by Michael Frost | Jun 6, 2019 | Art & Popular Culture
Recently, I set myself the modest challenge to list the ten most joyous buildings I’ve ever seen. By joyous I mean in the simple sense that they make me feel happy. I love looking at them. They bring me a sense of delight, or elation, or contentment. I see the fingerprints of God all over beautiful design, no matter the motivation of their designer, and for me magnificent architecture, like all great art, draws me nearer to God. The Celts believed that the veil between heaven and earth was three feet thick. But in thin places, they said, the veil has worn through. Heaven seems closer. They used the term to describe rugged, breathtaking places like the wind-swept isle of Iona or the rocky outcrops of Croagh Patrick. But for me meditating in the Cathedral of Brasilia or the Rothko Chapel is a thin place. As is laughing at Frank Gehry’s Dancing House or the nuttiness of Habitat 67. Sometimes I’ve stumbled upon thin places in great architecture. Like finding the SR Crown Hall in Chicago. I hadn’t expected to be so touched by it’s elegance and simplicity. Other times, I’ve gone looking for a certain building, knowing it is famed for its transcendence, like Frank Lloyd Wright’s Fallingwater. Some of the buildings listed here I see every day. Some,
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by Michael Frost | Mar 26, 2019 | Art & Popular Culture
Catholic blogger, Mary Pezzulo stirred up a bit of controversy this Lent when she published, Was Jesus Really Sexually Abused? I must admit, it was a question that hadn’t even crossed my mind before. Pezzulo’s basis for raising it comes from both a reading of the Gospel accounts of the crucifixion as well as historical research into the torturous methods of the Romans. Pezzulo wrote, “The ancient Romans were, as a culture, sadistic. They got off on hurting and humiliating people. And a gang of sadistic Roman soldiers ripped a Man’s clothes off and whipped Him while He was stark naked, then they forcibly dressed Him in a humiliating costume, beat Him up again, ripped the costume off, and threw His own clothes back on Him. That’s sexual abuse.” Some of her readers pushed back on this. They agreed it was abusive behavior, but questioned whether his forced public nakedness constituted sexual abuse. Pezzulo countered with, “Pretend it’s the first time you’ve heard that story.” And when you do try to imagine encountering it for the first time, being forcibly disrobed and mocked certainly has the elements of a sexual assault. But Mary Pezzulo lost a lot of readers when she pushed her argument even further, speculating on what she claimed was standard operating procedure for those brutish Romans. She began
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by Michael Frost | Mar 20, 2019 | Art & Popular Culture
In my previous post I mentioned I’m spending Lent meditating on Andrea Mantegna’s astonishing Renaissance painting, The Lamentation of the Christ, also known as The Dead Christ. This week in particular, as I’ve been contemplating it, I find my eyes drawn again and again to Mantegna’s depiction of Jesus’ feet. When you think about it, not many artists concern themselves with the soles of Christ’s feet. We get lots of pictures of his sandaled feet. And plenty of pictures of his feet anchored to the cross with nails as thick as your thumb. But not the soles. Which is odd really. I mean, this is the man who called people to follow him, to walk in his footsteps. You’d think we’d be more familiar with the feet of the one we’re trying to emulate. Alongside my reflections on this painting, I have been re-reading John’s Gospel. This week, I came to the lengthy conversation Jesus has with his disciples while sharing the Passover feast on the eve of his arrest and trial. The feast begins with Jesus performing the scandalous duty of washing his disciples’ feet, a necessary and routine practice, but one never undertaken by a teacher or master to his followers. Peter voices the feelings of all the disciples when he recoils in horror and says, “No, you
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by Michael Frost | Mar 14, 2019 | Art & Popular Culture
I’m going to spend 40 days sitting with the dead Christ. I was inspired by one of my teachers telling me he spent every day in Lent contemplating a single image, Dali’s Christ of Saint John of the Cross. Spending forty days sitting with Dali’s God’s eye view of the crucifixion, running his eye down the length of Christ’s cross-anchored body to the fishermen by the Sea of Galilee, centered my professor on the sacrifice of Christ and the love of God the father. So I’m trying the same thing this year, but with a different painting, although one that takes a no less unlikely perspective on the Easter story. Andrea Mantegna was a Renaissance master from Padua in northern Italy. Some time in the 1480s he painted The Lamentation of Christ (also known more bluntly as The Dead Christ). It’s an Easter composition unlike any other. Mantegna’s perspective is so rare, it takes us aback. Christ doesn’t writhe in agony on the cross. He’s not wracked with anguish in the Garden of Gethsemane. He doesn’t stand blood-soaked and humiliated before us, a crown of thorns gouging his head, a garish robe of red around his stooped shoulders. We are accustomed to all these views. In Mantegna’s vision, Christ is dead. He’s like stone. Like the marble slab upon which
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by Michael Frost | Dec 7, 2018 | Art & Popular Culture, Uncategorized
