Brehm Blog
Trent Pettit Sep 03, 2010
The title characters: the oedipal boy, Alexander, and his younger sister, Fanny, are the two children of two actors: Oscar and Emilie Ekdahl, in whose extravagantly ornamented household the film begins. Much akin to The Nutcracker, Fanny and Alexander opens with a Christmas Eve celebration (a festivity Bergman himself found unintelligible). From its very first scenes, the story feels as if told through a series recollections and memories. Superficially, the Ekdahl family appears to be a wealthy free-spirited secular family whose members appear without the typical tormented characters that frequent Bergman films. However, reality is not what it seems. Behind the polite stage lies a host of hidden discontent and infidelity. Later, we come to find that the father is seriously ill, the grandmother has been entertaining an affair with a Jewish banker for several years, one of Alexander’s uncles is a manic depressive, while the other is a lustful skirt-chaser whose wife pretends to happily tolerate it.
Soon, Fanny and Alexander’s worlds are radically shifted as their Father dies, and their Mother marries the local Bishop. The family leaves the colorful urbanity of the Ekdahl household, and moves into the Bishop’s mansion without any possessions to begin their “new life.” The Bishop’s house is, as Bergman describes, “ private, narcissistic, and barren, just like his religion... the Bishop is a man who remembers the law, but not the gospel.”
Eventually, the grandmother arranges for the Jewish merchant (who is also a kind of magician) to kidnap the children from the Bishop’s home. Soon, the children find sanctuary amongst the Jewish banker’s house, which alludes an ancient and magical quality (e.g. most obviously in the form of a mummy that is still breathing). Alexander wonders the home’s halls filled with strange artifacts and puppets. In one of the home’s rooms is locked away a strange nephew, whose meeting with Alexander begins to blur the distinction between the spirit and material for the rest of the film.
For Bergman, the world is composed of a mystical self-propagating force whose will resists an identity with either good or evil. This virulent "force" supervenes in Alexander’s favor, providing him an escape from the severity of his step-father's punishments, that is, by burning him alive. The film ends with a reunited Ekdahl family, and the birth of two children: the mother’s, from the Bishop, and another from the maid’s affair with Alexander’s luscious uncle.
Fanny and Alexander marks Bergman’s last, yet most extroverted effort. It represents a sort of autobiographical meditation on Bergman’s childhood, and a presentation of his acquiescent agnostic world-view. The character of Alexander represents a composite of Bergman’s own childhood, and is used in the film as a subject indebted to express what Bergman understands to be the plight of worldly-existence – one lived between the epitomes of joy and brutality. Sexuality, manners, death, religion, punishment, and art all make their appearances, infesting Alexander’s childhood innocence.
Bergman’s agnostic attitude remains overtly apparent in the phenomenal nexus of spiritual, magical, and mundane forms. They exist in frankness and simplicity. Bergman makes this present with subtle suggestion as the spiritual world unexplainably intrudes, even constitutes, the day-to-day experiences comprising worldly actualities. This is all accomplished without Hollywood’s typical hyperactive and vasolined style.
Fanny and Alexander is a rebellious affirmation of life (albeit, in the fashion of Dickens, who was Bergman’s inspiration for the film) through which you feel along with Bergman, the questioning of that old notion of “God torn down by impotence.” As life’s everyday wonders creep between the crevices of all that seeks to oppress humanity’s natural happiness, you are encouraged to contemplate, even accept, those things long held in skeptical limbo.
The general aesthetic of the entire film is captured at the end of the film in a speech made by Gustav Ekdayl, the adulterous uncle. It is wonderfully written, and thus, worth quoting in full:
We Ekdahls have not come into the world to see through it. We are not equipped for such excursions. We might just as well ignore the big things. We must live in the little world. We will be content with that and cultivate it and make the best of it. Suddenly death strikes. Suddenly the abyss opens. Suddenly the storm howls, and disaster is upon us. All that we know-- But let us not think of all that unpleasantness. We Ekdahls love our subterfuges. Rob a man of his subterfuges and he goes mad and begins lashing out. Damn it all, people must be intelligible! Otherwise we don't dare to love them or speak ill of them. We must be able to grasp the world and reality so that we can complain of their monotony with a clear conscience. Don't be sad, dear splendid artists! Actors and actresses, we need you all the same! It is you who must give us our supernatural shivers, or better yet, our innermost diversions... The world is a den of thieves, and night is falling. Evil breaks its chains and runs through the world like a mad dog. The poison affects us all, us Ekdahls and everyone else. No one escapes, not even Helena Viktoria or little Aurora. So shall it be. Therefore let us be happy while we are happy. Let us be kind, generous, affectionate and good. It is necessary and not at all shameful to take pleasure in the little world. Good food... gentle smiles... fruit frees in blossom, waltzes... [He moves towards the cradles and picks one of the babies up] "I hold a little empress in my arms. It's tangible yet immeasurable. One day she will prove everything I just said wrong. One day she will not only rule the little world, but everything. Everything.
