Religion

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Religion

THE "RELIGIOUS FILM": A GENRE?
CINEMA, MODERNITY, AND RELIGION
RELIGIOUS FILM AND GENDER
POSTSCRIPT: RELIGION, FILM, AND
THE VATICAN
FURTHER READING

Traditionally, "religion" has been synonymous with "spirituality." The increasing divergence between the two terms, however—particularly within highly secularized Western cultures, where the former indicates denominational affiliation, the latter an often unchurched seeking—raises the question whether there is now a contrast between religious films and ones of spirituality. If the religious film usually promotes adherence to a single institutionalized faith, the film of spirituality may well tap various—sometimes incompatible—belief systems, respecting all but refusing to grant primacy to any one. Thus Andrei Tarkovsky's (1932–1986) career-end summa, Offret (The Sacrifice, 1986), splices Japanese and Christian beliefs into an ecumenical spirituality to match the coupling of yin and yang on the kimono of its protagonist, Alexander, who beseeches God to save the world from nuclear annihilation. Different belief systems—primarily Christian and Buddhist—are also fused in the more mainstream The Matrix (1999). The supernatural, meanwhile, an apparently cognate category, is usually less productive of spirituality than of audience frissons, as in the ghost film.

The possibility that a cinema of religion once prevailed and then declined presents itself most forcibly in the case of American film, whose deference towards religion sinks palpably as the desired national audience comprises fewer and fewer WASPS (white Anglo-Saxon Protestants). Among American directors, a deeply personal approach to religious themes has been rare, and is strongest in Martin Scorsese (b. 1942), whose Catholic background may be of relevance. In Mean Streets (1973), Charlie holds his hand above a candle, imagining hell, and the possibility that his sexual habits may take him there is underlined by the cut from its flame to the orange-lit bar where he prances with a near-naked dancer. The perils of the flesh recur in the controversial Last Temptation of Christ (1988)—that temptation being the recurrent one for cinematic priests: love of a woman. The later Kundun (1997), however, shows religion free of the earlier lures and passions. Scorsese is a rare exception to the rule whereby American cinema subordinates religiosity to its governing system of genre, as when it uses priests in token fashion as avuncular light relief (in countless films) or an embodiment of the main protagonist's conscience, as in On the Waterfront (1954).

THE "RELIGIOUS FILM": A GENRE?

The genre system has often been described as founded upon standardization. Variation may recommend a new product, but the deviation from the norm must not be so great as to make spectators feel cheated. Should this happen in a religious film, they may well not only walk out but accuse the filmmakers of the severest infraction—blasphemy. The religious film could thus be the least elastic of genres.

Whereas other genres can be seen as emerging and declining, hybridizing with others to prolong their lives, the religious film is unusually stable. Its sole durable combinations have been with two genres of which it is highly compatible, and it has surely been affected by their demises: silent melodrama and the historical epic. This fusion means that the Good-Evil distinction of silent melodrama differs from that of later melodrama in being mapped directly onto the maxims of Christianity, not just the vague, instinctual feeling that certain things are right and others wrong, which is prevalent in subsequent decades. The demise of this earlier melodrama is rooted in its limitation of the audience to adherents of Christianity—a liability as society becomes more diverse, multicultural, and skeptical—and in the disappearance of silent cinema itself.

The second genre cross-pollinated with the religious film is the historical epic. Silent cinema is often both melodrama and epic, as in the films of D. W. Griffith (1875–1948), particularly The Birth of a Nation (1915) and Intolerance (1916). As melodrama loses its explicit link to Christianity, however, the epic remains the religious film's lone partner in a pact to lure audiences by combining the visual impressiveness of the legendary "cast of thousands" with the authority of the text to be illustrated. The enormous crowds can become a material form of the sublimity invoked by the text, suggesting religion's world-conquering power. Such is the case in the great Hollywood biblical epics of the 1950s and early 1960s, such as The Robe (1953), The Ten Commandments (1956), Ben-Hur (1959), King of Kings (1961), and The Greatest Story Ever Told (1965). The epic and the religious film may be potentially strange bedfellows, however, as the epic fascination by excess is often charged with threatening religious morality with prurient hypocrisy. Hollywood and the religious film are also potentially incompatible in a culture of celebrity, it being arguable that religious films should not cast actors with "star quality" but rather figures with sufficient presence, dignity, and credibility to represent (not eclipse) the "real stars," their sacred prototypes. Pier Paolo Pasolini's (1922–1975) Il Vangelo secondo Matteo (The Gospel According to St. Matthew, 1964) is a particularly widely praised example of effective nonstar casting.

