Coates, Paul. Aldershot, Hants.: Ashgate Publishing Limited, 2003. 217 pp. $84.95 (USD). ISBN: 0-7546-1585-5 (cloth).

[1] Paul Coates's Cinema, Religion, and the Romantic Legacy is a challenging but rewarding work, serving at once as a compendium of reviews of some of the most profound works of artistic cinema in the twentieth century and as an argument for film as a modern vehicle for the characteristically Romantic impulse to resist an overly rationalistic worldview. Although Coates's book would not likely appeal to a general audience interested in religion and film, it will find itself an important niche in the academic analysis of Christian theological themes in auteur cinema.

[2] Focusing on what he terms "important but little known films" by auteurs such as Krzysztof KiÍslowski, Lars Von Trier, and Jean-Luc Godard, Coates argues that precisely because these filmmakers are not priests they have something important to say about modern religious and spiritual experience.  Coates focuses primarily on problems of representation as a legacy of Protestant iconoclasm, especially as reflected in Polish and French film.  As such, his approach is angled through a distinctively Christian lens, at times veering into typological readings that colour his analysis in distinctive ways.  Coates sees the incarnation as an apt metaphor for film, which similarly seeks to make invisible ideas manifest (albeit on the screen), inviting awe through submission so that viewing a film may, in a sense, be considered a (markedly Christian) religious experience.  Evoking the notion of Romantic resistance to institutionalized religion and applying it to a modern context, Coates suggests that just as Romantic poets were admired for their unflinching resistance to the alienation of spirit and imagination in a newly mechanized world, so certain modern filmmakers resist the desert of postmodernism and multiculturalism that threaten to drain the incarnation of significance, even if this resistance is characterized by a dystopic critique of the commercial nature of modern society.  The Romantic poets were acutely aware of the inability of language fully to express their ideas, a limitation that Coates calls a "poverty of representation" that calls attention to itself as it gestures toward the "incapacity of human language adequately to render divine reality" (46). This caveat applies to film as well, so that the visual language of images becomes a sort of "sacrament" that points beyond itself even as it becomes the things to which it points.  Drawing on Rudolf Otto's idea of the mysterium tremendum, Coates points out that rationalistic attempts to distill the language of film into a fixed set of analogs have largely failed, so that film, like the work of the Romantic poets, must be viewed as a complex array of intersecting energies, ultimately defiant of purely rational analysis. In other words, in the twentieth and twenty-first century, we are still very much at the mercy of Enlightenment perspectives and heartily in need of new spiritual insights, some of which cinema may be able to provide.

[3] As part of his intertextual analysis of Christian imagery in film, Coates examines representations of Jesus, Mary and Satan. Citing a modern "longing for a Redeemer" as the main impetus for the presence of Christ figures in modern film, Coates rightly designates these figures as indicative of the failure of traditional redemptive models for many modern viewers.  Modern Christ figures are fallible, mediocre, and uncertain of their mission.  Similarly, depictions of Mary in modern film demythologize her, leaving instead a figure longing for theological certainty that is ultimately frustrated.  Depictions of Satan also problematize traditional theology, since in modern film, Satan is viewed less as an independent embodiment of evil and more as a ubiquitous temptation to despair in a world void of meaning.  Just as images of Jesus, Mary and Satan are evoked in order to challenge their institutionalized meaning, so images of ghosts and phantoms in modern film can be viewed as popular expressions of spirituality in an increasingly secular world, and as challenges to traditional ecclesiastical authority.

[4] Coates justifies his affection for Polish film by arguing that, as a victim of state repression under the control of the Soviet Union, Poland was characterized by an intense "Job-like anguish" that brought into sharper focus the "distinction between (inauthentic) religion and (authentic) spirituality" (166), making Poland the most apt arena for his examination of Romantic themes in modern times. Coates's focus on Polish cinema does not seem to be justified for this reason alone, since the threat of secularism in the modern world is hardly limited to communism. The presence in Coates's analysis of a significant number of Polish films dealing with the aftermath of the Holocaust is a more convincing reason, but many of these films are more concerned with Jewish theology than Coates credits, resulting in a curious effect when they are subjected to his typological readings. In his analysis of Ingmar Bergman's Wild Strawberries, Coates reads the character Isak's dream of a burnt ladder as a type of the crucifixion, as if Christian imagery were the only vehicle for representing redemption. In the same analysis, he identifies forgiveness as "that Christian keyword," implicitly denying the Jewish tradition any place for it. This christocentric slant at times makes for odd omissions, as in the analysis of Godard's Hélas pour moi (Woe is Me). The film begins with a voiceover consisting of a well-known Jewish story told by the Baal Shem Tov about a ritual of fire and prayer that, through generations, gradually evolves so that the ritual itself is lost, replaced only by the story of the event, which is enough. Coates leaves the Jewish origin of the story unacknowledged, which, curiously enough, plays into the point of the Baal Shem Tov's story itself. The story, indeed, is enough. And, despite the limitations that a Christian theological lens places on films that may or may not all adopt that worldview, on the whole, Coates's work is more than enough, offering some intriguing insights about the nature of film as a vehicle for spiritual and imaginative expression in a world that sometimes seems to have no place for such things.

Rachel Wagner
Department of Religion
Southwestern University
Georgetown, Texas
wagnerr@southwestern.edu