to educate her about her cultural roots and to be an older sibling to her. But one day Yang malfunctions and shuts down, and Mika is devastated.

When Yang is opened up at the repair shop to be diagnosed, Jake discovers Yang’s memory bank, where Yang stored all the memories he thought important. He unlocks it. By viewing the world, especially his family life, as processed by Yang, Jake realizes he has failed to engage meaningfully with the small daily gifts he has been given. He also becomes aware of more of Yang’s history—of his previous families and loves.

Streaming on Showtime.

12. Petite Maman, dir. Céline Sciamma. In this poignant French drama, eight-year-old Nelly (Joséphine Sanz) accompanies her parents (Nina Meurisse and Stéphane Varupenne) on a trip to clear out her mother’s childhood home following her grandmother’s death. As she explores the nearby woods, she meets a neighbor girl her own age (Gabrielle Sanz), and the two strike up a bond. There’s a fantasy element I won’t reveal—it’s better to let the movie unfold it for you—but suffice it to say, I love the imaginative way that writer-director Céline Sciamma tells this mother-daughter tale of grief and loss.

Streaming on Hulu.

13. The Wonder, dir. Sebastián Lelio. Inspired by the nineteenth-century phenomenon of the “fasting girls” and based on Emma Donoghue’s celebrated novel of the same name, this psychological drama is set in a rural Irish Catholic community in 1862. Eleven-year-old Anna O’Donnell (Kíla Lord Cassidy) has allegedly not eaten anything for four months but has been miraculously sustained by “manna from heaven.” As pilgrims begin flocking to witness the miracle and rumors swirl about possible sainthood, a council of local dignitaries initiates an investigation to determine whether Anna’s survival without food is indeed a holy feat, or a hoax perpetrated by Anna and her family.

The council hires Lib Wright (Florence Pugh)—a scientifically minded English nurse—and a nun to independently observe Anna over two weeks in alternating eight-hour shifts and to report back. Lib grows increasingly concerned for Anna’s health and safety, and when Anna reveals to her the reason for her fast, she knows she must act drastically.

Streaming on Netflix.

14. Apollo 10½: A Space Age Adventure, dir. Richard Linklater. Apollo 10½ is writer-director Richard Linklater’s nostalgic homage to growing up in a Houston suburb in the 1960s, the youngest of six. This was during the Space Race, and Linklater uses that context to interweave real childhood memories with his childhood fantasy of being an astronaut. So in a tongue-in-cheek revision of history, he has NASA recruit fourth-grader Stan (Milo Coy) to fly a secret mission to the moon to test out a landing module shortly before Apollo 11 goes up. The film uses an animation technique known as rotoscoping, which layers animation over live performances.

While I can appreciate the blend of dream and reality, I was much more interested in the real-life portions of the movie, which are substantial, than the revisionist space stuff. Playing kickball on the school blacktop, getting disciplined, eating Frito pies at the pool, watching cheesy TV shows with family, listening to the Monkees and the Archies and the 5th Dimension, riding to the beach in the bed of a pickup truck, braving the Black Dragon at AstroWorld, fighting Roman candle wars in the backyard on New Year’s Eve, competing in Little League, stealing plywood from home construction sites with his cheapskate father, listening to Grandma’s conspiracy theories—ordinary memories like these are narrated with such fondness by adult Stan (voiced by Jack Black) and so meticulously rendered, and it’s here where the movie really shines. If you like The Wonder Years, you’ll like this.

Streaming on Netflix.

15. Decision to Leave, dir. Park Chan-wook. A slow-burn crime drama with a heavy dose of romance, this film follows the married police detective Hae-joon (Park Hae-il), who, when investigating the death of a mountain-climber, becomes infatuated with the prime murder suspect, the climber’s widow, Seo-rae (Wei Tang). In an interview, the director said his goal was “to make a love story that does not say the words, ‘I love you.’” The film is all about what’s not said, what’s observed. For much of the movie we question whether Seo-rae is manipulating Hae-joon or is actually falling for him too.

I have to admit, I didn’t like either of the characters; I struggled to understand them or to be invested in their “love” story, which to me seems more like simply lust or intrigue. Seo-rae’s inscrutability is, I think, part of the point; she is a mystery to be solved, as much as the murders happening around her. And attraction is rarely rational, I suppose. (But c’mon, Hae-joon, you’ve got a loving wife back home!) Despite my failure to connect with it on all levels, this is a beautifully shot, craftily edited, engrossing film with a sustained, understated sensuality that is to be commended.

Streaming on MUBI.

16. God’s Creatures, dir. Saela Davis and Anna Rose Holmer. Aileen (Emily Watson) works as a shift manager at a seafood processing plant, alongside most of the other local women, in a remote Irish fishing village. When one of her coworkers, Sarah (Aisling Franciosi), files a rape claim against her son, Brian (Paul Mescal), Aileen fabricates an alibi to protect him. Is she incredulous that he could be capable of sexual assault, or is her denial more sinister? Atmospheric and tense, the film centers on Aileen’s psychological grappling with the limits of maternal love and her duty to what’s right and just.

17. Elvis, dir. Baz Luhrmann. Frenetic and flashy, this music biopic traces the meteoric rise and fall of rock and roll’s biggest legend, Elvis Presley (Austin Butler). The story is narrated by Elvis’s exploitative manager, Colonel Tom Parker (Tom Hanks), and examines their complex, twenty-plus-year relationship. Butler is amazing in the role, embodying Elvis’s energy and sex appeal while also showing his emotional vulnerability.

