Rev. Danny Fisher

To mark their seventy-fifth birthday, the British Film Institute is inviting readers to join seventy-five filmmakers and world leaders in answering two questions:

1. Which one film would you wish to share with future generations?
   
2. What excites you about the future of the moving image?

The film I would wish to share with future generations would be Ross McElwee’s 1986 documentary Sherman’s March. The production began as a fairly straightforward documentary about General Sherman’s brutal campaign through the secessionist South, but became something else entirely when McElwee’s was dumped by his girlfriend at the start of principal photography: an autobiographical work of sorts that his sister dubs “a brokenhearted filmmaker’s clumsy chivalrous quest to find love.” McElwee turns the camera on himself and the collection of Southern women he encounters as he retraces Sherman’s steps. But the film ends up being about a whole lot more, as its subtitle suggests: “A Meditation on the Possibility of Romantic Love in the South During an Era of Nuclear Weapons Proliferation”. It’s both a screamingly funny celebration of women and their beguiling effect on the male of species, and an unflinching and profoundly resonant look at frightening things on a personal and global scale. Trust me: movies don’t get any more original or unforgettable than this. There’s just no other film like it.

What excites me about the future of the moving image is the possibility of seeing more films that exhibit the qualities that make Sherman’s March so special: films that are deeply personal, contemplative, honest, uncompromising, unafraid of being different, and not designed primarily as commodities. (It would also be nice if more films were as simply and inexpensively produced.) It’s a very hopeful sign, I think, that an “indie” filmmaker like Christopher Nolan is entrusted with a summer tent-pole attraction like The Dark Knight and allowed to turn it into an intelligent and relatively sober meditation on the ethical questions raised by the “War on Terror,” and that the result is the second-highest grossing film of all time. That’s really exciting to me. We’re still a long way off from the qualities of Sherman’s March being the norm for popular films, but we might be getting there.

I discovered two great sites today that you ought to know about if you don’t already. The first is Open Source Buddhism, which is dedicated to “audio-visualizing Buddhism and Comparative Religion.” The brainchild of the Rev. Dr. James Kenneth Powell II (who earned his Ph.D. in Buddhist Studies from the prestigious program at the University of Wisconsin-Madison), Open Source Buddhism features lots of multimedia materials about specific topics of interest, ranging from Buddhist practice in various parts of the world to “Buddhism in Advertising.”

The other, which I discovered through a comment at this blog, is Buddhist Art News. The site “gathers and presents news items, reviews, resources, and sites related to Buddhist art, archaeology, architecture, music, film, dance, and many other pertinent topics.” And, boy, it seems like they never miss a trick. It’s now on my short list of resources for the blog. Don’t miss it.

In a video interview with the BBC, Archbishop Desmond Tutu laments that the Church is “obsessed” with sexuality, when there are more important issues for it to engage. “I imagine God is weeping,” he says. He also says he feels “ashamed” to be associated with the Church when it exhibits homophobia and “persecutes those who are already being persecuted” instead of striving for “justice.” Amen, Your Grace. Take a look here.

Via our friend Erik Davis at deathpower: In a report issued Friday, Amnesty International expressed concern about allegations of excessive use of force and mass arrests by police at demonstrations in St. Paul, Minnesota during the Republican National Convention (RNC) from September 1-4, 2008. The Nobel Peace Prize-winning human rights organization has called on the city and county authorities to “ensure that all allegations of ill-treatment and other abuses are impartially investigated, with a review of police tactics and weapons in the policing of demonstrations.”

A lot of Buddhobloggers have been blogging about this issue lately, but James Ure of The Buddhist Blog has an especially thoughtful contemplation on Buddhism and abortion at his blog. I recommend giving it a read–and share your thoughts with James and the rest of us.