THE FILMS OF ROBERT RRESSON: Moviemaking as done by the director of 'Diary of a Country Priest'
Cunneen, Joseph
C ORRESPONDENCE A clarification In my letter inquiring about the church's agenda regarding a sexual orientation that it considers objectively disordered, the editors of Commonweal replied,...
...and visuals of doors and grills under- - ; line the relationship between people and things...
...Similar sentiments have been expressed by justices in other cases...
...People in former Communist countries tend to blame party ideology for what is merely official bad taste...
...The camera observes his hands intently as they patiently scrape away the joints of his cell door, using an iron spoon he has bent into a chisel...
...In addition, a UN inquiry in Kosovo had found that eight of eleven areas where the shells had been used were still contaminated with low-level radiation...
...At the same time, they argue that the UN's sanctions have neither undermined Hussein's will to survive nor significantly weakened his hold on power...
...Much-needed clarification and fairness were on the way...
...This occurs in the film's key scene, when the cure challenges the local countess on her long-stored sense of personal bitterness...
...Suddenly bells are heard as a flock of sheep surround the beast...
...and British experts say no...
...cindy nolan Lincolnshire, III...
...An hour later, the bulletins from Gujerat flashed across the nation...
...A smug, liberal caterwauling animated the evening...
...It concludes, "This adventure will reunite two souls who otherwise would not have known each other...
...AmIGeekOrNot.com asks "How much of a geek are you...
...The polarities of views on this question range from the "objectively disordered" to "a gift of God...
...Souter and Ginsburg had argued that a religious school could assign such a book for a religious critique...
...Humility," she said, "that is the virtue most called for in a pluralistic world...
...Choice has become a key word in public opinion, politics, and the nation's jurisprudence...
...The -?" voice is not superimposed on the dialogue, as in Diary...
...20, we hear the braying of a donkey...
...It cost him nothing...
...My thought was: with my weak faith, do I really need to read discussions about the deficiencies in the Catholic church as perceived by others...
...True—and again like the Pentagon—it has no features that would tempt one to take a closer look...
...After he tells her the details of his crime, she calmly assures him of pardon...
...Yvon cries...
...The chief policeman was gracious...
...Much of the gray is literal...
...RAY TOLOSKO West Newbury, Mass...
...6 NOTEBOOK SANCTIONS ON IRAQ Ten years & counting Last month, a wave of medical concern raised a hot debate in Western Europe...
...are you dreaming...
...By American standards, the buildings aren't bad—or at any rate are no worse than most of our municipal architecture...
...A year ago, seventy members of Congress sent President Bill Clinton a bipartisan letter stating that the UN sanctions offered the Iraqi government little incentive to comply...
...Even nihilists can find a home in cyberspace at the Web site "Am I not or not...
...Pilla noted that the UN sanctions should be "reviewed, reshaped, and narrowed to achieve their legitimate objectives of ending threats to peace," and promised that the American bishops would hold the Iraqis' sufferings "in our hearts and prayers...
...when they move off, we see Balthasar extended on the ground, dead...
...While it would seem redundant to repeat what the images already reveal, such doubling assures an intensification...
...Many of the details for cuts are still to be worked out and they may prove to be more prudent and equitable than they sounded during the campaign...
...And Bresson's axiom that "the supernatural is only the real brought close up" suggests an additional reason to arrange retrospectives of his films and look at them more closely...
...and mortality rates for children under five have quadrupled (UNICEF estimates some 500,000 premature deaths in that subgroup...
...Gordon was there to "pay homage" to James Carroll, who was launching the publicity tour for his new book, Constantine's Sword...
...At the end of the sequence , ' the celebrant says, "Snatch us from damnation and receive us among your elect...
...The new one is likely to take a harder line toward Iraq...
...The January 26 issue was the last straw...
...A Man Escaped is made up of innumerable, quick-moving fragments...
...The central figure otAu hasard, Balthasar (1966), the most personal and perhaps the most powerful of Bresson's films, is a donkey...
...He chose unknown actors, with little or no experience...
...John Paul II's agenda, Gordon told the audience, is to return the church to its triumphalist past...
...When the metaphor is theft, tax cuts are taken as a form of restitution...
...I never stated, or implied, that the church is supporting research to eliminate gays (human persons...
...In 1993 (Zobrest v. Catalina School District), the Court upheld Arizona's provision of a sign-language interpreter to a deaf student who chose to bring her to his Catholic high school...
...We left finally, knowing that our response had been inadequate and perhaps futile...
...But he knew there was much more and he was determined to get it back...
...Such facts are slowly beginning to dawn on the American public...
...On average, 5,000 Iraqi citizens have died each month since the war, according to the Courant, as the result of UN sanctions leveled against the regime of Saddam Hussein...
...As in Diary and A Man Escaped, the central character narrates the story that takes place before our eyes...
...That was rich indeed...
...It also offers us a new dramatic form that is specifically religious—or better still, specifically theological...
...Some may refuse to see in his work anything but human will...
...One of the joys and burdens of being alive today is that we know too much," she said...
...And then I remembered that God hung between two thieves and said that yes, we were worth saving...
...Well, almost enough...
...Sex & the pope Luke Timothy Johnson has gotten it right ("A Disembodied 'Theology of the Body/" January 26,2001...
...Based on Tolstoy's short story, "The False Bank Note," L'Argent follows the chain of events after young students pass a counterfeit bill at a photography shop...
...From these, one can see what early twentieth-century Bucharest must have been like...
...As an educator of adolescents and a married mother of three, I have searched for writings that present a balanced view of the gift of sexuality, including both its pleasurable and difficult aspects...
...O'Connor's concurring opinion is refreshing for this affirmation and also for its rejection as an "absurdity," in the dissent of Justices David H. Souter, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, and John Paul Stevens, their opposition to giving library books as a benefit...
...In 1986 (Witters v. Washington Department of Services to the Blind), the Court upheld state financial aid to a blind ministry student, pointing out that the aid had been directed to the Christian college, not by any choice of government, but by the private choice of the recipient...
...I approached nervously (a crowd outside a police station is never a good sign), but what I saw there was worse than anything I could have imagined...
...A crowd had gathered at the police station which is at the top of our road...
