You desire to know something of my Religion. It is the first time I have been questioned upon it: But I do not take your Curiosity amiss, and shall endeavour in a few Words to gratify it. Here is my Creed: I believe in one God, Creator of the Universe. That He governs it by his Providence. That he ought to be worshipped. That the most acceptable Service we can render to him, is doing Good to his other Children. That the Soul of Man is immortal, and will be treated with Justice in another Life respecting its Conduct in this. These I take to be the fundamental Principles of all sound Religion, and I regard them as you do, in whatever Sect I meet with them. As to Jesus of Nazareth, my Opinion of whom you particularly desire, I think the System of Morals and his Religion as he left them to us, the best the World ever saw, or is likely to see; but I apprehend it has received various corrupting Changes, and I have with most of the present Dissenters in England, some Doubts as to his Divinity: tho’ it is a Question I do not dogmatise upon, having never studied it, and think it needless to busy myself with it now, when I expect soon an Opportunity of knowing the Truth with less Trouble. I see no harm however in its being believed, if that Belief has the good Consequence as probably it has, of making his Doctrines more respected and better observed, especially as I do not perceive that the Supreme takes it amiss, by distinguishing the Believers, in his Government of the World, with any particular Marks of his Displeasure. I shall only add respecting myself, that having experienced the Goodness of that Being, in conducting me prosperously thro’ a long Life, I have no doubt of its Continuance in the next, tho’ without the smallest Conceit of meriting such Goodness.
Benjamin Franklin, excerpt of a letter that Franklin wrote to Ezra Stiles, President of Yale on March 9, 1790, six weeks prior to Franklin’s death.
Continuing our series on screen portrayals of Pilate that I began in 2011 during Holy Week. The posts on portrayals of Pilate by Rod Steiger, Richard Boone, Barry Dennen, Hristov Shopov, Telly Savalas, Frank Thring, Stephen Russell, Greg Hicks, Cyril Richard, Stephen Moyer, Dennis King, Keith Mitchell, Leif Erickson, Peter Firth, David Bowie, Lowell Gilmore, Hurd Hatfield, Vincent Regan, Arthur Kennedy, Gary Oldman and Ian Holm may be viewed here, here, here, herehere , here, here, here, here , here ,here,here,here , here , here , here , here , here, here , here and here.
In Asbaek’s portrayal of Pilate we encounter a hirsute and ruthless Pilate. In his ruthlessness, the portrayal of Pilate reflects that of the Jewish historian Josephus who lived in the latter half of the first century. That portrayal has always been at odds with the more nuanced picture of Pilate contained in the Gospels. I have never viewed these different portraits of the man as necessarily in conflict. Depending upon events, a man might act quite differently than one might expect based upon their past. Pilate had two jobs from the Emperor: keep the peace and keep taxes flowing. Pilate was inclined to be merciful to Christ until Caiaphas skillfully convinced Pilate that he would accuse him of falling down on both his jobs if Christ were not crucified.
As to Pilate having a beard, most Roman aristocrats were clean shaven at the time, and had been since the end of the Second Punic War, and a beard was considered a Greek affectation. It is unlikely that Pilate would have had a beard, especially considering the hot and humid climate of Judaea, but some Romans did have beards, usually as a sign of fashionable youthful rebellion or as a sign of mourning.
Continuing our series on screen portrayals of Pilate that I began in 2011 during Holy Week. The posts on portrayals of Pilate by Rod Steiger, Richard Boone, Barry Dennen, Hristov Shopov, Telly Savalas, Frank Thring, Stephen Russell, Greg Hicks, Cyril Richard, Stephen Moyer, Dennis King, Brian Mitchell, Leif Erickson, Peter Firth, David Bowie, Lowell Gilmore, Hurd Hatfield, Vincent Regan, Arthur Kennedy and Gary Oldman may be viewed here, here, here, herehere , here, here, here, here , here ,here,here,here , here , here , here , here , here, here and here.
Bilbo Baggins as Pilate. Actor Ian Holm voice acted Pilate in the claymation version of the life of Christ in The Miracle Maker (2000). British actors have a long history of being cast in roles as Roman aristocrats. However Ian Holm does the role of Pilate without a trace of a British accent. He portrays Pilate as quite stern but not unsympathetic to Jesus who he finds completely puzzling. When Caiaphas states that Pilate is no friend of Caesar if he spares Jesus, Pilate gives up in disgust, washes his hands and orders the crucifixion of Jesus.
Continuing our series on screen portrayals of Pilate that I began in 2011 during Holy Week. The posts on portrayals of Pilate by Rod Steiger, Richard Boone, Barry Dennen, Hristov Shopov, Telly Savalas, Frank Thring, Stephen Russell, Greg Hicks, Cyril Richard, Stephen Moyer, Dennis King, Brian Mitchell, Leif Erickson, Peter Firth, David Bowie, Lowell Gilmore, Hurd Hatfield, Vincent Regan and Arthur Kennedy may be viewed here, here, here, herehere , here, here, here, here , here ,here,here,here , here , here , here , here , here and here.