As the new site of epic experience became the science fiction film, its implicit spectator became less the adult member of a single faith community than the child animated by a generalized sense of wonder: Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) was the first film of a spirituality popularized still further by Steven Spielberg's Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977) and George Lucas's Star Wars (1977). No wonder that a British census saw some householders give Jedi as their religion. As the 1960s saw the heavily touted dawning of a supposed Age of Aquarius and the Western rise of less traditional forms of religion, Hollywood abandoned the "religious film" for horror films showering frissons upon unchurched youth, the new primary audience, as in Rosemary's Baby (1968) and The Exorcist (1973). In Kevin Smith's Dogma (1999), which clearly identifies with two rebel angels striving to reenter heaven through a loophole, countercultural and youth culture urges validate rebellion. Similarly, other films may deem religion crazed, maligned, and even abusively authoritarian (e.g., Carrie [1976], Lawnmower Man [1992]). "Religious film" persists in its strong form only in certain Catholic or neo-Catholic directors who are mostly Italian (Franco Zeffirelli [b. 1923], Ermanno Olmi [b. 1931]): after all, no sounding of Italian society can ignore the pervasive influence of Roman Catholicism. The 1960s upheaval in the genre system may virtually bury its once most solid, predictable element: the religious film.

CINEMA, MODERNITY, AND RELIGION

If cinema issues from Western societies driven by modernity, can it ever be anything other than an object of suspicion for believers, particularly those of non-Western societies whose norms and jurisprudence invoke religious texts, aspiring to theocracy rather than democracy? One reply (from one group—the Christian one—in one part of the world—the moneyed West) may be that cinema is a powerful evangelical tool. Accept the idea that God is representable—one reading of the Christian belief that God condescended to represent himself in a man, Jesus the Christ, though fears of blasphemy may cause indirection in representing him—and cinema becomes a potential medium for fulfilling the "Great Commission" of Matthew 28:19–20 by disseminating the Good News. The films that do so will probably not be the ones acclaimed in Western multiplexes; rather, they will be produced by particular faith groups rather than big studios, and be watched as one-off events in tents—as the the very first Western films were. Their effectiveness may not be overwhelming—many Muslims will leave a film of Christ's life before the Resurrection, as they see the Crucifixion as the end of the story, and Jesus as merely a man—but the visual message can draw the world's unlettered masses as the stained glass of medieval cathedrals had done. Strict followers of Islam and Orthodox Judaism, who reject the possibility of figurative religious representation, will reject film too, as did the Taliban in Afghanistan. In practice, though, Islamists' views on cinema have not always been so theologically grounded: clerics may have burned cinemas to protest their supposed corruption of the Iranian populace under the shah, but once in power the Ayatollah Khomeini (1900–1989) incorporated film into a program of promoting "Islamic culture." In this moralistic program, Star Wars and Close Encounters of the Third Kind were acceptable imports, despite their origins in the corrupt West.

In recent years, the issue of cinema's capacity to convert has been raised most forcibly by Mel Gibson's The Passion of the Christ (2004). Despite its association with Gibson, it is no typical Hollywood blockbuster production: during shooting, the industry was skeptical of a film in Aramaic, an apparently eccentric star folly. This deeply personal project by a believing Catholic

KRZYSZTOF KIE? LOWSKI
b. Warsaw, Poland, 27 June 1941, d. 13 March 1996

Although Krzysztof Kie?lowski began his career as a documentarist, subsequently becoming a leading figure in the pre-Solidarity ferment of Poland's Cinema of Moral Anxiety, in the 1980s his work took a turn toward the philosophical, then the ethico-metaphysical, that yielded dramatizations of religious and spiritual issues of a seriousness rivalled in recent decades only by the films of Andrei Tarkovsky. This spiritual-metaphysical turn is often linked to Kie?lowski's first collaboration with Krzysztof Piesiewicz, a Catholic lawyer, in 1985's No End, but a philosophical and metaphysical concern with chance and destiny also pervades Kie?lowski's Przypadek (Blind Chance, 1987).

