42 words / 55:52
To listen in a player, click here.
To download the mp3, right-click here and choose “save target or link as.”
Greg Johnson and John Morgan discuss Martin Scorsese’s most recent film, Silence. Contains spoilers. You can read Trevor Lynch’s review here.
8 Comments
Perhaps more rewarding than a Sergio Leone series, from a New Right perspective, would be a series on the screenwriter Luciano Vincenzoni. He was Leone’s writer for the Man with No Name trilogy, and also wrote other brilliant films like The Great War (1959). He was a massive fan of Louis-Ferdinand Céline, which shows in many of his scripts, and almost got Leone to make a film version of Journey to the End of the Night.
I learned Portuguese, I love Portuguese. I might want to see this movie now that I know it has some history of the portuguese in it. Japan could never have become catholic, how could the Portugueses impose Catholicism without imposing the language? There is a link between an understanding of religion and the language of the individual, the language really shapes thought and behavior as well. And how do you teach God to a people that have never believed in a God? What do you call him? Usually something like the Great Ghost. Also to what you all said about Paganism and Hinduism I respond that the Catholic faith is pagan enough for me, you can pray to your favorite saint and let them help you, pray to whatever saint is interesting to you, if you follow a pagan god find the saint who shares their attributes.
I thought it was interesting the way you talked about how the Japanese appeared comfortable with slotting people into the different roles. I thought that was reminiscent of the way that American Indians would kidnap children or capture children to replace family members who died. The idea that they are owed replacement and that anything will work!
But the indians never let the adults, especially priests, live. I am guessing the Japanese were not so different from the indians as well and that this part of the film, the assimilation of westerners into the japanese society, is a piece of imagination.
A curious detail about Martin Scorsese is that at one time he was a Shabbos goy. Scorsese abandoned that job for good, but others would return to it, like Harry Truman and Colin Powell.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shabbos_goy
Haha and so is everybody else in Hollywood on a saturday.
Can you please explain how he was a shabbos goy?
James,
Check the link in my original comment. On the Jewish Sabbath, Martin Scorsese did things for his Jewish neighbors that they were prohibited from doing under Jewish religious law, like switching lights on and off.
If you want to have a WTF moment today, read the Wikipedia entry “Electricity on Shabbat.”
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electricity_on_Shabbat