Gary Oldman, who won an Oscar for his portrayal of Winston Churchill in Darkest Hour (2017), assumed the role of Pilate in the 1999 CBS miniseries Jesus. I cannot find a clip of his performance on the internet, but we do have an interview in which he discusses Pilate and the role of Pilate:
Oldman says that in this version the Romans are to blame for the execution of Jesus with Pilate the consummate politician leading the plot against Jesus. Certainly almost nothing in Scripture to support this viewpoint, but it certainly is one that has been frequently raised.
Something for the weekend. I Hate Snow. Courtesy of Winter Storm Uma my little slice of Central Illinois is under a winter storm advisory today. This after a week of spring like weather. Depressing but such is life in the Midwest where I have seen “Winter” occasionally in May.
It is these men at the front who are now making all Americans, born and unborn, forever their debtors. They are the men who have paid with
their bodies for their soul's desire. Let no one pity them, whatever their fate, for they have seen the mighty days and have risen level to the need of the
mighty days. And let no one pity the wives and mothers and fathers whose husbands and lovers and sons now face death in battle for the mightiest of
all high causes. Our hearts are wrung with sorrow and anxiety, but our heads are held aloft with pride. It is a terrible thing that our loved ones should face
the great danger, but it would be a far more terrible thing if, whatever the danger, they were not treading the hard path of duty and honor.
Theodore Roosevelt, April 2, 1918
The thirty-fourth in my on-going series on the poetry of Rudyard Kipling. The other posts in the series may be read here, here , here , here, here , here, here, here, here, here, here, here , here, here, here , here, here, here , here, here, here , here, here , here , here , here , here, here, here , here, here , here and here. Kipling wrote many poems during his career. This poem is manifestly not one of them. The poem is a lament by a man who lost his only son in the Great War. From first to last Kipling believed that Germany was a menace and had to be beaten. After the War he called for a harsh peace to make certain that German could not wage a world war again. Up to his death in 1936 Kipling warned that Germany was still a danger to the world. This should be clearly understood since there has been an attempt to misinterpret, willfully or not, some of Kipling’s war poems as a turn towards pacifism, an interpretation that Kipling would have rejected with a snort of contempt. No, in his poems Kipling blamed British governments for allowing Germany to grow strong enough to bring about the Great War and that his son, and a million other British and Empire men, had to die to correct the folly of British statesmanship. When I read this poem I think of future generations and the price they will pay for the fashionable lies and follies of our day. The heartbreaking question of “But who shall return us the children?” should be remembered by all who aspire to rule nations.
(“The Honours of War”—A Diversity of Creatures)
These were our children who died for our lands: they were dear in our sight.
We have only the memory left of their home-treasured sayings and laughter.
The price of our loss shall be paid to our hands, not another’s hereafter.
Neither the Alien nor Priest shall decide on it. That is our right.
But who shall return us the children?
At the hour the Barbarian chose to disclose his pretences,
And raged against Man, they engaged, on the breasts that they bared for us,
The first felon-stroke of the sword he had long-time prepared for us—
Their bodies were all our defence while we wrought our defences.
They bought us anew with their blood, forbearing to blame us,
Those hours which we had not made good when the Judgment o’ercame us.
They believed us and perished for it. Our statecraft, our learning
Delivered them bound to the Pit and alive to the burning
Whither they mirthfully hastened as jostling for honour—
Nor since her birth has our Earth seen such worth loosed upon her.
Nor was their agony brief, or once only imposed on them.
The wounded, the war-spent, the sick received no exemption:
Being cured they returned and endured and achieved our redemption,
Hopeless themselves of relief, till Death, marveling, closed on them.
That flesh we had nursed from the first in all cleanness was given
To corruption unveiled and assailed by the malice of Heaven—
By the heart-shaking jests of Decay where it lolled in the wires—
To be blanched or gay-painted by fumes— to be cindered by fires—
To be senselessly tossed and retossed in stale mutilation
From crater to crater. For that we shall take expiation.
Fate has a way of picking unlikely material,
Greasy-haired second lieutenants of French artillery,
And bald-headed, dubious, Roman rake-politicians.
Stephen Vincent Benet
I think it would have amused the Romans of Caesar’s generation if they could have learned that the assassination of Julius Caesar would eventually receive immortality through a play written more than 16 centuries after the event by a barbarian playwright in the Tin Islands that Caesar had briefly invaded. It would have tickled their well developed concept of the ludicrous, judging from Roman comedy.
