Mary Lea Bandy & Antonio Monda, eds. New York: Museum
of Modern Art, 2003. 299 pp. $24.95 (USD) / $34.95 (CAN). ISBN:
0870703498 (paper).
[1] This remarkable book includes forty-nine essays by thirty-five
writers on fifty-four movies, and was originally compiled to accompany
a film series sponsored by the Museum of Modern Art in 2003-04.
Most of the writers are professionally involved with film, and its
extensive list of contributors include filmmakers (Stan Brakhage,
Terence Davies, Nathaniel Dorsky, Martin Scorsese), critics (Dave
Kehr, Andrew Sarris, David Sterritt, and Molly Haskell), and novelist
Carlos Fuentes. This diversity of contributors is one of the
volume’s strengths, but it is also one of its limitations. Only
three contributors seem to be professionally engaged in the exploration
of religion and film (Virgilio Fantuzzi, Enrique Planas, and Jeffrey
Stout). It is refreshing to read chapters by authors who are not
burdened by the need to define their approaches in terms of current
scholarly trends, either in film studies or in religious studies
and theology. On the other hand, it is frustrating to read articles
that reflect no apparent awareness of decades of conversation about
the interface between religion and film, or that present none of
the nuances of that convergence.
[2] Choice of directors and films, as well as length and content,
are uneven. The fifty-four movies discussed in the book represent
sixteen countries, with the selection weighted toward European and
American productions. Fifteen are from the United States,
nine are from Italy, eight are from France, and only seven are non-Western:
four from Japan, one from Iran, and two co-productions from Burkino
Faso. Beginning with a fine essay by James Quandt on Robert Bresson’s Au
Hasard Balthasar and Le Diable Probablement, the volume
includes essays on films by directors generally known for wrestling
with theological or religious concerns: Woody Allen, Ingmar Bergman,
Luis Buñuel, Carl Dreyer, Federico Fellini, Alfred Hitchcock,
Krzysztof Kieslowski, Roberto Rossellini, Alexander Sokurov, Andrei
Tarkovsky, and Lars von Trier, among others. It also includes
essays on films that might more readily be considered popular culture: Unforgiven (Clint
Eastwood), Groundhog Day (Harold Ramis), Artificial Intelligence:
A. I. (Steven Spielberg), Magnolia (Paul Thomas Anderson). Some
of the essays do little more than re-narrate the film. Some essays
are as short as three pages, while others are thoughtful, critical
analyses, like P. Adams Sitney’s “The Roman Catholic
Subtext of Vertigo.” Still others spout nonsense: “Religion
makes life safer and better” (197). Of course, one might
quibble about their choice of films: why use John Huston’s The
Man Who Would be King (1975) and not also his adaptation of
Flannery O’Connor’s Wise Blood (1979)? And
what about the work of Martin Scorsese? Although he appears
as a contributor, his own films have no place in this book.
[3] The editors confess that they “began by thinking
less about films than about directors,” doing that because “some
directors seemed natural” (11). Why, however, would Terence
Malick (The Thin Red Line) not also seem natural? Even though
they say their interest in these filmmakers “depends not so
much on their personal belief as on the visual form of their reactions
to the idea or feeling of the presence or absence of God,” they
acknowledge that these are not “the only filmmakers concerned
with faith or the lack of it” (12). Notice the distinct criteria: “the
presence or absence of God” and “faith or the lack of
it.” Perhaps it is to be expected that the theological question
can only be articulated in terms of an anthropological one. The
relationship between the anthropological and theological formulation
of the questions could have been explored more fruitfully, thereby
offering readers a more nuanced understanding of the purpose of
these essays.
