Cinema divinite religion, theology and the Bible in film 1. Kısım

Cinema Divinite

Religion, Theology and the Bible in Film

Edited by
Eric S. Christianson,
Peter Francis
and
William R. Telford

scm press

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced,
stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted,
in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical,
photocopying or otherwise, without the prior permission of
the publisher, SCM Press.

© Eric S. Christianson, Peter Francis and William R. Telford 2005

British Library Cataloguing in Publication data

A catalogue record for this book is available
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t

Contents

Preface        xi

Notes on the Contributors        xv

Cinema Divinite:

A Theological Introduction        i

GERARD LOUGHLIN

Part i Key Concepts

1. Through a Lens Darkly:

Critical Approaches to Theology and Film        15

WILLIAM R. TELFORD

2. Key Concepts in Film Studies        44

BRIAN BAKER

Part 2 Case Studies - Films and Film-makers

3. Shot, Burned, Restored:

Dreyer’s La Passion de Jeanne d’Arc        63

MELANIE J. WRIGHT

4. Reading Stanley Kubrick:

A Theological Odyssey        78

JEFFREY F. KEUSS

5. Sacrilege, Satire or Statement of Faith?

Ways of Reading Luis Bunuel’s VIndiana        94

TOM AITKEN

6. An Ethic You Can’t Refuse?

Assessing The Godfather Trilogy        no

ERIC S. CHRISTIANSON

Was Judas The Third Man?

The Lost Childhood in the Cinema of Graham Greene 124 TOM AITKEN

Artificial Bodies:

Blade Runner and the Death of Man        137

GEORGE AICHELE

Part 3 Case Studies - Genres

Why Film Noir is Good for the Mind        151

ERIC S. CHRISTIANSON

Speaking of God and Donald Duck:

Realism, Non-Realism and Animation        167

ROBERT POPE

Clint Eastwood Westerns:

Promised Land and Real Men        182

PETER FRANCIS

A Fistful of Shekels:

Ehud the Judge (Judges 3.12-30) and the Spaghetti

Western        199

ERIC s. CHRISTIANSON

The Two Faces of Betrayal:

The Characterization of Peter and Judas in the

Biblical Epic or Christ Film        214

WILLIAM R. TELFORD

Part 4 Religion in Film

Re-membering the American Radical Reformation in

The Apostle and O Brother Where Art Thou?        239

JEFFREY F. KEUSS

Perversion and Fulfilment:

Revivalist Christianity in The Night of The Hunter        253

TOM AITKEN

16. ‘His blood be upon us, and our children’:

The Treatment of Jews and Judaism in the Christ Film 266 WILLIAM R. TELFORD

17. Ritual Recast and Revisioned:

Hollywood Remembers the First Passover and the

Last Supper        289

WILLIAM R. TELFORD

Epilogue Table Talk:

Reflections on Mel Gibson’s The Passion of the Christ 311

Bibliography        331

Appendix 1 Religion, Theology and the Bible in Recent

Films (1993-2004)        347

Appendix 2 Christ-Figures in Film        353

Index of Names: Actors, Authors and Directors        357

Index of Subjects        3^5

Index of Films: Title, Director and Year        370

For Andrena, Helen and Sonya

Preface

The Context

The chapters of this book were originally lectures delivered at the annual colloquium on film and theology (1998-2.004) held at St Deiniol’s Library in Hawarden near the cathedral city of Chester. St Deiniol’s Library is a unique theological resource. It was founded by William Ewart Gladstone ‘for the pursuit of divine learning’ and is Britain’s only Prime Ministerial Library. Its renowned collection of 250,000 books is housed in a Grade 1 listed building.

Gladstone was a devout Anglican throughout his life and he set up his library to help keep theology in dialogue with other intellectual currents. He feared that the growing tide of secularism would push his beloved Anglicanism into a sect, cut off from the woof and warp of contemporary intellectual debate. Dialogue between academic disciplines had always been important to Gladstone. From boyhood he had prized Dante, Aristotle, Homer, Augustine and Butler over and above the four Gospels. These authors (his favourites) together with great works of literature, the movements of history and the beauty of mathematics were for him repositories of truth just as surely as Scripture.

