Two New Titles on Beauty and Silence
by Mark McInroy
In every issue, book review editor Mark McInroy supplies notes on books recently released in theology and the arts. He is an assistant professor of systematic theology at the University of St. Thomas, and has published academic examinations of Origen of Alexandria, Martin Luther, Karl Barth, Karl Rahner, and Hans Urs von Balthasar. He is the author of Balthasar on the Spiritual Senses: Perceiving Splendour (Oxford University Press, 2014), and was a 2015 recipient of the prestigious Manfred Lautenschlaeger Award for Theological Promise.
In every issue, book review editor Mark McInroy supplies notes on books recently released in theology and the arts. He is an assistant professor of systematic theology at the University of St. Thomas, and has published academic examinations of Origen of Alexandria, Martin Luther, Karl Barth, Karl Rahner, and Hans Urs von Balthasar. He is the author of Balthasar on the Spiritual Senses: Perceiving Splendour (Oxford University Press, 2014), and was a 2015 recipient of the prestigious Manfred Lautenschlaeger Award for Theological Promise.
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Makoto Fujimura, Silence and Beauty (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 2016).
In Silence and Beauty, internationally renowned visual artist Makoto Fujimura offers a close reading of Shusaku Endo’s Silence that combines elements of autobiography, literary and art criticism, and cultural and political history. Inspired by a conversation with Martin Scorcese, Fujimura takes up issues of faith, betrayal, suffering, and evil as found in Endo’s novel and modern-day Japan. Chapter 1, “A Journey into Silence: Pulverization,” begins with an account of Fujimura’s first encounter with the fumi-e, (literally, “stepping blocks”), which are images of Christ and Mary that Japanese Christians were forced to walk over as evidence of having renounced their faith during the seventeenth-century Tokugawa shogunate persecution of Christians. Fujimura recounts being haunted by how very smooth the images were from repeated exposure; as his own doctoral thesis he used the nihonga method of traditional Japanese painting (which involves pulverizing pigments by hand) for abstract pieces laid |
on the floor of his presentation space. Endo, too, was profoundly struck by the fumi-e that he saw at a key point in his life. Especially powerful were the blackened footprints that indicated repeated stepping on the image. It was from this encounter and the “failed faith” (41) it exposed—in both the history of Japanese Christians and himself—that Endo began to conceive Silence. Chapter 2, “A Culture of Beauty: Cultural Context for Silence,” analyzes the tendencies toward hiding pain in Japanese culture, and many of Fujimura’s reflections in this chapter are centered around his notion that “Endo’s genius is not just to look starkly into the darkness but to create characters and language that somehow inexplicably move beyond it” (58). He manages, according to Fujimura, “to find beauty in its nadir” (58). Chapter 3, “Ambiguity and Faith: Japan, the Ambiguous, and Myself,” begins with an observation about the high regard for silence in Japanese culture (the perfect marriage involves hardly speaking to one’s spouse) and the ambiguity that this silence inevitably brings. This acceptance of ambiguity not only afforded practical benefits to Japanese Christians who needed to mask their faith during persecution (often by making their Christian worship appear to be an esoteric Buddhist sect). It also, in Endo’s works, informs faith as “a way to affirm the ambiguity of God’s working through the suffering of human existence” (77). In Chapter 4, “Ground Zero,” Fujimura first narrates his personal, intense experience of September 11, 2001 (he and his family lived three blocks from the World Trade Center) and his later travel to the true “Ground Zero” in Nagasaki. With acute awareness of the resonances of the phrase, Fujimura then terms as “Ground Zero conditions” those events of massive upheaval and shifts in consciousness, which may or may not be triggered by violence. Fujimura then conveys his movement toward Christian faith, which resulted in a “Ground Zero” realignment of his own priorities and self-understanding. In Chapter 5, “Fumi-e Culture,” Fujimura characterizes Japan’s fumi-e culture as more than an isolated period in the seventeenth century. Instead, it has produced “a culture that forces individuals to suppress their most treasured identity”; it is a “unique, attenuated crucible of trauma, [which] slowly seeped deep beneath the surface of society over 250 years” (104). To Fujimura, Endo manages to convey to his readers the psychological trauma of fumi-eculture and the “culture of vacillation” that it has produced. Chapter 6, “Hidden Faith Revealed,” insists that, although Endo does not mention Sen no Rikyu (1522-1591) in Silence, his presence permeates