Hello again Everyone!

Here’s the Morning Monday Mislet (MMM) letting you know of a riveting television season which will start as part of the Contemplative Cinema Club.
The season kicks off this Tuesday night (November 25) in Clarendon St. Spirituality Centre, Clarendon St (back of Brown Thomas carpark), Dublin, at 7pm.
Whilst last season’s exploration was about belief, this season’s theme is around radical or extreme uncertainty.
The ability to bear uncertainty and remain sane is one of the the hallmarks of the mystical life. However, since we are not all mystics, all of the time, these films look at the human condition encountering extremity and the resulting spiritual fallout which happens psychologically, socially, politically.
Again the format remains in using drama as the stimulus for spiritual conversation. I, for one, enjoyed very much our inaugural season of the CCC (we love our acronyms around here) and I’m really looking forward to sharing, reflecting and conversing on the following cutting edge T.V. dramas/documentaries.
I think it’s apt that the season should close with ‘Planet Earth’ – a Christmas carol if ever there was one.
So, I hope something in this season might be of interest for you, and that you feel most welcome to come on down and join in some pre-Christmas conversation.
With warm (will I say that again?), warm wishes on this cold November morning!
Christine

Touching the Void, (2003) BBC Films. Kevin MacDonald. (25th Nov)
Touching the Void is the story of two British mountain climbers whose climb up the Siuls Grande Mountain in Peru led to extraordinary events. In May 1985, Joe Simpson and Simon Yates ventured up the unclimbed west face with “no margin for error, no helicopter rescue and no 999″. Simpson slipped down an ice cliff and landed awkwardly, smashing his tibia into his knee joint and breaking it. What ensued left one man clamoring for his life and the other having to make the agonizing decision to leave his partner to die. This ‘triumph of the human spirit’ relies on the candid honesty of both men relating their stories. Yates’ admission that he spent most of his journey down the mountain trying to think up a story that would make him “look better” makes him surprisingly sympathetic.Meanwhile, Simpson’s account of sitting alone in an ice crevasse waiting for death while musing on the existence of God is harrowing, particularly since he came to the conclusion that he was completely alone in the universe

Boys from The Blackstuff (1982) BBC Films. Written by Alan Bleasdale (2nd Dec)

Boys from the Blackstuff follows the stories of five unemployed tarmac layers (hence ‘the black stuff’) after they have lost their jobs due to the events of the original play. Set in Bleasdale’s home city of Liverpool and reflecting many of his own experiences of life in the city, each episode focused on a different member of the group. The series was highly acclaimed for its powerful and emotional depiction of the desperation wreaked by high unemployment, and was noted by many reviewers as a critique of the Margaret Thatcher administration, which was seen as being responsible for the fate of many of the working class unemployed, although most of the series had actually been written in 1978.”[A] seminal drama series… a warm, humorous but ultimately tragic look at the way economics affect ordinary people… TV’s most complete dramatic response to the Thatcher era and as a lament to the end of a male, working class British culture.”[1]

CONSPIRACY (2001). BBC Films. Frank Pierson.(9th Dec)
Conspiracy is the historical recreation of the 1942 Wannsee Conference, in which Nazi and SS leaders gathered in a Berlin suburb to discuss the “Final Solution to the Jewish Question”. It is Nazi Germany, 1942. The Russian Front has bogged down in snow and mud, and the Americans have entered the war. For the first time, defeat is a possibility. In light of this, fifteen high-ranking members from all areas of the Nazi government – soldiers, economists, administrators and lawyers – are brought together by order of the Fuhrer in a luxurious mansion in Wansee, Berlin. No records of their meeting will be kept, and they will not reveal the substance of their discussion to the outside world. The issue before them is to determine a solution – a final solution – to the Jewish problem. Lead by SS-General Reinhard Heydrich, this group of high ranking German officials came to the historic and far reaching decision that the Jews of Europe were to be exterminated in what would come to be known as the Holocaust. This is a record of the meeting which led to one of the most horrific and shameful episodes in human history.

Planet Earth, (2007) BBC Films, David Attenborough.(16th Dec)
Planet Earth is an Emmy Award and Peabody Award-winning BBC nature documentary series narrated by David Attenborough and produced by Alastair Fothergill. It was first broadcast in the UK from 5 March 2006. The series was co-produced with Discovery Channel and the NHK in association with the CBC, and was described by its makers as “the definitive look at the diversity of our planet”. It was also the first of its kind to be filmed entirely in high-definition. The series was nominated for the Pioneer Audience Award for Best Programme at the 2007 BAFTA TV awards.