-RE!
Elijah Davidson Aug 27, 2010
The following is a guest post from Fuller professor J.R. Daniel Kirk. I heartily encourage you to frequent his blog, Storied Theology. It is one of my very favorites. He writes on everything from Revelation and Paul to modern folk music and movies, often integrating the lot.
The following post concerns the short-lived series Firefly and its film sequel, Serenity. I, personally, treasure the show and movie, and J.R. Daniel Kirk does a great job of touching on some of its larger themes. If you haven't experienced the show, I encourage you to do so as soon as possible. In the mean time, enjoy the following post.
-- Elijah Davidson, Co-Director for the Institute for Reel Spirituality at the Brehm Center for Worship Theology and the Arts
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If you’ve missed the series Firefly, you may go to Hulu right now and start catching up. It was canceled after one season but managed to produce not only a huge cult following but also a feature film entitled Serenity.
Following up on the series, and assuming for the most part that you know the characters and their ways from there, the film focuses on the desire of the
intergalactic alliance (think “the Empire”) to recapture River, a young woman who has taken up with a former freedom fighter (think “the rebel alliance”) and his crew–a posse that now steals and trades whatever they can to make a buck off of their Firefly Class spaceship named Serenity.
This is called a “space western” on many of the sites, and the name is apt (think “first three Star Wars movies, with their western hero Han Solo / Luke Skywalker”). Heck, so long as I’m making Star Wars references, there’s even a scene where the good guy and bad guy duke it out on some catwalks. But I digress.
A few interesting themes pervade the movie, and I’d encourage you, should you dive into this world with its cult following, to keep your eyes and ears open for them.
One of the characters is a “shepherd,” a futuristic sort of monk/pastor. He encourages the main cowboy type, Mal, to believe–even if he doesn’t believe in God, to believe in something. There’s a running theme in the film about the power of belief itself. It’s worth keeping your ears out for that.
One of the core conflicts in the movie seems to revolve around that idea of belief. The alliance believes that it can compel people to be better, to a better way of life. Mal and his posse represent the opposite. Mal says he doesn’t believe we can make people better.
As Mal dukes it out with a guy who always seems to be dressed in black (or dark purple), their different beliefs come to the fore again. Evil dude is a top flight assassin, who is striving to create “a world without sin”–a world that will hold no place for himself, he well knows. The conflict of the film is resolved when Mal presents an alternative means to that world without sin: not killing the girl, River, but telling the galaxies the truth about the Alliance.
In the end, Mal tells the secret of survival to River as they fly off for their next journey: love. It was love that enabled River to be freed from the Alliance in the first place. It is love that allows the crew of Serenity to survive.
Especially for a “space western,” this was a well-told story whose thematic riches might be easy to miss within the otherwise predictable action-hero adventure.
-- J.R. Daniel Kirk
Eric Herron Aug 21, 2010
I recently came across a magazine article about the advent of the very first playground in New York City. This playground was completed in 1903 in New York’s Lower East Side. The response to this novel park was astounding. Twenty-thousand children swamped the playground and its surrounding area. In what was likely supposed to be a quiet and dignified ceremony, the Mayor (Seth Low) shouted a speech in which he proclaimed, “The city has come to realize that it must provide for its children, that they have a right to play as well as work.” (Of course, labor laws at this time were such that children were not protected from becoming industrial cogs, even when they should have been free to learn and explore the world with joy and creativity).
Modern playgrounds (in the 20th century sense) were usually constructed with the theory that it was to be a place of education. In fact, according the the United Nations “Declaration of the Rights of the Child” (1959) the purpose of “play” was “to develop [the child’s] abilities, his individual judgment, and his sense of moral and social responsibility, and to become a useful member of society.” With this theory in mind, playgrounds were made using fixed parts - swings, sandboxes, seesaws, and slides. Children came to these fixed parts and had a limited number of ways in which to play on them. These were the accepted and traditional playground amenities. Through “play”, children were to learn how each of these functioned and become adept at using them. In the process, it was hoped that children would have opportunities to learn the etiquette of society: take your turn on the swings, don’t throw sand, share the seesaw, no pushing on the slide, etc.
