Getting vestments (and other things liturgical) wrong in TV and Movies
stonespring
Shipmate
Why won’t tv and movie producers pay for someone to do the minimal
research necessary to know that stoles should not be worn over chasubles (although some hippie-ish priests do so)? Seriously, I see this time and again, even in historical pieces where it looks like producers had some effort put into researching everyone else’s clothes.
What other examples of getting vestments and liturgy wrong in movies and tv can you think of?
research necessary to know that stoles should not be worn over chasubles (although some hippie-ish priests do so)? Seriously, I see this time and again, even in historical pieces where it looks like producers had some effort put into researching everyone else’s clothes.
What other examples of getting vestments and liturgy wrong in movies and tv can you think of?
Comments
A lot of screenwriters will try to approximate some kind of archaic liturgical speech and get it all screwed up, e.g. addressing multiple demons as "thou".
Another wedding error - your typical Jane Austen film or television drama will end with a festive wedding, but that class of people did not go in for big weddings at that date. They were regarded as rather low class, all right perhaps for farmers, but a bit brash, vulgar and not the thing for gentry or those who had aspirations to be thought as such.
I don't know when the change happened and big weddings came back into fashion, but suspect gradually on from Victoria's wedding in 1840 and the development of the Victoria and Albert portrayal of family life.
He found the vaguely-Christian-origins producers the worst, and disliked working with US firms on Civil and War of Independence projects as producers often had very political or national mythology notions which they did not like challenged. With a decent knowledge of African American music of the ante-bellum period, he had much work in trying to draw producers away from "Sister Act" remakes and was once cut out of a production of an underground railway made-for-TV film for objecting to Gounod's Ave Maria being sung by a clergyman at a lynching (with lovely damages for constructive dismissal, I was given to understand, as my glass of Lagavulin 16-year-old was being topped up for the retelling).
His triumph was getting a 1810 Presbyterian congregation to line out the hymns rather than use the bright red 1975 Common Praise hymnbook. Sadly, a heart weakened by radiation therapy stopped, and his work is done. Googling will find a few dozen Canadian consultants, and I find it odd that UK producers do not have stables of them at call.
That said, John Le Carré's occasional descriptions of non-conformist church environments in his novels have always annoyed me - for instance a baptist pastor descibed as having a "parish".
Fr Jack was clearly neither profane nor drunk enough!
The original Chesterton Father Brown is a very different figure in a very different situation.
But quite fun in its own way.
In more recent series, I get the impression that Father Brown's little homilies to the murderer (generally on the theme of God's forgiveness) are actually fairly in line with Roman Catholic thinking, but for the first few series I did wonder quite what the church and police advisers did: all I could think of was that they sat in the corner playing drinking games when they spotted an error.
Right, St. Peter's Cross. Near me a Lutheran St. Peter's Church has upside down crosses along its windows.
I seem to recall an X-files episode exploiting this confusion.
That one struck me too, but I am not disposed to complain too much as I get rather tired of mistakes being made in the other direction. Lighted candles on the Communion Table before the mid-Victorian period is a pet-peeve of mine. Also votive candle stands in MOTR Anglican churches in the 1950s - I don't think so! Freestanding altars before about 1965 is another one I can be very caustic about.
When I was a child the Rector of the neighbouring parish to the one I grew up in a Westcott House man (ordained in the early 1960s, IIRC) who tended to wear choir habit for everything except baptisms (surplice and stole) and Communion (chasuble in one church; surplice and stole in the other two.) A lot less 'tatting-up' was done in the 1950s than we have become accustomed to today. The clergy around our way were typically MOTR-leaning-high and trained at Lincoln, Westcott, or King's College London, and that was the usual mode of dress before Parish Communion became all the rage about 45-50 years ago. I knew one or two parishes that had been slow to change and they were still basically doing that in the early 1980s.
Some of you might just know that I have a passing interest in trains. Film companies come to preserved railways for historical scenes, but often ignore the advice they are given. Very often, in scenes said in (say) the 20s or 30s, the train will be a 1950s British Railways one with livery to match. That's just annoying.
