#the audience of people on this website who have watched communion and would be interested in transformative art of communion is exactly 1

[vinkandpaint]

so I watched communion (1989) last month and I've been thinking about movie!whitley ever since. this started out as one joke redraw of top right, but then I ended up doing studies bc he's fun to draw whoops.

[aaroncutler]

June 5: The link above leads to the website for the Brazilian festival Olhar de Cinema (“Cinema View”), whose eighth edition begins today and runs through June 13th. For this year’s edition, I served on the selection committee for feature-length films together with programmer colleagues Carla Italiano, Eduardo Valente, and the festival’s director, Antônio Junior. The bulk of my work was spent on the festival’s Classics, Special Screenings, and three competitive sections, in addition to the Focus section – devoted this year to the work of the instigating Chilean filmmaker Camila José Donoso – and the Retrospective section, which this year proposes a dialogue between a small body of films directed by Raúl Ruiz and a number of works made by Brazilian filmmakers during periods of exile.

When I look at this year’s program, I feel pleased with the presence of a high number of strong films that offer diverse expressions, many of them non-commercial in nature and filled with compelling reflections on present times. Since each individual viewer’s taste is different, I will not recommend any titles here, but will instead encourage anyone interested to contact me through the information listed on the Mutual Films website. I will also wish and hope for all of Olhar’s attendees this year their best possible experience of the festival.

June 18: In the days since the conclusion of the most recent edition of Olhar de Cinema, a few different versions of a historic photograph have been circulating online. The version in what I understand to be the best resolution contains four of the festival’s prize-winning filmmakers posed together. From right to left: Letícia Simões is holding the Critic’s Award that was given for her feature-length film Home, a delicate first-person tracking of the relationship between herself and her mother in Bahia. Maíra Bühler is holding the Best Film prize for the festival’s main international Competition section, which was awarded for her nuanced Let It Burn, a humanistic communion with recovering crack addicts at a rehabilitation center in the city of São Paulo. Camila Freitas is smiling after having won two awards – the Audience Award and the international competition’s Special Jury Award – for her film Landless, a largely female-led portrayal of members of Brazil’s Landless Workers Movement in the state of Goiás. And Cris Lyra, in addition to being one of Landless’s cinematographers, is the winner of the Best Brazilian Short Film prize for her film Breakwater, a warm study of a young lesbian community on New Year’s Eve on a beach in São Paulo state. 

I am always concerned, when reading or writing festival wrap-up pieces, that a focus on prizewinners will take away from reflecting on other films and on the program as a whole. In this case, however, I find it difficult for the grouping of filmmakers listed above not to catch attention. The eyes can open wider when one additionally considers some of the other prize-winning filmmakers and films. For example, the international competition’s prize for Best Short Film went to Aziza, in which the director Soudade Kaadan considers questions involving her native Syria through a grouping of actors playing archetypal scenes. The chief prize of the Other Views section went to At Jolie Coiffeure, in which the Cameroon-born director Rosine Mbakam concentrates closely on a beauty parlor in Belgium run by another Cameroonian immigrant woman. The Other Views jury further gave an Honorable Mention to Indianara, a documentary portrait of a contemporary trans female activist in Rio de Janeiro. The prize for Best Film from the New Views section went to Just Don’t Think I’ll Scream, an indelible film diary narrated in the first person by the openly gay French director Frank Beauvais. The top prize and honorable mention for shorts in the Mirada Paranaense section (awarded to films from the Brazilian state of Paraná) went to works with LGBTQI+ and indigenous themes, respectively.

The festival of course had some films (and even some films with prizes or mentions) that were made by or about ostensibly white and ostensibly heterosexual men. But I do believe that something amazing happened in this year’s edition of Olhar, which is that historically underrepresented voices took prominence in ways that I had never previously imagined happening in a general international festival’s lineup. The most amazing aspect of this occurrence, for me, is that it happened in what hindsight makes seem like organic fashion. The festival’s juries gave their prizes and mentions to films in competition sections that featured record-breaking numbers of works directed by female and LGBTQI+ male authors. And, as part of the festival’s curatorial team, I can state that these sections took their shapes as a result of our group’s rigorous yet fundamentally simple efforts to screen as much of the best of contemporary world cinema as could fit into the program. In other words, there was no theme, nor thematic intent, that was adopted in relation to the general selection of new films: The shape of the program, rather, came to reflect something that is genuinely happening in global arthouse and independent cinema today, at the levels both of filmmaking and of audience responses to it. (Filmmakers, after all, are also viewers.)