[4] That interplay between the theological and the anthropological
is reflected in the two quotations with which the editors begin
the Introduction: one from the book of Job about the hiddenness
of God (23:8-9) and one from Blaise Pascal: “You would not
seek me, if you had not found me” (Pensées,
554). The editors have made the contributors aware of the “hiddenness
of God” motif in Pascal’s writings, since that quotation
is repeated numerous times by various writers. Pascal might have
been a more significant conversation partner had the editors explored
Pascal’s thinking more deeply by citing, for example: “What
can be seen on earth indicates neither the total absence, nor the
manifest presence of divinity but the presence of a hidden God.
. . . God being thus hidden, any religion that does not say that
God is hidden is not true, and any religion which does not explain
why does not instruct” (Pensées, 555, 584).
Similarly, the Book of Job, or other biblical texts, might have
become constructive conversation partners.
[5] Although the editors note the “unrepresentable God of
Israel,” they do not explore the nuances of that topic within
biblical texts, which might have been done in at least two ways.
First, they assume a simplistic contrast between the Hebrew Bible
and the “incarnated and therefore revealed God of the New
Testament” (10). They could just as well have said that incarnation
is a form of hiddenness in which God is understood as appearing
incognito. Thus, in life as in film, God appears hidden in human
form. It is understandable, therefore, why two of the contributor’s
articles offer alternative (and conflicting) interpretations of
divine absence/presence in Kieslowski’s works. Noted another
review of this volume, “Where one [Sesti] finds contingency,
the other [Planas] finds absolute truth” (Brian Frye in Cineaste 29,
4 [2004]).
[6] These essays do not adequately explore the depth and diversity
inherent in the theological notion of the hiddenness of God. For
example, few writers identify their working assumptions as well
as Scorsese does in his article on Europa ’51. Universalizing
the main character’s experience, Scorsese writes: “God
never comes out of the shadows to lend a hand and clarify the situation
for us. Which means that God is hidden in this film in the same
way that God is hidden in life—forever immanent, provoking
anxiety and inspiring hope” (77). Scorsese implies that it
is not such an odd thing to reflect on the hiddenness of God in
film. It is the work of art that makes such apprehension possible.
After all, even the biblical writers did not uniformly think that
God was always evident to human perception and experience. The book
of Esther never mentions God. The psalmists often lament the experience
of the hiding face of God (e.g. Ps 13:1). Isaiah offers an anguished
affirmation, “Truly you are a God who hides himself” (45:15).
Even the disciples of Jesus in the Gospel of Mark remain blind to
the divine presence, which is blurred by their own presuppositions
and paradigms. It is not only Paul (whom the editors cite) whose
epistemological humility in 1 Cor 13:12 (“Now I know only
in part”) might shape a conversation between the hidden God
of film and the hiding God of the Bible.
[7] To be fair, the editors affirm that although film has always
dealt with “spiritual themes,” it has been only since
the late 1920s that “the theme of a hidden spirituality,
or, . . . of spirituality’s absence” has been
prominent: “Many movies have simultaneously insinuated and
disguised the mystery that believers call God” (10). On noting
that this subject “is hidden from the characters, the audience,
or both” the editors ask: “Is God, His presence or absence,
the inmost theme of any story? Why do so many filmmakers address
spiritual ideas without overtly naming them: timor dei?
Respect? Do they feel the need to create a kind of veil or filter
of metaphor in treating so deep and complex a topic? Or are they
afraid that the subject can too easily become uncommercial, or perhaps
intellectually unsound” (10-11)? The problem posed here is
not unique to film, but belongs to the larger questions of theological
aesthetics and the proper place of art in the religious imagination.