The negative movement of the age aims at establishing a severance between the Christian system and the general thought of the time; . . . but no enlightened Christian will ever admit that our Christianity was intended to be an isolated thing standing apart from all other conditions of our life ... we assert the right for the Gospel to associate with every just influence over the whole sphere of our nature and its functions.^[1] [2]

It is, therefore, completely in keeping with Gladstone’s vision for St Deiniol’s that religion and theology should be in dialogue with film especially as film has become such a popular and potent force in contemporary Western culture.

go to the cinema at least once a month (up from 5% in 1984), while 46% of Generation ‘X’ go to the cinema at least once a month (only 10% in 1984). The proportion of children going to the cinema once a month has risen from 10% in 1984 to 37% in 1999 and the percentage of older people has also increased from 1% to 12%.2 If you add to this the 90 million DVDs purchased in 2002 (only 4.1 million in 1999) and the 79 million videos purchased, not to mention the 57 million DVD rentals and 119 million video rentals in 2002 - it is possible to see the renewed pervasive power of film in the UK.^[3]

Popular film provides Generation ‘X’,^[4] and even baby boomers, with shared common texts and myths. These are the things we talk about over drinks and meals. The value of film to theology is that it helps the process of inculturation and of contextualization of a now largely pagan Western world.

Film enables theology, as Clive Marsh has pointed out, ‘to work out what it is going to be possible to say in our contemporary climate about any of theology’s major themes’.^[5] It also gives a strong indication of how it can be said, and of the values and assumptions that it must engage with. Film provides a language and images that can enable theology to be expressed in a way that is readily understandable in today’s cultural climate.

2. The St Deiniol’s Colloquia

If that gives the official raison d’etre of the colloquia and this volume, there remains a more accurate, less worthy, genesis to the process. Frankly, the colloquia were instigated because we liked watching films. The idea for the first colloquium was mooted at the book launch for Explorations in Film and Theology during the 1998 Leeds Film Festival. The colloquia, lectures and subsequently this volume are an attempt to build upon the work of that volume.

Since its inception in 1998, interest in the annual colloquium has pleasantly taken the organizers by surprise (each has been ‘sold out’ with long waiting lists). Over 250 people have now attended the colloquia in which film buffs, clergy, laity, academics and students (not all categories are exclusive) have felt a keen desire to reflect on the various relationships emerging between religion, theology, the Bible and film. theology, biblical studies and film studies/film criticism. Because we come from different backgrounds and disciplines, it is inevitable that we offer an array of critical approaches to the study of film such as formalism, expressionism, realism, textual analysis, contextual analysis, postmodern eclecticism, narrative criticism and cultural studies.

The various relationships between religion, theology, Bible and film represent a growing area of study and academic interest. Film is a potent force in Western culture and cannot be dismissed as mere entertainment or as being popular (as opposed to high-brow) culture. Margaret Miles rightly comments that ‘popular film provides an index of the anxieties and longings of a large audience’6 and as such it compels our attention and serious study.

4. Acknowledgements

The editors wish to thank the staff of St Deiniol’s Library for hosting seven excellent colloquia. All the contributors would like to thank the participants in the colloquia for their enthusiasm about film and the insights they offered on these lectures, all of which has helped to shape these pages. We would especially like to thank Patsy Williams, the St Deiniol’s Librarian, for carefully building an excellent collection of literature on the subject. We thank Kate Sury for deciphering and typing the transcript of The Passion of The Christ discussion, Victor Morales for his work on the bibliography and Jo Wilkinson for her work on the indexes. Barbara Laing of SCM Press has been a patient, tolerant and perceptive editor. We only hope that you enjoy the book as much as we have enjoyed writing the lectures, attending the colloquia, and, above all, watching the films.

Eric S. Christianson

Peter Francis William R. Telford

Notes

1. W. E. Gladstone, Gladstone Private Papers, Undated Manuscript, Hawarden: St Deiniol’s Library, 1893.

2. Peter Brierley (ed.), UK Christian Handbook Religious Trends 3, London: Christian Research, 2001, Part 2, p. 21.

3. Eddie Dyja (ed.), BFI Film and Television Handbook 2004, London: British Film Institute, 2003, pp. 52.-7.

4. The age range 19—37 (the so-called Generation ‘X’) makes up 25% of the population (14.6 million out of a population of 59.2 million).

5. Clive Marsh and Gaye Ortiz (eds), Explorations in Theology and Film, Oxford: Blackwell, 1997, p. 32.

6. Margaret Miles, Seeing and Believing, Boston: Beacon Press, 1996, p. x.

The Contributors

George Aichele is Professor in the Department of Philosophy and Religion at Adrian College, Adrian, Michigan. As part of the Bible and Culture Collective, he was a co-writer of The Postmodern Bible. More recently he has written The Control of Biblical Meaning: Canon as Semiotic Mechanism and co-edited (with Richard Walsh) Screening Scripture: Intertextual Connections Between Scripture and Film.