the novel. Rikyu was forced to commit suicide by Hideyoshi (Japan’s “great unifier”) in 1591, and Fujimura sees a connection between “the blood that soaked the tatami mats of Rikyu’s teahouse and the blood of the martyrs paraded through the streets of Kyoto only a decade later” (136). Chapter 7, “The Redemption of Father Rodrigues,” notes the influence of Graham Greene’s The Power and the Glory on Endo, especially the “whiskey priest” in Greene’s novel, whose failures are echoed by Father Rodrigues in Silence. Here Fujimura makes the profound point that, in failing by stepping on the fumi-e, Father Rodrigues “inverts into his genuine faith, faith not dependent on his religious status or on his own merit, but faith in grace” (147). Looking at the novel as a whole, Fujimura contends that it is a missional work, not by “triumphantly regarding the island of Japan as an imperialistic exploit; rather, it is the mission of entering deeply into the psyche of Japanese hearts struggling with trauma” (148). Chapter 8, “The Aroma,” begins with an account of the chief points raised in two recent studies of the widespread maladies afflicting modern Japan: Michael Zielenziger’s Shutting out the Sun: How Japan Created Its Own Lost Generation (2006) and Anne Allison’s Precarious Japan (2013). Fujimura then claims that Endo’s description of Father Rodrigues after he stepped on the fumi-e and was under house arrest is the daily reality of young adults in Japan today in their feelings of confinement and limitation by their society. Fujimura insists that, although Japan as a whole has become a “hikikomori” nation in its lack of desire to be missional to the world (not just religiously, but in terms of its culture), “What Japan offers that no other culture can offer is the integration of nature with culture, and the distinct reality of [beauty]” (201). The the final chapter of the book, “Mission Beyond the Waves,” Fujimura suggests that “Japan can become a sending country, exporting its integrated beauty and the value of silence” (203). Silence, in particular, receives the last word offered by Fujimura, “In the mystery of silence and beauty God speaks through our broken lives facing our Ground Zero. In the layers revealed through the worn-smooth surface of a fumi-e is a true portrait of Christ” (212).
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Freek L. Baaker, Mathilde van Dijk, Leo van der Tuin, Marjeet Verbeek, eds., Blessed are the Eyes that Catch Divine Whispering: Silence and Religion in Film (Marburg: Schüren, 2015).
The editors of Blessed are the Eyes that Catch Divine Whispering: Silence and Religion in Film have assembled an ambitious volume offering a diverse set of multi-disciplinary perspectives on the uses and religious meanings of silence in contemporary and classic films. The study is arranged in two sections, each of which contains seven chapters. Part 1 is called “Framing Silence and Religion,” and Part 2 is “Attributing Meaning to Silence.” Heidi de Mare’s “Salient Silence: Some Principles of the Visual Formation |
in Crash (2004)” examines a moment of silence at the end of Crash that plays an integral role in, as de Mare puts it, “supra-individual experiences in terms of transcendence, binding and bonding, [which are] so essential in religion” (35). In Chapter 2, “Wagner at the Movie Theatre: Classical Music as Supporting Diegetic Technique in Contemporary Cinema, Illustrated by means of Lars von Trier’s Melancholia,” Christian Wessely argues that the classical music selected by the director leads one to interpret the ambiguous ending of the movie as a “parable on the behavior of [hu]mankind in the face of inevitable extinction” (42). In chapter 3, “Silence Resonating in the Cinematographic Space,” Sylvain de Bleeckere analyzes two films, Into Great Silence and Des Hommes et des Dieux. The author claims that silence communicates importantly distinct theological meanings in the two films. In Chapter 4, “Towards a Non-Symbolic Use of Silence: Bergman’s Winter Light,” Frank Blaakmeer invites his reader to reconsider silence, not as a simple absence of noise, but instead as having its own “sound.” Chapter 5, Kutter Callaway’s “The Sound of Silence: Westerns, Wisdom, and Myth,” begins with the portrayal of silence in 1 Kings 19:1-18, in which Elijah hears “a sound of thin silence” that mediates the divine. Callaway connects this to American Westerns, in which wide landscape shots offer “visual silence” that is a “meaning-filled space” (91). In Chapter 6, “The Silence of Flowers: A Gender-specific Analysis of Mystical Moments in Hana-Bi (Takeshi Kitano, 1998) and Bright Star (Jane Campion, 2009),” Jonneke Bekkenkamp notes the ways in which flowers function to “visualize mystical moments” in both films. Part 1 is completed by Chapter 7, “Going to the Movies in Indonesia,” in which Lucien van Liere analyzes cinematic treatments of the failed 1965 coup d’état and the mass killings that followed it.
