Scorsese’s Next Film?

movie filmThere have been rumblings about director Martin Scorsese making a film of Shusaku Endo’s magnificent historical novel Silence, about Japanese martyrs of the 17th century.  Now it seems that the rumor may become a reality, according to Spero Forum.

In a preface to Endo’s book, Scorsese writes perceptively about faith:

How do you tell the story of Christian faith? The difficulty, the crisis, of believing? How do you describe the struggle? … Shusaku Endo understood the conflict of faith, the necessity of belief fighting the voice of experience.  The voice that always urges the faithful – the questioning faithful – to adapt their beliefs to the world they inhabit, their culture…That’s a paradox, and it can be an extremely painful one: on the face of it, believing and questioning are antithetical.  Yet I believe that they go hand in hand.  One nourishes the other.  Questioning may lead to great loneliness, but if it co-exists with faith – true faith, abiding faith – it can end in the most joyful sense of communion.  It’s this painful, paradoxical passage – from certainty to doubt to loneliness to communion – that Endo understands so well, and renders so clearly, carefully and beautifully in Silence.

I, for one, can’t wait to see the film.

2 COMMENTS

  1. Scorcese first talked about making this movie right after he’d made “The Last Temptation of Christ” more than 20 years ago. I long since thought he’d passed on the idea. Good to see that maybe he hasn’t.

LEAVE A REPLY

Please enter your comment!
Please enter your name here