...the letter argued that "morally, it is wrong to hold the Iraqi people responsible for the actions of a brutal and reckless government...
...It was related not to mad cow disease but to depleted uraniumtipped shells fired by NATO in Bosnia (1994-95) and Kosovo (1999...
...In the 1985 Aguilar decision, Justice Sandra Day O'Connor, also writing in dissent, questioned "the utility of entanglement as a separate establishment standard in most cases...
...It is rare to find this in a single voice...
...Indeed, it took me over a minute of staring to register what I was seeing, and even now I have difficulty believing I saw it...
...This was a bit of a hoot, since the substance and tenor of her remarks rarely deviated from her outrage over the pope's refusal to do things the way she thinks they should be done...
...She could never shake the image of the parents who must have sent their babies off that morning as if it had been any other day...
...In preparation for the movie, Bresson frequented police headquarters and informed himself on how pickpockets operate...
...Fragments are constantly used to suggest the whole, and there are ellipsis, fast-cutting, and little psychological explanation of character...
...The affluent can afford the high tuition for private schools and the more moderate tuition for parochial schools...
...There are reminders of the communion of saints, most notably in the gentle glance of the widow even in the face of horror...
...We finally gave in to the children's pleas only a few months ago...
...Sources dose to the curia claim the Vatican is in talks with AOL / Time Warner to develop a site...
...But her reaction lacked any sense of proportionality...
...surface excitement is deliberately hushed, allowing reflection on the ways of providence...
...By midafternoon on the second day I could no longer take it, but Ravi, desperate for more information, couldn't bear to turn it off...
...And Alan Greenspan's mixed blessing a few days later (cut, but not too much...
...administrations...
...Writing in the May/June 1999 issue of Foreign Affairs, John and Karl Mueller describe comprehensive state sanctions as an "impressive method" of mass destruction...
...His very restraint, however, forces viewers to give Diary their closest attention...
...They shrug at the Exposition Center to the north and sneer at the National Theater at the center, but they seem compelled by a perverse form of pride to first take visitors to see the enormous House of the People, second largest building in the world after the Pentagon...
...As a candidate, George W. Bush called for a strengthening of sanctions, and Hussein will no doubt be a primary focus of Bush's foreign policy—in terms of energy security and family honor...
...L'Argent is a stark reminder that Bresson was primarily concerned with the conflict between sin and grace...
...It requires that the aid be merely supplementary and not relieve the school of expenses it would otherwise incur, that the aid be to the child, not to the school, and that "any aid...that ultimately flows to a religious institution does so only as a result of the genuinely independent and private choices of the aid recipients...
...Again the interior voice: "Suddenly our Lord had granted me the grace of letting me know, through the words of my old teacher...that I was the prisoner of his sacred Passion...
...The Trial of Joan of Arc (1962) incorporates the actual transcript of Joan's trial, and Bernanos is again the source for Mouchette (1967...
...a phenomenology of salvation and grace...
...he wants the viewer to discover the interior meaning of the images he has arranged...
...He says no, and we haven't either, because for a moment the voice of the journal is the only one that is audible...
...I hope and pray that I will be able to see this happen in my lifetime...
...Bresson said he wanted "to show that the stages in the life of a donkey are the same as those in the life of a man...
...With Fontaine's running commentary as the spinal cord of its construction, most of the film is '¦I -¦ presented in the first person...
...O'Connor dryly noted, "Even a publicly financed lunch would apparently be unconstitutional under a divertibility rationale because religious school officials conceivably could use the lunch to lead students in a blessing over the bread...
...Could someone explain that to me...
...The images we remember best from the film are those of the hands of a group of thieves working their trade in front of the Gare de Lyon...
...each scene is complete in itself, as if controlled by some law of necessity...
...It was half an hour before I realized it and the story from the novel came back to me immediately...
...It would be interesting to see an article explaining why the analogy is unreasonable...
...As Amedee Ayfre has said, "In Bresson's universe 'all is grace/ but simultaneously 'all is freedom.'" ? 18 (Continued from page 4) goodness of sexual pleasure" more than enough...
...Shots send the men fleeing...
...Gordon also warned the audience that the growth area in religion was not among the broadminded, compassionate New Yorkers gathered in the room...
...payments for school maintenance and for the salaries of teachers of secular subjects were struck down...
...Catholic bishops' conference, wrote to Patriarch Raphael Bidawid of Baghdad, his Iraqi counterpart, saying that while the international community held the Iraqi government accountable for threatening the peace, world leaders must not "hold the Iraqi people hostage or harm innocent people...
...It's not hard to play to the worst suspicions of those who are either wholly ignorant of Catholicism or passionately disaffected from the church...
...There is an absence of psychology, which French films had prided themselves on, and practically no character development...
...There are abrupt passages of time and new characters are introduced without preparation, but the sudden ending, in which the imprisoned Michel extends his hands through the bars to Jeanne, seems somehow inevitable...
...As many economists have pointed out, there appears to be little economic justification for tax cuts that will kick in after the current slowdown has ended...
...By the time we returned, the man had been untied and now lay quivering on the ground...
...He is as little interested in conveying pious messages as in replicating surface realism...
...Instead, Bush instinctively appeals to a hardy American prejudice: taxation is a form of confiscation...
...Nevertheless, the film would be unbearable except for the extreme economy of means employed by Bresson...
...I think we need to remember that John Paul II is a consummate actor and a media expert," Gordon said...
...Despite the critical success of his first two films, The Angels of Sin (1943) and The Ladies of the Bois de Boulogne (1944), Bresson decided to break with the conventions of French film production in preparing Diary for the screen...
...But that was last January...
...are nasty— a Bush /Cheney campaign poster is the first image you see—while others are plain bizarre ("Am I interested in weather shielding for my brickwork or not...
...Instead of using artificial sets, he shot the movie in a village in the Pas-deCalais, and he avoided all spectacle and melodrama...
...Absent the particulars, examine and consider the justifications for the cuts frequently repeated by Bush and Company: "The surplus belongs to the taxpayer, not to the government...
...Within hours of the tragedy our living room had become a kind of command center...
...Other social and legal complications surfaced...
...Larger things are at stake than one politician's cynicism or one pope's bad decisions...