This was all fine and good. Fine and good if you simply want to raise well-behaving, and polite little clones. This kind of playground, however, was terribly suited for fostering creativity. It was also terrible for promoting play, if we mean a more playful kind of play than that described by the United Nations.
Today, there is sort of revolution afoot in playground construction and strategy. It started in mid-century Europe when the first “junk playground” was constructed by Carl Theodor Sorensen in Copenhagen. This innovative structure had moving parts: pieces of wood, pipes, nails, hammers, shovels, and other tools. Today, the junk playground concept has evolved into what New York architect David Rockwell calls the “Imagination Playground”.
One of the key features of this new playground model is that it replaces the fixed parts of the traditional playground with “loose parts”. Specifically, these are large, bright-blue, foam blocks molded into complementary, modular shapes. With these, the children on the playground have virtually limitless options for play. What was once a fairly scripted activity (swing on the swings, slide on the slide) has now become a free and open, creative exercise. With the availability of foam blocks (which, by the way, seem much safer to me than nails, hammers, and wood!) children are invited to imagine new ways of playing.
You know where I’m going with this.
How much do our worship services resemble the playgrounds of old? We have our fixed parts known as “the four-fold plan of worship”: Gathering, Word, Table, Sending. In some ways, these are indispensable for they give a coherent deeply-rooted (yet simple) structure to our meetings. And yet, the content we typically pour into these molds tends toward restriction in the realm of creativity and imagination.
Our song-singing, though formally participative, often appears more as performance. The Word is typically an intellectual exercise for the congregation and primarily a presentation of the verbal and mental acuity of the preacher. Our Communion often resembles driving through a McDonalds rather than a sacred act in which uniquely created individuals are cemented together in mysterious, holy union.
What’s more, the mid-century, European version of our worship with it’s organs, pews, and hymnals has really not altered very much, except in terms of the names of the parts. Rock bands have replaced organs. Folding chairs and theater seats have replaced pews. Projected lyrics have replaced printed hymnals. These changes are only cosmetic. We are still stuck with inherited and “fixed” parts. These limit our ability to imagine, create, and play in the presence of God.
If we were to change all of this, what would it look like? What are the bright-blue foam blocks that are to replace our swings, seesaws, and slides?
To answer this question would be to write another full blog post. Instead, let me pose the question to you: How do you imagine a worship environment in which people are invited to create and imagine instead of merely mimic and recite?
The term “loose parts” as it relates to child’s play was coined by the architect Simon Nicholson in 1971. In an essay called “How Not to Cheat Children: The Theory of Loose Parts”, he wrote:
“In any environment, both the degree of inventiveness and creativity, and the possibility of discovery, are directly proportional to the number and kind of variables in it.”
In terms of our worship practices, how can we increase the variables and “loose parts” in order to liberate the inventiveness and creativity of our worshipers?
-Eric Herron Brehm Blog
Eric is the Community Manager at http://www.creativeworshiptour.com/
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Quotes and historical content from: Mead, Rebecca. “State of Play." The New Yorker July 5, 2010:32-37.
Elijah Davidson Aug 20, 2010
What is the appeal of criminals? Why do we enjoy watching movies about their lives? Why do we end up rooting for them in those movies?
The Godfather saga, The Professional, The Italian Job, Ocean’s 11, 12, and 13, Bonnie and Clyde, Inception, The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly, Pulp Fiction, Goodfellas, Fight Club, The Usual Suspects, Memento, Taxi Driver - the list goes on and on and on. So many much loved movies are about morally repugnant people, people whose actions would be absolutely reprehensible if they weren’t characters in movies. Why?
Why do I cheer behavior on screen that I abhor in real life?
I recently watched a movie that fits into this category of films. The General is a 1998 film about Irish thief and folk hero of sorts Martin Cahill. Cahill was a gangster. He stole, killed, and tortured people in Dublin throughout the 80s and early 90s. He is especially well known for his ability to elude the police and remain legally disconnected from any of his crimes. He aligned himself with none and all of Ireland’s political groups, and in the end (and in the beginning of the film), he is assassinated, though who killed him remains a mystery.
The film is very good. It stars Brendan Gleeson as Cahill and Jon Voigt as the officer chiefly in charge of apprehending the thief. Roger Boorman directed the film, and very deservedly procured the award for best director atCannes the year the film premiered. If you see it, I encourage you to watch it in its original black and white and not the color version.
