There have been rumblings about director Martin Scorsese making a film of Shusaku Endo’s magnificent historical novel Silence, about Japanese martyrs of the 17th century. Now it seems that the rumor may become a reality, according to Spero Forum.
In a preface to Endo’s book, Scorsese writes perceptively about faith:
How do you tell the story of Christian faith? The difficulty, the crisis, of believing? How do you describe the struggle? … Shusaku Endo understood the conflict of faith, the necessity of belief fighting the voice of experience. The voice that always urges the faithful – the questioning faithful – to adapt their beliefs to the world they inhabit, their culture…That’s a paradox, and it can be an extremely painful one: on the face of it, believing and questioning are antithetical. Yet I believe that they go hand in hand. One nourishes the other. Questioning may lead to great loneliness, but if it co-exists with faith – true faith, abiding faith – it can end in the most joyful sense of communion. It’s this painful, paradoxical passage – from certainty to doubt to loneliness to communion – that Endo understands so well, and renders so clearly, carefully and beautifully in Silence.
I, for one, can’t wait to see the film.
Update: it’s slated for a 2015 release: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0490215/
Scorcese first talked about making this movie right after he’d made “The Last Temptation of Christ” more than 20 years ago. I long since thought he’d passed on the idea. Good to see that maybe he hasn’t.