The Secret of Kells
Mar. 24th, 2010 22:19![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
starlady"I have seen many things...I have seen Ireland ravished by invaders in search of gold. But I have seen the book, the book that turned the darkness into light. I have seen the Book of Kells."
On the one hand I really liked this movie quite a lot, and on the other I had one significant problem with it.
Awesome parts first! This movie is produced by the same people who did The Triplets of Belleville, which is one of the best animated movies ever in my humble opinion precisely for all the things that make it such an outlier (silence! Frenchness! wine-drinking! bicycles! I could go on) and was a co-production of France, Belgium and Ireland. It tells the story of the very young monk Brendan of Kells, whose uncle the Abbot has very strict ideas about how best to protect Kells and its community from the invading Northmen aka Vikings, and whose authority is challenged by the arrival of the master illuminator Aidan of Iona, at whose behest Brendan eventually meets and befriends Aisling, the spirit of the forest that surrounds Kells. The question quickly becomes--will Aidan and Brendan survive both the Vikings and the Abbot's disapproval and the ill will of the Dark One, Crom Cruach, to finish the Book of Iona, and in particular the Chi-Rho page?
I have seen the Book of Kells with my own eyes, and I don't think it's possible for me to understate the beauty of the Book, and the absolute awe which the achievement of its illuminators inspires in the beholder. Wisely, the movie doesn't attempt to recreate the Book directly; instead it relies on its impact on its viewers for its emotional impact, which is more than enough; at the end I was nearly in tears (yes, I do like books rather a lot). If you couldn't tell, this movie is very much of the How the Irish Saved Civilization school of thinking, with which I have few quibbles per se but which I was led to question in the course of the movie. More on that below.
The animation is gorgeous, and I was surprised and pleased to see that despite its firm setting in the medieval era the movie does not insist on medieval Ireland's monolithic whiteness--the monks in the scriptorium are Russian, African, Italian and Chinese, which is just so damn cool. I was also happy to hear that the Irish characters actually have Irish accents (the Abbot is voiced by Brendan Gleeson, natch), which seems pretty cool. Aisling even sings in Irish at one point--all of these things seem to gesture simultaneously towards the reality of Ireland's past and of its present, which pleases my sensibilities. Indeed, the fact that Aisling's help is crucial in Brendan being able to finish the Book seems to indicate a reconciliation between Ireland's ancient past and Christian middle period (and present). Finally, there's a certain irony in that while Aidan's dying wish is that Brendan share the Book with the people, to give them hope, the Book is now immured behind museum walls with only eight pages (two illuminated, six text) displayed at any one time, and usually not the Chi-Rho page. Sic transit gloria mundi.
Passe Tom Lamarre, I spent a good deal of time trying to decide whether the movie displayed motion into depth or motion across layers, and the answer is emphatically motion across layers (the few time the sensation of depth is induced, it's to heighten the impact of such things as falling snow or floating seed pods), which seems to me to be related to the movie's medieval setting, inasmuch as we accept Lamarre's contention that ballistic motion into depth is associated with uncritical modernity, and motion across layers with critiques of or alternative relations to the same. (And Brendan's confrontation with Crom Cruach is amazing.)
All this being said and as much as I absolutely loved the movie, I really, really had a problem with the representation of the Vikings. They are black horned beasts with glowing red eyes and no intelligible human language, which has a certain graphic appeal but which unfortunately just repeats the tired old civilization = light, barbarism = darkness cliché/false dichotomy with which I am really uncomfortable. As a matter of fact I was reminded of Aku's killer robots (and of Aku himself) in Samurai Jack. The Vikings had culture; it just wasn't that of the Irish, and it's no one's fault that societally speaking we now account the medieval Irish as having had the right of it w/r/t the value of written knowledge. I don't think any of this entitles anyone to literally demonize the Vikings. And in some ways I don't think I even know enough value-neutral terms to discuss all my thoughts on "civilization"; that's probably another post. And the transposition of an emphatically pale bunch of people into completely black monsters is really discomforting. Basically, they're like Jackson's Orcs but without subtitles, and it was deeply discomforting. There's plenty of ways to make the scary villains scary while not erasing the fact that they were white and reinscribing old clichés.
P.S. Kate Beaton is relevant on this topic. Her take on the Vikings gets the same point across in a vastly less problematic way (whereas in the movie when the Viking leader looks on the Book he tears the pages out and chucks it on the ground…which actually places the Vikings outside God's/Christianity's/the Book's ambit, since sinners are moved to repentance (through being struck blind) by looking on the Book, supposedly).
P.P.S. Fun fact: Judging by my paternal grandmother's surname (Doyle), I am at great remove the spawn of acculturated Vikings from way back in the day. So they can, in fact, be taught.