“Some people want to grow in their souls. Film must start to take that seriously. We must stop telling them stories they can understand.” – Howard Barker There were some great movies released in 2018. Black Panther managed to break box office records and represent the African (American) experience unlike any film in recent memory. Isle of Dogs and Game Night were enjoyable diversions. The Coen Brothers’ foray into Netflix, The Ballad of Buster Scruggs was terrific. As were American Animals and Roma. But a surprising number of really good films in 2018 addressed really big themes. Themes like love, injustice, white supremacy, religious faith, hope and despair, death and grief. These are the kinds of things some people go to the theater to avoid. But as film writer Howard Barker notes, some moviegoers like films that expand their souls. They don’t necessarily want easy-to-understand fare, and are willing to watch less mainstream films that address important issues. So, here’s five of my favorite soul-growing films of the year and the themes they address: 1. SWEET COUNTRY Theme: INJUSTICE “Sweet Country is Old Testament cinema, with an almost biblical starkness in its cruelty and mysterious beauty, set in a burning plain where it looks as if the sun-bleached jawbone of an ass could at any moment be picked up and
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by Michael Frost | Nov 19, 2018 | Advent
It will soon be Advent, the most beautiful of church seasons, celebrated over the four Sundays preceding Christmas. You might not be part of a liturgical church tradition, but marking each Sunday with a reading and the lighting of a candle can be a rich way to prepare yourself, your family, your congregation for the true meaning of Christmas amidst all the tinsel and commercialism of the season. You might like to use these four paintings, each from different eras, as stimulus for thinking about the well-known story. Here’s how you might do it: Light the candle (you’ll need three purple and one rose candle, and a white one for Christmas). Read the Bible text. Take time to examine the picture. Read the reflection below each picture. This could be done in your Sunday service, or around the family meal table, or as a personal devotional practice. I hope this small resource helps to focus your heart and soul on the true things of Christmas – hope, faith, joy and peace – and forms a brief respite from shopping mall Santas and Jingle Bells and gluttony and avarice. Oh, and merry Christmas. __________________________________________ WEEK 1 — HOPE Light the Prophets’ Candle (purple), symbolizing hope Reading: Luke 1:26–38 Artwork: The Annunciation by Henry Ossawa Tanner (1859-1937) In Henry Ossawa Tanner’s depiction of
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by Michael Frost | Jun 20, 2018 | Art & Popular Culture
This week I saw Leigh Whannell’s new film, Upgrade, a sci-fi horror film that really got me thinking about the nature of Christian discipleship. The movie introduces us to Grey Trace, a bit of an everyman, an old-school car mechanic who loves his wife Asha and distrusts all this new-fangled technology (the action takes place slightly in the future so there’s some cool gadgets on display). When Asha is murdered and he is left a quadriplegic in a vicious gang attack, Grey finds himself confined to a wheelchair seething with desire to track down his wife’s killers but unable to do anything about it. He is approached by Eron, a world-renowned tech genius (with very limited social skills, you know the kind by now) who explains that his company has developed a stop secret, biomechanical enhancement, a beetle-like computer chip, that when implanted in a person’s spinal column can send signals from the brain to the body. Eron calls it Stem, and says he’s willing to trial it on Grey. Stem, he promises, can “bridge the gap between brain and limbs.” It can restore the life that’s been taken from Grey. And sure enough, with Stem implanted in his neck, Grey can walk and move freely. But there’s a catch. Stem can not only interpret brain signals and convey messages
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by Michael Frost | Apr 12, 2018 | Art & Popular Culture
Remember that line in Yann Martel’s book, Life of Pi, when the protagonist tells his visitor, “I have a story that will make you believe in God.” Can stories really do that? And if they can, shouldn’t film have even more chance to convey belief in God, given the visceral impact they can have? So, which films would you recommend as those most likely to make someone believe in God? My mind went immediately to films about people struggling with their faith, like Black Narcissus (1947) or Robert Bresson’s Diary of a Country Priest (1951) or Ingmar Bergman’s The Seventh Seal (1957), all masterpieces of religious-themed cinema. But in each of these cases, the viewer is invited to observe the characters’ tenuous hold on faith. Would they make someone believe in God? Any film that could evoke a sense of God’s presence would have to be extremely challenging one, the kind of visual experience that demands much of the viewer. I mean, God is worthy of our undivided attention, right? We’re not talking about Bruce Almighty (2003) or The Shack (2011) here. So, here are three admittedly extremely challenging films that I think could at least help you believe in God. TREE OF LIFE (2011) Written and directed by Terrence Malick, Tree of Life is a film like no other. It
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by Michael Frost | Apr 11, 2018 | Art & Popular Culture