...That evening, as still more heartbreaking images of infant corpses and grieving fathers were shown on television, I could think only of that man—a thief perhaps, but also somebody's precious child—beaten senseless by another human being and I wondered if there was any hope for us at all...
...Hundreds, perhaps thousands, of other buildings fell to Ceausescu's wrecking ball, their sites open wounds...
...Suddenly Torcy exclaims: "What on earth's the matter...
...Still, he was one of the more reasonable people in the crowded room at the Interf aith Center...
...The man was a known criminal and by "interrogating" him for two days, he had already recovered a huge collection of keys and several stolen items (he gestured across the room toward a stack of VCRs, cassette players, and TVs...
...But what follows is pure savagery, though the killings are not shown: the dog groans, dead bodies lie on the stairway, and the widow is seen seated calmly on her bed...
...And I believe it is a greater insult to the murder of the Jews than if he had simply been silent...
...The jurisprudence of our nation's high court has developed with many twists and turns from a twofold bedrock principle it established in 1947 in upholding state-provided bus transportation to children attending parochial schools: "No government can pass laws which aid one religion or all religions" and "State benefits provided to all citizens without regard to religion are constitutional...
...Johnson is careful to be inclusive of concerns of men and women, heterosexual and homosexual, single and married...
...Taxpayers know better than the government how to spend their money...
...The relationship between movies and religion can be a treacherous one, often exploited by well-intentioned pastors looking to illustrate their sermons or teachers of religious studies, hoping to increase class enrollment...
...Not for the lukewarm "A Disembodied 'Theology of the Body'" reminded me to look again at C.S...
...Three years (and many prayers) later, the sanctions remain in force, scarcely reshaped or narrowed...
...AmICatholicOrNot.com hasn't yet emerged...
...Drawn up by Tom Campbell (R-Calif...
...I have enough questions of my own...
...Instead of "performing," Bresson asked his actors—whom he called "models"—to read the text, repeating movements and phrases until a kind of automatism was reached, revealing their inner being...
...in the morning we see a bleeding donkey struggling with its burden...
...Can unemployment benefits be denied a Seventh Day Adventist discharged for refusing to work on Saturdays...
...Pope John Paul II has a specific message to convey, and there are at least two of us who think his message is right on...
...Yvon rushes to a cafe, then to police agents to confess: "It is I who killed the hotelkeeper and his wife in order to steal from them, and I have just assassinated a whole family...
...ANTHONY DI RUSSO Greenville, N.H...
...You can upload pictures of yourself and be rated by visitors to the site...
...Indeed, the promised cut of $1.6 trillion was the first order of business in the Senate the Monday after inauguration day...
...Just to clear my head a little, I went out for a walk...
...Aside from electing a former Communist to lead a country into capitalist democracy, the most obvious contradictions in Romania, as in every post-Communist country, are evident on the drive into Bucharest from the airport...
...Ravi spoke with him at length about the difference between interrogation and torture, and reminded him of the Supreme Court decision against the use of excessive force in extracting confessions...
...ben shafer Chicago, III...
...She had been deeply affected by an account of a school in Italy that had collapsed in an earthquake, killing every single student inside...
...A French theologian has written that "Everything happens as if the 'holiness' of Balthasar permitted him to bring to completion the aspirations to the good...which exist in the other characters, but which in them do not succeed...
...Knowing that my Hindi would never rise to this occasion, to say nothing of needing more courage than I possessed alone, I ran home to get Ravi and we dashed back in our car...
...Goaded on by Gordon, the crowd turned the evening into an orgy of anti-Catholic speechifying...
...It contains the passage from John's Gospel in which Jesus speaks of the need to be born again, including the words of the movie's subtitle: "The spirit blows where it wills...
...That is to say, to reach the latter through the former...
...We have no right to ask anyone else to do anything the way we would do it," she announced...
...But if we look more closely at his films, grace is there, powerful and invisible...
...Do you want to do this to yourself...
...Postmodern people of faith, like Gordon and her admiring listeners, have access to a sense of humility that fundamentalists and so-called Catholic triumphalists explicitly renounce...
...The slamming of a cell door, the gunfire when Orsini is executed, the whistle of a train passing close to the prison are real sounds, experienced by the audience as if they too were prisoners...
...His bare legs and arms were a mass of angry red welts and his entire body was trembling violently...
...Ravi warned him that he would be inviting his own punishment if he continued to violate the law so flagrantly...
...And by the way, for what it's worth from a nontheologian, I think the advertisers, media, celebrities and population in general, promote "the (Continued on page 30) 4 Taxing rhetoric To the surprise of many Americans, George W. Bush delivered an elegant inaugural address on January 20...
...How hot ami...
...Bresson conveys his vision of reality through a rigorous film style...
...The important role of private choice is thus affirmed...
...REV...
...Harder to summarize is Bresson's narrative method...
...I know that you won't turn me in," he tells her...
...Millions of dollars were diverted from the educational aspects of the program to lease classroom vans placed outside the schools and to provide for bus drivers, maintenance, and heating...
...Johnson is also sensitive to the hidden sexist underpinnings of much of the current church teaching and to the basic logical flaws in many of its supportive arguments...
...Increasingly, religious people were "fundamentalists," true believers whose faith was rooted in "hatred and terror and uncertainty...
...Released from prison, he takes a room in a small hotel...
...My husband Ravi is one of India's experts on disaster relief and earthquakesafe housing...
...A man was being tortured...
...The movie's title seems to eliminate suspense, but by concentrating on the details of prison life and avoiding melodramatic effects, Bresson brings us close to Devigny's actual experience and encourages us to reflect on the significance of imprisonment and liberation...
...A plethora of decisions followed, striking down aid programs that did not lend themselves to this easy application...
...He put his head inside the window and said, "Should I do it inside the station then...
...Hoping & praying I thoroughly enjoyed Jerry Ryan's "1054 & All That" (January 12,2001...
...If I were God," she says, "I would pardon everyone...
...There, learning that his little daughter has died and that his wife is leaving him, he tries to commit suicide...
...He described them as a blunt instrument which "hurt large numbers of people who are not their primary targets...
...It's marvelous," he said, "to discover a man gradually and to the degree that one gets deeper into a film, instead of knowing in advance what he will be...
