Essay

Culture

Film & TV

9 April 2024

5 min read

Scorsese’s fusion

The director's whole canon is infused with religion.

Sonny Tindall

Sonny works creatively with videography, graphic design, fashion, and photography.

A bloody and shocked boxed leans on the ropes

Robert De Niro in Raging Bull.

United Artists.

Since the release of Silence in 2016, film critics have referred to Martin Scorsese’s ‘Trilogy of Faith’; this term refers to the legendary director’s three faith-based movies, a 'trilogy' of films which was brought to a neat completion by Silence.

Or was it?

Scorsese recently announced his next project: The Life of Jesus. This will be his fourth film that sits comfortably within in the ‘faith’ category, shattering the neat theory of a trilogy of films. Not only that, this film, which will be an adaptation of a novel of the same name by author Shūsaku Endō (who also authored Silence), has officially put an end to a notion that has irked me for some time: that themes of religion and faith are exclusive to just three of Scorsese’s twenty-six films.

Into the seventh decade of his long career, it feels as though no cinematic ground has been left uncovered by Scorsese. From a children’s film about the awe-inspiring wonder and amazement that cinema offers (Hugo), to an absurdist black comedy with an unassuming philosophical sting (After Hours), to a psychodrama depicting the corrosive effects of isolation and disillusionment eerily predictive of today’s Incel culture (Taxi Driver). And then there are the films that, at least at first glance, stand in opposition to his signature mobster-epics - his aforementioned ’Trilogy of Faith’.

Even when Scorsese is telling stories completely removed from faith, he still weaves spiritual content into the fabric of his work.

Scorsese’s first foray into depicting overtly spiritual subject matter was 1988’s The Last Temptation of Christ. It sees Scorsese, and frequent collaborator and screenwriter Paul Schrader, seek to find and dissect the humanity of Jesus (played by Willem Defoe). This film dives headfirst into the complex waters of the incarnation, asking what it means for Jesus to be both fully man and fully God. Scorsese subsequently creates a portrait of Jesus as a human wrestling with the complexity and ambiguity of his own divinity.

His second ‘Faith Movie’ sees him delve into the world of Buddhism and non-violence with 1997’s Kundun. It is part history lesson, part spiritual exploration, showcasing the life of the 14th Dalai Lama. The film begins with the Dalai Lama being discovered by monks at the age of two and tracks his life as both the spiritual and political leader of Tibet, until its annexation by China and his exile to Northern India in 1959. Similarly to Last Temptation, it is within the ambiguity of a dual identity that Scorsese finds the narrative thread of the film; while Scorsese’s Jesus is caught in the tension of being both God and man, the Dalai Lama must wrestle with his identity as both the political and spiritual leader of a nation amidst a world in constant conflict.

Which brings us to the supposed culmination of Scorsese’s ‘Trilogy of Faith’: 2016’s Silence. The film, based on the novel by Shūsaku Endō, tells the story of two Catholic Portuguese missionaries in 17th Century Japan. When it comes to the setting and plot of this film, the crucial contextual detail is that, in an attempt to stamp-out peasant uprisings, Christianity has been outlawed in Japan. And yet, the film sees these two Catholic priests (played by Adam Driver and Andrew Garfield) venture into a land where Christians are being routinely tortured and executed for their faith. Their motivation for doing so is to find their mentor, Father Ferreira (Liam Neeson), who has reportedly renounced his faith. Upon their arrival, the two priests are confronted with the reality of the Japanese regime, coming face-to-face with relentless brutality and violence. And, as the narrative unfolds, they become active participants in the fate of other Christian prisoners, for whom the choice to defend or renounce their faith is a choice between life or death. As a result, we witness the priests’ personal beliefs, as well as their opinions of Father Ferreira’s decision, begin to change.

And there we have it: what the critics would have you believe is Scorsese’s ‘Trilogy of Faith’. While it is true that these are the only films that directly depict religious subject matter, this theory overlooks the constant presence of religious imagery and themes throughout his entire career. Indeed, there is more to Scorsese’s highly stylised, Rolling Stones soundtracked, bombastic gangster films than this theory would have you believe.

To fully expound the religious themes in Scorsese’s work would require an entire career retrospective: from his very first film (Who’s That Knocking at my Door – 1967), where the young Catholic boy struggles to reconcile his idealisation of the virginal purity of women with the reality of the women in his life, all the way up to his latest feature, (Killers of the Flower Moon - 2023), the third act of which is built upon notions of guilt, confession and forgiveness. Even when Scorsese is telling stories completely removed from faith, he still weaves spiritual content into the fabric of his work.