I appreciate how the movie shows the influence of Black artists on Elvis’s music, even dispelling the myth that he was the founder of rock and roll—a credit that he himself, in multiple interviews, rejected, instead crediting his Black predecessors. Elvis grew up in a Black neighborhood in Tupelo, Mississippi, and when he moved to Memphis as a teenager, he frequented Beale Street, a hub of African American culture. From these environments he absorbed the sounds of Pentecostal gospel and rhythm and blues.

Elvis features stunning performances by historical Black characters. An early scene intercuts bluesman Arthur Crudup (Gary Clark Jr.) performing his original song “That’s All Right” in a juke joint—which would become Elvis’s first single—with “I’ll Fly Away” sung by a Black congregation at a tent revival; preteen Elvis observes one through a hole in the wall and participates, Spirit-caught, in the other. As a young aspiring recording artist, prior to mounting the Louisiana Hayride stage, his first big premiere, he pumps himself up by singing “I’ll Fly Away.”

Later, Elvis hears Big Mama Thornton (Shonka Dukureh) perform the raunchy “Hound Dog” (written for her by a Jewish songwriting duo, Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller) in a bar on Beale Street, which is then sampled and interpolated in a song by Doja Cat commissioned for the movie. At Club Handy, Elvis hangs out with his friend B.B. King (Kelvin Harrison Jr.) and is blown away by the vitality and genius of the young Little Richard (Alton Mason), who performs his original and then-unknown “Tutti Frutti” for the crowd; the conversation Elvis has about it with King, and what King says and doesn’t say, speaks volumes. As people shuffle out for the night, the pioneering rock singer-guitarist Sister Rosetta Tharpe (Yola) sings “Working on the Building” and “Strange Things Happening Every Day.”

All these and more were part of Elvis’s music education. They came before. His use of Black source material has always been controversial, deemed “cultural appropriation” (i.e., theft) by some. He profited greatly from the creative contributions of Black women and men, many of whom failed to attain proper recognition and compensation for their work. They lacked the platform and the acceptance across racial lines, whereas Elvis’s whiteness opened doors for him. And so he brought rock and roll—developed in Black churches, juke joints, streets, and nightclubs—to the masses. For sure, he added his own stamp, synthesized it with other influences, and was a majorly talented performer in his own right. Elvis celebrates the title character’s inventiveness but also recognizes his indebtedness to Black musicians. It’s not a central concern of the movie, but it is present. More central is, as one might expect of the genre, the toll of fame.

Streaming on HBO Max.

18. Nope, dir. Jordan Peele. In this neo-western sci-fi thriller, OJ (Daniel Kaluuya) and his sister, Em (Keke Palmer), own a family ranch in California, where they train and handle horses for television and film productions. But their business is struggling, and to keep it afloat they sell some horses to Jupe (Steven Yeun), a former child actor who operates a nearby theme park that capitalizes on his surviving an infamous violent attack on the set of a nineties sitcom. (Best opening scene of the year?) Then their ranch becomes a site of abduction—a UFO takes some of their horses. They attempt to capture video evidence with the help of tech salesman Angel Torres (Brandon Perea) and documentarian Antlers Holst (Michael Wincott). The film’s epigraph is a quotation of Nahum 3:6, a pronouncement of divine judgment: “I will cast abominable filth upon you, make you vile, and make you a spectacle.”

Nope is not as concise as Peele’s other two films, Get Out and Us; I couldn’t follow all the threads. But surely a major thread is an indictment of our voracious need for spectacle. Another is the traumas that the film industry can inflict on people. Another, or maybe a subset of the previous, is the erasure of Black cowboys from our stories of the American West. Nope pokes and prods at these issues and raises questions rather than providing answers. For example, there’s a tension here between the magic of spectacle and its insidiousness. Peele participates in what he condemns. As film critic Thomas Flight articulates, “Nope is a spectacular horror film about the danger of spectacle. It’s a big-budget Hollywood film that critiques the Hollywood industry. It’s not a movie that can draw a clear resolution to those dualities. Instead, it’s a film that explores the queasiness that arises when we’re not sure if something’s good or bad but we find ourselves in the midst of it.”

Entertaining; suspenseful; riveting sound design by Johnnie Burn; and an infectious performance by Palmer as the charismatic Emerald, her live-wire personality a perfect foil to the taciturn OJ’s.

19. Cha Cha Real Smooth, dir. Cooper Raiff. Andrew (Cooper Raiff), a Gen Zer, is a recent college grad who lives with his mom, stepdad, and younger brother and works as a party starter at bar mitzvahs. At one he meets Domino (Dakota Johnson) and her daughter, Lola (Vanessa Burghardt), who has autism, and strikes up a friendship. This movie is sweet and maybe slight, and it takes a few missteps, but I enjoyed it a lot.

I find Raiff’s onscreen persona—essentially the same one he adopted in his debut feature, which I also really liked—charming, though I know others find it insufferable! Andrew is vulnerable, quippy, awkward, real. He loves his mom. He cries openly. He lacks direction. He seeks connection. He’s trying to figure life out, and growth comes slowly. He’s someone I recognize and have empathy for.

Streaming on Apple TV+.

20. Causeway, dir. Lila Neugebauer. This quiet drama follows the physical and emotional recovery of Lynsey (Jennifer Lawrence), a US military veteran who returns home to New Orleans after suffering a traumatic brain injury serving in Afghanistan. In the process, she develops a friendship with her auto mechanic, James (Brian Tyree Henry), who bears his own wounds from a tragic event—some visible, some not. The two help each other work through the lingering effects of their traumas and move closer to wholeness. Their gentle, easy vibe with one another is really beautiful to witness.

Streaming on Apple TV+.

