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 KiÌslowski, 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
