Tag: school authorities

Picnic at Hanging Rock
(Director’s Cut,
4K Restoration)

Post author By Jeremy Clarke
Post date 14 February 2025
No Comments on Picnic at Hanging Rock
(Director’s Cut,
4K Restoration)
Sticky post

Director – Peter Weir – 1975 – Australia – Cert. 12a – 107m

*****

A group of teenage schoolgirls supervised by two teachers go on a picnic beside an isolated volcanic outcrop: three of them never return – Valentine’s Day previews on Friday & Saturday, February 14th & 15th, then is out in UK cinemas from Friday, February 21st

Two locations sear themselves into your brain when watching Picnic at Hanging Rock, whether for the first time or the umpteenth. One is the obvious one – the eponymous, towering rock formation in Victoria, Australia, at once an inescapable presence in a landscape and an invitation to come into its labyrinth and explore. The other is Appleyard College, a turn of the (nineteenth into twentieth) century boarding school for young ladies, shot in the real life 1870s-built, Georgian mansion Martindale Hall. They are two very different worlds, one natural, wild, and inexplicable, the other buttoned down and socially stratified.

The picnic, which takes place on St. Valentine’s Day, 1900, only seems to take the first third of the film’s running length. Two teachers, Miss Greta McCraw (Vivean Gray from The Last Wave, Peter Weir, 1977) and the French mistress Mlle de Poitiers (Helen Morse) are in charge of around a dozen teenage girls, all dressed very prim and properly.… Read the rest

Tags 1900, Anne Lambert, Australia, boarding school, brook, buttoned down, Christine Schuler, disappear, Dominic Guard, down to earth, doze, enigma, fee-paying school, fellow students, finance, foul play, gardener, Gheorghe Zamfir, go exploring, Helen Morse, hot weather, inexplicable, isolation, Jane Vallis, John Jarrett, Karen Robson, labyrinth, location, maid Jacki Weaver, mansion, Margaret Nelson, Martindale Hall, missing, mystery, natural, orphan, out in the heat, outcrop: Valentine’s Day, panpipe, perfect day, permission, Peter Weir, picnic, Picnic at Hanging Rock, police, prim and proper, primal, principal, Rachel Roberts, remove shoes and stockings, rock formation, Russel Boyd, school authorities, schoolgirls, search, secrets, sex, socially stratified, St. Valentine’s Day 1900, student attendance, supervision, teachers, teenage, Tony Llewellyn-Jones, trees, turn of the century, unpaid fees, vanish, Victoria, Vivean Gray, volcanic, well-off, wild, working class, young ladies

Features Live Action Movies

Kidnapped
(Rapito)

Post author By Jeremy Clarke
Post date 22 April 2024
No Comments on Kidnapped
(Rapito)
Sticky post

Director – Marco Bellocchio – 2023 – Italy, France, Germany – Cert. 12a – 135m

*****

A boy is forcibly taken from his Jewish family by the Pope to be raised as a Catholic priest because he has been baptised into the Catholic faith – out in UK cinemas on Friday, April 26th

Italy, the mid-nineteenth century. The Papal States will have disappeared by 1870 as Italy moves towards unification. In the meantime, they are still under the administrative control of the incumbent pope, Pius IX.

Bologna, 1852. A maid sees off a soldier in the night following a romantic tryst. The soldier is neither here nor there; the maid, Anna Morisi (Aurore Camatti) will play a significant part in what follows. The life of a nine-child Jewish family is about to be disrupted forever.

The home of the very ordinary Mortalo family, who are Jewish: father Momolo (Fausto Russo Alesi), mother Marianna (Barbara Ronchi) and their nine children. The parents are deeply religious and raise their offspring accordingly, teaching them, among other things, to recite the Shema prayer every night before they go to sleep. One night in 1858, they are visited by the authorities under Feletti (Fabrizio Gifuni) who have come to take away one of their children under Papist law.… Read the rest

Tags 1852, 1858, 1870, abduction, antisemitism, atheism, Aurore Camatti, baptised, Barbara Ronchi, boarding school, Bologna, Catholic, Catholic boarding school, Catholic Church, Catholic faith, Catholic ritual., Catholic services, Catholicism, church, Church authorities, conversion, dormitory, Enea Sala, ethnicity, Fabrizio Gifuni, faith, family, Fausto Russo Alesi, hate, heritage, Italian unification, Jesus Christ crucified, Jew, Jewish, Jewish family Pope, Judaism, kidnapped, Latin, Leonardo Maltese, lie, Limbo, liturgies, maid, Marco Bellocchio, Mezusah, Mortalo, nails, nineteenth century, ordination, Paolo Pierobon, Papal States, papist, Papist law, pharmacist, Pius IX, power structure, priest, protest, raised, religious artefact, religious conversion to Catholicism, ritual, ritual of baptism, Roman Catholic, Rome, salvation, Samuele Teneggi, school authorities, Shema prayer, statue, taken, Unification of Italy, upbringing, vision

Features Live Action Movies

Kidnapped

One God, two families

Kidnapped
Directed by Marco Bellocchio
Certificate 12a, 135 minutes
Released 26 April

This Italian drama, based on true events, is set when the papacy was both the head of the Roman Catholic Church and the state authority in parts of Italy, a situation that would change with Italian unification in the 1870s and the instigation of a secular, country-wide system of government. There would be implications for the separation of church and state.

In 1858, six-year-old Jewish boy Edgardo Mortalo (Enea Sala) was removed from his family by the papist authorities following his Catholic baptism (how he was baptised emerges later) and taken to a school run directly by Pope Pius IX (Paolo Pierobon) to educate such ‘Christians’ in the faith and turn them into priests.

The Church’s theological rationale behind this appalling action… [read the rest at Reform]

[Read my longer review on this site]

Tags 1852, 1858, 1870, abduction, antisemitism, atheism, baptised, Barbara Ronchi, boarding school, Catholic, Catholic boarding school, Catholic Church, Catholic faith, Catholic ritual., Catholic services, Catholicism, church, Church authorities, conversion, dormitory, Enea Sala, ethnicity, faith, family, Fausto Russo Alesi, hate, heritage, Italian unification, Jesus Christ crucified, Jew, Jewish, Jewish family Pope, Judaism, kidnapped, Latin, Leonardo Maltese, lie, Limbo, liturgies, maid, Marco Bellocchio, Mezusah, Mortalo, nails, nineteenth century, ordination, Paolo Pierobon, Papal States, papist, Papist law, pharmacist, Pius IX, power structure, priest, protest, raised, religious artefact, religious conversion to Catholicism, ritual, ritual of baptism, Roman Catholic, Rome, salvation, school authorities, taken, Unification of Italy, upbringing