The shade of Caesar probably would have objected to his portrayal by Shakespeare. Caesar comes off as a stuffy dodo, almost reduced to a plot device, his assassination setting the play in motion. To his contemporaries Caesar was a prodigy of nature. Coming from a largely impoverished aristocratic family of no special note, Caesar rose to the front rank of the Roman political scene largely due to his political daring and his mastery of the intricate Roman political machinations of his time. His military genius, which so fascinates us, he was able to exercise because of his political ability and intrigues, his political career in no way resting upon his military career. His military genius did allow him to seize power and to begin the funeral ceremonies for the Republic which had been manifestly dying since the time of the Gracchi brothers decades before the birth of Caesar. Caesar was a great destroyer in historical terms, but it would be up to his nephew Octavian, who lacked all of Caesar’s military skill but who was a greater political genius, to erect on the ruins of the Republic the Principate, that would morph in time into the Roman Empire, all while Octavian/Augustus protested that he was a Republican and that he was merely restoring the Republic.
The Ides of March deserve to be carefully marked in our contemporary time, because it demonstrates how swiftly a political system of great antiquity could be swept away, and one man rule installed. Republics tend to be fragile things, and tend to die unless carefully tended and guarded.
BRUTUS
Be patient till the last. Romans, countrymen, and lovers! hear me for my cause, and be silent, that you may hear: believe me for mine honour, and have respect to mine honour, that you may believe: censure me in your wisdom, and awake your senses, that you may the better judge. If there be any in this assembly, any dear friend of Caesar’s, to him I say, that Brutus’ love to Caesar was no less than his. If then that friend demand why Brutus rose against Caesar, this is my answer: –Not that I loved Caesar less, but that I loved Rome more. Had you rather Caesar were living and die all slaves, than that Caesar were dead, to live all free men? As Caesar loved me, I weep for him; as he was fortunate, I rejoice at it; as he was valiant, I honour him: but, as he was ambitious, I slew him. There is tears for his love; joy for his fortune; honour for his valour; and death for his ambition. Who is here so base that would be a bondman? If any, speak; for him have I offended. Who is here so rude that would not be a Roman? If any, speak; for him have I offended. Who is here so vile that will not love his country? If any, speak; for him have I offended. I pause for a reply.
All
None, Brutus, none.
BRUTUS
Then none have I offended. I have done no more to Caesar than you shall do to Brutus. The question of his death is enrolled in the Capitol; his glory not extenuated, wherein he was worthy, nor his offences enforced, for which he suffered death.
William Shakespeare, Julius Caesar, Act III, Scene 2
(I posted this at The American Catholic and I thought the film mavens of Almost Chosen People might enjoy it.)
This is the nature of war. By protecting others, you save yourselves.
Kambei, leader of the Seven Samurai
Dave Griffey at Daffey Thoughts takes a look at Akira Kurosawa’s masterpiece, The Seven Samurai.
I finally did it. My entire life, I’ve heard of the almost mythical movie The Seven Samurai. Considered one of the greatest foreign language films by American critics and universally praised by critics around the world, I just never got around to watching it. When I did look for it, it was difficult to find. And when you could find it, it was always expensive.
Finally, this last Christmas, The Seven Samurai ended up under the tree. Because of its length of 3 1/2 hours, we couldn’t find time to see it. Since the two oldest have moved on with college, they’re not around to watch things like they used to, but they wanted to watch it with us for the first time. So it wasn’t until Tuesday night that we could get everyone together for the first viewing.
It was worth the wait. Long and short, it lived up to the hype and then some. Everyone knows of its influence. We all know The Magnificent Seven was just an American version of the film. We know that from Guns of Navarone to A Bug’s Life, the movie has been considered one of the most influential and copied movies of all time.
Despite this high expectation, and I can’t put my finger on why, it lived up to all I had heard and more. I think, when the dust settles, it was the interaction between the players. Oddly, in the end (without giving away too much), the seven Samurai do little of the fighting, instead funneling the fight over to the village farmers and letting them do most of the heavy lifting. The movie is mostly about the relationships between the villagers and the Samurai, and the Samurai (technically mostly Ronin) and each other.
But here’s what dawned on me. In America, there is this notion that only in America, and all because of that infamous ‘Code’ of the 1930s, our films were repressed and unable to express themselves openly. We have this notion that the sex and drugs culture, with explicit and open and unrestrained sexuality and hedonism, accompanied by increasingly gory and bloody violence shown graphically in film and on television, were all just the logical result of the ‘Code’ finally crumbling and true artistic expression emerging.
Furthermore, we are now just getting back to how it always was, when sex and sex and graphic sex and gore and graphic violence were just the way it should have been or always was or both. Without saying it directly, we have this notion that we’re finally getting things back to the rest of the world, where gay sex, group sex, graphic violence, drugs and all the explicit ‘invite the camera in the bedroom’ movies were common around the world.