The collaboration with Piesiewicz on Dekalog (The Decalogue, 1989) marks an intensification of Kie?lowski's investigation of religious, ethical, and metaphysical issues. The Decalogue comprises ten fifty-odd minute films, each loosely tied to one of the Ten Commandments, each lodging an enigmatic witness—termed an angel by some critics—in the margins of the various stories about the inhabitants of a single housing block. With the exception of "Dekalog 1," which relentlessly tracks the implications of "thou shalt have no other gods before me," the witness in each story is the series' main link to a transcendence whose purposes are unclear. In "Dekalog 1" the dialogue of faith and unbelief pursued by many religious films shapes the difference between the rationalist character Krzysztof and his Catholic sister Irena. Consulting the meteorological office, Krzysztof calculates that a nearby frozen mini-lake is safe for his son Pawel to skate. He is proved cruelly and inexplicably wrong, and the disaster of Pawel's drowning suggests the intervention of unknown forces (a computer that behaves strangely? the witness encamped by the lake? a punitive God?). The film ends with Krzysztof overturning a row of candles before an image of the Madonna in a partly completed church: like many people crying out to God or gods, he finds suffering incomprehensible. Later parts of The Decalogue are more ethical than spiritual, though the presence of the witness supplies a continual undertone of the metaphysical.

Metaphysical enigma pervades La Double vie de Véronique (The Double Life of Véronique, 1991), about two identical girls who live, separately, in Poland and France, and experience different fates. The film leaves provocatively open the question of whether any wider order frames their stories and might render them comprehensible. Similarly mysterious is the status of the judge in Trois couleurs: Rouge (Three Colours: Red, 1994), who is godlike, and may be God incognito, being apparently able to steer the chance encounters of a young girl (Valentine) towards a prospective lover, Auguste. Issues of theodicy loom large, however, as Valentine meets Auguste through a ferry-sinking that drowns hundreds: divine election appears to be distinctly capricious. But Red is no Buñuelian, simply blasphemous indictment of the divine, for the events remain mysterious. Kie?lowski's sensitivity to suffering and his desire to pose questions rather than offer answers—particularly not pat ones—resonate with the Western spirituality of recent times.

RECOMMENDED VIEWING

Przpadek (Blind Chance, 1987), Bez Ko?ca (No End, 1985), Dekalog (The Decalogue, 1989), La Double vie de Véronique (The Double Life of Véronique, 1991), Trois couleurs: Bleu (Three Colours: Blue, 1993), Trois couleurs: Blanc (Three Colours: White, 1994), Trois couleurs: Rouge (Three Colours: Red, 1994)

emphasizes both the nails driven through the hand of Jesus and the sword the gospels said would pierce the heart of his mother, and is shaped by Mary's agonized following of her son's Passion. Industry astonishment at its box-office success indicates the distance between contemporary Hollywood and the 1950s era of the biblical epic. While some objected to its violence, it could be deemed an inevitable part of a realistic account of the brutal arrest, trial, and crucifixion of Jesus Christ, though some of the indignities visited upon his body do indeed lack scriptural warrant (as when the cross to which he has been nailed falls forward, crushing his body excruciatingly). Gibson cinematizes and elaborates upon the Stations of the Cross, whose medieval and Renaissance iconography he echoes at points. Many Christians found it a powerful, conscience-shaking reminder of the intensity of Jesus's suffering for the sins of the world, and Pope John Paul II reportedly averred after a viewing "it is all true." If any have been converted by the film, it has been as individuals within the ticket-buying public for a commercially released work, not as members of the communities assembled for a free screening where that kind of film evangelizes the non-Christian world, Gibson's evangelizes one sometimes seen as "post-Christian."