I write this while also thinking about how all five of the programs in the festival’s Special Screenings section featured female and/or LGBTQI+ authorship; about how the festival’s Focus section spotlighted the work of Camila José Donoso, who brilliantly collaborates with a variety of marginalized human subjects; about how the Classics section featured a unprecedented four programs of films directed by women in addition to films directed by men with urban trans, Aboriginal Australian, and indigenous African protagonists; about how the festival’s Retrospective section featured female directors for the first time thanks to the presences of films by Lúcia Murat and Helena Solberg; and about how Raúl Ruiz might seem like an outlier, were it not for the fact that (among other reasons) his widow and collaborator Valeria Sarmiento edited more than two-thirds of the films that he shot and is still intensely involved with continuing his legacy in addition to developing her own directorial projects. There are other examples of expanded views of cinema that were present in other sections and programs at Olhar this year, and I will refrain from trying to give them in the interest of space.

One could claim that the broader idea of an expanded view of cinema, both from a historical and from a present-day perspective, cannot possibly be maintained. In response, I would circle back to the photograph. In a year in which Olhar’s lineup also featured an unprecedented number of strong Brazilian films, it strikes me that all four of the award-winning female documentarians in the photograph are also Brazilian. Anyone that has read an international news report recently is likely to know that Brazil is going through hard times. Even so, its cinema today seems to be offering hope to the world in an uncommonly humanistic way.

I also sense a particular hope through the presence of Cris Lyra in the photograph and the fact of her being held equal to the other three filmmakers - not because she is a self-identifying lesbian, but rather, because she is the director of a short film who, in this moment, is being given the same amount of attention afforded to three other directors that have all made feature-length works. In multiple ways, the film world still treats works under 50 minutes in length as being inherently inferior to those possessing running times of 50 minutes or more. This prejudice creates what is among the most nefarious and long-lasting divisions that continue to exist among people who work with and watch cinema. It is one more wall to break down.

[lindseyvalois]

Essay on “Lost”

When Oceanic flight 815 crash landed onto television in 2004, viewers did not know what they were in for. The pilot episode of ABC’s hit series, Lost, tricked viewers into thinking they were watching a survivalist drama when it was actually about to be so much more than that. Borrowing from the genres of fantasy, sci-fi, and drama, Lost follows a group of plane crash survivors who end up on a mysterious island that harbors eerie secrets. The writers, including J.J Abrams and Damon Lindelof, incorporated many central themes into the plot of Lost that posed interesting questions including the ideas of good vs evil, heaven vs hell, destiny vs chance, and science vs faith. The subject of religion and philosophy is prevalent in Lost and is shown in the constant butting of heads between the characters of John Locke and Jack Shepard. This theme of science vs faith in Lost sparked many interesting fan and scholarly analyzations across a wide array of mediums.

In the six seasons that it was on the air, Lost reeled in audiences with a complex storyline that was mysterious and suspenseful. Fan’s made blogs dedicated to analyzing details, reviews of each episode were posted on news websites, and scholars did studies on central themes in Lost and published them. The show itself focused so immensely on the concepts of science and faith that the season 2 premier was even named “Man of Science, Man of Faith” after an argument in the season 1 finale between the characters of Jack Shepard, the man of science, and John Locke, the man of faith. Jack Shepard, played by Matthew Fox, is the first character we meet on the island. His entire life has been routed in science since he followed in his father's footsteps and became a surgeon. He is a skeptic when it comes to destiny and believes that every mysterious instance that happens on the island must have a logical explanation. Terry O’Quinn plays John Locke who, on the other hand, is a strong believer in fate. Prior to the crash, Locke was wheelchair bound, but when he wakes up with the full use of his legs, he begins to believe that the island brought him there for a reason.