Silence, 2016.

A 17th century monk holds up a wafer before an altar while Japanese Christians kneel.

Andrew Garfield in Silence.

Yet, there is one film, and one scene in particular, that I would suggest epitomises the profound influence that Christianity has had on Scorsese’s life and work; it is the closing scene of 1980’s Raging Bull, a biopic of Italian-American boxer, Jake La Motta (Robert De Niro). And you’d be forgiven for thinking that this stark film about a man who is defined by violence has no spiritual content, nor religious imagery to it. Yet, as the film draws to a close, La Motta looks at himself in a mirror and recites Marlon Brando’s famous ‘I coulda been a contender...’ monologue from On The Waterfront. And then, as the film fades to black and the only thing left for the audience to expect is the rolling of the credits, an excerpt of John’s Gospel fills the screen:

‘So, for the second time, the Pharisees summoned the man who had been born blind and said “speak the truth before God, we know this fellow is a sinner”. “Whether or not he is a sinner, I do not know”, the man replied. “All I know is this: Once I was blind and now I can see”’.

This movie, which neither centres religion nor cinema in its plot, climaxes with one of the greatest cinematic monologues, and ultimately, a Bible verse.

Why?

Because, for Scorsese, a man who flirted with entering the priesthood in his younger years and was first exposed to cinema through one of his local priests, the marriage of Catholicism and cinema have defined his life. Therefore, when it comes to work of Martin Scorsese, it would be impossible to have one without the other.

Now that Scorsese himself has explicitly moved beyond the idea of a ‘Trilogy of Faith’; perhaps the critics, and we the audience, should do the same.

Review

Awe and wonder

Books

Culture

Poetry

10 October 2024

6 min read

Charles Taylor on how poetry seeks cosmic connections

The philosopher yields an array of luminous insights.

Paul Weston

Paul Weston is a Fellow at Ridley Hall, Cambridge.

At dusk, three people sit on a field edge and look at the stars emerging.

Rad Pozniakov on Unsplash.

Charles Taylor, Cosmic Connections: Poetry in the Age of Disenchantment

At just shy of 600 pages, philosopher Charles Taylor’s latest book is not for the faint-hearted. At the heart of the book are fascinating questions. What kind of language should we use when we encounter ‘beauty’, or experience ‘wonder’ which seems to take us into a new kind of space, or make time stand still? It could be the sight of a breathtaking landscape. It could be a piece of music. It’s that sense of ‘connection’ with something bigger than ourselves. What might it mean? More particularly, how do we express what we intuitively feel to be real and deeply significant about such things when our usual language fails to capture it?

Taylor says that his latest book ‘is about (what I see as) the human need for cosmic connection . . . one shot through with joy, significance, inspiration’. And his hypothesis is that ‘the desire for this connection is a human constant, felt by (at least some) people in all ages and phases of human history’, even if ‘the forms this desire takes have been very different in the succeeding phases and stages of this history’. The book explores these questions by focusing on late-Romantic European poetry and traces its development through the work of later poets including Goethe, Rilke, Wordsworth, Hopkins, and T. S. Eliot.

The background to Taylor’s explorations is the ongoing impact of the Enlightenment on our language and understanding about ‘truth’ and ‘meaning’. Those familiar with his 2007 book A Secular Age will find echoes of it here, particularly the way in which post-Enlightenment language tended to develop the language of control. This, he argues, became increasingly dominant in Western modernity ‘because it is linked to a practical stance which is basically instrumentalist; we seek out the efficient causal relations in our world with the aim of discovering handles which will enable us to realise our purposes’. In reaction to this narrowing of possibilities, the Romantic poets focused on ‘the experience of connection, and the empowerment this brings: not a power over things, but one of self-realization’. And a key element of the Romantic movement was the recognition that a poem (alongside the wider arts) uncovers deeper meanings: it ‘reveals to us, brings us into contact with, a deep reality which would otherwise remain beyond our ken’.

‘Poetry goes beyond creating a mood, an atmosphere of feeling, and claims to give access to the inner force in a thing, not by describing it, but by making it palpable’

Charles Taylor

The book focuses on the variety of forms that this reaction took amongst Romantic poets. A unifying desire for ‘connection’ led to differing ideas about how poetic language makes this possible and what kinds of meaning are revealed. But the central belief remained constant: that poetic language was the key to addressing a prevailing cultural atmosphere of ‘disenchantment’, in which the desire for cosmic connection had been sidelined.