[8] Moreover, it is not clear what constitutes either presence or
absence, or if those ought to be the best categories for discussing
how film participates in the realm of faith, or religion, or religious
experience (spirituality). Even though the editors affirm the divine
disguise in the movies, they do not say by what criteria film viewers
might recognize this hiddenness as distinct from the mysteries and
complexities inherent in life. They write: “Film history tells
us that a hidden God can take the form of a donkey bearing all human
misery on its shoulders, or of a starship that, after many close
encounters, finally reaches us and changes our lives. A hidden God
can manifest in the weight, mystery, and power of a rain of thousands
of frogs falling from the sky in the San Fernando Valley, reminding
us that injustice and inhumanity are not limited to the Egypt of
Exodus” (12). Fellini is said to have “made films about
the mystery of existence.” Groundhog Day shows us a
character “who cannot grow in life until he is able to love.” In Breaking
the Waves, “the image of God is a woman prepared to endure
a personal Golgotha supported only by love.” Sometimes the
editors refer simply to “transcendence” like that screened
in the “formal rituals of Yasujiro Ozu’s Late Spring” or
in “a woman’s joyful preparation of a sumptuous dinner” (Babette’s
Feast) or “the tormented relationships with tradition
and religion” (Ouedraogo’s Yaaba and Tilai)(13).
[9] Is this volume, therefore, about “the image of God” embodied
in characters? Or is it about how film shows us that “transcendence
can be mirrored” (13) through the ordinary? Even though those
questions are not answered consistently throughout the book, the
diversity of approaches illustrate clearly that, through filmic
narrative, viewers become conversation partners with film, as the
art form opens windows of perception and awareness into both immanent
and transcendent dimensions of human experience.
[10] For the most part, however, writers do not deal with film’s
aesthetic as it bears on religion, theology, scripture, tradition,
and spirituality. Nor do they question whether “filmmakers
address spiritual ideas without overtly naming them” (11).
When the editors ask, “Do they [filmmakers] feel the need
to create a kind of veil or filter or metaphor?”, they tend
to focus on thematic rather than aesthetic concerns. Focusing primarily
on the thematic element of film as a way of exploring the hiddenness
of God in human life is surely a laudable endeavour. But it does
not adequately account for how viewers come to recognize such themes
in the first place. How is it that themes are grounded in the larger
narrative or worldview inhabited by the viewer, or in the kinaesthetic
experience of the film? Illustrating more clearly how these films
participate in the mythic motifs and scriptural heritage of Judaism
and Christianity would not only have answered those questions, but
would also have explained why most of the films chosen for the book
are European or American productions.
[11] The article by Mario Sesti on Groundhog Day offers an
illustration of a conversation between film and theology that goes
beyond thematic analysis. He notes that “the film manages
to show us everything that’s going on without letting us see
what it means” (209). Since the film is about showing, and
therefore about seeing, it is not thematically about God
or faith or religion. Still, Sesti is able to articulate well how
this “aesthetic fantasy” (211) becomes a parable of “oblivious
sanctity” as the main character, Phil Connors, moves from
being a “hostage” to his world, to its very “creator,” and
finally to the discovery of the limits of his ability to create
his own world. Hence, it is not so much the absent creator that
the film depicts, but the idolatry of the human, which Sesti calls “other
divinities” that also “seem to hide here” (210).
These other deities are none other than “the author, the director,
the producer, the screenwriter, and other minor deities of choice” who,
suggests Sesti, know every possibility in the world of the film “without
ever being visible” (211). The risk of transcending thematic
analysis in this case, however, also reduces the role of the viewer
who might view the film as she might read the Book of Esther, by
bringing her own narrative of divine grace and justice into the
viewing experience and, thereby, discern a presence that is Other
than human.
[12] The final essay in the book is the superb reflection “Devotional
Cinema” by Nathaniel Dorsky. For those interested in the religious
or spiritual affectiveness of film, this essay is required reading
(Dorsky’s short book by the same title is available from Tuumba
Press, 2003). Dorsky’s chapter takes a completely different
approach from that of most essays in the book. For Dorsky the heart
of the relationship between religion and film is “not where
religion is the subject of a film, but where film is the spirit
or experience of religion” (261). Dorsky focuses the relationship
between religion and film through an aesthetic rather than a thematic
lens. It is the aesthetic experience that is his focus on how film
offers us “moments of revelation . . . from the way a filmmaker
used film itself” (261). He speaks of film as a metaphor of
our being, “a concordance between film and our human metabolism.” In
this sense, therefore, his approach is kinaesthetic. Film itself
becomes “a form of devotion” (261).
