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Finding God at the Movies ... And why Catholic churches produce Catholic Filmmakers
Richard A. Blake, S.J.
Thomas Jefferson spoke of a "wall of separation" between church and state, and whatever might be said of the metaphor, it does not travel well across all realms of society and culture. Certainly there is no separation of film and faith, as Richard A. Blake, S.J., shows in this essay, based on a talk he gave at the annual Riggs Dinner for friends of the Woodstock Theological Center, this past April. Father Blake is professor of fine arts and co-director of the film studies program at Boston College. Here, he speaks of church and cinema, and how the Catholic imagination has leavened the American film industry.
Come back with me through the decades to the golden age of movie going, before the age of multiplexes, ill-mannered cell-phones and super-sized popcorn along with super-sized patrons, who yak away as though they were still at home watching Oprah. The house lights have already gone dark and the theater is utterly black. A uniformed usher uses a flashlight to show the way down the carpeted aisle to the row of plush seats. Velvet curtains shroud the screen. A tomb-like hush envelops the audience. The world is as still as death-empty, void, and meaningless. Suddenly an arrow of light shatters against the front wall. As the curtains part, the void comes alive with miraculous scenes and sounds, with deserts and oceans, cowboys and dancers, lovers and warriors. Let there be light, and the void teems with creation in its endless varieties and splendors. One might even say that witnessing such a miracle might be considered a form of religious experience, a reliving of the creation story from Genesis, and so it is. But we're not there yet. To arrive at this conclusion, we have to make our journey from movies to contemplation in stages. In keeping with an old Woodstock tradition consecrated long ago by Walter Burghardt, we'll take it in three steps: movies, movie makers and movie goers.
First, the movies themselves. As early as 1951, just as film was starting to develop its own critical language, the great French critic André Bazin wrote simply: "The cinema has always been interested in God." In his essay "Cinema and Theology" he pointed out that from the earliest days of one-reel silent films, religious themes were commonplace in this infant entertainment industry. He even began to classify religious films into various categories, and again in keeping with the Woodstock tradition, he provided three familiar types. The first comprised stories taken from the Bible, beginning with primitive ten-minute passion plays, through the silent masterpieces like King of Kings and Sign of the Cross. The years immediately following Bazin's essay would provide wide-screen epics, like Samson and Delilah, Ben Hur, The Ten Commandments, The Greatest Story Ever Told and The Robe. The tradition continues in the present with Martin Scorsese's The Last Temptation of Christ and currently Mel Gibson's Passion of the Christ. And we might even expand the category a bit to include Jesus of Montreal, with its contemporary setting, Jesus Christ Superstar with its rock music, or Dogma with its crude but very funny satire on the Church.
Jesuit Martyrs as Film Genre. Bazin's second category includes lives of saints. He had in mind Dreyer's silent classic, The Passion of Joan of Arc and Rossellini's The Flowers of St. Francis, released in this country with the horrible title, Francis, God's Jester. Poor Joan of Arc is recycled every few years, the most recent being The Messenger. This genre has been less successful, but occasionally another example appears, like A Man for All Seasons, or Black Robe, a film version of a successful novel patterned closely on the experiences of the Jesuit North American martyrs. Near saints appear once in a while as well: one thinks of Romero, or Entertaining Angels, the story of Dorothy Day. When can we expect a life of Mother Teresa, starring the ever-spunky Sally Field, or perhaps the ever-smiling Julia Roberts?
The third grouping consists of films about struggling church professionals. Here the photogenic quality of Catholic priests and nuns has proved irresistible to filmmakers. We have the nice-guy priest like Bing Crosby in Going My Way, the tough-guy priest like Spencer Tracy in Boys Town, the dying priest in Diary of a Country Priest, the alcoholic priest in Mass Appeal, and the gay priest in The Priest. We have an equally diverse population of movie nuns: gooey nuns in Come to the Stable, singing nuns in Sound of Music, farmhand nuns in Lilies of the Field, rebellious nuns in The Nun's Story, psychotic nuns in Agnes of God, and romantic nuns in Black Narcissus. Most recently we've had the tender but tough as nails nun in Dead Man Walking.
