Shusaku Endo on Screen

It has been known for some time that one of the most award-winning directors in American film, Martin Scorsese , will be directing a movie adaption of Silence , a novel by the Catholic Japanese writer Shusaku Endo, slated for 2013. Speaking of the novel, Scorsese says that it had “given me a kind of sustenance that I found in only a very few works of art”:

‘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.’

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