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