Praise Judas!

Found this online. No idea who Tim Ward is, but this made me laugh. And it's funny because it's true. Judas Iscariot never receives enough praises. So thank you Judas.

Alex the Antichrist

As this is Good Friday, I thought I would give you film suggestion for the day: A Clockwork Orange, my favourite. I'm not kidding. It is fitting for Easter, if only for this scene (warning: there is not only violence but also nudity in it). Is A Clockwork Orange a Christian film you may ask? Well, the YouTube video below makes a pretty good argument for it. I found I don't agree with everything the YouTuber says (and he falls for too many myths about both Anthony Burgess and the genesis of A Clockwork Orange, mostly invented by Burgess himself), but I do agree that Alex is an Antichrist figure. Quite literally, in fact. You can read my own opinion on the subject in 2016. Anyway, so there you have it: it does not take much to add A Clockwork Orange to your list of Easter movies.

Une impiété pour le dimanche des Rameaux

Nous sommes le dimanche des Rameaux, la semaine sainte commence, donc le dernier droit avant Pâques, qui ne saurait arriver trop tôt cette année. Je ne savais pas comment le souligner, puis j'ai pensé à cette vieille blague, très mauvaise, un calembour atroce comme il s'en fait peu. Cela dit, l'impie que je suis aime bien être irrévérencieux envers la religion en général et le catholicisme en particulier (le dimanche des Rameaux c'était la grosse affaire à l'école quand j'étais jeune). Alors, voici donc ce calembour atroce:

"Savez-vous que lorsque Jésus est entré dans Jérusalem, il était en voiture? Oui, les évangiles disent qu'il est rentré en Triomphe."

Je sais, je sais: ayoye! C'est tellement mauvais en fait, que ce n'est pas très impie, même pas blasphématoire. J'essaierai de faire mieux dans les jours qui viennent. Je pourrais même me commettre à écrire quelque chose de controversé, si j'ai le temps et l'inspiration.

Of Christ and Antichrist

Easter is tomorrow and I thought I would share an anecdote about it. I often identified Easter with Jesus of Nazareth, which script was written by Anthony Burgess, my favourite writer. He also wrote in parallel Man of Nazareth, his own and more personal take on the story of Jesus. But Burgess is of course most famous for writing the dystopian novel A Clockwork Orange, which was adapted into a famous (and sometimes infamous) dystopian movie about youth, violence and free will. The connection may surprise you, but both novels/movies do share similar themes and if you pay attention to the dialogues you can see both works have the same spirit. When I told of Burgess' involvement with the Biblical movie years ago to a fellow uni student, who really enjoyed A Clockwork Orange, book and movie, he could not believe it. "Anthony Burgess wrote the script of Jesus of Nazareth? But he's the Antichrist!"

It is not quite true, but that deserves to be a great unknown line. Burgess was not the Antichrist, or even an Antichrist, although he was a lapsed Catholic and had no issue in his writing delving in blasphemous thoughts. You can read more about it in this post and that one. In A Clockwork Orange raise moral and ethical issues which cannot be answered through the narrow views of any catechism or credo. You also have a main character, Alex who is not only an antihero of another type, pure and innocent, nevertheless he could be considered a sort of Antichrist, not so much because he opposes Christian teaching as he completely disregards them. In jail, he loves reading the Bible, not as a holy work inspiring religious devotion, but as a source of sadistic fantasies. As one can see in the scene below. It is a scene like this one, which was also in the novel, that prompted by fellow student to say that Anthony Burgess was the Antichrist. He was only partially right: Burgess' character was an Antichrist. Then he wrote a character that was Christ. You tell me which one was more believable.

Vendredi saint

Photo prise en Bretagne en 2008. Le crucifix de village, presque omniprésent sur les routes de cette région, m'avait beaucoup étonné. Nous sommes aujourd'hui Vendredi saint et j'ai pensé que la photo était de circonstances. Quand j'étais un enfant catholique vivant dans la Grande Noirceur, le Vendredi saint était... Était notre première journée de vacances, alors je l'aimais beaucoup. Mes frères et moi écoutions Jésus de Nazareth ou un autre film biblique s'il n'y avait pas Jésus à la télé et on se préparait pour Pâques. C'était supposé être une journée sombre de la Semaine sainte, moi je l'ai toujours trouvée sympathique.