...The case is likely to be taken up by the Supreme Court, so some final clarity on this question may be imminent...
...Just as they are in Diary, almost all the sounds in A Man Escaped are natural...
...As we were pulling out of the driveway, the chief walked toward the car and motioned to us to wait...
...It may not harmonize with the classical buildings to the north of University Square, but compared to the dark glass rectangle of the Intercontinental Hotel just to the southwest, it looks restrained, even elegant...
...An indictment of a money-driven society, the movie is a summation of Bresson's style, in which the accidents of chance and the possibilities of grace are found inextricably connected...
...But here today—caught between the devastation in Gujerat and the police station in Dehra Doon—I can only say like Peter: "Lord I believe...
...So the experience of having blowby-blow, minute-to-minute accounts of such a nightmarish tragedy was quite new to me...
...I'm sending in my check today...
...Just as Fontaine determines to act, the guards bring in Jost, a young man dressed partly in a German uniform, to share the cell...
...Bucharesters especially mourn the lost churches, and the more superstitious feel mat their destruction released forces even more malign than Stalinism and what they called Ceausism...
...I had read a novel earlier that week in which one of the characters explained how she always made a point of sending her children off in the morning with a loving good-bye because you just never knew what might happen in the course of the day...
...Bresson has interiorized what others would have treated as a naturalistic documentary...
...He urged that we think of ourselves as "citizens, not spectators...
...The first question—or rather speech—from the audience was a stem-winder that started out expressing doubt over the possibility of change in the church and descended into a rant on the Catholic origins of civil violence around the world, the sinister immigration policy of the church, and predictably enough, the Catholic overpopulation problem...
...At the prison Mass, while the chaplain recites the first prayers of the canon, interceding for the living and the dead, the 1 prisoners succeed in exchanging various contraband objects despite the surveillance of the guards...
...Yet everything that the Bush administration hopes to accomplish, from education reform to modernizing the military to providing Medicare prescription coverage, may depend on marshaling resources that lie in those surpluses, to say nothing of all that needs doing and currently goes unattended...
...AmIHot.com, a similar site, has personal ads with each photo...
...Others range from political satire ("Am I President or not...
...What might the center's next program be, "Mormonism: A Weird Religion for Weird People" or "The Hasidim: Haven't They Heard of Birth Control...
...This is especially evident in Pickpocket, which was received as a near revelation by the young directors of what became known as the "nouvelle vague...
...What secular benefits may government provide to students in parochial schools...
...After a medium shot of the two priests, Torcy continues: "What's up now...
...In a close-up in the lavatory, water turns red from the blood on his hands: he has murdered the proprietors...
...Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit...
...Glitzy signs for Western consumer products only partly mask Communist gray...
...Downright hilarious, though, was Gordon's analysis of the nature of faith in a postmodern age...
...Robert j. comiskey Springfield, Va...
...He even performs in a circus, where there is an unforgettable exchange (Continued on page 18) 15 (Continued from page 15) of glances between Balthasar and the other animals...
...Reducing the federal deficit used to be a Republican mantra...
...In a divided decision, the court ruled that state aid could not be neutral if it went predominantly to religious schools...
...The Court faced the question: Is a computer like a book and thus a "lawful benefit" or is it equipment and accordingly "forbidden aid...
...When the home page appears you are greeted with an image of a man or a woman underneath a beauty ballot...
...When he is revived, he is intent on vengeance...
...Fontaine's story shows a de.' - velopment from solitude to communication...
...There is a close-up of the young priest's face as Torcy's words are covered by the voice of the journal: "I hadn't realized that I was weeping...
...One member lists among her hobbies "drinking/getting drunk," "wrestling," and "building sand castles...
...Bresson tells us nothing of the prisoner's activities in the French Resistance, but shots of his face show intelligence, determination, and self-control...
...We hear his voice as he rereads it: "I don't think I am doing wrong in jotting down, day by day, with absolute frankness, the very simple trivial secrets of a very ordinary kind of life...
...Bresson's choice of material for many of his movies indicates a strong religious sensibility...
...The National Theater, a cube slightly rounded at the edges, would grace, or anyway not disgrace, a good-sized American city...
...His book-length essay, Notes on Cinematography (1975) was a complete rejection of what he calls "photographed theatre...
...Gaps and attempts to fill them are not confined to Bucharest...
...What is left are nineteenth-century neoclassical government and commercial buildings, domed at the corners and chastely ornamented...
...Sometimes the voice pronouncing the words of the journal covers over those being spoken by the cure, who is heard again only when the journal's voice has become silent...
...Tudor, head of the Greater Romania Party and fierce opponent of Jews, Hungarians, and gypsies, then asked Romania's highest court to set aside the vote on grounds of fraud, bribery, collusion, and a number of other allegations...
...II THE FILMS OF ROBERT BRESSON The Mozart of French cinema Joseph Cunneen The December 1999 death of Robert Bresson at the age of ninety-two represents the virtual end of the post-World War II era of internationally known film directors...
...Halliday warns that although the sanctions have failed to dislodge Hussein, they have turned a whole generation of younger Iraqis against the West, creating a veritable breeding ground for future extremists...
...The supreme instance of this technique is an exchange between the young cure and his mentor, the cure de Torcy, when the older man insists that we all have to find the place in the gospel where we personally encounter Jesus...
...What seems on landing to be a golden ground haze turns out to be smog that rises higher and grows thicker toward the center of the city...
...During the Gulf War (1991), more than 900,000 rounds of such ammunition were fired (compared to 31,000 rounds in Kosovo and 11,000 in Bosnia...
...In looking at the ecumenical movement, Ryan pointed out real possibilities and opportunities to come together and share our faith without our traditions inhibiting our worship and dialogue...
...An examination of Bresson's stylistic decisions shows how he transformed Georges Bernanos's classic but apparently unfilmable novel into a credible and deeply affecting movie...
...Wherever you do it, brother, the upper-wallah (God) will be watching...
...Throughout the film, the cure's voice either echoes the text as he makes his diary entries, or prolongs it in subsequent images...
...Desperate, he becomes the driver in a robbery attempt, but is caught and sent to prison...
...Until very recently, we had no television in our home...
