Gordon in the News: last updated 02/12/2016
By Mark Sargent, provost
I seldom emerge from a film without a strong urge to talk about it. I suppose it’s like vacation photos: Perhaps if someone else endures them, you can remain on that journey a while longer. There’s also the pleasure of being a good detective, trying to fit the jigsaw of symbols and themes into a meaningful design. Most of all I want to tell someone why the film moved me or provoked me. How it resurfaced memories or reshaped my view of the world. How it prompted me to think about my life and my faith.
In 1999 we opened the Barrington Center for the Arts at Gordon, with its 80-seat cinema classroom. That small theatre helped spark the idea of the Provost’s Film Series, an occasion for watching and talking about films—avant garde films, pop films, the classics, the eccentrics, the visual poems.
Over the past 12 years I have enjoyed exploring more than 100 films with students and faculty. We have travelled a long way in the process, observing works from more than 25 nations. Cinema can be a magnificent window on the struggles and hopes of other peoples. Film has become one of the most—if not the most—influential of the art forms, a mirror and a molder of our culture, our values, our spiritual longings.
I can’t come close here to savoring all my favorite moments in the series. There was that fierce January nor’easter, during the very first film, when a crammed house delivered a split verdict on the integrity of Duvall’s Apostle. And the bus ride to Logan Airport, when I ran into a Gordon alum still eager to talk about Before the Rain, with its interlocking riddles about religious violence in Macedonia. Or the long email exchange with a student curious why I was so moved by the Berlin Wall and the weed-filled lots in Wings of Desire. Or the young man who described what it was like, as the child of a Vietnam veteran, to watch Morris’ documentary The Fog of War. Such conversations always bring more light than I could have imagined. Without the post-film discourse, I might never have realized that the fierce undercurrent of grace in Babette’s Feast is that the magnificent chef, unbeknownst to all, serves the Eucharist to a man who may well have had a hand in her husband’s slaughter.
Final paragraph here that would invite people to visit the page, travel along with the Gordon community on this journey, find reviews that might help them to decide what to put in their Netflix queue? Os something like that.