“What does courage look like inside systems that punish it?”
I was forwarded that question from someone who was developing a film series on resilience in fascist times. What a great prompt.
I had been thinking recently about the films I used to show my former photo students and how they could be useful now. Those were the before-times but in addition to the aspects I was hoping to convey to them in photo class - empathy, critical thinking, careful attention, eye for composition, and understanding unconventional narrative structures - I see how some of those films could offer answers to the question above. Or at least good followup questions.
Such films challenge the viewer. They are certainly not necessarily happy-happy or even obviously hopeful to the casual viewer. A few are even quite dark. But none are banal, none are formulaic, each is enriching and ultimately hopeful. Or if not hopeful at least grounded in real humanity and to me that counts for a lot. Some center on the power of art, music, beauty, nature, knowledge, or simply the act of maintaining courage in the face of fear and hopeless times.
I’ll give you a recent example to set this up a bit more. I went to see the new 28 Years Later: The Bone Temple the other day. I’ve followed the whole franchise and I’d heard good things about this one, even compared to its predecessor last year. (By the way, on the way there I noticed a small sign for a doctor’s office, a Dr. Kelson, who, if you don’t know, figures prominently in the film. What are the odds?)
I sat through the previews, which were the usual fare - depressing, brainless reminders of how assembly-line so many movies are these days. When you see the prevalence of violence, nihilism, anti-humanism (also overly sugar-coated kitsch, a kind of fake humanism), gender stereotypes, etc, plus the utter lack of critical thinking they require, it starts to make more sense where we find ourselves these days.
Anyway, then came the main attraction. Ok, yes, it’s quite brutally violent early on. I mean Bone Temple IS a zombie horror film. But soon it made me understand it was necessary to first be nauseated by the violence in order to counteract it. And in this film the worst violence is by broken people, not the infected.
Without giving anything away, I would argue the film gradually and subtly reinforces humanism for the viewer on several levels. Even the humanity of some villains and zombies themselves. I can’t describe the ending itself without spoiling it, but its unexpected poignance took my breath for a minute. There’s also a clever throwaway line about fascism and examples of empathy near the end which will surely be decried as woke. Lord help us.
The point is: what we watch matters, it shapes our outlook. It matters that we watch critically and carefully for what a good film can offer, and that hope and humanity can arrive in surprising forms if we’re open to it. Amid the gore and apocalyptic setting, Bone Temple offers more human values in its own way than any Disney film.
I left feeling a bit changed, always a good sign.
Which brings me to a short list of films I’m going to recommend in that spirit. I’m planning in-person community viewing and discussion events for these films, so if you’re local stay tuned. Or maybe we can add an online component, I’ll work on that. I’m not going to embed trailers here, for one thing they don’t work well in this newsletter format, but I will link the titles. You’ll have to look around to see where to stream them. Most of these I own and have watched many times.
All are ultimately about beauty and courage. In our systems that increasingly punish both.