...during the credits, accompanied by the andante of Schuberf s Piano Sonata no...
...A tear rolls down the young cure's cheek as the voice continues: "The truth is that my place for all time has been the Garden of Olives...
...The court quickly rejected Tudor's appeal only three days after votes were cast...
...Think of your own humanity...
...The Church and the Jews, A History...
...It was as if the Court treated religion like potential cyanide in the public water supply...
...It was enough to make a Catholic speed home with the intention of reuniting the procreative and unitive dimensions of the conjugal act...
...And sometimes, as in last December's election to the presidency of former Communist Ion Iliescu, who served from 1990 to 1996 as the country's first president after the fall of Nicolae Ceausescu, they make progress by going backward...
...In a strangely appropriate final image, the cafe patrons are massed against the door through which Yvon and the police pass...
...Postmodern people know that there is not just one truth, and consequently must embrace what she called the "challenge of de-evangelization" (few people in the room evidently caught the reference to John Paul II...
...I share that skepticism...
...Moreover, as you are well aware, a sexual orientation is only one component of the totality of personhood...
...But parents have been limited by their economic status in choosing the kind of education they want for their children...
...Help thou my unbelief...
...Providing secular textbooks was approved by the Supreme Court...
...In Mitchell, the "computer" case, the Court relied heavily on its 1997 Agostini ruling and on two other decisions involving challenges to benefits with religious overtones...
...Susan Sontag helpfully suggests a parallel with Brecht's theater: techniques that seem to distance us from the action end up by making our experience more absorbing...
...The shop-owners...
...In our nation, the U.S...
...I think he's too easy on the pope," Gordon began her remarks about Carroll's book, which, incidentally, does acknowledge that John Paul II has done more than any other pope to bring Catholics and Jews together...
...Carroll, a laicized priest, has done that too often in upscale magazines and newspapers like the New Yorker, the Atlantic Monthly, and the Boston Globe...
...Bresson's love of ab- , - straction is accompanied by a sure instinct for the telling concrete detail...
...during the conversation "•* '.<-;' with the countess, we hear the rak- ¦ -. ing of paths in the park...
...D 8 JO McGOWAN Corporal punishment Natural & other disasters in India Just minutes before the January 26 earthquake hit Gujarat, India—we live in Dehra Doon, north and east of that state—I was thinking about earthquakes...
...Or again, has anyone demonstrated that dissent from Humanae vitae has produced more stable and faithful marriages...
...Nor was he making a thriller...
...Can a prayer be offered before public school graduations or football games...
...A plea beneath the photo reads "Please help keep this site fun, clean, and real...
...The woman, a widow who takes care of an aged father and an adolescent nephew, closes the kitchen door and tells Yvon to sit down and eat...
...Years pass, and we observe Balthasar's trials at the hands of a succession of masters who whip him mercilessly...
...Where else can you get all this for $44 per year...
...there is a constant going and coming between the external and the internal world...
...But the Romanians will insist that every visitor see it, so prepare to be appalled...
...Lewis's Mere Christianity and his comparison of contemporary sexuality and gluttony...
...Religion was never imposed on the material...
...Bresson makes it • - - easy for agnostics to explain the actions of the cure as the result of heredity and morbidity, and the < ¦'%)¦:,:,s',', v />>', ;- • pious may feel cheated by the di- "\ -" ; * > * ft *¦'•' - rector's refusal to edify...
...At the end, when Fontaine jumps to safety from the outer wall, the "Kyrie" of Mozart's Mass reverberates in thanksgiving, but also continues to intercede for all who remain within the walls, whether prisoners or jailers...
...The situation is different in all of Western Europe and Canada, where substantial government subsidies ensure the freedom of parents to choose a religious school...
...President Bush insisted that we take our responsibilities seriously both in this country and in the world, reminding us that "compassion is the work of a nation, not just a government...
...There was much to applaud in Bush's brief address, though to his credit, the president did not play his lines for easy applause...
...In 1975 (Meek v. Pittenger) and again in 1977 (Wolman v. Walter) the Court established a further principle: "books for kids in religious schools, yes...
...I wanted all the factual details to be exact," he said, "but at the same time I tried to get beyond basic realism...I was hoping to make a film about objects which would at the same time have a soul...
...In that case, he would be nothing but the personality of an actor...
...Who needs it...
...As an old prisoner who was close to despair tells Fontaine, "It was necessary for Orsini to fail so you could succeed...
...As noted in the original letter, until such time as the church can adopt a more neutral stance on the interpretation of the orientation itself, the dialogue will remain one of defensive posturing...
...Take the promised tax cuts: the first and almost only extended round of applause during Bush's speech went to the reiteration of his campaign promise to cut taxes...
...It also seemed to dispel, at least among the Court's majority, any spirit of hostility toward religion and children in religious schools...
...Lest we forget, all of this was said at the Interf aim Center of New York...
...Today there are literal gaps in the city, especially in the south center, where the market was cleared and remains empty and boarded up...
...I thought...
...Can creches and menorahs be placed on government property...
...Diary of a Country Priest is a prime example of Bresson's rigor...
...My inquiry was directed toward the implications of the current, official institutional position of the church...
...There is a moment of near-domesticity as he passes on the clothes she has washed, and she hangs them up...
...Like the Pentagon, it doesn't look that big because it's a lot broader than it is tall and because, from the front, its full dimensions are not observable...
...Building on its 1947 decision and other precedents, the Court in 1971 (Lemon v. Kurtzman) established a threefold test for the constitutionaliI I ty of public funding of religious institutions: Such monies must serve "a secular legislative purpose," have "a primary effect that neither advances nor inhibits religion," and entail "no excessive government entanglement with religion...
...One doesn't denounce the state of Israel, for example, because of the passing (we hope) popularity of Ariel Sharon...
...When I took my then-fifteen-yearold son to see the film, he was hardly interested in the religious subtext but found the movie far more "real" than the thrillers to which he was accustomed...
...Given Romanian attitudes toward what Ceausescu managed to build before his fall, they should be more tolerant of the ruins...
...When the cure falls in the mud, Seraphita, his precocious catechism student, gives him a doth to wipe - " his face...
...The House of the People could be worse...
...Romanian Orthodox churches, the older ones aged into individuality and distinction...
