Films

I have just seen Terence Davies's film Benediction on iPlayer. The camera work and its use of music and poetry is excellent. It claims to be a biographical account of Siegfried Sassoon's life and it seems to get the broad outlines correct. However, it gives a misleading view of his military career and it skates over his late conversion to Catholicism with the result he comes across as troubled to the end of his days whereas family insist he was at peace for the last decade of his life.

I have just seen Terence Davies's film Benediction on iPlayer. The camera work and its use of music and poetry is excellent. It claims to be a biographical account of Siegfried Sassoon's life and it seems to get the broad outlines correct. However, it gives a misleading view of his military career and it skates over his late conversion to Catholicism with the result he comes across as troubled to the end of his days whereas family insist he was at peace for the last decade of his life.

Thanks for this - it sounds like a difficult but interesting 'watch.'

Ive watched this fairly recently too plus Ive several of his books of poetry. His war poems are the most well known and rightly so. Im uncomfortable with his turn to Catholicism at the end of his life, mainly as (personal opinion) it is a toxic, abusive and hypocritical belief system, you are though correct in that the film didn’t explore this aspect well. 

The catholicism of some writers I enjoy is an ongoing problem for me, Im thinking particularly of Graham Greene and T.S.Eliot. It is that age old conundrum of can we separate the art from the artist?.  On balance I feel we must as not to leads to book burning then so often to the burning (literal or metaphor) of people.  Additionally we need to read both sides of every coin to understand its message 

Alice