When Wes Anderson’s film The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou came out on DVD in 2004, in the extras it included an interview Anderson and co-writer Noah Baumbach did with Italian film critic Antonio Monda. Typically, it’s slightly absurdist, with the odd moment of sincerity, like the time when Monda asks Anderson and Baumbach if they believe in God. “No,” replies Baumbach without hesitation. So Monda directs his question to Anderson, “What about you?” “I think so,” Anderson says sweetly. Baumbach looks surprised. “Really?” Anderson demurs only slightly, “Yeah, I mean… I mean, roughly.” To me that seems like an entirely appropriate answer for a filmmaker who addresses huge issues like the nature of family, human brokenness, grief and depression, the challenges of under-parented adults, and a hunger for purpose, but in whose films God only appears obliquely. Critic David Zahl writes, “The very mention of a religious dimension to Wes Anderson’s films may sound surprising, even bizarre. It is certainly not what he is known for.” In fact, Zahl observes, rather cleverly, that because Anderson’s films are so extraordinarily intricate and perfectly balanced, “…it seems there is no room in a Wes Anderson film for any deity other than Wes Anderson.” But God does show up in Anderson’s films. It might take some faith to see it, but in
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by Michael Frost | Feb 26, 2018 | Art & Popular Culture
Recently I posted this on Facebook: Why, why, why did the most inspirational and groundbreaking cinema event of the decade have to be a stoopid Marvel movie?!!? Yeah, it’s true I don’t like Marvel (or DC) films. And I’m not that fond of Star Wars or Star Trek movies either. I mean, I don’t hate them, and I get that lots of people really love them, but to me they’re just too repetitive and predictable. I’ve just grown weary of the two dimensional character development and the gee-whiz effects. Please don’t hate me. So when I referred to “the most inspirational and groundbreaking cinema event of the decade,” of course I was meaning Ryan Coogler’s Black Panther, the Marvel blockbuster that follows King T’Challa as he struggles to support the highly-advanced African nation, Wakanda. People of color are raving about Black Panther, especially about the amazing nearly all-black cast, and that fact that the film reflects on big topics like pan-Africanism, racial politics, and imperialism. And I do find that exciting. But, come on, it’s still a stoopid Marvel film. Of course, I was roundly taken to task by Marvel fans on Facebook (which is fine), but I found myself being even more convicted by the comments I got from people of color. They wrote about how much it meant
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by Michael Frost | Jun 13, 2017 | Art & Popular Culture
I haven’t seen Wonder Woman and I probably won’t. I’m guessing it’s pretty much the same as the other Marvel/DC comic book hero films. As everyone keeps pointing out though, what is different about Wonder Woman is that the lead superhero is woman! Or an Amazon, if that’s the same as being a woman. In the original comic book, WW was sculpted from clay by her mother Queen Hippolyta and given life by Aphrodite, along with superhuman powers as gifts by the Greek gods. And somehow Zeus is her father. I know. It’s confusing. Anyway, at least she’s played by a woman. And everyone says that makes her a role model for little girls and a feminist icon. Who am I to disagree? I find it interesting that people are gushing about the breakthrough of having a female superhero in the very year that a number of exceptional female-led dramas have been released. Both William Oldroyd’s haunting Lady Macbeth and Sophia Coppola’s Cannes-winning The Beguiled are about 19th Century women forced to take control of their lives when men threaten to destroy them. Both films make much of the fact that the odds are stacked in favor of men and in order to survive (or indeed, thrive), women must resort to extraordinary measures. In each case, the women’s sexuality draws them
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by Michael Frost | May 22, 2017 | Art & Popular Culture
First up, this isn’t an anti-Trump post. It’s an anti-Marvel one. I want to escape the Marvel Cinematic Universe. And I’m not being ironic, they actually call it that. The Marvel Cinematic Universe is a creation of Marvel Studios, which has been churning out superhero films since 2007, racking up 15 so far, every one of them exactly the same as the last. In the past year alone we’ve had new Marvel franchises like Guardians of the Galaxy, Dr Strange, and Deadpool, as well as being treated to retreads like X-Men 9, Wolverine 3, and Captain America 3. And they have 11 more in various stages of production, including Thor 3, Avengers 3, the newbie Black Panther, and the third Spider-Man reboot (or 6th film if you’re counting). Hey, I’m not judging you if you like these pictures, but does the world really need another Spider-Man movie?? In the Marvel Cinematic Universe superheroes of various shapes and sizes, from Hulk down to that raccoon character in GOTG, rip and tear the world to pieces as they fight aliens, villains, gods, and mad scientists at every turn. They even fight each other. There are two main reasons I want to escape (not counting the fact that all these films share the same basic plot). Firstly, none of them contain a skerrick of actual
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