HONORABLE MENTIONS: Sr.; Hustle; Marcel the Shell with Shoes On; The Sea Beast

Favorite Films of 2022, Part 1

Victoria Emily Jones4 Comments

Since 2020, I have been publishing an annual list of my top twenty films of the year, with trailers and microreviews. (See my lists for 2020 and 2021.) I love the collaborative nature of filmmaking, the coming together of so many talents—writing, acting, directing, shooting, editing, set design, costume design, etc.—to tell a story through moving images. Movies are actually my favorite mode of storytelling. It’s a shame that in some circles they’re denigrated as inferior to novels, less worthy of our time. That’s absolutely not true!

Moviegoing can be transformative. Like other art forms, movies reflect back to us the many aspects of the human (and in the case of my #5, animal!) experience, and can demand something of us.

Here are the first ten of my twenty recommendations for films to see that were released in the United States (though several were made internationally) in 2022, ranked in order of preference. Please be aware that many of these have R ratings and that you can consult content advisories if that concerns you.

1. Everything Everywhere All at Once, dir. Daniels (Daniel Kwan and Daniel Scheinert). Bighearted and bizarre, this comedy sci-fi action adventure is about a first-generation Chinese American woman, Evelyn (Michelle Yeoh), who’s trying to hold it all together as her laundromat business is failing and her relationships are fraying, especially with her twenty-something daughter, Joy (Stephanie Hsu), whom she just doesn’t “get.” Then one day, out of nowhere, Evelyn is enlisted by a version of her husband, Waymond (Ke Huy Quan), to stop the evil Jobu Tupaki, a version of Joy, from destroying the multiverse. As Evelyn travels to alternate universes, she’s able to access skills and emotions her alt-selves possess and bring them back with her to help her fight.

Absurdity ensues. In one universe, Evelyn has hotdogs for fingers, and so becomes adept at using her feet; in one she’s a rock overlooking a canyon; in another, a teppanyaki chef whose colleague is controlled by a raccoon under his hat; in yet another, she’s a martial arts–trained movie star who never left China. She “verse jumps” from one to the other seeking to save her daughter from the vortex of despair into which she’s trying to suck everyone and everything, and all the while Joy is trying to find a version of her mother whom she can connect with, who can understand the emptiness in her.

The directors said the film is about a family trying to find each other through the chaos. At its core, it’s a family drama—one that explodes across the multiverse. It’s also about choosing kindness and joy (symbolized by a googly eye) and moving toward one another in empathy. It’s much louder and more outrageous than all my other picks, and I could have done without the scatological humor, but I found myself enthralled by the wild, disorienting ride that lands at a really tender place. Michelle Yeoh proves her versatility as an actor, and Jamie Lee Curtis, who plays IRS inspector Deirdre Beaubeirdra, is hilarious.

Streaming on Showtime.

2. The Banshees of Inisherin, dir. Martin McDonagh. Set in 1923 during the Irish Civil War on a fictional island off Ireland’s west coast, this dark comedy begins when Colm (Brendan Gleeson) tells his lifelong bestie, Pádraic (Colin Farrell), that he no longer wants to be friends. Colm is a fiddler and composer who wants to establish a legacy, a musical output that will live on—a goal that Pádraic is impeding by distracting him with daily hours of dull conversation, he says—whereas Pádraic says he merely wants to be known for “being nice.” Baffled by his friend’s abrupt severing of their relationship, Pádraic repeatedly pursues understanding and restoration, escalating the tension toward acts of violence. Male friendship and loneliness, melancholy, and mortality are key themes in this artful buddy-breakup movie that had me laughing out loud as well as tearing up.

Streaming on HBO Max.

3. Guillermo del Toro’s Pinocchio, dir. Guillermo del Toro and Mark Gustafson. Light overcomes the darkness in this stop-motion animated musical adaptation of the classic Italian children’s novel from 1883. It was written and codirected by Guillermo del Toro, a master of magical realism, and has been in development since 2008. When his young son dies, the carpenter Geppetto (David Bradley) carves a boy puppet, Pinocchio (Gregory Mann), to fill the hole left by this profound loss. In an act of compassion, the Wood Sprite (Tilda Swinton) brings Pinocchio to life and commissions Sebastian J. Cricket (Ewan MacGregor), an itinerant writer, to look out for him. Curious and unruly, Pinocchio ends up trapped in a circus by an abusive showman. He and his father spend much of the film trying to reunite, to be family to each other.  

These story points will sound familiar to most, but del Toro cleverly adapts them and adds new ones, setting the story in a Tuscan village during the rise of Mussolini in the 1930s, with one of the main villains being a Fascist podestà who’s trying to recruit Pinocchio into the army. It turns out it is the villagers who blindly subscribe to Il Duce’s propaganda who are the puppets, whereas Pinocchio, with his irrepressibility, is decidedly unpuppetlike. Thus the film explores contexts in which disobedience can be a virtue. Del Toro also places more emphasis on Geppetto’s growth than Pinocchio’s, making the story about Geppetto becoming a real father—learning to accept Pinocchio with all his quirks and difference, not making his love contingent on Pinocchio fulfilling his image of the perfect son—rather than Pinocchio becoming a real boy.

The artistry of this film is dazzling! I was blown away by the production design by Guy Davis and Curt Enderle (they designed the locations and characters and established the whole visual style), especially the evocation of interwar Italian life and culture, with the centrality of the church. I’m also dazzled by the puppets—shout-out to Georgina Haynes, the director of character fabrication—because remember, with stop-motion animation, all the characters are handmade, physical creations existing in three-dimensional space, not computer-made or drawn on a page; all but the “wooden” Pinocchio (made from 3D-printed hard plastic) consist of a manipulable silicone skin sitting over a mechanized system.

Streaming on Netflix.