On the English side of the channel, Taylor finds in Keats’ poetry, a new form of expression summed up in his statement ‘Beauty is Truth and Truth Beauty’. In Taylor’s words, ‘Art raises the object to a new unity and intensity, which constitutes Beauty. But this is not something which just exists in the mind of the artist (or reader); it has reality, and hence Truth, even though this reality is partly brought to fruition by artistic (re)creation’.

Similarly, for Gerard Manley Hopkins, the form of poetic language itself can become a means of ‘connection’. As Taylor puts it, in Hopkins’ work, ‘Poetry goes beyond creating a mood, an atmosphere of feeling, and claims to give access to the inner force in a thing, not by describing it, but by making it palpable’. His poetry embodies this in that it ‘renders the rhythms of the being itself through the “sprung rhythm” of the verse’.

The second half of the book looks to poets of the last 200 years who have navigated parallel pathways towards this ideal of experienced fullness – in the face of increasing industrialisation and disenchantment. Baudelaire longs for the experience of fullness, but finds it barred by a state of melancholy that he described as ‘Spleen’. It is a melancholy brought about by the endless repetitions of mundane and urbanised life. Baudelaire’s attempt to find release from our imprisonment in trapped time is to face Spleen head on and to transform it through poetic contemplation.

T. S. Eliot’s poetry similarly aims to evoke the sources of a fuller life in a culture of decay by means of the ‘continual surrender’ of the poet to something more significant and valuable. In Eliot’s case this resolves in a more-or-less traditional sense of Christian order, but Taylor notes that his poetry doesn’t necessarily require this. Miłosz on the other hand, amidst the social and political upheavals in Poland, sought a higher form of poetry: a poetry that could rise above the discord of social turmoil in order to define a moment and clarify the path that needed to be taken.

‘The work of art opens for us a new field of meaning, by giving shape to it’.

Charles Taylor

At times, the weight and detail of Taylor’s exposition threatens to overwhelm the reader, but he offers an array of luminous insights along the way, and he is largely successful in keeping an eye on the broader questions and themes. Perhaps the most important here is his belief that the human desire for ‘cosmic connection’, with its yearning for joy, significance and inspiration is perennial. The book is in this sense an elaborate historical worked example of this desire, understood – perhaps imperceptibly – as a sense of ‘loss’ or ‘longing’. It is this ‘central aspiration of the Romantic period’, he concludes, that ‘remains powerful today’.

My own experiences of talking with people today seems to amply confirm Taylor’s view. And the search for language to describe the desire for this sense of connection (or the longing for it) continues to thrive even within a so-called secularised culture (most likely because of it). It too seeks language for expression and sometimes struggles for some of the same reasons that the Romantics identified. Taylor’s phrase ‘the immanent frame’ (from his A Secular Age) powerfully evokes a sense of being held on a restricted rein, unable to name or explore the realms of ‘beauty’ or the ‘transcendent’ beyond perceived cultural boundaries. Connected to this is the still commonly held belief that any supposed knowledge derived through the arts doesn’t put us in touch with anything other than ourselves.

Taylor convincingly transcends the supposed dichotomy between these so-called ‘subjective’ or on the other hand, ‘ontological’ possibilities. ‘The work of art’, he says, ‘opens for us a new field of meaning, by giving shape to it’. Moreover, it can ‘realize a powerful experience of fulfillment . . . of connection which empowers’. And Taylor backs his theory with autobiography. In Goethe’s ‘Wanderer Nachtlied’, he says, ‘There is a kind of rest/peace which I long for. I don’t fully understand it, but now I have some sense of it’. Or broadening the artistic field, he finds that listening to Chopin’s Fantasie-Impromptu in C sharp minor ‘opens me up to an unnameable longing’, or that when he listens to Mozart’s Jupiter Symphony, he feels ‘a striving upwards, an expression of praise and thanks, straining to reach some higher addressee (for me, this would be God), but I can imagine that someone else, feeling the ascending movement, would imagine another destination’).

Here then is a book that shines a light on the possibilities of ‘cosmic connection’. Taylor affirms our desires, reassuring us that we should not feel strange to share the same longings for ‘fullness’, for ‘transcendence’, for ‘joy’ and for ‘connection’ as did the Romantic poets. Our recognition of these desires may well have been evoked by the kind of poetry or music that Taylor talks about here. But for all of us, it is good to be reminded that in a western world still heavily influenced by the climate of secularisation many today are still searching for the sense of cosmic connection that Taylor describes.

Charles Taylor’s Cosmic Connections: Poetry in the Age of Disenchantment is published by Harvard University Press.