They had a lot of competition. My favorite book on early-modern religious wack is Blasphemy, immorality, and anarchy : the Ranters and the English Revolution
Jerome. Friedman ; c1987 ... but I see there's been a lot more published about those sectarian avant-gardes since I last read up on them. If only I could get into the library...
my lately favorite to the subject is "Holy Fools in Byzantium and Beyond" (2006) by Sergey A. Ivanov
There are saints in Orthodox Christian culture who overturn the conventional concept of sainthood: their conduct is morally dubious. Such saints are called ‘holy fools’. They existed in Byzantium for about 1,000 years, but nearly vanished in modern Greece. In Russia, however, they are deeply worshipped by the believers up till this day. In this book holy foolery is treated as a cultural phenomenon: as a spontaneous response of the religious consciousness to the secularization of the church. The author has repudiated the traditional ‘Orthodox’ paradigm; he discovered a great number of Byzantine and Old Russian sources dealing with holy fools. By adopting a diachronic approach, this book identifies the prerequisites for this phenomenon, traces the way it was shaped in the religious mind. A holy fool comes into existence as an instinctive protest against the insipid, mundane existence of Christians who lost the scope for the blinding light of the Celestial. Holy foolery is a reaction to the diminution of the Absolute. The book tracks down holy foolery from its origins in Egyptian monasteries through its evolution in the cities of Byzantium, describes its prime and decline, followed by a new flourish and a gradual fading on Greek soil. It then proceeds to analyze Russian holy foolery, which borrowed some elements from the Byzantine model, but also reinterpreted it quite a bit. The book also considers other phenomena similar to holy foolery, in the Western medieval world, as well as the Islamic one.
the handbag, one of the booty-shaking knights wears reminds me of a picture i noticed today in local news.
i pity such an item didn't appear in ursula.
and i guess it would even fit your upcoming voyage!
Last edited by Holdrüholoheuho on Mon Apr 12, 2021 9:46 am, edited 1 time in total.
yay the ranters! i was going to mention them for some reason the other day in another thread but i have forgotten where and why
i like movies about (mad) christian religion, but there's not that many is there? they're all either jesus, ommm-so-holy monks or straight out porn
where are the (good) chaos films about the brethren of the free spirit (aleister crowley eat your sad little heart out) the taborites (naked bohemians) & everyone's favourites the templar knights (oh for an adaptation of klossowski's baphomet ♥)
aside from the aforementioned ursula, and the devils (which is tbh silly but yum our ollie), there's anchoress (?) and vincent dieutre's lovely fragments sur la grâce (mad jansenists) and.....????
i am postponing&postponing&postponing to finally watch LITTLE CRUSADER (Václav Kadrnka, 2017)
https://letterboxd.com/film/little-crusader/
Knight Borek is searching for his missing son. Enthralled by the stories of children’s crusades, little Jan has run away from home. Borek’s crusade is a journey into his own subconscious, where he is forced to confront his greatest fear.
i am not sure to what degree it is mad, but "children’s crusades" sound pretty mad.
i have seen another film by Václav Kadrnka, EIGHTY LETTERS (2011), that was cool, so i have good hopes "Little Crusader" is not bad.
https://letterboxd.com/film/eighty-letters/
The story takes place in Czechoslovakia in 1987. The father has defected to England and the mother and her son are planning to leave the country to reunite with him. The film is told through the eyes of the fourteen year old boy, his rankled look without the veneer of experience and initiation in one day. Autobiographical.
ickykino tweeovalis wrote: ↑Mon Apr 12, 2021 10:24 am
i am postponing&postponing&postponing to finally watch LITTLE CRUSADER (Václav Kadrnka, 2017)
https://letterboxd.com/film/little-crusader/
Knight Borek is searching for his missing son. Enthralled by the stories of children’s crusades, little Jan has run away from home. Borek’s crusade is a journey into his own subconscious, where he is forced to confront his greatest fear.
i am not sure to what degree it is mad, but "children’s crusades" sound pretty mad.
children's crusades! god, where did i read about them last...eeehrm, aha maybe norman cohn's pursuit of the millenium (also contains all of the above mad stuff too)
that little crusader film looks nice. i've kind of gone off slow cinema, but always up for people wandering hopelessly (haphazardly) around the countryside (if you grab if, and ONLY if you were grabbing it for yourself anyway, pls can you also dump in resources?)
i guess it is because of the spirit/heritage of Karel Vachek who was (as a pedagogue) head/chief of the "documentary film" department of FAMU but hated the word "documentary".
his "documentaries" are anything but a "documentary" in a strict/traditional sense.
he was making amalgams of documentary-essay-farce and he was quite influential among the local "documentary" lovers.
so no wonder docalliance's menu is a haphazard mess.