Must a religious film be about religious subject matter? As a Jesuit, I think not.
This quick survey is enough to demonstrate that there has been an astounding variety of religion-based films. It leads to two conclusions. The first is that Bazin was right. Film and religion have proved over the years to be quite congenial companions. Films can deal with an incredible variety of religious topics - sometimes well, sometimes poorly - simply because they have. Filmmakers have found religious themes suitable for the medium, audiences accept them and producers feel they can make money with them. In a word, movies can be spiritual because time and time again they have been.
The second conclusion must arise as a challenge to Bazin. Writing over 50 years ago, when film criticism was in his infancy, he limited his observations to content. Must a religious film be about religious subject matter? As a Jesuit, I think not. I don't want to place that kind of limitation on either the medium or on religion. As Christians we are Incarnational, that is, we believe that God continues to inhabit his universe. All manner of objects and persons are sacred because God made them and sustains them. One key dimension in Ignatian spirituality is its relentless discovery of God in all things. The Jesuit poet Gerard Manley Hopkins tells us that "The world is charged with the grandeur of God." So we conclude that film can provide a religious experience, and furthermore that we should not limit that experience to obviously religious content.
Many of the best, most Catholic filmmakers know this instinctively, even if they have never had the occasion or ability to provide a theological explanation for what they are doing. This brings me to the second point: the people who make the movies. Although I have done some work on the Jewish background of Woody Allen and the Lutheran background of the Swedish master Ingmar Bergman, I'd like to limit our reflection tonight to Catholics. Most of them would never consider themselves religious filmmakers, nor do they think of themselves as self-consciously Catholic. They are "Catholic" filmmakers almost despite themselves. Martin Scorsese, the ex-seminarian who failed to gain admission to Fordham, put it most succinctly and yet most profoundly and in a most Catholic formulation when he opens Mean Streets in Old St. Patrick's Cathedral on Mulberry Street in Lower Manhattan. The hero has just come from confession, and he concludes his penance with the prayer: "You don't make up for your sins in church; you do it on the streets." He leaves church and spends the rest of the film trying to save his irresponsible friend from loan sharks, even to the shedding of his blood. Scorsese does not need ecclesiastical trappings to reenact this Catholic story of redemption; he does it on the streets, which for him are a violent and messy arena of grace.
Why Catholics Can't Stop Filming. To an astounding extent that I had never suspected until I started to look into the matter, the movies are really a Catholic medium. While Jews have placed their mark on the corporate side of the industry, Catholics have been equally over-represented in the creative side. Think of some of the key filmmakers that even casual film audiences know by name: Hitchcock, John Ford, Frank Capra, Scorsese and Coppola, Leo McCarey, Robert Altman, Michael Cimino, and the master of teen-age horror films Roger Corman. In this ecumenical age we might even include Cecil B. DeMille, who was a high Episcopalian. Among the younger Americans, we have Kevin Smith, David Lynch, and Ed Burns. If we extend our reach to Europe, we find a similar pattern. Important directors and artistic movements arise far more regularly from Catholic cultures in France, Italy and Spain than from traditionally Protestant countries. Why is this?
In a Catholic church, the senses reign, or at least they are encouraged rather than suppressed.
A tour of our churches helps us reach toward an understanding of the phenomenon. Look at Protestant churches, with plain walls and clear-glass windows, with seats arranged facing an unadorned cross, pulpit and lectern holding the Bible. In this world, the Word is supreme. Now come into a Catholic Church. Look around slowly. Here we find stained glass, statues and icons. The scent of incense clings to the carpets. The rituals are reenacted with gesture and ornate vestments. In a Catholic Church, the senses reign, or at least they are encouraged rather than suppressed. Protestants reflect upon the Bible privately, let the word of God touch them as individuals and express a personal commitment to Jesus Christ. As a rule, Catholics don't read the Bible, at least not with the enthusiasm of Protestants, and they profess their faith as members of a congregation.
