Each week, Richard Brody picks a classic film, a modern film, an independent film, a foreign film, and a documentary for online viewing.
“Chi-Raq”
The release of Paul Schrader’s “First Reformed,” starring Ethan Hawke as a minister in crisis, brings to mind other great movies centered on religion. Spike Lee has made several (including “Red Hook Summer”), and his passionate, teeming political musical “Chi-Raq,” from 2015, is among them. The movie, which he wrote with Kevin Willmott, is based on Aristophanes’ “Lysistrata”; it’s about a group of black women in Chicago, led by Lysistrata (Teyonah Parris), who, mobilizing in resistance to gun violence and gang violence, go on a sex strike to get the men in their communities to end the bloodshed. Though the drama has pagan roots (and Lee taps into classical rituals for a climactic sequence of hieratic mystery and tragic power), it’s centered on a Christian framework that’s brought to the fore in an extraordinarily powerful church sequence, an agonized funeral lamentation that arises from a real-life story and character. There, a priest, Father Mike Corridan (John Cusack), delivers an inspiring, urgent, pained sermon that places the gun violence of Chicago in the wider context of American racism and economic injustice. Father Corridan is based on the Reverend Doctor Michael Pfleger, a Catholic priest in Chicago, whom Evan Osnos profiled in The New Yorker; the scene in the movie was filmed on location at St. Sabina, the church where Pfleger works, and Lee consulted with Pfleger while researching the film and drew upon his sermons for the scene.
Stream “Chi-Raq” on Amazon Prime, YouTube, and other services.
“Sergeant York”
Most of Howard Hawks’s films display a sublime profanity ranging from the ribald to the heroic, but the heroism of his 1941 film “Sergeant York” has its roots in Christian faith. It’s a bio-pic about the real-life Alvin York (for whom Manhattan’s York Avenue is named), a Tennessee farmer who repudiated violence on religious grounds and, when drafted to fight in the First World War, sought to be recognized as a conscientious objector. As depicted in the film (where he’s played with a good-humored earnestness by Gary Cooper), York, an expert marksman, undergoes a trial of faith through Bible study, proves his marksmanship to his commanding officers, becomes a riflery instructor—and ultimately (no spoilers here) serves in combat, where he single-handedly overwhelms a German company and leads the capture of more than a hundred enemy soldiers. The combat scenes are brief and, though tense, also laced with humor; most of the film is set in and around York’s home, where the hearty business of daily life is balanced by the sternness of faith. The movie fits squarely into Hawks’s career-long vision of traditional religious mores shifting (many of his heroes learn to make love, not war), and the political power of “Sergeant York” wasn’t lost on its audience. It was a positive vision of American involvement in a war in Europe, made and released at a time when Nazi Germany had swallowed up much of Europe but the U.S. was still officially neutral. Senate Republicans held hearings about “Sergeant York” and other overtly anti-Nazi Hollywood movies, accusing, with anti-Semitic swipes, Hollywood Jews (Hawks wasn’t Jewish but the film’s producers, the Warner brothers, were) of trying to drag the United States into a war on behalf of the Jews of Europe.
Stream “Sergeant York” on Amazon, Google Play, and other services.
“Ganja & Hess”
Bill Gunn’s 1973 horror fantasy, “Ganja & Hess,” builds its metaphysical mysteries firmly on the ground of daily life. It’s the story of a wealthy and prodigious scholar of African culture, Dr. Hess Green (Duane Jones, who previously starred in “Night of the Living Dead”), who—after being stabbed with an ancient dagger by his deranged new assistant, George Meda (Gunn)—becomes addicted to blood. When George kills himself in Hess’s mansion, Hess drinks his blood; when Ganja Meda (Marlene Clark) visits Hess in search of her husband, they become lovers—and then she becomes a vampire as well. Gunn begins the story in the church where Hess’s chauffeur and factotum (Sam Waymon, who also wrote the film’s score) is the minister. The movie is one of the great metaphorical visions of African-American mythologies and their reverberations through daily life. Gunn links vampirism to Christianity and also to archaic African rites; the movie’s vision of eroticism, violence, artistic devotion, and day-to-day practical struggles (involving thefts from medical facilities that link it to drug addiction) evoke both the inspirations and the deformations of ecstatic religion.
Stream “Ganja & Hess” on Amazon Prime and other services.
“The Wind Will Carry Us”
The Iranian director Abbas Kiarostami, who died in 2016, made most of his films in his home country, under its Islamic regime, and he both faced and evoked the restrictions imposed by religious law. In his 1999 film “The Wind Will Carry Us,” he dramatizes the conflicts between practice and law, between tradition and doctrine, between human nature and benighted efforts to constrain it. The story is set in a distant mountainside village in Iranian Kurdistan, where a scientist from Tehran—an ethnologist, who might be something of a filmmaker himself—arrives with a pair of urban colleagues to document a local funeral rite. A centenarian woman there is on her deathbed, but she doesn’t die quickly, and the researcher and his team, stuck there indefinitely, become integrated into the lives of the villagers. What they observe and experience is the irrepressible force of life—the hidden glimmers of eroticism and struggle for sexual freedom that emerge both from the interstices of traditional practices and from the inroads of technological modernity. It’s a brilliant, tender, subtly comedic vision of the sublime and humane aesthetic of ritual confronting the absurdity of dogma.
Stream “The Wind Will Carry Us” on Kanopy, Amazon, and other services.
“Rocky Road to Dublin”
On May 25th, Ireland votes on whether to liberalize its abortion laws. (Currently, abortion is only allowed to save the life of a pregnant woman.) The journalist Peter Lennon’s 1967 documentary “Rocky Road to Dublin” (incidentally, one of the few movies screened at the 1968 Cannes Film Festival before it was shut down) looks closely at the powerful influence of the Catholic Church—its doctrines and its clergy—in the country’s politics. Lennon looks at the revolutionary background of Irish independence and considers that its ideals of secular republicanism were betrayed by the Church-centered nationalism that prevailed instead. Lennon speaks with a newspaper editor, student journalists, writers, and a stage director who confront censorship—of the press, of literature, of theatre, and of movies—that the Church demands and the government imposes, and also reports on the domination of the educational system by the clergy. The movie also shows the changing sexual mores of young Irish people, contrasting their practices with the ongoing ban on contraception that the Irish government imposed. Lennon holds out hope that a younger generation will bring about change; a half century later, the question remains open.
Stream “Rocky Road to Dublin” on Amazon.