4. Aftersun, dir. Charlotte Wells. Eleven-year-old Sophie (Frankie Corio) is on vacation with her single dad, Calum (Paul Mescal), in Turkey. He doesn’t have a lot of money, but he’s trying to create a memorable holiday for her. And despite its mundanity, it is memorable—the frame story is adult Sophie replaying its moments on tape and in her mind. Aftersun is a very personal project for first-time writer-director Charlotte Wells, who draws on her own history and relationship with her father; she says she wants people to be able to feel the warmth of these memories, even though they’re tinged with sadness. Though it’s never spelled out, it appears that Calum suffers from depression, and we gradually see more and more of his pain. The lack of exposition enables us to make our own inferences about it and about the ending. The “Under Pressure” dance sequence, which intercuts a frantic, stroboscopic nightclub scene where adult Sophie searches the floor for Calum with one of young Sophie and Calum dancing lovingly outside the hotel, safe in each other’s arms, is a contender for scene of the year—a metaphoric conveyance of mental health decline, of holding on and letting go.

5. EO, dir. Jerzy Skolimowski. Who would have thought a donkey’s inner life could be so captivating to watch onscreen? His memories, his imagination, his hopes, his fears, the affection he feels and longs for, his joys and sorrows. EO follows the life journey of the titular donkey as he passes from owner to owner, some of them kind, others cruel. He starts out at a circus in Poland, where he’s tenderly cared for by the young performer Magda (Sandra Drzymalska). But he’s seized by animal rights activists and ends up at a horse sanctuary, and from there he moves to a petting farm for children with disabilities. He escapes, looking for Magda, and spends a harrowing night alone in the forest. Chancing upon a soccer game the next day, he becomes a mascot for a time, a figure of great adulation but also vitriol by the opposing team. His next job is as a beast of burden at a fur farm, where he’s made to carry fox pelts, and then he’s acquired by an Italian priest.

There’s very little dialogue in the film, and there are no voiceovers to convey EO’s thoughts or emotions, which we infer by context. The cinematography, from close-up shots of EO’s dark, expressive eyes to wide shots of varied landscapes, is gorgeous—visual poetry. EO is an indictment of human violence and a call to empathy for animals. Dare I say I liked it better than the Bresson classic (Au hasard Balthazar) that inspired it? Unlike its predecessor, it stays entirely focused on the donkey’s perspective, with humans relegated to the periphery.

6. Hit the Road, dir. Panah Panahi. A road-trip dramedy from Iran, this debut feature by Panah Panahi follows a family of four as they drive across the Iranian countryside under the pretext of a wedding. Dad (Mohammad Hassan Madjooni), who wears a leg cast, sits in the back with the young, ball-of-fire son (Rayan Sarlak) and sick dog, while Mom (Pantea Panahiha) and the quiet older son (Amin Simiar) take turns at the wheel, sometimes evincing their worry. There’s something clandestine about this journey, and over the course of the film we learn more but not much. But even with the imminent separation hanging like a cloud, there’s a lightness and a sweetness that’s so endearing as we watch the characters bicker and goof around and connect with one another. Films that can hold together the weighty and the comical, like this one, tend to be the ones I enjoy most.

Streaming on Showtime.

7. TÁR, dir. Todd Field. Set in the classical music world, this drama explores the corrupting nature of power through the (fictional) character of Lydia Tár (Cate Blanchett), an award-winning conductor, composer, educator, and author. It’s an intense and brilliant performance of a complex character who is amazing at her craft but who also uses her status to manipulate others, including the young female cellist who has just joined her orchestra, the prestigious Berlin Philharmonic. The tension rachets up as they prepare to perform Mahler’s Fifth Symphony and rumors about Lydia’s connection to the death of one of her former protégés threaten to undo her.

8. Broker, dir. Kore-eda Hirokazu. Found families is a key theme in the oeuvre of the Japanese director Kore-eda Hirokazu, whose Shoplifters (2019) is one of my all-time favorite films. His latest, Broker, is set in South Korea. Seeking to place her newborn son, Woo-sung, in the care of a family better equipped to raise him, the young single mom So-young (Ji-eun Lee) leaves him outside a church, where he is intercepted by Sang-hyeon (Song Kang-ho) and Dong-soo (Dong-won Gang), who attempt to sell him on the adoption black market. The next day she returns with doubts and demands to be included in the process of finding a home for Woo-sung. So she follows the two brokers in responding to the calls of prospective buyers, and along the way they pick up a stowaway from an orphanage, the ebullient Hae-jin (Seung-soo Im), the character that really brought it all together for me.

As they drive from city to city, the five travelers bond with one another, each of them carrying their own forms of rejection trauma and seeking love and belonging. The last night they spend together . . . wow! Kore-eda is a deft handler of sentiment, never maudlin but rather inserting understated emotional moments in all the right places (another example: the flower on the wet car window scene). He tackles heavy subject matter and complex social issues with heart, always keeping his characters at the center and allowing for reprieves of warmth and brightness. He avoids simplistic endings but also unnecessarily bleak ones, taking a vantage point of hope.

9. The Fabelmans, dir. Steven Spielberg. This coming-of-age drama is a fictionalized telling of Steven Spielberg’s upbringing in a midcentury Jewish American household and, since seeing his first movie in a theater at age six, his developing passion for cinema. Spielberg’s stand-in is Sammy Fabelman (Gabriel LaBelle). In many ways The Fabelmans is Spielberg’s love letter to his artistic and free-spirited mother, named Mitzi in the movie and played by Michelle Williams, who from the get-go fully supports Sammy’s dream to become a filmmaker, unlike his much more practical father, Burt (Paul Dano), a computer engineer, who doesn’t initially see filmmaking as a worthy pursuit.