I found Whatsername's depiction of an evangelical pastor / missionary in The Poisonwood Bible deeply irritating, however good Whatsername's book might have been (I thought it was a straw-man brain explosion but just saying). I am yet to meet a pastor/ missionary of that type bowing his head reverently / piously / pompously and performing the sign of the cross when saying grace. And that was just the surface level complaint.
AFAIK it never graced the silver screen, but I know little about film. I saw Mary Poppins once. In about 1967.
Quite possibly in connection with St Peter, who was said to have insisted that his own crucifixion be head-down, as he was not worthy to suffer in the same position as Our Lord?
So often there is a burial in a new grave but in a very old part of the churchyard, where there hasn’t been a new grave for 100’s of years. It looks atmospheric though...
Yes, quite. Most people sufficiently Christian know this, but somehow it’s become a standard part of Hollywood “satanic cults.” Really quite strange. I think it’s also most often done with a cross and not a crucifix, which I also find somewhat amusing. If anything, turning a crucifix could be construed as offensive, just because seeing Jesus at that angle could be disconcerting. But a regular old wooden cross?
(NB that I cannot now name any films to back up my points; mea culpa)
Robin Hood Prince of Thieves, if memory serves.
Father Brown, though RC, is sufficiently cognisant with the CofE of his day (Chesterton having converted to being RC) to recognise that a real clergyman would either be a fire and brimstone Bible basher or a flamboyant Anglo-Catholic, but that anyone who presented himself as both simultaneously could only be an actor and a fake.
I think it turned out that the entire village was inhabited by actors or former actors, playing the part of squire, his lady, rustics, servants etc for some dodgy purpose, but it's a long time ago, and I can't remember the reason.
(That was the reason in the Father Brown story, which I reread recently. Enoch, it is indeed very apt for this thread.)
Well that's a hazard for a start. Mash up the petals and you have people slipping all over the place, especially if you have a floor of encaustic tiles
At a wedding, maybe, but if you chuck the petals around for a Procession of the Blessed Sacrament (say, at Corpus Christi), then Our Lord, and His Blessed Mother (along with the Angels, and Saints) will preserve you from harm.
Not that you're likely to see such a procession in a Baptist Church.
Yet.
A few other observations about churches in general in TV drama:
The vicar/minister/priest is always present in the church.
The tiniest village church has an organ equivalent to the one in York Minster. Come to think of it, the bells are the same.
Every single church of any denomination in Wales only ever sings Cwm Rhondda.
At least it wasn’t purple, which I’ve seen before
Unless it's a little, out-of-tune instrument, played by a tone-deaf elderly woman.
IIRC, he always wore green vestments, no matter the season or holiday. The Diocesan Bishop (who was having an affair with the priest's father, the married retired bishop), was at "St. Barnabus" all the time. It was apparently a diocese of only one parish.
I can't remember all the other liturgical and ecclesiastical atrocities -- it's been quite a few years.
There weren't that many petals. And the aisles were carpeted, Nonconformists not going in for the suspiciously Anglican encaustic tiles!
Reminds me a bit of Rev. Although most of it was pretty accurate, I never understood why the Archdeacon was always hanging around and why he had such a big say in how the parish was run.
I doubt it -- the priest was very liberal, and the Bishop (the one having an affair with the priest's father) was a woman.
In one production of Poulenc's "Dialogues des Carmélites," the Chaplain was still clad in his cassock in the last scene, which would have cost him his head in real life; as the sisters made their procession through the mob on their way to the guillotine, he repeatedly crossed himself, rather than any of them. And I've forgotten how many productions of that one I've seen in which the Chaplain goes scuttling through the streets wearing a chasuble. Seriously? It's the Terror! You're dead meat!
In one world premiere opera, the RC parish priest was shown coming to the wedding party wearing not just his cassock but his surplice and stole. Fortunately, I was allowed to attend the dress rehearsal, after which I pulled the PR person (another sensible Episcopalian) aside and told her what needed to be fixed and why. She was able to get through to the director and make him realize that he really didn't want that error to be a feature in the review.