Silence (Picador Classics)

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Martin Scorsese Settles 'Silence' Lawsuit, Casts Liam Neeson". IndieWire.com. January 31, 2014. Archived from the original on October 2, 2016 . Retrieved September 30, 2016. The god of silence: Shusaku Endo's reading of the Passion – critique of the Japanese novel 'Silence'" by William T. Cavanaugh, Commonweal, March 13, 1998 Matt Zoller Seitz of RogerEbert.com gave the film four out of four stars, stating: " Silence is a monumental work, and a punishing one. It puts you through hell with no promise of enlightenment, only a set of questions and propositions, sensations and experiences... This is not the sort of film you 'like' or 'don't like.' It's a film that you experience and then live with." [76] Richard Roeper also awarded the film four out of four stars, saying: "When Ferreira finally appears and we learn the truth about where he's been all this time, it further serves Scorsese's central theme about the conflict between adhering to one's sacred vows and traditional beliefs and doing the right thing, the prudent thing, the moral thing, on a very pragmatic level." [77] Dante Ferretti received praise from reviewer Justin Chang for his set designs used in the film. Ferreira’s story is one of the most dramatic stories of Christianity and missionary history of all time,” says Fr. M. Antoni J. Ucerler, SJ, a professor at the University of San Francisco and an expert in Japanese Christian history. “He was the great missionary, the superior of all Jesuit missionaries, and the first to renounce his faith under torture.”

Martin Scorsese's 'Silence' Wraps Production; First Image with Andrew Garfield Released". Screen Rant. May 5, 2015. Archived from the original on November 17, 2015 . Retrieved November 14, 2015.Silence received the 1966 Tanizaki Prize for the year's best full-length literature. It has also been the subject of extensive analysis. [5] In a review published by The New Yorker, John Updike called Silence "a remarkable work, a sombre, delicate, and startlingly empathetic study of a young Portuguese missionary during the relentless persecution of the Japanese Christians in the early seventeenth century." [6] William Cavanaugh highlights the novel's "deep moral ambiguity" due to the depiction of a God who "has chosen not to eliminate suffering, but to suffer with humanity." [7] Fathers Rodrigues and Garrpe, former students of Ferreira, are Portuguese priests in their late 20s. The pair travel from Portugal to China, hoping to find a covert way to reach Japan. While there they are joined by Kichijiro, a pitiful and drunken man about their age whom they suspect is a Christian, though he adamantly denies it. A Portuguese superior of the Church warns them of a magistrate named Inoue, a particularly cruel and devilish persecutor, but nevertheless helps Rodrigues and Garrpe commission a Chinese ship and crew. They smuggle themselves and Kichijiro onto the shores of Japan, landing in the mountains near Nagasaki. Rodrigues' journal depicts his struggles: he understands suffering for the sake of one's own faith; but he struggles over whether it is self-centered and unmerciful to refuse to recant when doing so will end another's suffering. At the climactic moment, Rodrigues hears the moans of those who have recanted but are to remain in the pit until he tramples the image of Christ. As Rodrigues looks upon a fumi-e, Christ breaks his silence: "You may trample. You may trample. I more than anyone know of the pain in your foot. You may trample. It was to be trampled on by men that I was born into this world. It was to share men's pain that I carried my cross." Rodrigues puts his foot on the fumi-e. Shūsaku Endō’s Silence takes place in Japan during the 1600s, shortly after the Japanese government suppressed the Shimabara Rebellion, in which Christian Japanese peasants rebelled against the government’s heavy persecution. After the rebellion’s defeat, many Catholics went underground, continuing to practice their religion in secrecy. The novel begins when a young Portuguese Jesuit missionary, Sebastian Rodrigues, and his two colleagues, Father Garrpe and Father de Santa Maria, decide to set out to Japan to find out what happened to their teacher, Father Ferreira. Ferreira is rumored to have apostatized, or renounced his religious beliefs, after having gone underground in Japan and spent thirty years in Christian service there. Rodrigues finds it hard to believe that Ferreira, a highly respected member of the Jesuit community, has renounced his faith. If he has, Rodrigues wonders what this means about his faith in Christianity and the religion he has dedicated his life to. Debruge, Peter (December 10, 2016). " 'Silence' Review: Martin Scorsese Belabors His Passion Project". Variety. Archived from the original on March 26, 2017 . Retrieved March 21, 2017.

Shusaku Endo ( 遠藤周作), born in Tokyo in 1923, was raised by his mother and an aunt in Kobe where he converted to Roman Catholicism at the age of eleven. At Tokyo's Keio University he majored in French literature, graduating BA in 1949, before furthering his studies in French Catholic literature at the University of Lyon in France between 1950 and 1953. A major theme running through his books, which have been translated into many languages, including English, French, Russian and Swedish, is the failure of Japanese soil to nurture the growth of Christianity. Before his death in 1996, Endo was the recipient of a number of outstanding Japanese literary awards: the Akutagawa Prize, Mainichi Cultural Prize, Shincho Prize, and Tanizaki Prize. December 22, 2016 — Thirty years after Robert De Niro and Jeremy Irons portrayed Jesuits in the Academy Award-winning movie “The Mission,” the Society of Jesus figures prominently in a new film opening in theaters on Dec. 23. Decades in the making, Martin Scorsese’s “Silence” tells the story of Portuguese Jesuit missionaries in 17th century Japan. Although the film is based on a fictional novel by the Japanese author Shusaku Endo, many of the events and people depicted in “Silence” are real. Perhaps," begins Mr Kato, "Japanese people have begun to travel outside of the country now, and, as in the novel Deep River, their own encounters with life beyond this country are changing both them and this society. They are doing some of the retailoring for themselves now." Mr Kato falls silent.

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Tragic Death on Taiwan Set of Martin Scorsese-Directed 'Silence' ". Deadline Hollywood. January 29, 2015. Archived from the original on February 3, 2015 . Retrieved February 20, 2015. Until his death in 1996, the Catholic Endo, Japan’s own Graham Greene, explored these issues in nearly two dozen novels. But nowhere are these questions more probing nor their answers more disturbing than in Chinmoku, which won the coveted Tanizaki Prize in 1966 and which William Johnston translated three years later into the taut, heart-breaking novel called Silence.