...More than three years ago, Bishop Anthony Pilla, then president of the U.S...
...I think he's a dangerous figure...
...If I have an open mind to the Bible and to the magisterium, then those ideas can result in very wholesome and faithstrenghening thoughts...
...The movie's title is the motto of the ancient counts of Baux (the presumptive heirs of the Magi...
...It overturned in their entirety its previous bans on instructional equipment (Meek v. Pittenger, 1975...
...One is forced to ponder: If the purpose of sanctions is to oust Saddam Hussein, are they working...
...Since then there have been an additional sixty thousand sanction-related deaths—more than the number of U.S...
...In the same case, Justice William H. Rehnquist referred to "entanglement" as a Catch-22 paradox since "aid must be supervised to ensure no entanglement but the supervision itself is held to cause an entanglement...
...I think he's done an enormous amount of harm...
...Paradoxi¦•-¦¦ cally, by presenting events with cool detachment even during moments of great danger, audience involvement becomes more and ¦" - " ' more intense...
...Why is contraceptive intercourse not like the Romans' vomitorium...
...Polio, meningitis, and typhoid—all nearly eradicated before the war—are also on the rise, and cases of cholera quadrupled between 1997 and 1999, from 486 to 2,398...
...Where is the money...
...What a woman...
...we hear the barking of a dog, and the camera's gradual withdrawal returns us to the world of appearances...
...Bresson, of course, is counting on our recognition that the donkey is a powerful symbol of the lowly among whom Jesus chose to live...
...In Cluj (Klausenberg under the ID Harry J. Byrne SCHOOL CHOICE Has the Supreme Court changed its mind...
...That bias leads directly to another: the government that governs least _5_ Hot or not...
...What if there were an earthquake...
...he eliminated almost a third of the finished film in a final cut for the exhibitors' copy...
...After thinking about the article, I concluded that it produced some very thought-provoking ideas...
...In Transylvania, churches built in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries by Saxon settlers are largely deserted or turned into monuments because Ceau§escu allowed the parishioners, still largely German-speaking after more than eight centuries in the region, to emigrate when the German government paid large exit fees...
...I sure would like to know...
...When, during the actual escape, Fontaine overpowers a guard, Bresson deliberately keeps the violence out of view, forcing us to both shrink from and accept the costs of the struggle for freedom...
...he transposes A Gentle Woman (1969) and Four Nights of a Dreamer (1971) from Saint Petersburg to Paris, and borrows several threads from Crime and Punishment in Pickpocket (1959...
...The last is that of an open door through which Yvon, led by the police and gawked at by the curious, passes by in chains, yet perhaps truly free for the first time...
...Twenty?...And who is doing the counting...
...she demands...
...All of this appeared to go down very well with those in the room...
...tape recorders and projectors, no...
...If s simply too easy...
...Bresson's apparent coldness encourages a state close to contemplation in the audience, though few would formulate their responses in explicitly religious terms...
...we are wit¦",' nesses, not confidants...
...Bresson's work doesn't lend itself to such purposes...
...One Canadian expert, the Courant reported, has warned of likely lung cancers developing among Gulf War veterans...
...Dostoyevsky was Bresson's favorite author...
...The article by Luke Timothy Johnson attempts to take Pope John Paul II to task, thereby defining his deficiency, for not showing some "appreciation for the goodness of sexual pleasure...
...The site has inspired copycats of several varieties...
...Then he reached out and took his hand...
...the next sequence is the most tender and terrifying of Bresson's career...
...In a runoff with Corneliu Vadim Tudor, Iliescu received over 66 percent of the vote, much of it from moderates whose candidates failed to make the second round of voting...
...On January 26, my son had slipped out of the house while I was busy making my daughter's lunch and I didn't say good-bye to him...
...A prisoner in the courtyard shows him how he can communicate with those outside the walls...
...Samples are being examined for toxicity in five European countries, and an official assessment is expected in March...
...It was a ¦ -''" ...*-.' matter," Bresson said, "of making...
...The secular nature of a book could be readily determined and thus permitted, but equipment could be diverted to religious use and thus was prohibited...
...According to a series published last fall in the Hartford Courant (October 22-25,2000), birth defects in Iraq have nearly tripled since the end of the war, raising the issue of whether the use of depleted uranium-tipped weapons bears greater scrutiny there...
...No longer, it appears, will previous barriers to aid—the danger of political divisiveness, an undue proportion of aid going to Catholic schools, or a school's "pervasively sectarian" nature—taint the constitutionality of an aid program...
...In the first scene the newborn donkey is taken home and baptized amid idyllic images of a village childhood...
...None of that is good enough for Gordon or her fans...
...Did they cause a growing number of cancer- and leukemia-related deaths among NATO veterans...
...offered a tiny (four-millimeter) cross for the pastor to wear, Bresson told his prop director, "I'm afraid that might be a little big...
...use it to pay for a package brought by Yvon, a young messenger, who loses his job after he innocently uses the bill to pay for a meal...
...Furthermore, since widespread water contamination persists, a result of bombed-out infrastructure and the curtailment of chemical production and importation, dysentery and gastroenteritis are rampant, affecting both the old and the young...
...another, Orsini, after an unsuccessful attempt to escape, informs him that hooks will be necessary in descending the prison walls and that the lamp frame in his cell contains three hooks...
...Paul O'Neill, secretary of the treasury, acknowledged at his confirmation hearings the high priority a tax cut has in the new administration...
...You're not even listening to me...
...Simply stated: How will it respond, assuming no change in its present stance on nonheterosexual orientations, if the cause(s) of such orientations are uncovered in the future and subsequently the orientations themselves are subject to change within the canons of acceptable ethical norms...
...Last June the Court took another major step (Mitchell v. Helms) in making its church-state jurisprudence more coherent, its principles more unambiguous and equitable...
...Although there is no specific case dealing with public aid to religious schools on this year's Supreme Court docket, the future may bring more long-overdue relief to parents who choose religious schools for their children...
...I caught her last month at the Interfaith Center of New York...
...What 13 are you blubbering about...
...It was, the Court said, as though an individual had received a paycheck and turned a portion of it over to a religious institution...
...I am not moved by him kneeling at the wall," she boasted...