On the one hand I really liked this movie quite a lot, and on the other I had one significant problem with it.
Awesome parts first! This movie is produced by the same people who did The Triplets of Belleville, which is one of the best animated movies ever in my humble opinion precisely for all the things that make it such an outlier (silence! Frenchness! wine-drinking! bicycles! I could go on) and was a co-production of France, Belgium and Ireland. It tells the story of the very young monk Brendan of Kells, whose uncle the Abbot has very strict ideas about how best to protect Kells and its community from the invading Northmen aka Vikings, and whose authority is challenged by the arrival of the master illuminator Aidan of Iona, at whose behest Brendan eventually meets and befriends Aisling, the spirit of the forest that surrounds Kells. The question quickly becomes--will Aidan and Brendan survive both the Vikings and the Abbot's disapproval and the ill will of the Dark One, Crom Cruach, to finish the Book of Iona, and in particular the Chi-Rho page?
I have seen the Book of Kells with my own eyes, and I don't think it's possible for me to understate the beauty of the Book, and the absolute awe which the achievement of its illuminators inspires in the beholder. Wisely, the movie doesn't attempt to recreate the Book directly; instead it relies on its impact on its viewers for its emotional impact, which is more than enough; at the end I was nearly in tears (yes, I do like books rather a lot). If you couldn't tell, this movie is very much of the How the Irish Saved Civilization school of thinking, with which I have few quibbles per se but which I was led to question in the course of the movie. More on that below.
The animation is gorgeous, and I was surprised and pleased to see that despite its firm setting in the medieval era the movie does not insist on medieval Ireland's monolithic whiteness--the monks in the scriptorium are Russian, African, Italian and Chinese, which is just so damn cool. I was also happy to hear that the Irish characters actually have Irish accents (the Abbot is voiced by Brendan Gleeson, natch), which seems pretty cool. Aisling even sings in Irish at one point--all of these things seem to gesture simultaneously towards the reality of Ireland's past and of its present, which pleases my sensibilities. Indeed, the fact that Aisling's help is crucial in Brendan being able to finish the Book seems to indicate a reconciliation between Ireland's ancient past and Christian middle period (and present). Finally, there's a certain irony in that while Aidan's dying wish is that Brendan share the Book with the people, to give them hope, the Book is now immured behind museum walls with only eight pages (two illuminated, six text) displayed at any one time, and usually not the Chi-Rho page. Sic transit gloria mundi.
Passe Tom Lamarre, I spent a good deal of time trying to decide whether the movie displayed motion into depth or motion across layers, and the answer is emphatically motion across layers (the few time the sensation of depth is induced, it's to heighten the impact of such things as falling snow or floating seed pods), which seems to me to be related to the movie's medieval setting, inasmuch as we accept Lamarre's contention that ballistic motion into depth is associated with uncritical modernity, and motion across layers with critiques of or alternative relations to the same. (And Brendan's confrontation with Crom Cruach is amazing.)
All this being said and as much as I absolutely loved the movie, I really, really had a problem with the representation of the Vikings. They are black horned beasts with glowing red eyes and no intelligible human language, which has a certain graphic appeal but which unfortunately just repeats the tired old civilization = light, barbarism = darkness cliché/false dichotomy with which I am really uncomfortable. As a matter of fact I was reminded of Aku's killer robots (and of Aku himself) in Samurai Jack. The Vikings had culture; it just wasn't that of the Irish, and it's no one's fault that societally speaking we now account the medieval Irish as having had the right of it w/r/t the value of written knowledge. I don't think any of this entitles anyone to literally demonize the Vikings. And in some ways I don't think I even know enough value-neutral terms to discuss all my thoughts on "civilization"; that's probably another post. And the transposition of an emphatically pale bunch of people into completely black monsters is really discomforting. Basically, they're like Jackson's Orcs but without subtitles, and it was deeply discomforting. There's plenty of ways to make the scary villains scary while not erasing the fact that they were white and reinscribing old clichés.
P.S. Kate Beaton is relevant on this topic. Her take on the Vikings gets the same point across in a vastly less problematic way (whereas in the movie when the Viking leader looks on the Book he tears the pages out and chucks it on the ground…which actually places the Vikings outside God's/Christianity's/the Book's ambit, since sinners are moved to repentance (through being struck blind) by looking on the Book, supposedly).
P.P.S. Fun fact: Judging by my paternal grandmother's surname (Doyle), I am at great remove the spawn of acculturated Vikings from way back in the day. So they can, in fact, be taught.
I'm probably nattering on about the obvious, but
Date: 2010-03-26 01:37 (UTC)Re: I'm probably nattering on about the obvious, but
Date: 2010-03-26 01:40 (UTC)