Many blog posts were written by fans of the show that covered a wide array of topics as well as fan theories about where the show was going and what it all meant. “Lost: A Show About Science or a Show About Faith?- Thoughts on the END of Lost’s Series Finale ‘The End,” is the title of a post that was written in 2010 by Julie Kushner on her blog called “Tv Recappers Anonymous.” In her post, Kushner humorously collects her thoughts on the controversial ending of the show and adds pictures with captions underneath such as, “one Man of Science. One Man of Faith. The Island wasn’t big enough for both of them . . .  or was it?” Kushner makes it clear that she is writing based on opinion. For example, she writes, “ I think Lost‘s journey as a show, was similar to Jack’s journey, as a character.” She goes on to say that Lost seemed to start out as a show based on science, often having scientific explanations to the odd occurrences that happened on the island, but once the character of Locke died, Jack's character became more rooted in faith and so did the show as a whole. Kushner exclaims her dismay about the show taking a turn to the side of faith and discusses her opinions on how the show would be if it remained on the science side, to which many people responded with their own opinions. Blogs are the most informal and entertaining way for fans to write opinion pieces and spark discussions or share ideas with others.

Not only did fans create forums to express their ideas, but experts conducted scholarly studies about Lost pertaining to their particular field of study. “Sustaining the Mystery, Developing Cross-Religious Understandings: Religion, Philosophy, and Convergence Culture Online in ABC’s LOST,” is a study written by Lynn Clark where she sought to find out “the extent to which online forums and discussions about Lost serve as a location for increased understanding about religious difference” (1.) She points out the philosophical and religious references, including how John Locke was named after the philosopher and Jack Shepard’s last name is of Biblical descent. She also discusses the less explicit allusions to religion besides Christianity, including Sayid, who is a muslim character, and the articulation of Buddhism and spirituality that Locke presents (10.) Clark uses a dense vocabulary to discuss her findings as well as the findings of others. She states that programs like Lost facilitate the mediatization of religion by showing religious symbolism within the plot that are outside the bounds of what is normally considered religious, reframing iconic religious symbols within these new contexts and creating a way to understand them through popular culture, and extending considerations of religion outside of religious institutions through the discussions that the program sparks among audiences (30.)

Sitting in the middle of forum and fact are the news sources that responded to episodes of Lost. In a 2010 article for the New York Daily News titled “‘Lost’ and Religion: Christianity and Faith Played a Big Role in ABC Series,” Michael Sheridan discusses the religious symbolism used, specifically in the last episode, and adds quotes from one of the writers of Lost, Carlton Cuse, as confirmation. "The faith axis seems like it's a big part of the show this year and faith is really important to both of us," said Cuse, referring to his co-writer Damon Lindelof. Even though it is not fact, Sheridan displays a level of professionalism while pointing out the “Jesus Christ-like arc” that Jack Shepard takes in the series finale. He identifies similarities between Jack and Christ, stating that Jack has a wound on his torso like the one Jesus suffered on the cross, shares water with another important character in a similar fashion to the Holy Communion, and ultimately sacrifices himself for the greater good. Sheridan also states that Jack is the son of Christian Shepard, “the aptly named patriarch who ultimately leads the show's cast into the afterlife.” Since these religious theories about Lost weren’t completely confirmed, it is important as a news source to include quotes from reputable sources as well as background info, which Sheridan does both. He discusses how the show always had themes of religion that were upfront, such as John Locke's hardcore belief in destiny and the mystical powers of the island, Mr. Eko’s mission to build a church on the beach, and Charlie’s statues of Mary that were filled with heroin.

Rooted in fantasy, Lost is a show where the phenomenal writing leaves room for interpretation and analyzation. Fans, critics, and scholars have taken the underlying themes of Lost, such as science vs faith, and examined them diligently. Forums were created for opinions and theories to be discussed, studies were conducted, and articles were posted to expand the minds of audiences that tuned into watch the show.

Bibliography:

Tv Recappers Anonymous

NY Daily News

Scholarly Source