[13] By “devotion” Dorsky means that “it is the
opening or the interruption that allows us to experience what is
hidden, and to accept with our hearts our given situation. When
film does this, when it subverts our absorption in the temporal
and reveals the depths of our own reality, it opens us to a fuller
sense of ourselves and our world. It is alive as a devotional form” (261).
In that sense, Dorsky is not limited by a thematic approach to the
conversation. About Rossellini’s Voyage to Italy (1953),
he writes, “It is not a film about a subject, rather it is the
subject” (263). Attending to film that way swings the interpretive
pendulum away from a thematic, content-driven “reading” of
film to an encounter with film as a work of art.
[14] Reflecting on what he calls the “postfilm experience,” Dorsky
suggests that a film does things that run beyond its screening.
It lingers, as though “[t]here was something in the actual
nature of the cinema, its view, that could produce health or illness
in an audience” (264). This powerful effect “is film’s
ability to mirror and realign our metabolism” (265). For Dorsky,
this is not metaphor. Drawing on the analogy of music, Dorsky suggests
that the range of textures in Bach’s music “are a primordial
mirror or example of what it is to be fully human. We hear ourselves
at our alchemical best” (265). Similarly, film may also “partake
in this luminosity and elemental glory” (265), but to do so “it
must obey its own materiality.” When a film does that well,
it becomes “a way of approaching and manifesting the ineffable,” which
is “an essential aspect of devotion” (267). Of course
filmmakers can scuttle devotion by treating film either as photography,
or as a mirror of the filmmaker’s own vanity. But when film
truly creates a “visual space” governed by a “hierarchy
of vision, language, and concept,” viewers may participate
in a world that “can sublimely inform our daily experience” (267).
For that to happen, however, film must be allowed to be film, not
a representation of “spoken-language ideas” (268). Film
that illustrates “a scripted, written reality or concept,” thereby
distorting “the vision-language hierarchy violates the primordial
strength of what cinema has to offer” (268). Dorsky’s
essay says much more than that. But for the purposes of this review
it is important to note Dorsky’s holistic understanding of
film, which transcends the instrumentalism (thematic focus) of many
of the essays in this book.
[15] It is as though Dorsky’s chapter highlights the limitations
of the entire project. He points out, perhaps coincidentally, what
Flannery O’Connor wrote about “The Catholic fiction
writer” who, “as fiction writer, will look for the will
of God first in the laws and limitations of his art and will hope
that if he obeys these, other blessings will be added to his work” (Mystery
and Manners, ed. Sally and Robert Fitzgerald [Farrar, Straus & Giroux,
1962], 152). The problem with many of the essays in the Bandy and
Monda volume are also, analogously, related to O’Connor’s
critique of the “average Catholic reader” who, “[b]y
separating nature and grace as much as possible, . . . has reduced
his conception of the supernatural to pious cliché and has
become able to recognize nature in literature in only two forms,
the sentimental and the obscene” (Mystery and Manners,
147). The artist, O’Connor continues, must attend to “the
laws and limitations” of the art form, thereby presenting “mystery
through manners, grace through nature, but when he finishes there
always has to be left over that sense of Mystery which cannot be
accounted for by any human formula” (153). Awareness of those
dangers for both artist and reader, which O’Connor articulates
here, would have provided the writers of the essays under review
with more resources for their own critical reflection on the intersection
of faith and film.
[16] If only Dorsky’s essay had guided the project rather
than ended it. If his criteria for the relationship between film
and devotion had guided the writers beyond the vague “hidden
God” thesis, this would have been an extraordinary book. Film
is not “a medium for information” (276), not even information
about a hidden God. Nonetheless, the essays are beautifully
presented, including sixty black and white illustrations, a filmography,
and notes on each of the contributors.
Gordon Matties
Canadian Mennonite University
Winnipeg, Canada