Except, it wasn’t. The Seven Samurai, a movie where hired guns come in to save a village from rampaging bandits, is violent. There are dozens of deaths. And yet, you never really see much. No blood. No gore. No guts hanging out. You see a few fights at the end. You see some duels. But no explicit violence. You see a case where a village girl and a young Samurai get together in a barn, much to the father’s dismay. Later, the head Samurai chuckles that they’ll expect more from the youngster now that he has ‘become a man.’ We all know what that means, just as I’m sure audiences did back then. But they didn’t show it. And all that restraint without the evil Hollywood Code, driven by the nefarious Catholic Church.
And that got me to thinking, as I am wont to do. The fact is, there was no real ‘Hollywood Code’, at least any different than anywhere else in the world. Oh, there was a code. And it had its demands and its expectations from films, just like today. If you think on it, there isn’t a lack of movies coming out of Hollywood that question homosexual normality, or challenge abortion rights, or reflect on the failures of the Civil Rights movement over the last quarter of a century, because there is nobody out there imagining these things. They simply aren’t allowed. If they were made, they would be boycotted, banned, attacked and even sued. Codes have always been around. I’m sure they always will be.
And not just in America. Being a fan of old, silent movies, I’ve seen my share from around the world before there was this mythical Hollywood Code. Heck, a few predate Hollywood. Sometimes you get a little more than you would in 1930s or 1940s Hollywood fare. Sometimes you might catch a bit of skin in some old, silent Italian film, or see some more direct examples of innocents dying in an old Soviet propaganda film. If there was any nudity at all, it came off as more artsy than anything sexual, and that’s stretching it since I don’t recall anything, but I’m willing to allow for the possibility. Yes, you could get a little more nitty-gritty at times, like the original King Kong, but like 1954’s The Seven Samurai, there just isn’t a case of flagrant, porn like sex and graphic blood and gore violence that I have found. There just isn’t. Anywhere. Around the world.
This is something that has arisen only over the last fifty years or so of film making and other visual entertainment. Sure, the ‘themes’ were there. Samurai was about the real, down in the trenches lives of these legendary warriors as much as it was anything. It was taking the chivalrous knight down a notch, by showing warts and all. But it didn’t show it with the camera. It showed it with the dialogue and the mind of the viewers.
Somewhere, however, filmmakers in America, Europe and around the world began showing us, rather than pointing our minds to think it through. By the fifties, violence was starting to creep into the explicit levels. By the sixties, sex was getting more open as violence became more graphic. No longer did a mixture of camera angles and convenient barricades mixed with clever dialogue point the audience to what happened. Nope. By the late sixties, the cameras were going into the bedroom or showing the gunshots and saying ‘here you go, this is what happened.’
It was about then that the same began happening around the world, to a greater or lesser extent. By the late seventies, everything was on the table. Explicit sex (not counting the porn film industry that had been developing apace for a couple decades by then) and graphic violence were the name of the game.
And it was right around that time, if memory serves, that the mass killings began, at least as we know them today. And not just here in the old US of A. Of course movies and entertainment around the world have become pretty graphic – including in Japan. And it seems that mass killings are quite the global phenomenon. Oh, not the shootings like we have. But mass knifings, mass bombings, basically attempts to kill as many innocent people you might or might not know as possible.
Could it be connected? Based on the film record, there simply was no culture at the dawn of the film industry that threw all manner of graphic sex, violence, gore and smut out there for public consumption. Even outside of the Hollywood ‘Code’, there seemed to be pretty strict codes around the world. But all of that changed by the mid to late 20th century.
Could there be a connection with this relatively new phenomenon of people seeking to slaughter as many innocents as possible for no other reason than to slaughter them, and the rather graphic level that entertainment has risen to? We already elevate celebrity and entertainment to the place that religion and national identity enjoyed in ages past. Could there be a connection?
It turns out that this whole ‘Code’ thing wasn’t reserved for America, just like this phenomenon of mass killing of innocents isn’t confined to America. Because the breakdown of barriers in cultural output, and the rise of mass killings through terrorism and personal crime seem linked in the timeline, could there be a connection worth examining?
Just curious and sort of thinking out loud after watching one fine romp of a film.
Go here to comment. In his capacity for endless violence Man reveals himself as lower than the beasts. In his capacity for self-sacrificial violence in defense of others Man stands above the angels. Once upon a time, film makers understood that central truth of the human condition.
Something for the weekend. O God Beyond All Praising. Written by Michael Perry in 1982, it served as the recessional hymn at the funeral of Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia on February 20, 2016. The tune is Thaxted, the hymn tune written by Gustav Holst from the middle section of the Jupiter movement of Holst’s The Planets.
Donald R. McClarey
Paul Zummo
Almost Chosen People 