...Low-income families are constrained to accept the public education system with its state-mandated system of values...
...casualties in Vietnam—and there has been a change in U.S...
...They represent all of us who remain in the theater and look at the screen...
...We see Fontaine fashioning cords from the iron wires of his bedstead and the cloth of his bolster...
...The principal issue, of course, is how to interpret orientation itself...
...For the Exposition Center, the builders dug a large circular hole and put a dome over it, but the symmetry is much more pleasing than the Stalinist block nearby...
...other Western Europeans are not so sure...
...Claude Laydu became so identified with the role as the young cure d'Ambricourt that he virtually disappeared from movies afterward...
...there are 600 shots but ,•¦- . no extended sequences...
...As Commonweal's reviewer Robert Louis Wilken persuasively showed (January 26), Carroll's book is deeply flawed, especially his insistence that any traditional Christian understanding of the Crucifixion is inherently anti-Semitic...
...In its tortuous efforts to distinguish between "forbidden religious aid and lawful secular benefit," the Court's evolving incoherence and uncertainty came to be recognized by its own members...
...Aghast, I asked someone in the crowd what was happening and he told me that the police were trying to get a confession about a recent string of robberies...
...C ORRESPONDENCE A clarification In my letter inquiring about the church's agenda regarding a sexual orientation that it considers objectively disordered, the editors of Commonweal replied, "We doubt that the official church is supporting research to eliminate gays through genetic surgery, or otherwise" (January 12, 2001...
...By day, the grime visibly coats the buildings and dusts the cars (mostly Dadas, locally assembled) that crowd streets and clutter sidewalks...
...According to Dennis Halliday, the UN's former coordinator of aid to Iraq, the UN embargo has "pushed the Iraqi people back toward Saddam," undermining the sanctions' stated goal...
...And morally, if not politically and militarily, when do sanctions become objectionable...
...Ravi looked at him for a long moment, speechless...
...If you've ever asked yourself that question, here's a Web site for you: www.AmIHotOrNot.com...
...Again, the key to constitutional legitimacy was the private choice of the individual...
...In a true film, we should have the feeling of discovering someone...
...He had been tied in the "chicken" position (knees to his head) and then hung upside down on a pole stretched across two chairs...
...But the Court went much further...
...Narrative development, punctuated by the seventeenth-century music of Lulli, is abrupt and unexplained...
...the deficit could reemerge if surpluses fail to materialize) was taken by Republicans as an order to move full speed ahead...
...In March 2000, UN Secretary General Kofi Annan openly expressed concern about sanctions on Iraq...
...and Wolman v. Walter, 1977), stating that mere potential divertibility to religious use was no longer an invalidating factor...
...Bresson's pacing is deliberate...
...As state and local governments attempted to provide secular benefits in fairness to parents of children attending parochial schools, extreme church-state "separationists" were quick to lodge court challenges...
...It was his duty...
...Indeed, he first thought of giving A Man Escaped the title Help Yourself...
...when a package arrives, he transforms its contents into additional cords needed for climbing down the prison walls...
...Furthermore, down the line the cuts could turn out to be inflationary, bringing back the huge deficit that the Clinton administration inherited from the last Republican interregnum and finally tamed with the discipline supplied by the aforementioned Alan Greenspan...
...It is as if acts of God are not enough—we have to create our own tragedies as well...
...Near the end, covered with relics, Balthasar takes part in a religious procession, but that same night he is taken by smugglers to carry contraband to the frontier...
...and John Conyers (D-Mich...
...Earlier, Yvon's prison cellmate encourages him to resist the temptation to revolt, and another prisoner, looking out at the courtyard, says, "I always pray for suicides...
...A Man Escaped (1956), Bresson's next movie (the French title is A Man Condemned to Death Escaped), is an even clearer demonstration that the "spiritual" aspect of his work emerges from style rather than subject matter...
...John Paul II's behavior in relation to the Jews is "simply an outrage," she said...
...That barrier is now gone...
...At the outset, there is a brief text: "This is not a crime story...
...drops of blood descend along the wall, followed by the sound of an axe falling into a stream...
...to the philosophical ("Am I an existentialist or not...
...Bresson is faithful to the Bernanos text—all the dialogue in the movie is taken from the novel—but the director's style is quite different...
...Paradoxically, a sense of community has been achieved through one man's courageous actions...
...Supreme Court has long been challenged to strike a balance between the religion clauses of our First Amendment—"Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion or prohibiting the free exercise thereof...
...Have you heard me...
...Although Bresson never found the broad audience that made Ingmar Bergman and Federico Fellini household names, his reputation among movie professionals—Jean-Luc Godard called him "the Mozart of French cinema"—guarantees that his work will continue to be studied, especially by aspiring directors...
...their building collapsed and all but four died...
...The first image of L'Argent is of an ATM machine that operates twenty-four hours a day...
...Bucharest was, by older accounts, a lot more like Paris before various disasters: earthquakes in 1940 and 1977, the bombing of World War II, and the megalomania of Ceausescu, who, like Nero, wanted to demolish large sections of his capital in order to build a monument to himself...
...He had no choice, he assured us...
...Still, in December, Cleveland's voucher program was judged unconstitutional by the U.S...
...The Aguilar decision, which excluded public school teachers working in federally funded remedial programs from parochial school buildings, on the grounds of political divisiveness and "entanglement," had intolerable consequences...
...Bresson's final film, L'Argent (1983), made when he was seventy-six, displays the confidence of a master ready to explore an even darker reality...
...God knows, the history of Christian anti-Semitism is horrible, but Carroll is not the first or the most authoritative to write about those crimes...
...While the Courant series in no way exonerated Hussein for his failure to meet UN requirements, and blistered him for refusing to release humanitarian aid to the Iraqi people, nonetheless it reported that during the period sanctions have been in place, percapita annual income in Iraq has dropped from $3,500 to $750...
...In the immediate future, the Federal Reserve's lowering of interest rates is likely to work more smoothly and more quickly...
...Gordon was oblivious to the absence of humility and the unwarranted certainty with which she caricatured the pope's actions as well as the beliefs of those she deems "fundamentalists...
...Bresson's cinema was a reaction to the artificiality of most movie-generated emotion, which he saw as an exploitation of ready-made feelings...