The most disturbing element of this film, which includes tremendous amounts of profanity and explicit violence, is the way it makes you sympathize with Cahill. Objectively, Cahill is
a morally decrepit man. He is a thief, liar, murderer, adulterer, torturer, perjurer, manipulator, and all around sorry guy. And yet I found myself rooting for him. At one point, he puts a jewelry store out of business, chucking its workforce on the street, and yet I felt he was somehow justified in his actions. I was gleeful when he was able to connive the very detective assigned to catch him into being his alibi. I wanted the woman whose life he threatened to lie on the witness stand so Cahill could avoid prison yet again. When I realized this, I was more disgusted with myself than with Cahill.
Perhaps we are able to root for people in movies whom in real life we would chastise because stories create their own systems of morality. In The General, we are presented with
a Cahill who is trying to provide for his family, who shows real remorse after he mistakenly accuses a friend of stealing from him, who is mocked and harassed by police officers. Yes, Cahill is a criminal because he breaks society’s laws, but he doesn’t break the laws of the movie while his enemies do.
I can’t really criticize movies for creating their own moral systems though, can I? After all, I do the same thing in my own life all the time. Sure I speed on the freeway, but I wouldn’t ever dream of driving while intoxicated. I tell a “white lie” here and there, but I don’t call people pretending to be their bank and try to convince them to give me their credit card information. I’m not that bad.
And that’s true to an extent. Compared to a depraved theoretical and fictional other, I’m a saint. Compared to the fictionalized police officers in The General, Cahill is a stand up guy as well. If only we had some better standard to compare our actions against.
Oh, yeah. We do.
Morality is tough stuff, not for the feint of heart. I would argue that systems of morality are best left developed not by man at all but by God. Only God is pure and holy. Only God is capable of giving us a truly true standard to compare ourselves against. God did that in Christ, the Truth if ever there was one.
So, to get back to my original question – why do I root for villainy in films? Well, because in those films, what would be villainous in real life is presented as heroic. As long as I remember that I’m operating within the world of the story, I don’t see a problem with rooting for Martin Cahill and the like. In fact, I find I learn a few true moral lessons in the process.
Now, if I try to translate the film’s morality into the real world, however, we’re going to have a few issues, because in this world we’re judged by a Higher Authority than the screenwriter’s pen and the director’s shot selections. In this world, the real world, Christ has called us to love our neighbors, to live for Him, and to lay down our lives for the world just as He laid down His.
-- Elijah Davidson, Co-Director of the Institute for Reel Spirituality at the Brehm Center for Worship Theology and the Arts
Deborah Buchanan Aug 16, 2010
I used to consider myself one of those creative types: I had the ‘creative’ look, I’ve been a community teaching artist, choreographed a piece for 40 plus people, and sometimes, others would turn to me for creative ideas. However, I seem to have fallen into a creative drought: where nothing in my life seems to resemble any semblance of creative energy. And so now, I am in search of a muse . . . .
These days, finding an authentic muse in the context of our over-stimulated consumer culture is either very easy, as everything—including muses—has been commodified; or very, very hard. In the past few weeks, I have picked up The Artist’s Way, Vein of Gold (both by Julia Cameron) and other books on creativity, only to put them back down after realizing that I really don’t want to explore my own creativity at that level!
However, in my line of work, creativity is a necessity. I am a professor of religion to undergraduate students who MUST take my class. So, on many days, I have a less than captive audience; particularly, if it is a Friday, a Monday, the day before a holiday, the day after a vacation, etc. The challenge with teaching religion and trying to do it creatively is that one runs the risk of becoming one more source of entertainment competing for a captive consumer (I mean student) to sell (I mean teach) something to. How does one authentically infuse one’s vocation with creativity and, in my case, cultivate the authentic and creative engagement?
On the other hand, outside of my vocation, I yearn for recreation, that as above, is not consumptive entertainment but life-giving play that is infused with creative energy and contributes to my own creative approaches to life, my relationship with God, my human relationships, and my own growth as an artist.
The question one must ask is: Are these two approaches to creativity distinct or one in the same? While I treat my life like the former, my beliefs would suggest the latter. My own Christian belief system and my study and teaching of world religions suggest that creativity finds its source in the Creator who is both Create-er of all and Lord of all: concerned with both the mundane aspects of obligation that beg for creativity and those parts of our existence that we assume to be “creative.”
So, as I search for my illusive creative spark, I believe the following:
- Creativity is a gift to be received as part of our humanity—as we are created in the image of a Divine Creator;
- Creativity is a skill to be cultivated;
- Creativity is a quiet invitation to be fully human, fully alive, and fully present in the mundane, the profound and even the in the profane or challenging moments of life.
Wanted: displaced creativity to infuse into vocation, avocation, and the daily grind.
- Deborah Buchanan