ABOUT ENDLESSNESS -- Roy Andersson's latest little collection of oddities, and I'm going to need to take another look, hopefully on a bigger screen when Film Forum runs it later this month. It feels harder and sadder than his other works, on first glance.
These matters are best disposed of from a great height. Over water.
Think that was the last movie I saw at the cinema before they shut for 5 months again. I found it less hard/sad than Pigeon, personally, seemed pretty consistent with You, the Living. I'm a huge fan of his but never see him mentioned on the forums, wonder if we could scramble a poll together despite his limited filmography.
I had tickets to that at TIFF (the last one before lockdowns) and my wife confused the showtime of 18:00 with 8:00, and we showed up two hours late and missed the whole thing. I still get vague ptsd just hearing the title. Haven't seen it yet, but still looking forward to it.
Roscoe wrote: ↑Tue Apr 13, 2021 11:55 am
ABOUT ENDLESSNESS -- Roy Andersson's latest little collection of oddities, and I'm going to need to take another look, hopefully on a bigger screen when Film Forum runs it later this month. It feels harder and sadder than his other works, on first glance.
Definitely sadder. I thought it held together better than Pigeon too.
there's lovely naked men sitting in fields of flowers and my first thought is 'oooo watch out for ticks! you don't want one there!', i must be tired.
(i'm shit with ages, but weren't there a couple of disquietingly young boys in this or has too much of the recent foucault palaver penetrated my periphery?)
Joks Trois wrote: ↑Tue Apr 13, 2021 1:55 pm
Satantango: that final scene. Damn! 9/10.
Hey Joks, I was a bit worried about your absence a few days ago when you hadn't posted for nearly a month. Glad to know you're ok, mate!
Thanks mate! Just been extremely busy at work and with other personal matters. I will be posting more often now!
Satantango though. So glad I bought it on blu-ray and rewatched it. What a film. Was better the second time. One of the very few modern masterpieces of cinema for me.
SATANTANGO really works, and works even better with repeat viewings. Some of the film's problems get a little more pronounced with those repeat viewings, of course -- I'm starting to wonder if anybody, Tarr included, would notice if some of those long takes of people walking walking walking were cut in half.
And in other viewing:
DOCTOR X -- Curtiz's other two-strip Technicolor horror film, and all cleaned up in a new Blu-Ray restoration there's plenty to feast your eyes on. Alas, the story's basic foolishness just can't be denied, and it never quite takes off the way MYSTERY OF THE WAX MUSEUM does. Lionel Atwill seems most uncomfortable, he seems to be having difficulty remembering his lines.
These matters are best disposed of from a great height. Over water.
I'm an Atwill fan too -- which makes his weird stiff performance here most uncomfortable watching. Those weird broken sentences as if he's not quite sure what to say next. I rather enjoy his odd pronunciation of "scalpel" as "scal-PELL."
These matters are best disposed of from a great height. Over water.
Roscoe wrote: ↑Wed Apr 14, 2021 3:09 pm
I'm an Atwill fan too -- which makes his weird stiff performance here most uncomfortable watching. Those weird broken sentences as if he's not quite sure what to say next. I rather enjoy his odd pronunciation of "scalpel" as "scal-PELL."
Fair enough, I'd have to rewatch to know how I feel about his performance here. This reminds me that I should buy the Doctor X and Mystery of Wax Museum blu-rays to support people bringing out Atwill in HD.
MrCarmady wrote: ↑Tue Apr 13, 2021 11:57 am
'm a huge fan of his but never see him mentioned on the forums
there was what i remembered as a very vocal anti-andersson contingent on the old forum but in hindsight that may just have been me (and jerry i think?).
Hey I watched a movie. On my phone. It was the extraordinary adventures of Mr west in the land of the bolsheviks. Directed by lev kuleshov, w pudovkin as a gangster. Boris Barnet plays a cowboy. Strangest of all is.aleksandra kolkhova, kuleshov's wife, whose unique look helped make by the law so memorable. Her performance here is almost avant garde. I regret to say I can't make gifs. I expect it's not as good as miss mend, bit it's certainly losds of fun as well as a fascinating cultural relic. Extremely stylized and often hilarious. Did I mention this is on youtube