Friday, August 20, 2010

El Cid Versus the Mosque, Part 2

El Cid

Below is the second part of a seventeen-part video of the classic 1961 movie El Cid, starring Charlton Heston and Sophia Loren (and subtitled in Portuguese). This is our contribution to the El Cid Project, which aims to establish a different narrative around the hallowed ground in Lower Manhattan.

Remember: the El Cid Project proposes to screen the movie near the Ground Zero site, as a counterweight to the “cultural center” planned by the Córdoba Initiative.



Part 1, along with a fuller explanation of the El Cid Project, is here.

[Nothing follows]

8 comments:

The Observer said...

If they do go ahead and build this mosque, and if some right-wingers then go ahead and blow it up, would it then be unacceptable to build a church over its ruins afterwards?

Or would that be an extended arm reaching out for tolerance and understanding?

Hmm .....

And by the way, the Portuguese subtitles are very helpful as it gives me an opportunity to freshen up on my Portuguese :-)

babs said...

Heh, I find the first commenter to be quite astute as Islam has a long history of building over the ruins of Christianity. Never mind all the objections recently aired by the Imams wife... Isn't that exactly what they intend to do?

1389 said...

It's high time they do build a church. They sure don't need to wait until a mosque is built and destroyed. It needs to be built NOW.

Click here to see why.

Anonymous said...

If you have friends who are not on the interwibbles, it is fairly easy to prepare a DVD for them to watch. Using a Firefox AddOn called DownloadHelper I now have all 17 parts. (There are many other download programs, a rather crowded market!) Then a program called DVD Flick took the downloaded snippets, glued them all back together again and prepared a disk image for burning.

Sean O'Brian said...

SPOILER ALERT:

If you have not seen El Cid before then please do not read any further.

"My first memories of censorship are cinematic: screen kisses brutalized by prudish scissors which chopped out the moments of actual contact. (Briefly, before comprehension dawned, I wondered if that were all there was to kissing, the languorous approach and then the sudden turkey-jerk away.) The effect was usually somewhat comic, and censorship still retains, in contemporary Pakistan, a strong element of comedy. When the Pakistani censors found that the movie El Cid ended with a dead Charlton Heston leading the Christians to victory over the Muslims, they nearly banned it, until they had the idea of simply cutting out the entire climax, so that the film screened showed El Cid mortally wounded, El Cid dying nobly, and then ended. Muslims 1, Christians 0."

-Salman Rushdie. Imaginary Homelands: Essays and Criticism 1981-1991.

Svartwulf said...

See, I have a great solution to the whole Ground Zero Mosque situation, seeing as it's going to be built no matter what.

We rebuild that St. George Cathedral.

Then we build Buddhist Temples, Shinto Shrines, Pagan Temples and Groves, and so on.

As Ground Zero is a sacred place, Let Us make it sacred to all. And when the Muslims Call To Pray, Let every other group their raise their voices and make such a noise so as to drown out the Muslims.

Keith Olbermann compaired those who are protesting this Mosque to Nazis. Here is my response to that:

What Fools These Mortals Be

Unknown said...

Renowned artist, Marc Richard Rubin, and I were in NYC on June 6 at the Stop the Mosque rally with his 7ft x 14ft
masterwork "Atrocity 911" which Marc painted as at the request of his life-long friend who lives 2 blocks from WTC. She asked him to "Paint this atrocity so no one will ever forget".

Al-Jazeera turned their camera from the painting as they were interviewing a raging Imam Rauf. That is the power of art and images. An Israeli woman translated to us Rauf's words from Arabic: " "I am the director of the mosque.(not the community center as they like to claim) It will be a living center for young men from Saudi Arabia and other Muslim countries..."

We wheeled "Atrocity 911" through the streets of lower Manhattan on June 8. Tens of thousands of people saw the painting. Military and ex-military, NYPD, NYFD, Iranian-Americans, Syrian-Americans, and native New Yorkers, they ALL thanked the artist. Many bumped knuckles. Many had tears in their eyes. The painting HEALS and UNITES people. To those who asked "why isn't this painting in a museum?" the answer is "its not politically correct".

Marc painted "Atrocity 911" for the people and we will take it again to the streets of Manhattan on Sept 11. One cannot argue with a truthful image. Become a Facebook Fan of "Atrocity 911" and see pictures of the painting in lower Manhattan and in front of the proposed mosque at
Atrocity 911 Painting

Old Atlantic Lighthouse said...

Meet the Muslim Press had on RINOs supporting build a mosque anywhere but Ground Zero. These RINO leaders do not support the El Cid Project if it means the same thing as it would to El Cid, removing all Muslims from Christian lands everywhere.