Details, credits, errata: This week Sam and Alissa talk about Silence, Martin Scorsese’s 2016 masterpiece of tested faith and cultural contrast. Sam had never seen it before and it instantly became one of his favorite movies so if you saw the trailer and were like “oh, the torture one,” please rest assured that that’s not what this is it all, in fact it’s unbelievably good. Out-of-this-world great.
Our guest is the great film writer Bilge Ebiri, whose piece about Silence is one of the best pieces of writing and thinking about film we’ve had the pleasure to recommend to you on this podcast. Bilge is currently an editor at New York but has written just about everywhere.
We talk about a lot of stuff on this podcast, most of it related to Scorsese. The three movies that get the most airtime besides our primary object of study are The Wolf of Wall Street, which can be rented from Redbox here, The Irishman, which is on Netflix, and The Last Temptation of Christ, also on Redbox.
Our episode art on the website this week is a “Maria Kannon” sculpture, a porcelain statue from the Dehua county in the Chinese province of Fujian, opposite Taiwan. Chinese Dehua porcelain was traded to the Japanese until Sino-Japanese trade all but ceased in the mid-17th century, shortly after this film is set. Statues like this one, of the Buddhist goddess of mercy, Kannon, was often venerated by Kakure Kirishitan (secret Christians) who were afraid to keep more literal images of the virgin Mary, and some statues, like this one, were made for that purpose.
Our theme song is Louis Armstrong and His Hot 5’s Muskrat Ramble, made freely available by the Boston Public Library and audio engineering shop George Blood, LP through the Internet Archive. Silence is copyright 2016 Paramount Pictures. All other content is copyright 2020 Sam Thielman and Alissa Wilkinson.
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