Part 2 begins with R. Ruard Ganzevoort’s “Silence Speaks: Theological Musings on Silence in Religion and Film.” The chapter examines four different types of silence: repressive, transforming, ominous, and transcending, which all appear to be “powerful candidates for the reflection on cinema and religion” (125). Particularly valuable is Ganzevoort’s observation that all four kinds of silence involve ambiguity, or “an anti-structure that opens up the patterned world of action and meaning by creating gaps and fissures” (137). In Chapter 9, “Silence-effects: Frederick Wiseman’s Films as Parables,” Alyda Faber claims that the silence of Wiseman’s films is analogous to the silence of parables in that both forms of silence “open possibilities of the unsaid and unknown” (139). Chapter 10, Tjeu van den Berk’s “The Threefold Silence after the Death of God Filmed by Bergman (1963), Campion (1993) and von Trier (2011),” analyzes Ingmar Bergman’s The Silence, Campion’s The Piano, and von Trier’s Melancholia. The three films are emblematic, to van den Berk, of a world without God, or at best a world in which God is silent. However, there are differences among the three films in their response to silence: “Where Bergman and von Trier nihilistically and depressively succumb to the dark silence, Campion submits to it and finds new forces” (163). In Chapter 11, “Silence and Desire in Psychoanalysis: Approach by Way of the Film Persona by Bergman,” Jean-Marie Weber looks at Bergman’s 1966 film Persona as a portrayal of psychoanalysis using silence as a crucial means through which the individual becomes an agent in his or her life. Chapter 12, Frank G. Bosman’s “Silent Adam: Silence and Religion in Film in Wall-E,” argues that Wall-E is an Adamic figure, who, with his companion Eve, develops silence as a “New Adamic Language” (181). In Chapter 13, “Wholehearted Silences Complete a Meaningful Conversation,” David H. Pereyra uses the 2011 French film The Intouchables (directed by Olivier Nakache and Eric Toledano) as an instance of silence becoming a means of communication between the two protagonists of the film.
In the final chapter of the book, the editors offer concluding thoughts concerning the many forms of silence treated in the volume.
Part 2 begins with R. Ruard Ganzevoort’s “Silence Speaks: Theological Musings on Silence in Religion and Film.” The chapter examines four different types of silence: repressive, transforming, ominous, and transcending, which all appear to be “powerful candidates for the reflection on cinema and religion” (125). Particularly valuable is Ganzevoort’s observation that all four kinds of silence involve ambiguity, or “an anti-structure that opens up the patterned world of action and meaning by creating gaps and fissures” (137). In Chapter 9, “Silence-effects: Frederick Wiseman’s Films as Parables,” Alyda Faber claims that the silence of Wiseman’s films is analogous to the silence of parables in that both forms of silence “open possibilities of the unsaid and unknown” (139). Chapter 10, Tjeu van den Berk’s “The Threefold Silence after the Death of God Filmed by Bergman (1963), Campion (1993) and von Trier (2011),” analyzes Ingmar Bergman’s The Silence, Campion’s The Piano, and von Trier’s Melancholia. The three films are emblematic, to van den Berk, of a world without God, or at best a world in which God is silent. However, there are differences among the three films in their response to silence: “Where Bergman and von Trier nihilistically and depressively succumb to the dark silence, Campion submits to it and finds new forces” (163). In Chapter 11, “Silence and Desire in Psychoanalysis: Approach by Way of the Film Persona by Bergman,” Jean-Marie Weber looks at Bergman’s 1966 film Persona as a portrayal of psychoanalysis using silence as a crucial means through which the individual becomes an agent in his or her life. Chapter 12, Frank G. Bosman’s “Silent Adam: Silence and Religion in Film in Wall-E,” argues that Wall-E is an Adamic figure, who, with his companion Eve, develops silence as a “New Adamic Language” (181). In Chapter 13, “Wholehearted Silences Complete a Meaningful Conversation,” David H. Pereyra uses the 2011 French film The Intouchables (directed by Olivier Nakache and Eric Toledano) as an instance of silence becoming a means of communication between the two protagonists of the film.
In the final chapter of the book, the editors offer concluding thoughts concerning the many forms of silence treated in the volume.