Meet Yuseff and Andrea – two people who represent billions who communicate, learn, and connect in a post-literate world.
Meet Yuseff and Andrea – two people who represent billions who communicate, learn, and connect in a post-literate world.
This is a short film, created for the Visual Story Network, that explains the urgent need for compelling visual stories to communicate the fullness of God’s love for the world. I’m a part of VSN and share this vision.
More and more, the desire grows in me simply to walk around, greet people…Still, it is not as simple as it seems…
“More and more, the desire grows in me simply to walk around, greet people, enter their homes, sit on their doorsteps, play ball, throw water, and be known as someone who wants to live with them. It is a privilege to have the time to practice this simple ministry of presence. Still, it is not as simple as it seems…”
A friend of mine, Scott Lundeen, runs a ministry called Urban Entry here in Denver. He creates media resources to help envision and equip people to engage in relationships and service among the poor and marginalized in our communities. I think they’re doing some cool stuff.
This video was just posted on his blog site. It is based on a quote from Henri Nowen and gets right to the heart of a struggle we often face. Those of us who are acculturated for performance and delivering measurable results as a way of measuring our worth do well to consider Jesus’ call to be in relationship first. It’s what Nowen refers to as a ‘ministry of presence.’ Check it out.
Do you feel the same struggle in your vocation or avocation to make a difference in peoples’ lives? Do you feel envious of programs that get media attention or that are better resourced. Do you feel pressure to ‘achieve’ in a way that ultimately takes you ‘off the streets’?
I sometimes whine about my sad lot – that it’s difficult to see how I can sustain what God has called me to do, that I feel pressure to jump on the social media train that demands I become ‘famous’ in order to become influential and effective. But I feel God’s correction when I really am with the people I want to serve: with my film students, on Skype calls with friends in Africa who teach me as much as I want to teach them, these are the moments of reality and clarity.
My prayer for you is that you have many of those moments, even in the midst of the “necessary” things that shadow the life-giving things.
We want to speak about spiritual issues and confront worldviews that we see are damaging to human beings or against God’s desires for his creation. But we often approach our communication from a posture of harshness, anger, and critique that does not reveal our love for those to whom we speak.
Know your audience. Love your audience.
Does this sound insultingly obvious? It should be. I recently heard a speaker say this phrase as she was talking about Jesus’ communication style. Jesus understood and loved the people to whom he was speaking.
We want to speak about spiritual issues and confront worldviews that we see are damaging to human beings or against God’s desires for his creation. But, we often approach our communication from a posture of harshness, anger, and critique that does not reveal our love for those to whom we speak. Or, we speak in generalizations and abstractions that don’t take into account that there are real people behind ideas or systems that we oppose. Do we really believe that our ‘enemies’ are not people too, people who have their own reasons for believing the way they do, their own stories of what brought them to the places they are?
If we were to really love our audiences (even those we intend to critique), how might this change how we speak?
The gutted, empty model that Hollywood offers has all the attraction of that foamy white stuff in a bag that passes for bread in the grocery store.
Here’s a little more related to the controversy over the temporary removal of the words “Holy Bible” from a scene in the new film, Soul Surfer.
On Patheos.com, Frederick Schmidt discusses Hollywood’s Digitally Enhanced Religion.
My interest is in the implied notion of those films: the notion that spiritual and religious commitments can be generic and yet formative—the notion that the best faith is an undefined faith and a God without a name.
It is this notion that is both misleading and largely errant. A faith without content might sell a lot of movie tickets. It might generate a warm feeling or two. On a rare occasion an unnamed God can even get us started on a spiritual journey. The Apostle Paul knew that and so do those whose first steps on their journey are taken with a Twelve Step Program. But an unnamed God does not have much staying power.
Why? Because to name God is to name what God wants and with it the purpose of life, the nature of our values, and the shape of our commitments. The decision to name God is a decision to name what is real and, by definition, what is unreal—what is important and what is less important, or even trivial. Naming God, in other words, is itself an act of commitment.
…The gutted, empty model that Hollywood offers has all the attraction of that foamy white stuff in a bag that passes for bread in the grocery store.
How do we create a variety of compelling narrative stories while eliminating one of the primary channels of communication, spoken dialogue and narration?
I’m just starting to work with a group in Europe on some short film projects. I was asked to help them hone their skills in making narrative short films. Their goal is to create short films that will stimulate spiritual conversations. Their challenge is that they want their films to be distributed very easily across many countries and language groups. Ideally, they’d tell stories without the use of dialogue that would need to be dubbed or subtitled.
So, without resorting to pantomime (a mainstay of youth evangelism in Europe), how do we create a variety of compelling narrative stories while eliminating one of the primary channels of communication, spoken dialogue and narration?
If you do an internet search for “non-verbal film” you will come up with only a few standard reference points, usually films like Koyaanisqatsi, a well-known non-verbal film that is really a sort of visual tone poem, very impressionistic, but very powerful and influential. That film, and others like it, tend to be intentionally, un-structured in terms of story. They intend to be evocative rather than directive in their message.
For our purposes, we would like to be evocative, to be sure, but we also want to tell a story that is understandable. As I’m searching my memory for examples, I’ve come up with The Red Balloon, a film from my childhood that is very well-known. As far as I remember, there is no real dialogue in that film (not that no one speaks at all) and the story is very clear and has deep emotional range. Another film that I’ve thought of is called, The Snowman. You can usually catch it on television during the holidays. Again, it has a strong storyline but no dialogue. Both of these films are classics for many reasons, including their musical scores and, in the case of The Snowman, the amazing animation style.
So I’m thinking through principles that can help us develop some films that are easily understood across a range of language and cultural groups and that do more than present a funny situation or clever visual twist and little else. Most short films I’ve found that have little or no dialogue tend to be this type: jokes, clever situations, or visual experiments that have little story.
I’m working on my principles. I’d be interested to hear what others think, and if you know if examples of films I should watch.
The Arts can serve as one of the most effective mediums to build bridges of respect, understanding, sharing and friendship between East and West, Muslims and Christians.
What if we really listened to each others’ stories, saw things through others’ eyes; would it make a difference in the world?
Here’s an encouraging arts festival, beginning Feb 3 in Cairo. I wish I could be there!
Caravan Encouraging East and West, Muslims and Christians, to journey together through the Arts
The Arts can serve as one of the most effective mediums to build bridges of respect, understanding, sharing and friendship between East and West, Muslims and Christians. Therefore, Caravan was started by Paul-Gordon Chandler as an informal catalyst to explore and encourage the interplay between Faith and the Arts—and more specifically within the context of interfaith, encouraging Muslims and Christians to journey together through the Arts…thereby seeing the Arts used to facilitate intercultural and inter-religious dialogue.
Check out the web site: Caravan Festival of the Arts
MindSoulStory 