Insofar as cinema enters non-Western societies, it does so initially as a foreign body. Local religious hierarchies' fears of a possible Trojan horse can be soothed by pointing to such phenomena as the Indian mythological films that flesh out divine exploits for communities watching in an awed hush. The Indian mythological films are for local consumption, however, and aesthetic cogency is not their primary aim. Critical films—such as Satyajit Ray's Devi (1960), where a man's idolatry of his daughter-in-law extends into viewing her as the incarnation of the Goddess—are viewed more widely, through an international festival and art-cinema network. Their primary allegiance is not to any faith, but to the aesthetic. One result may be a cinema with a complexion like that of the New Iranian cinema, which arguably becomes enigmatic and allegorical by omitting almost completely one of the primary motivations of many Iranians—religion—to address which might endanger both film and filmmaker.

Conflicts between religious (traditional) and secular (modern) orders pervade many of the most significant films on religious topics. Religion becomes the venal ally of the czarist authorities in a Soviet film like Eisenstein's Battleship Potemkin (1925). The secular-religious conflict animates the disagreements between believing knight and skeptical squire in the plague-ridden medieval world of Ingmar Bergman's (b. 1918) Det Sjunde inseglet (The Seventh Seal, 1957), and continues—internalized—in the heart of a doubting pastor in his Nattvardsgästerna (Winter Light, 1963), the most explicitly religious film in his trilogy about "the silence of God." A similar contrast runs between father and son in Devi: the absence in Calcutta of the skeptical son Umaprasad frees his believing father to cast his daughter-in-law as an incarnation of the goddess Durga. Such strong contrasts make for powerful dramas that are most intense when most unresolved and mysterious. Lars von Trier's dissolution of the mystery at the end of his Breaking the Waves (1996), by way of contrast, may enact a Kierkegaardian leap from the aesthetic to the religious: heavenly bells toll for Bess, who had prostituted herself for her husband and feared that the accident that sent him home may have been God's cruel answer to her selfish prayer not to be parted from him; despite appearances, and the condemnation of a sectarian church, she was a saint. A similar leap marks the end of another Danish film, Carl Dreyer's (1889–1968) Ordet (The Word, 1955), where one character—Inge—is resurrected. Meanwhile, modernity mocks religion relentlessly in Viridiana (1961), Simón del desierto (Simon of the Desert, 1965), and La Voie lactée (The Milky Way, 1969), all by the Spanish surrealist Luis Buñuel (1900–1983), which view saintliness as a ludicrously inadequate response to inveterate social problems.

Despite various attempts to define what Paul Schrader has called a "transcendental style" of cinema, believers may be skeptical of conflations of the aesthetic and the religious. Conventions of seeing are arguably more important than any particular stylistic strategy: believers will see the transcendent in any pious retelling of biblical events or the lives of the saints, however kitschy, while evocations of an uncategorized ontological strangeness presuppose unchurched spectators. The formal strategies usually termed "transcendental" are deviations from norms. Schrader describes them quasireligiously, as stylistic "asceticism," and finds them exemplified in the works of Carl Dreyer and Robert Bresson (1901–1999) in particular. Others might see them as "modernist" rather than "religious": leaving characters on one side of the image to rediscover them mysteriously present on the other—a perceptual dislocation in the Schrader/Scorsese Taxi Driver (1976)—becomes "transcendental" only when married to explicitly mystical content, as in Tarkovsky's Nostalghia (Nostalgia, 1983). For the theologian Amédée Ayfre, religious form and content meet in a focus upon the face, the location of the eyes so often termed windows of the soul. Such a spiritually limned cinema of the face is found in, for instance, Kie?lowski, Bergman, the Dreyer of La Passion de Jeanne d'Arc (The Passion of Joan of Arc, 1928), and the Larisa Shepitko of Voskhozhdeniye (Ascent, 1976). It avoids mainstream cinema's dissection of a (usually female) body into fetishized parts. Its aim is agape, not eros. Meanwhile, the work of Tarkovsky—especially Stalker (1979)—often evokes a spirituality of desolation—what St. John of the Cross called "the dark night of the soul"—by averting the head to show only its back, while the focus upon hands and feet in the late films of Bresson may reinforce a general absence of signifiers of the divine. Bresson's nonprofessional actors themselves are framed not as revelations, as in Italian neorealism, but as ciphers. The result has been seen as verging upon nihilism, as in L'Argent (Money, 1983), whose reworking of a Tolstoy story omits the original's charting of the positive contagion of the Gospel in its second half.

