CINEMATIC LENSES AND LAYERS: MOVIES TO EXERCISE MINDS AND SPIRITS

Tuesday evenings, beginning September 9, our sabbatical minister, Rev. Dennis McCarty, will offer  weekly MUUVIE Nights. We will watch eight evocative motion pictures, teasing out what they tell us, at different levels, about the people and cultures that created them.  MOVIE NIGHTS START AT 6PM!

These movie workshops will dovetail with a series of Sunday morning services on popular culture, gaining  surprising insights into emotional/spiritual currents, our place in them, and how they manifest themselves all around us. 

A person can attend as many or as few sessions as seem  intriguing. Sometimes a Sunday service will analyze and contextualize the next movie in our series, sometimes it will address a different, though related, topic. 

Tuesday, Sept. 9 - Metropolis

We will begin our motion picture  adventure with a silent film which has many modern-day  descendants: German director Fritz Lang’s 1927  expressionist masterpiece, Metropolis. If you have ever enjoyed a mad scientist horror flick, or nightmare movies ranging from Dark City to Blade Runner to any Batman film and beyond, they all draw from the visual imagery Lang created in Metropolis. Meanwhile, his depiction of billionaires riding in luxury, on the backs of the working class, resonate as though this film were made yesterday.

Tuesday, Sept. 16 - Zero Dark Thirty

We will re-explore epistemic justice and injustice by watching director Kathryn Bigelow’s controversial 2012 action procedural, Zero Dark Thirty. This movie kicked off a furor because of its depiction of torture by American intelligence agents in the hunt for Osama Bin Laden. (It is not for the faint of heart.) Yet there is more going on than that, both in its lenses on the individuals being tortured, those committing the atrocities, and most crucially, its depiction of a woman working in what is assumed to be a man’s field. Its feminist message  was largely ignored, however, in the debate over even  more controversial elements. 

This leaves us with more questions than answers. What did director Bigelow herself believe on these issues? What is she trying to tell us? What is she telling us—that she doesn’t realize she’s telling us?

Tuesday, Sept. 23 - The Outlaw Josey Wales

We will watch Clint  Eastwood’s 1976 western, The Outlaw Josey Wales. No movie genre better expresses the myth of America itself than the Western. When this particular western was released, it received rave reviews. But we can also see the tendrils of D.W. Griffith’s racial attitudes, along with the Civil War “lost cause” myth, still playing out  in a movie made sixty years later. Intertwined with its  rousing, “shoot ‘em up” action, Josie Wales reflects the  civil and gender rights struggles of the 1960s, as well as the toxic masculinity that also shaped classic westerns.

Tuesday, Sept. 30 - La Belle et La Bete

We will watch another classic, black-and-white film, from French director Jean Cocteau’s poetic La Belle et La Bete (Beauty and the Beast) from 1946. Not the Walt Disney cartoon. The only thing the two really have in common is the title. In a river of visual poetry, Cocteau evokes sexuality, oppressive relationships—and the nature of death itself.  

Tuesday, Oct. 7 - Within Our Gates

We will watch Black filmmaker Oscar Michaeux’s silent film, Within Our Gates. On the shoestring budget available to him as a Black film director, Micheaux could not match the movie magic of big-budget Hollywood movies. But his movies evoked Black life and the Black point of view far better than anything Hollywood would do until generations later.

Looking back, we can appreciate the sly — sometimes slashing — wit with which he satirized white movie tropes. This is particularly the case with Within our Gates, which deliberately parallels — and visually condemns — the racist and sexual paranoia of D.W. Griffith’s The Birth of a Nation.

The title comes from the Bible’s Book of Deuteronomy, instructing the faithful to treat “the stranger that is within thy gates” with compassion, fairness, and respect. America has a poor record on that aspect, of course. And today’s Christian Nationalists duplicate that hypocrisy even as they proclaim their reverence for the Bible itself. Over the next couple of weeks, given our own country’s flirtation with fascism, we will view two films on the struggle against dictatorship and also its cost, exacted on the most vulnerable.

Oct. 14 - 12.12

Today, South Korea is renowned for glitzy K-drama, as well as K-pop music. That artistic gloss, government-subsidized, developed over more than a generation. In the process, Korean filmmakers also studied their own land’s long struggle against repressive regimes. Tuesday, Oct. 14, we will watch the newest film of our series, Korea’s 2023

domestic blockbuster,12.12: The Day. In 1979, Korean General Chun Doo-whan staged a series of coups d’etat, which overthrew Korea’s democratically elected government. His ten-year regime was actually less repressive than the dictatorship that preceded it, but Chun’s soldiers killed thousands of dissidents and innocent bystanders in seizing and keeping power.

Called to account long after removal from power, Chun refused to accept any responsibility. Korean artists are still sorting out this piece of their history. This depiction of the coup grants Chun grudging respect. He is the villain, but resembles the Western “Marlovian hero,” gaining admiration by his very commitment to his villainy.

Oct. 21 - A Petal

A devastating 1996 film, A Petal, portrays the impact of dictatorship on the disempowered. In 1980, Chun’s soldiers violently put down demonstrating students in the city of Kwangju, killing thousands. A Petal depicts the impact on a teenage girl, traumatized by the violence and brutalized in its aftermath. It is almost a lost film, very rarely seen — and frankly, difficult to watch. But it is brilliant filmmaking. It was also the screen debut of Korean singer/actress Lee

Jung-hyun, who went on to stage and screen mega-stardom. One added note of interest: It reprises music of singer Kim Choo-ja, who is unknown in the West, but who

became Korea’s first great pop star in the 1970s. It was Kim Choo-ja who laid the groundwork for today’s K-pop.

Oct. 28 - The Shape of Water

We will finish with Mexican director Guillermo del Toro’s acclaimed 2017 fantasy romance, The Shape of Water. Similar to our earlier fantasy romance, La Belle et La Bete, this movie can be viewed on multiple levels. Del Toro drew the Aquaman character from 1950s horror movies, but also real South American legends. It pays homage to old “creature features” while debunking the “Make America great again” ethos that created those films. It also also parallels Victor Hugo’s novel about religious and sexual hypocrisy, The Hunchback of Notre Dame, both visually and thematically. Most of all, del Toro tells us, it is an exploration of what it means to be “The Other.” In an age when gender-nonconforming people, people with disabilities, and non-Euro-American people are all coming under increased threat, this movie’s cultural critique is more relevant than ever.

Do come join us for one or several of these fascinating film adventures. You may never watch a movie in the same way again. Childcare is available upon request, please contact childcare@firstuuomaha.org.