I wondered if The Fabelmans was going to be a self-indulgent homage to Spielberg’s successful career, full of Easter eggs to his other films, but it wasn’t that at all. The story stands on its own apart from its basis in the particularities of Spielberg’s life. It’s about vocation and family and the power of films to help us see the truth. That it’s also a semiautobiographical portrait of a director whose films I grew up on (E.T., Jaws, Jurassic Park) and continue to admire is an added bonus!

10. Nanny, dir. Nikyatu Jusu. Marked by menace and mystery, this psychological horror-drama centers on Aisha (Anna Diop), a Senegalese immigrant to New York City hired by an affluent couple to care for their daughter. Aisha is haunted by the absence of her six-year-old son, whom she left under the care of a cousin in Senegal so that she could earn money to bring him to the US. But that goal becomes difficult when her employers start withholding her wages. As she navigates the oppressive situation she finds herself in, she is visited by figures from West African folklore: Mami Wata (a mermaid-like water spirit) and Anansi (a trickster spider). They seem like malevolent forces, but her boyfriend’s grandmother encourages her to reframe her thinking and to ask what the spirits want not from her but for her. Could they be haunting her to help guide her toward a new and better life?

The film deals with class, race, exploitation, resistance, survival, motherhood, and guilt—all parts of Aisha’s immigrant experience. Despite the too-quick resolution that follows, the scene at the end of Aisha being reborn out of chaos is visually and emotionally compelling. I appreciate how writer-director Nikyatu Jusu, born in the US to Sierra Leonean parents, uses supernatural horror tropes in unique and subversive ways.

Streaming on Amazon Prime.

Read part 2.

Advent, Day 8: Prepare Ye the Way

Victoria Emily Jones5 Comments

In those days John the Baptist appeared in the wilderness of Judea, proclaiming, “Repent, for the kingdom of heaven has come near.” This is the one of whom the prophet Isaiah spoke when he said,

“The voice of one crying out in the wilderness:
‘Prepare the way of the Lord;
make his paths straight.’”

—Matthew 3:1–3

LOOK: Painted staircases by Xomatok

Xomatok stairway
Painted staircase by Xomatok (b. 1985), Lima, Peru, 2021. All photos by Jeremy Flores.
Xomatok stairway
Xomatok stairway

From Colossal:

Artist Xomatok translates the vibrant, geometric motifs of handwoven Andean blankets, or llicllas, into large-scale works that mark the pathways through the hilly Alisos de Amauta neighborhood in Lima, Peru. Painted during the course of two months as part of the Municipality of Lima’s Pinta Lima Bicentenario, the 13 interventions were a collaborative undertaking by the artist and local residents, who transformed the public staircases that wind through the district into multi-level canvases. The resulting patterns are kaleidoscopic and highlight a spectrum of bright colors and symmetries often associated with the traditional textiles.

View more photos.

LISTEN: “Prepare Ye the Way of the Lord” by Stephen Schwartz, from the musical Godspell (1971)

The following video clip is the opening sequence of the 1973 film adaptation of the stage musical Godspell, which stars David Haskell as John the Baptist:

So. much. joy!

The ram’s horn issues its call. Ballet dancer, student, struggling actress, waitress, cab driver, businessman, businesswoman, parking attendant—they all leave their jobs, casting off their workplace trappings to accept John’s invitation to new and abundant life. They meet him at The Angel of the Waters, a sculpted fountain in New York City’s Central Park. They throw themselves into the fountain like children, receiving their baptism, their initiation into the upside-down kingdom of God.

But John notices Jesus standing at a distance, stripped down and ready for his own baptism. John’s lighthearted visage turns heavy for a moment in recognition that Jesus’s baptism is into suffering and death.

I wrote about Godspell two years ago when I featured one of its songs, “Turn Back, O Man,” to go along with a lectionary reading from Ezekiel. The musical is wacky, with the ragtag disciples forming a comic troupe to act out Jesus’s parables and teachings from the Gospel of Matthew. Some Christians find it all too silly and irreverent. Others, like me, see it as capturing an important element of the Good News, which is joy. This is what Godspell’s creator, John-Michael Tebelak, wanted to get across.

Perhaps the festive tone of the opening number seems disjunctive with what we know of John from the Gospels—a desert ascetic who preached about vipers and axes and fire and winnowing forks, warning his hearers of the wrath to come. Point taken.

However, while his message is a sobering one, repentance need not be a dour affair. We must take honest stock of our sins, yes, laying them out in confession before God, but scripture assures us many times over of God’s pardon, and that’s something to rejoice in! There is a joy to repentance and to following the way of Christ. Turning off the death-road, onto the road of life. As we unload the burdens that have accrued on our backs, we are freed to walk upright once again.

“Repent, for the kingdom of heaven is at hand!” John cries out on the riverbank.

I’d encourage you to read that not as a threat but as an invitation. The kingdom of heaven is marked by grace and possibility. It’s a pearl, it’s a seed, it’s a feast. When we embrace the gospel, our cities become a playground where we enact the values of Christ, childlike as they are, preparing the world to receive her coming King.