Holy and Blasphemous fiction

First, an announcement for my readers who live in or near Manchester, if there are any: there is a film festival organized with the collaboration of the Anthony Burgess Foundation: Christianity, Controversy, Cinema. I learned it from their blog. I don't like the title much, I think it should have been called Holy and Blasphemous Cinema, or something of the sort. When one speaks about religion and gathers controversy, it is either because it is devout or blasphemous. The first movie is of course Jesus of Nazareth. Not a controversial cinematic account of the Gospels in any way, but a beautiful movie all the same, and with plenty of Burgess' witticism. That said, I tend to put my favorite writer among the iconoclasts and the blasphemers. Because his Jesus was more Zeffirelli's Jesus, for one, and because what I would call his "Biblical trilogy" (the three novels and films he wrote about the Exodus, the life of Jesus and the early days of Christianity) question, of not completely challenges, the claims at the heart of Christianity. In Man of Nazareth, the novel he wrote alongside the movie, the sacred mixes with profane details and Rabelaisian vulgarity. I recently rewatched Moses the Lawgiver, a brilliant, underrated movie, far superior to the bombastic but far more famous Cecil B de Mille's movie. While the latter was a devout Biblical spectacle, Moses is a complete deconstruction/demythification of the Exodus, where God could merely be a manifestation of Moses' madness. Read a full review on this blog. It surprised me to read online devout Christians praising it: the movie is everything but a piece of Christian propaganda. But Burgess was blasphemous in other ways. Literature, as it is said at the beginning of The Kingdom of the Wicked for instance, has no interest in moral. It does, however, has interest in truth, and in this novel, Christian claims to truth, whether it is historical or spiritual, are smashed to pieces. The promises of eternal life is crushed by the certainty of death. Fiction has little value if it is not blasphemous.

The BBC Passion

The BBC made a mini-series about the Passion of Christ. Why do I have the feeling it's a rip-off of Mel Gibson's Passion of Christ? I will probably watch it, or part of it, but it can't be as good as Zeffirelli's movie. The BBC doesn't do much in the drama department anymore, it's often cheap, tacky, soap operatic, dumbed down for dumber audiences and overall unwatchable.

By the way, I enjoyed Gibson's version, although I felt I was watching a horror movie. A good, very well made, well acted, well written, historical horror movie. If Dracula ever gets readapted, he should direct and maybe, maybe, we would get a faithful adaptation.

Salome

I am watching Jesus of Nazareth at the moment, and I discovered that one of the uploaded versions on youtube practically cut all the parts where Salome was onscreen or indeed mentionned. So on that version, we see nothing of her dance and nothing of the lustful glances of Herod Antipas (brilliantly played by Christopher Plummer). In primary school, when they were showing us bits of the movies, they were always fast-forwarding these parts too. Does Herod look too much like a depraved voyeur? But that's the point. is the dance too sexual? Again, that's the whole point. I am apalled that even for religious movies, religious people apply censorship.

Anthony Burgess in Jesus of Nazareth

As many of you know (well, many, a large proportion of the very small number of people reading this blog) I am a big admirer of Anthony Burgess. I will one day write a complete entry about him. After discovering him with A Clockwork Orange (I guess that's the standard way), I was happily surprised to see that he also wrote the script of Jesus of Nazareth, my favorite Biblical movie (maybe the only adaptation of the Gospels worth watching). I used to watch this movie every Easter since I was a child. A Clockwork Orange was my literary epiphany, but I knew Burgess from an early age through his Jesus. Without knowing, of course. I was happily surprised to see that the movie is available on youtube, which makes it possible to watch it this during the Holy Week, as I used to do when I was living in Québec. It's also terribly funny to see the comments left on youtube from religious people, blessing the ones watching the movie, blessing those who uploaded it on youtube, etc. Ironic, since Anthony Burgess was an agnostic, lapsed Catholic and almost accused of being the Antichrist when the movie A Clockwork Orange was released. As an adult, I now take pleasure to discover the Burgessians elements of the script, in the lines especially. I am wondering, if there are any of Burgess admirers reading this entry (who knows? one can hope), if they found many Burgessian elements in Jesus of Nazareth.

And I hope nobody will think this is a religious blog reading the last few entries.