RELIGIOUS FILM AND GENDER

Whereas many post-1960s religious films focus upon priests racked by internal spiritual torment, the female religious path seems often to run through physical victimization and to end in sainthood (see, for example, Breaking the Waves). This itinerary is central to Dreyer's Passion of Joan of Arc, and Joan has interested many filmmakers, particularly French ones, such as Bresson, Jacques Rivette, and Luc Besson. The leading French director of the nouvelle vague, Jean-Luc Godard (b. 1930), has addressed religion in "Je vous salue, Marie" (Hail Mary, 1985) and Hélas pour moi (Woe Is Me, 1993), which link Christian and classical mythological themes to the interest in relationships between older men and younger women found in some of his nonreligious films of the same period. Godard questions the adequacy both of representation in general and of the representation of the divine in particular.

The majority of films about life within the single-sex religious orders are drawn—as cinema is so often—to the female order, in this case the convent, which, even at its best, becomes a place from which to escape into "real life": The Sound of Music (1965) is the most widely disseminated instance. Mainstream cinema's polarization of female images—between adoration and demonization, "the mother and the whore"—is reproduced in convent films, whose nun is either angelic, fun-loving and/or musical, or vaguely sinister and possibly deranged. From Michael Powell's Black Narcissus (1947), whose color stresses the earth-moving status of lipstick applied to a nun's lips, to Jerzy Kawalerowicz's austerely formalized Matka Joanna od aniolów (Mother Joanna of the Angels, 1961) and Ken Russell's flamboyant The Devils (1971), various films see female celibacy as catalyzing breakdowns far more spectacular than priestly ones. It is thus intriguing to note that one of the most restrained and credible versions of a priest thus tormented should have been the work of a woman, The Third Miracle (1999), by Agnieszka Holland.

POSTSCRIPT: RELIGION, FILM, AND
THE VATICAN

It may be valuable in the end to consider the opinions of an institution more powerful than this encyclopedia, more authoritative than this author: the Roman Catholic Church. Popular perceptions of the interrelationship of art and religion often focus upon the bans and boycotts instigated by organizations such as the Catholic League of Decency and highlighted by media that feed on the spectacle of protest and the identification of religion with "Thou shalt nots." The Vatican can commend as well as forbid, however. In 1995, to mark the centenary of cinema, it listed forty-five "Best Films" in three categories: "Religion," "Values," and "Art." The religious films were heterogeneous, ranging from Hollywood epics to films by Tarkovsky, though—as might be expected—Jesus and the saints comprise almost half of the main protagonists. Only Tarkovsky and Dreyer appeared twice in the "Religion" section; Bergman was restricted to the "Values" section, with The Seventh Seal (1957) and Smultronstället (Wild Strawberries, 1957). The full list of religious films is: Andrey Rublyov (Andrei Rublev, 1969), Babettes gæstebud (Babette's Feast, 1987), Ben-Hur (1959), Francesco, giullare di Dio (The Flowers of St. Francis, 1950), Francesco (1989), The Gospel According to St. Matthew (1964), La Passion de Notre-Seigneur Jésus Christ (Life and Passion of Christ, 1905), A Man for All Seasons (1966), The Mission (1986), Monsieur Vincent (1947), Nazarin (1959), The Word (1955), The Passion of Joan of Arc (1928), The Sacrifice (1986), and Thérèse (1986). The list can be accessed, with comments, at www.nccbuscc.org/fb/vaticanfilms.htm. It may be significant that only three of these are set in the twentieth century (one only just: Nazarin, in 1905), reflecting the often embattled status of religion within the modernity of which cinema is a prime mediator.