Juneteenth roundup: Documentary, playlists, Alvin Ailey’s Revelations

Victoria Emily Jones2 Comments

DOCUMENTARY: Juneteenth: Faith and Freedom, dir. Ya’Ke Smith: Released June 7 by Our Daily Bread Ministries, this film follows Where Ya From? podcast host Rasool Berry to Texas to talk with pastors, historians, activists, artists, and elected officials about the spiritual significance of America’s newest federal holiday, and to visit historic sites associated with it. You can watch the full seventy-five-minute film for free on YouTube. Here’s the trailer:

The interviewees, in order of appearance, are:

  • Dr. Michael W. Waters, pastor, Abundant Life African Methodist Episcopal Church
  • Sam Collins, president, Juneteenth Legacy Project
  • Lisa Fields, founder, Jude 3 Project
  • DJ Norman-Fox, historian, author of Juneteenth 101: Popular Myths and Forgotten Facts
  • Lawrence Thomas, Juneteenth organizer
  • Dr. Carey Latimore, history professor, Trinity University
  • Sharon Batiste Gillins, genealogist, Institute of Genealogy and Historical Research
  • Diane Henderson-Moore, member, Reedy Chapel AME
  • Deborah Blacklock-Sloan, historical researcher and genealogist, Rutherford B. H. Yates Museum
  • Jacqueline W. Bostic, chairman, Fourth Ward Redevelopment Authority
  • Jacqueline Bostic-McElroy, assistant district attorney, Fort Bend County
  • Rev. Art McElroy, senior pastor, Antioch Missionary Baptist Church
  • Opal Lee, civil rights activist and “grandmother of Juneteenth”
  • Lecrae, hip-hop artist

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SPOTIFY PLAYLISTS by Lara Downes (with commentary!):

>> Songs for Freedom: A Juneteenth Playlist (2021): Award-winning pianist and NPR radio host Lara Downes curated an excellent Spotify playlist for Juneteenth last year—a mix of jazz, classical, and soul. It is full of wonderful surprises, introducing me to the work of several African American composers, new and old, such as Wynton Marsalis’s The Democracy! Suite for jazz ensemble; a symphony by William Grant Still titled “Song of a New Race”; “Adoration” by Florence Price (originally written for organ but arranged here for violin and piano); “Fanfare on Amazing Grace” by Adolphus Hailstork; and “Startin’ Sumthin’” by Jeff Scott, a French hornist who performs “urban classical chamber music.”

There are also several well-known names—Billie Holiday, Mahalia Jackson, Aretha Franklin, Nina Simone, Duke Ellington, John Coltrane, Stevie Wonder—and more recent popular artists like Jon Batiste and Rhiannon Giddens. Batiste’s arrangement of “What a Wonderful World” is gorgeous, and the music video—wow (see below). It features a group of Black nuns having fun around London—picnicking on a park bench, traversing monkey bars, sharing the gospel with passersby, eating cotton candy, riding bumper cars. It captures the tone of the song perfectly.

From Downes’s list I also really like the blues song “I Knew I Could Fly” by Allison Russell and Leyla McCalla, excerpted in the following featurette. It’s from the album Songs of Our Native Daughters, which sheds light on African American women’s stories of struggle, resistance, and hope.

Be sure to read the NPR article that introduces the playlist. Downes calls out nine of the musical selections with blurbs that provide some background, and throughout there is a smattering of historical photographs of Black flourishing in and around Washington, DC, from 1904 onward, taken by the Black-owned Scurlock Studio.

YWCA camp for girls
YWCA camp for girls. Highland Beach, Maryland, 1930. This photo is from the Scurlock Studio Collection at the Smithsonian National Museum of American History.

>> Songs to Believe In: A Juneteenth Playlist (2022): As I was formatting this post I realized that Downes just published a brand-new playlist for Juneteenth 2022. I haven’t had time to listen yet, but it looks awesome. “I offer you a collection of music that insists on the promise of freedom, however long in coming,” she writes. “Music that counters the shrieking dissonance of conflict with the radiant warmth of its harmonies, that offers us comfort in our sorrow and sustenance in our struggle. Songs that ground us with the steadiness of their rhythms and embrace us in the lines of their melodies. Music that brings us hope and faith and even joy, urging us to stand and fight another day, reminding us that what we are celebrating on this holiday is our freedom to believe, even in the hardest of times.”

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YOUTUBE PLAYLIST: Juneteenth Playlist by Victoria Emily Jones. Nineteen songs of freedom and faith—gospel, pop, funk, R&B, and spirituals. I wanted to choose all live performances or music videos so that there’s a visual element to engage.

One of the songs is “Clap Praise” by Diane White-Clayton, performed by Selah Gospel Choir. It’s a setting of Psalm 47, which opens, “Clap your hands, all you peoples; shout to God with loud songs of joy!”

Dr. Diane White-Clayton is a composer, conductor, pianist, and lecturer in ethnomusicology specializing in Black sacred music. I love the exuberance and all the body percussion in this widely performed piece of hers. I learned about Selah Gospel Choir through Bridge Projects, an art gallery in Los Angeles where they recently performed. The choir was founded in 2007 “as a space for people who want to sing gospel music birthed by the spirit of the Black church and the ancestry of Black community but are either unable to find it in their home place of worship or do not identify with being in a church at all.”

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DANCE WORK: Revelations, choreographed by Alvin Ailey: This classic thirty-six-minute work choreographed by the pioneering Alvin Ailey premiered in New York in 1960 and since then has been performed continually around the globe. This particular performance at Lincoln Center premiered online on December 6, 2020, as part of Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater’s virtual season during the pandemic. “Using African American spirituals, song-sermons, gospel songs, and holy blues, Revelations fervently explores the places of deepest grief and holiest joy in the soul.” Ailey said it was born of the “blood memories” of his childhood in rural Texas and his affection for the Baptist church that nurtured him.

All the numbers are great, but my favorite is “Wade in the Water” (part of the “Take Me to the Water” sequence that begins at 9:41). Second favorite: “Fix Me” (5:22).

Pentecost roundup

Victoria Emily Jones5 Comments

SONGS: The Holy Spirit Prayer is a traditional Catholic prayer that’s sung at Mass on the feast of Pentecost: “Come, Holy Spirit; fill the hearts of your faithful, and kindle in them the fire of your love. Send forth your Spirit and they shall be created, and you shall renew the face of the earth. O God, who by the light of the Holy Spirit did instruct the hearts of the faithful, grant that by the same Holy Spirit we may be truly wise and ever enjoy his consolations, through Christ our Lord. Amen.” The following two songs are settings of the first part of this prayer.