...If not yet, when might they...
...Her barely contained anger at the pope prevents her from seeing what James Carroll honestly acknowledges: for all his failings, John Paul II sincerely reveres Judaism and has taken once unimaginable steps toward Jewish-Catholic reconciliation...
...Your attractiveness will be rated on a scale of one to ten—ten for hot, one for not...
...per-capita daily protein intake has fallen from 81.6 grams to 53.3 grams, landing the country on the list of nations endangered by malnutrition...
...An absolutizing of the establishment clause at the expense of the free-exercise clause seems to have occurred...
...Film critic and theorist Andre Bazin's praise is well earned: "Probably for the first time, the cinema gives us a film in which the only genuine incidents, the only perceptible movements, are those of the life of the spirit...
...No small irony in the title of that venue...
...Despite his fear that the soldier may be a spy, 14 Fontaine takes a risk and involves Jost in his planned escape...
...When the men shuffle into the courtyard to empty their slop buckets, there are notes from Mozart's Mass in C Minor, and an imprisoned Protestant pastor hands Fontaine a note...
...a rapid film with slow things, suggesting the heavy life of prison...
...In a time of budget surpluses, it is an offer that few will resist...
...In the coming months, look for the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith to issue norms for a Catholic Internet rating system, tentatively titled Ex corde Webesiae...
...Those that remain are regarded with less suspicion by ethnic Romanians than the much larger Hungarian minority...
...On such occasions, leaving ordinary duration for a domain beyond time, we enter the realm of inner consciousness...
...It is in this latter area that the Supreme Court has been frequently challenged to decide whether a practice constitutes "an establishment of religion" or its appropriate "free exercise...
...If not in ten years, in fifteen...
...He was on the phone to friends in the United States to mobilize funds, speaking to the prime minister's office to determine the areas of greatest need, receiving reports from friends in the affected villages and towns, and meeting with his team to plan strategies for temporary shelters as well as long-term reconstruction and relief...
...His widely praised overtures, such as his apology for historic violence against the Jews, his visit to Israel, and his pilgrimage to the Western Wall, are a fraud and a lie...
...By night, the haze, not quite as thick as that in Blade Runner, softens signs and street lights, making the vendors' stalls and the cobbled side streets of the Old Court district look like the Left Bank in Paris...
...The constant sense of religious mystery in Bresson's films, therefore, is not so much a product of subject matter as of style...
...It would be excellent for Johnson to expand these topics and to open the dialogue for those who would join him in his plea for a revisiting of Humanae vitae...
...Even more stark than the effect of radioactive contaminants on veterans and local populations, however, is another, continuing action against Iraq...
...L'Argent (1983) is based on a short story by Tolstoy...
...Disciplined by Bresson almost to the point of playing an automaton, Laydu said he did not realize that he had been portraying a saint until he saw the completed film...
...In dissenting from a 1985 decision (Aguilar v. Felton), Chief Justice Warren E. Burger wrote that the Court manifested "hostility toward religion and the children who attend church-sponsored schools...
...Although the story is based on the real-life escape of Andre Devigny (renamed Fontaine in the movie) from the Nazi prison of Montluc in Lyon in 1943, Bresson's intentions were very different from those of the Italian neorealists...
...Patrick Jordan I PAUL BAUNANN CATHOLICISM & ANTI-SEMITISM An evening with James Carroll & Mary Gordon When it comes to Catholic bashing—and especially pope bashing—the novelist Mary Gordon is in a class of her own...
...Yvon pets the dog...
...Bresson makes these words more poignant by avoiding any dramatic emphasis...
...9 Robert Murray Davis REPORT FROM ROMANIA Ceau§escu's legacies Eleven years after the end of Communist rule, Romanians still try to fill the gaps and resolve the contradictions created during four decades of repression and isolation from the West...
...Writing for a plurality in the Helms computer case, Justice Clarence Thomas, joined by Chief Justice Rehnquist and Justices Anthony M. Kennedy and Antonin Scalia, made specific reference to past bigotry against Catholics resulting in Court decisions banning aid to students in schools that were "pervasively sectarian"—code language for "Catholic...
...In 1997 in Agostini v. Felton, the Court overturned this troublesome precedent, declaring: "We therefore conclude that our establishment clause law has significantly changed...
...Yet, as carefully crafted as the speech was in its appeal for the nation "to seek a common good beyond your comfort, to defend needed reforms against easy attacks, to serve your nation, beginning with your neighbor," it also exposed the contradictions embedded in the Republican agenda—contradictions that belie the president's appeal to the common good...
...Gordon was particularly incensed over the beatification of Pius IX and John Paul It's support for Pius XII's canonization...
...Rushing out, he exchanges glances with a grey-haired woman and follows her home...
...No summary of the plot can explain why this movie, which shows so much pain and cruelty, is nevertheless not depressing...
...Submit your picture and find out...
...In its 6-3 decision, the Court declared a computer was like a book...
...mansions of the nobility and higher bourgeoisie turned by the Communists into museums, writers' clubs, and other cultural sites...
...He is known in the United States as the director of Diary of a Country Priest (1950...
...He presents Yvon's surrender not as an act of weakness but a way of breaking the chain of evil, perhaps as the beginning of redemption...
...The bright colors, the wide, panoramic shots of the meadow, the sheep's bells continuing to call out even after Balthasar dies, and a final return of the Schubert sonata create a deeply affecting and healing ending...
...The four justices were joined in a separate concurring opinion by Justices O'Connor and Stephen Breyer that, overruling past barriers, nevertheless enunciated some remaining restrictions...
...As we walked past him and into the station, he stared at us dully, dearly in shock...
...Some, like "Am I capable of understanding basic logic or not...
...In calling for civility, courage, compassion, and character, he spoke to the desire of many for greater national comity and citizen accountability...
...But do we...
...While Bernanos is often lyrical, highly visual, and dramatic, the film opens simply, showing the school notebook in which the cure is making an entry...
...One of the most poignant stories involved a class of thirty high-school juniors (my son's age) who had been called in for a special exam (January 26 is a national holiday in India, and children generally attend school only to participate in outdoor parades and patriotic displays...
Vol. 128 • February 2001 • No. 3
