スコセッシ監督の前書き

先ほどのインタビューは真面目なものでしたが、一般向けテレビ番組では重い映画の沈黙はさわりだけ触れて後はこれまでのキャリアの話に終始していますね。監督の名前をどう発音するなんて軽い話題もあるのはテレビ向けなんでしょう。

原作である沈黙の英語翻訳版にはスコセッシ監督が前書きを書いています。どんなことを書いているのか興味がある方は以下のリンクをお読みください。

Martin Scorsese Introduces ‘Silence’

How do you tell the story of Christian faith? The difficulty, the crisis, of believing? How do you describe the struggle? There have been many great twentieth-century novelists drawn to the subject – Graham Greene, of course, and François Mauriac, Georges Bernanos and, from his own very particular perspective, Shusaku Endo.

When I use the word ‘particular’, I am not referring to the fact that Endo was Japanese. In fact, it seems to me that Silence, his greatest novel and one that has become increasingly precious to me as the years have gone by, is precisely about the particular and the general. And it is finally about the first overwhelming the second.

（中略）
I picked up this novel for the first time twenty years ago. I’ve reread it countless times since. It has given me a kind of sustenance that I have found in only a very few works of art.

孫引きになりますがApproaching Silenceという本でもスコセッシ監督が寄稿しているようですね。

Endo’s novel confronts the mystery of Christian faith, and by extension the mystery of faith itself. Rodrigues learns, one painful step at a time, that God’s love is more mysterious than he knows, that He leaves much more to the ways of men than we realize, and that He is always present … even in His silence. What role am I playing, wonders Rodrigues? Why am I being kept alive? When will my martyrdom arrive? Of course, it doesn’t. Which means that he will be playing a role that is very different from the one he expected to play. He will not be following in the footsteps of Jesus. He will be taking a less revered path, and therefore playing a very different role. This is the most painful realization of all.

How do I translate the last pages of the novel, as abstract as Moby-Dick or The Idiot, into images and actions? So how do I film these interior sensations and realizations and emotions? How do I make the mystery of faith, and the ways of God, cinematically present? The answer is in making the movie — going to Taiwan, working with the actors and the cameraman and the production designer, shooting, and then putting it together in the editing room, adding a frame here and taking one out there, mixing the sound, timing the color, and deciding that it’s finished. But on another level, that answer lies within the cinema itself, and its way of pointing us toward what we cannot see.

定期購読者限定の記事になり恐縮ですがNew York Review of BooksではIan Burumaがレビューを書いていました。

Japan: Beautiful, Savage, Mute
Ian Buruma FEBRUARY 9, 2017 ISSUE
Silence
a film directed by Martin Scorsese

Martin Scorsese’s beautiful new movie, Silence, based on Endō Shūsaku’s novel, begins and ends in the same way: a dark screen filled with the noise of summer on the rural coast of southwestern Japan, cicadas rasping, waves crashing, thunderclaps exploding, and rain lashing the rocks.
In between is played out, for almost three hours, the harrowing story of two young Portuguese Jesuit missionaries on a clandestine search for another priest who is rumored to have renounced his faith after torture and to be living as a Japanese Buddhist. The tale, based on historical events, is set in the 1640s. Half a century before, the Shogun Hideyoshi, who unified Japan after years of violent conflict between regional warlords, had embarked on a merciless campaign to get rid of Christianity by expelling foreign priests and forcing Japanese Christians, concentrated mostly in the regions around Nagasaki, to give up their faith by stamping on images of Christ and the Virgin. Those who refused were subjected to a variety of hideous tortures: scalded in sulphurous hot springs, burned at the stake, crucified, drowned at sea, or suspended upside down over pits filled with excrement until death, often slow in coming, ended their torment.

遠藤周作は「日本人は超越的なものを信じることができない」と見ていたようで、それ以外にも篠田正浩監督による沈黙があったこと、宣教師フロイスにも触れていたり日本に詳しいところを見せています。



(Wikipedia)
ルイス・フロイス（葡: Luís Fróis [luˈiʃ frɔjʃ]、1532年 - 1597年7月8日（慶長2年5月24日））は、ポルトガルのカトリック司祭、宣教師。イエズス会士として戦国時代の日本で宣教し、織田信長や豊臣秀吉らと会見。戦国時代研究の貴重な資料となる『日本史』を記したことで有名。

フロイスの本の方に興味が出たのですが、Kindle版は売っていないのですね。最近、本屋に行って買うのは面倒に思えてきました。。。