Catholics gather together as a community that includes family, friends, neighbors and perfect strangers, almost as though they were going to the movies. (Haven't we all heard family stories about Uncle Freddie who once had a drink or two and then genuflected at the movies?) In the saints we have mythic folk heroes like movie stars, and a whole array of product tie-ins from relics, to holy cards to medallions. We witness the rituals enacted over and over again like the final shoot-out of a Western or teary embrace of long-separated lovers during the finale of a musical. Catholics then come from a culture that nurtures all the elements needed for filmmakers. This is the Catholic imagination that has found a natural home in film. Whether or not these filmmakers remain engaged with the Church, they have at one time been immersed in this visual, sensual world that is steeped in mystery. Imagine the impact upon a sensitive child attending a requiem Mass for a deceased grandparent. Mysteries of life and death merge with the flowers, music, incense, holy water, vestments, and candles.
From an early age, Catholics learn to tame the mysteries of life and death with the hardware of the material universe. By dealing with the here-and-now rather than fleeing it, Catholic filmmakers allow their characters to seek a form of redemption in their day-to-day struggles. For Hitchcock, the workaday world contains unseen dangers, and one may even be threatened by a loss of identity, but the human person can prevail, eventually. Coppola and Scorsese have their heroes wrestle with the conflict between tribal loyalties to the family or the mob and their own personal integrity, but they too find redemption. John Ford sets his greatest films on the American frontier, where survival depends on dedication to the family, the wagon train, or the regiment. All their characters seek personal integrity and redemption in the midst of a community. Their struggles are rarely couched in spiritual terms, but they are invariably religious quests with milestones along the way marked by Catholic images. The Catholic imagination is more than catholic, more than sacramental - it is profligate. It sees the workings of grace everywhere.
But how are we to read these Catholic images and these Catholic stories? Isn't there a danger of reading too much into what we see on the screen and hear on the Dolby sound system? That brings us to the third area of inquiry: us, casual movie goer and professional critic alike. To be honest, yes, there is always the danger that we will distort a film, or poem, or piece of music by reading too much into it. Every viewer of a film, like every reader of a novel or connoisseur of painting, brings a knapsack of personal baggage to the experience of art. We are who we are, but that should not intimidate us, rather it should raise our appreciation to a new level of sensitivity.
Catholic filmmakers bring a particular sensibility to the concrete material universe; they see symbols everywhere.
Calling all Catholic Critics. Contemporary critical theory has been giving a great deal of attention to "receptors," or consumers of art. And, critics now routinely identify themselves as feminists, or Marxists, or queer theorists - but there is an odd paradox here. While contemporary critics proudly proclaim their political or ideological point of view as a starting place of their analysis, they rarely put religion into the mix of acceptable critical tools. I would like to argue that a Catholic critic who is self-consciously honest about his or her own Catholic imagination, can add another viewpoint to the analysis of any film, and that such analysis is both valid and illuminating. It should enter into the discussion as an equal partner in critical discourse.
Now we can go back to the beginning, when that shaft of light leaps from the projector and produces all those wondrous images on the screen. The flickering beam creates a universe out of the darkness. In such a universe of people and things, God is present, creating, sustaining, and loving. It's a world rich in symbols of God's presence. Catholic filmmakers bring a particular sensibility to the concrete material universe; they see symbols everywhere. In their own unique way, they are aware of sin and guilt, atonement and redemption, death and resurrection, not merely in the trappings of church and religion, but everywhere. Similarly a viewer or critic can bring a Catholic imagination to these works, and in doing so, can savor the holiness of the images.
Because, if God looks with delight on the work of his hands, so can we.