Spent most of the day planning and prepping for our upcoming summer school on Postmodern Spirituality.
I'm doing a session on spirituality and film which will look at a broad range of approaches to the spiritual in recent/contemporary film ranging from the explicitly religious (think Stigmata) thru to the more broadly aesthetic which might not be out and out spiritual but which nonetheless is concerned to see beyond the merely material to something other (think the paper bag blowing in the wind in American Beauty or Billy's Kestrel stilling the world in Kes).
As well as doing the analytical stuff I will also be showing a film on one of the evenings. Question is which film? It's not that I can't think of one but rather that I can't decide which. What would you you opt for? Remember what I'm looking at is not so much the out and out Christian God stuff but film as one of the media in which the spiritual questioning and questing of our age finds expression. Any ideas?
musings on mission and ministry ... and other miscellaneous mind-leaks
11 comments:
You have to go with Field of Dreams
;o)
Moon, i'm serious about Moon.
I think American Beauty is my favourite film of all time. So I'd go for that! It kind of says it all for me.
Leap of Faith - the rain comes, the boy walks, and what's with the lines of telegraph poles in the final scenes as Steve Martin walks away, ashamed and cast out....
You've got the obvious but genius Clint Eastwood's Grand Torrino (not spelt right but you get my drift). Or the less obvious, completely priceless Little Miss Sunshine, peppered with thoughts about what life is for, what's important, what's not. Trouble is, for a Christian audience, the language may cause difficulties (in more ways than one, I suspect)
A serious man
Antony
Dogma
Thanks everyone for your comments and suggestions. In the end I've decided to let the students choose. Came up with what I hope is a varied list with a bit of gen on the film, details of certification and running time. It will be interesting to see what they go for. Here's the list:
American Beauty
Avatar
Dean Spanley
Gran Torino
Kes (had to feature)
Magnolia
Stigmata
Whale Rider
Not all great films and not all personal faves but hopefully enough variety to offer a real choice.
For those who are biting their finger nails waiting to find out which way the vote went, Whale Rider beat Gran Torino using the single transferable vote system. They like it. We had a good discussion.
This is a great excuse to be pedantic and a bore at the same time.
If you only watched one film, you didn't use the Single Transferable Vote system to decide which, you used the Alternative Vote system. STV works in multi-member (or multi-film) constituencies only and when one person (or film) is selected, you work out how much it met the threshold by, then allocate its second preferences at a fraction of the vote value proportionate with the excess. (So if the threshold is 5, and one film gets 6, everyone who voted for the first film gets a fifth of one vote allocated to their second preference. One of the downsides of STV is it encourages people to game the system by giving their second preferred candidate their first preference if they think their first preference is going to win anyway, so 100% of their vote value goes to their 2nd preference instead of only a small fraction.) If no candidate (or film) is elected you remove the bottom candidate (or film) and redistribute their/its second preferences at full value until one candidate (or film) has reached the threshold, then you redistribute excess votes from that candidate (or film), then continue.
In AV you just follow the 2nd part of the process because once one candidate (or film) is elected, that's it. AV is imo better than STV, in part because you retain smaller, more coherent, geographic communities & MPs feel more loyalty to a particular area. They have to be more responsive to constituents because each vote matters more than with STV. However I prefer FPTP overall.
Why Tim, thankyou how er, now what's the word ....
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