>> “Kindle in Us Your Love” by Deanna Witkowski: This funky refrain by jazz composer Deanna Witkowski “works well as a gospel acclamation, prayer response, or opening song,” especially for Pentecost. I’m planning to introduce it to my Presbyterian congregation this Sunday. (For church services, Witkowski charges a licensing fee of just $3 per use.) You can purchase the piano score here; it also appears in the Voices Together hymnal. Hear a high school choir perform the piece in the video below, with Witkowski accompanying on keys.

Come, Holy Spirit
Kindle in us the fire of your love
Come, Holy Spirit
Kindle in us your love

>> “Holy Spirit, Come to Us” by Jacques Berthier (Taizé chant): Taizé is an ecumenical Christian monastic community in France comprising more than one hundred Catholic and Protestant brothers from some thirty different countries. They welcome in around a hundred thousand young pilgrims a year, who come for prayer, Bible study, and communal work and worship. The songs of Taizé use simple musical phrases and few words that are repeated. Composed in 1998, “Holy Spirit, Come to Us” is one of 232 songs Jacques Berthier wrote for Taizé. It consists of solo verses sung by a leader over an ostinato refrain sung by the people.

Holy Spirit, come to us
Kindle in us the fire of your love
Holy Spirit, come to us
Holy Spirit, come to us

Jesus said, “It is by your love for one another
That everyone will recognize you as my disciples.”

Jesus said, “No one has greater love than this:
To lay down one’s life for those one loves.”

We know love by this,
That Christ laid down his life for us.

This is love: it is not we who have loved God
But God who loved us.

Taizé songs may be sung in public worship settings free of charge, provided their simplicity is preserved (i.e., no elaborate arrangements are permitted); for other uses, see here.

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DIGITAL DOWNLOAD: Pentecost Party: Word & Wonder is offering a free twelve-page PDF of resources for celebrating Pentecost with children. Besides a list of party ideas, it includes an imaginative retelling of the Pentecost story from the perspective of a child, a prayer guide, prompts for talking about the Holy Spirit, coloring pages, and a pinwheel craft. On their website you will also find other family-friendly resources for the church year. [HT: Global Christian Worship]

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BLOG POST: “Whitsun Week” by Eleanor Parker: “The week following Pentecost is a lost holiday. From the Middle Ages until the early 20th century the period around Whitsun was the principal summer holiday of the year – especially Whit-Monday”—which is June 6 this year. “It was the time for fairs, Morris dancing, games, ale-drinking, school and church processions, weddings, wandering into the countryside, and generally having a good time.” Gooseberries and cheesecakes were broken out for the occasion, and communities engaged in fun activities like cricket, archery, sack races, and donkey derbies.

British medievalist Eleanor Parker compiles several sources that describe the Whitsuntide festivities of medieval western Europe and calls her readers to revive the week’s outdoor merrymaking!

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SHORT FILM: Stickmatch: Created in 2020 by London-born animator William Crook, this twenty-second stop-motion animation uses autumn leaves to simulate flames. [HT: Colossal]

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Here’s a new Spotify playlist I made for the month of June.

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Previous posts on the blog that are related, either directly or indirectly, to Pentecost include:

Roundup: Spirituality of food docuseries; a psalm and a jazz band walk into a bar; and more

Victoria Emily Jones1 Comment

DOCUMENTARY SERIES: Taste and See, dir. Andrew Brumme: “Taste and See is a documentary series exploring the spirituality of food with farmers, chefs, bakers, and winemakers engaging with food as a profound gift from God. Their stories serve as a meditation on the beauty, mystery, and wonder to be found in every meal shared at the table.” The Rabbit Room, who is partnering with them for a virtual cinema event (see below), says, “If, in some blessed alternate universe, Robert Farrar Capon had decided to make a documentary with Terrence Malick, guided by the foundational wisdom of Wendell Berry, then they would have made something like the pilot of Taste and See.”

Some of the people you see in the series trailer are Shamu Sadeh, cofounder of Adamah Farm and Fellowship in Connecticut, which integrates organic farming, Jewish learning, sustainable living, and contemplative spiritual practice (Adamah is the focus of the pilot film); The Soul of Wine: Savoring the Goodness of God author Gisela Kreglinger, who grew up on a winery that has been in her family for generations and who leads wine pilgrimages in Burgundy and Franconia (“a spiritual, cultural, and sensory exploration of wine”); Norman Wirzba, a professor at Duke who teaches and publishes at the intersections of theology, philosophy, ecology, and agrarian and environmental studies (see, e.g., his Food and Faith: A Theology of Eating); Kendall Vanderslice, a North Carolina baker, author, and founder of Edible Theology, which offers “curriculum, community, and communications that connect the Communion table to the kitchen table”; and Joel Salatin, who raises livestock on his Polyface Farm in Swoope, Virginia, in the Shenandoah Valley.

You can buy tickets to a virtual screening of the hour-long pilot, which is happening twice daily from June 3 to June 19 and includes exclusive access to a panel discussion with singer-songwriter Andrew Peterson, theologian Norman Wirzba, and director Andrew Brumme. Revenue from ticket sales will fund the production of future films, some of which are already in the works. “The funding raised will determine how far we can go and which stories we can pursue,” Brumme tells me. “We’re hopeful the virtual event will bring together enough of a supportive base of people who want to see this series made.” There’s also an option on the website to donate.