The evening begins at 7pm and usually lasts until 9.30 – 9-45pm, and includes tea/coffee/biscuits and fruit!
Donations accepted.

Hello There Everyone!

In the hope that this September finds you dry – but bored and adventurous – I would like to invite you to the inaugural season of The Contemplative Cinema Club ( CCC – likeit?).

This is an endeavor to use cinema as the stimulus for spiritual conversation.

Starting THIS Monday I hope to show films from all over the world on the theme of human belief. Each of the films shows a dimension of what it is to believe in the unseen, whilst remaining sane, and I hope each of the films position inner strength and fortitude at the center of human life. Thats the idea, anyhow. So here is the imagined list for the next six week which I hope will tickle your fancy.

THE GOSPEL ACCORDING TO ST. MATHEW (1964) PIER PAOLO PASOLINI 29th Sept.
Pier Paolo Pasolini was an atheist, indeed a Marxist, and his The Gospel According to Matthew is routinely interpreted as a proto-Marxist allegory. Yet Pasolini was perhaps first of all a poet, and the concepts of the sacred and the divine, far from repelling him as so much religious superstition, held for him a powerful appeal. In 1962 he came to Assisi in response to Pope John XXIII’s call for dialogue with non-Christian artists. While there, he read through a book of the Gospels “from beginning to end, like a novel,” later proclaiming the story of Jesus “the most exalting thing one can read.”

JOAN OF ARC (1928) CARL T. DREYER 6th Oct
“To witness Carl Dreyer’s The Passion of Joan of Arc is to glimpse the soul of a saint in her hour of trial. The film is more than a dramatization, more than a biopic, more than a documentary: It is a spiritual portrait, almost a mystical portrait, of a Christ-like soul sharing in the sufferings of Christ.”

ANDREI RUBLEV (1969) ANDREI TARKOVSKY 13th Oct
The masterpiece, Andreiv Rublev charts the life of the great icon painter through a turbulent period of 15th Century Russian history, a period marked by endless fighting between rival Princes and by Tatar invasions.

THE DESTINY OF MAN (1959) SERGI BONDARCHURK.20th Oct
Andrei Sokolov, the film’s protagonist, had lost in the war with fascist Germany his wife and children, had survived the horrors of a concentration camp. He was already being led to be shot, but at the last minute the camp’s commandant, Muller, revoked the sentence. After his release from the camp, Andrei Sokolov marched with the Soviet Army as far as Berlin. But Fate would not stop testing him: on Victory Day he got the news of his son Anatoly’s death. And in spite of the fact that he seemed to have lost everything, he remained a good human being and became a father to an orphaned boy.
The great Russian director and actor Sergei Bondarchuk played the leading character in his own film, which was to become a hymn to human spirit and faith in life

THE DOROTHY DAY STORY (1996) MICHAEL RAY RHODES 3rd NovThis biographical drama was based on the true story of Dorothy Day, a devout Catholic who devoted much of her life to working with the poor and homeless on New York City’s Lower East Side. Born in an Episcopalian household in 1897, Day was a tireless and outspoken champion of the rights of the poor and disenfranchised. Day came under heavy criticism for her political and social activism; as she put it, “If you feed the poor, you’re called a saint, but if you ask why they’re poor, you’re called a Communist.”

YES (2005) SALLY POTTER. 10th Nov
A bold and daring work from one of the UK’s most exciting directors, YES is Sally Potters response to the events of 9/11. An American woman trapped in a loveless marriage meets a Lebanese doctor who lives in exile in London, working as a cook. The two embark on a passionate affair which gradually pushes them to the limits of who and what they are and challenges their assumptions about sexuality and surrender, about morality and ethics, about God and about love.

The films start at 7pm on Monday Nights in Clarendon St Spirituality Centre, (Edith Stein room), and the sessions will last until 9.30pm approx. and include tea, fruit, coffee, biscuits, POPCORN… Donations accepted.

SO, Please feel very invited and welcome at the opening season of…THE CCC!

Best Wishes,

Christine

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ALL ARE MOST WELCOME.
To book please contact me on Email: Christine Clear

or TEL: 087 783 7421