To hear more from the director, especially about the inspiration behind the series, check out the interview Drew Miller conducted with him.

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DISCUSSION PANEL: “Art Between the Sacred and the Secular,” June 6, 2022, Akademie der Künste, Berlin: Moderated by the Rev. Professor Ben Quash, this free public event (reserve tickets here) puts in conversation artist Alicja Kwade; Dr. María López-Fanjul y Díez del Corral, senior curator of the Bode Museum and the Gemäldegalerie; and Dr. Neil MacGregor, former director of the British Museum and the National Gallery, London. The questions they’ll address (see below) sound really intriguing!

Kwade, Alicja_Causal Emergence
Alicja Kwade (Polish, 1979–), Causal Emergence (December 2020), 2019. Watch hands on cardboard, framed, 175 × 175 cm.

“The abiding power of Christian motifs, ideas and styles in a host of modern and contemporary works that superficially look un- or anti-Christian indicates that visual art and Christian tradition have not become complete strangers. This invites analysis and understanding.

“How have Christian artworks and artistic traditions found new articulations, caused new departures, or provoked new subversions in the last 100 to 150 years? What forms of engagement between theology and modern and contemporary art do such developments in the relationship between art and Christianity invite and reward?

“How do viewers (Christian and non-Christian) interact with historical Christian art today, and how do modern sensibilities affect our viewing of earlier Christian artworks and artistic traditions?

“Is contemporary art an alternative to religion or can it sometimes be an ally? How do contemporary art and religion each respond to human experiences of the absurd or the tragic? What do contemporary art and the spaces in which we encounter it, tell us about the histories of both Western Christianity and Western secularisation?”

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FUNDRAISER: New Ordinary Time Album: The indie folk trio Ordinary Time is one of my favorite musical groups—I heard them in concert at a church here in Baltimore a few years ago!—so I’m really excited to see that they’re working on their sixth full-length album, their first since 2016. It will be produced by the esteemed Isaac Wardell, founder of Bifrost Arts and the Porter’s Gate. Per usual, it will comprise a mix of original and classic sacred songs, including the new “I Will Trust,” demoed in the second video below. Help fund their production costs through this Indiegogo campaign, which ends June 15. A donation of just $25 will get you an early download of the album.

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SONG: “Oh Give Thanks (Psalm 107)” by Wendell Kimbrough: Wendell Kimbrough is among today’s foremost singer-songwriters engaging with the Psalms. His adaptation of Psalm 107 [previously] is one of his most popular songs, ever since the original studio recording released in 2016. Now he’s recorded a live version with a New Orleans jazz band! It is available on most streaming and purchase platforms.

The music video was shot in February at a bar in Daphne, Alabama, with some eighty of Kimbrough’s friends and supporters, and it premiered May 13. It was his way of saying farewell to his Church of the Apostles community in Fairhope, Alabama, where he served as worship leader and artist-in-residence for eight years. He left this spring to take a new job as uptown artist-in-residence at Church of the Incarnation in Dallas.

“From the time I wrote ‘Oh Give Thanks,’ I always pictured it as a bar tune, specifically set in New Orleans,” Kimbrough says. “The image Psalm 107 conjures for me is a group of friends sitting together swapping stories of God’s deliverance and raising their glasses to celebrate his goodness.” He has noted that some people are uneasy about singing the line “We cried like drunken sailors” in church, but he points out that it’s there in the Old Testament psalm! (Recounting how God rescued a group of men from a storm at sea, the psalmist says that as the waves rose, “they reeled and staggered like drunkards / and were at their wits’ end. Then they cried to the Lord in their trouble, / and he brought them out from their distress,” vv. 27–28).

To learn how to play the song on guitar, see Kimbrough’s video tutorial. You may also want to check out the songs of thanksgiving I compiled on Spotify.

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CHURCH ARCHITECTURE: Santa Maria Goretti Church, Mormanno, Italy: In 2013 architect Mario Cucinella won a competition held by Italy’s assembly of Catholic bishops to create the new parish church of Santa Maria Goretti in the hilltop town of Mormanno in Calabria. Because a third of the funds had to be raised locally, the project wasn’t completed until last year. Cucinella says that gave him time to win over its most important constituency: the elderly women who go to Mass every day, and who at first “were suspicious of its modernism.” [HT: My Modern Met]

Cucinella designed an elegantly minimalist concrete building with sinuous surfaces that form the shape of a four-leaf clover, a reinterpretation, Cucinella says, of the shape of Baroque churches. The enclosure has only a few openings. “On its north side, two walls part to create an entrance—while also contributing edges to a cross cut into the curves and lit by LEDs at night. On its south side, a small window is positioned to focus afternoon sunlight on a crucifix on July 6,” Maria Goretti’s birthday.

Santa Maria Goretti Church
Santa Maria Goretti Church, Mormanno, Italy, designed by Mario Cucinella Architects, completed 2021. Photo: Duccio Malagamba.
Photo: Duccio Malagamba
Maraniello, Giuseppe_Baptismal font
Baptismal font by Giuseppe Maraniello. Photo: Duccio Malagamba.

Inside, the walls are hand-finished in plaster mixed with hemp fibers and lime, which give them a mottled, earth-toned look. The most dominant feature of the interior is the twelve-foot-deep scrim that falls from the ceiling in swirls, filtering in sunlight. Artist Giuseppe Maraniello (b. 1945) was commissioned to create the lectern, tabernacle, baptismal font, and figure of the Virgin Mary, while the simple steel and wood seating is by Mario Cucinella Design. Click on any of the three photos above to view more.

The church’s namesake, one of the youngest saints to be canonized, was stabbed to death in 1902 at age eleven while resisting a rape. She is the patron saint of purity, young women, and victims of sexual assault.