Tom Aitken became a freelance writer in the early 1980s. Since that time he has contributed general articles and book and theatre reviews to numerous publications, including, among others, The Times, The Times Literary Supplement, The Guardian, Lumen Vitae, The Charleston Magazine, The New Zealand Woman’s Weekly and The Morning Star. He must be one of relatively few writers to be (at different times) a regular contributor to The War Cry and The Tablet, of which he was cinema critic from 1994 to 2002. He has served on ecumenical and Catholic juries at film festivals in Berlin, Venice and Portugal.

Brian Baker is Senior Lecturer in Literature and Film in the English department of University College Chester. He currently has three books in the process of completion: with John Cartwright he has recently completed Science and Literature for ABC-Clio’s ‘Science and Society’ series; he is writing a book-length study of the contemporary British novelist Iain Sinclair for the Manchester University Press’s ‘Contemporary British Novelists’ series; and also completing a book-length project on screen masculinities, entitled Masculinities in Fiction and Film: Representing men in popular genres 1945-2000.

Eric S. Christianson is Senior Lecturer in Biblical Studies, University College Chester. Since publishing his A Time to Tell: Narrative Strategies in Ecclesiastes (Sheffield Academic Press) he has continued publishing on Ecclesiastes and is writing a commentary that focuses on the Bible’s Wirkungsgeschichte (cultural ‘impact history’). He teaches, researches and publishes in film and Bible, and reviews films for Third Way magazine. He is currently working on a monograph developing a rigorous comparative approach to Bible and film.

Peter Francis is Warden of St Deiniol’s Library. He was ordained into the Anglican Church in 1978, his ministry has included rural and urban congregations, in addition he has been a chaplain at the University of London and Provost of St Mary’s Cathedral, Glasgow. At St Deiniol’s Library he has edited two collections of essays on Gladstone: The Grand Old Man and The Gladstone Umbrella, as well as a book of essays on rural ministry and theology, Changing Rural Life. He is currently writing a book on film, mission and ministry.

Jeffrey F. Keuss is Visiting Professor of Theology and Ethics at Seattle Pacific University, Fuller Theological Seminary and Northwest Graduate School. An ordained minister in the Presbyterian Church (USA) having served in churches both in the USA and Scotland, he currently teaches in the areas of theology and ethics, Christian spirituality and mysticism, and theology and contemporary culture. He has published articles and reviews on theology and contemporary culture and is a contributing editor to Literature and Theology (Oxford University Press) and Reviews in Religion and Theology (Blackwells). He is the author of A Poetics of Jesus: The Search for Christ through Writing in the Nineteenth Century and The Sacred and the Profane: Contemporary Issues in Hermeneutics (both with Ashgate Publishing).

Gerard Loughlin studied at both the University of Wales, Lampeter, and at Cambridge University, where he wrote his doctorate in philosophical theology. He is Senior Lecturer in Theology and Religion at the University of Durham. Gerard Loughlin is the author of Telling God’s Story: Bible, Church and Narrative Theology and Alien Sex: The Body and Desire in Cinema and Theology, and editor of Queer Theology: Rethinking the Western Body.

Robert Pope is Senior Lecturer in Contemporary and Applied Theology in the University of Wales, Bangor. He is the author of Building Jerusalem: Nonconformity, Labour and the Social Question in Wales, 1906-1939 and Seeking God’s Kingdom: the Nonconformist Social Gospel in Wales, 1906-1939.

William R. Telford studied at the Universities of Edinburgh, Glasgow and Cambridge, as well as at Union Theological Seminary, New York. After a period of research and teaching at the University of Oxford, and a number of years as Senior Lecturer in Religious Studies (Christian Origins and the New Testament) at the University of Newcastle, he is currently Senior Lecturer in the Department of Theology and Religion at the University of Durham. His research interests include the historical Jesus, the canonical Gospels and especially the Gospel of Mark, methods of interpretation, and the Bible in literature and film, and he has published on these subjects in a number of books, journals and edited works. His books on the New Testament and the Gospel of Mark'include The Barren Temple and the Withered Tree, (ed.) The Interpretation of Mark, The Theology of the Gospel of Mark, The New Testament: A Short Introduction and (with others) The Synoptic Gospels.

Melanie J. Wright is Academic Director at the Centre for the Study of Jewish-Christian Relations and a Member of the Faculty of Divinity, University of Cambridge. She is the author of Moses in America: The Cultural Uses of Biblical Narrative and Understanding Judaism, and is currently writing a book on religion and film.

Cinema Divinite:

A Theological Introduction

GERARD LOUGHLIN

At the end of Explorations in Theology and Film (1997) - an earlier collection of essays on cinema and religion edited by Clive Marsh and Gaye Ortiz - David Jasper offered a chastening reflection on the possibilities of film for theology. While Jasper allowed that ‘popular cinema’ was not ‘all bad’, he doubted that it could provide the means for a challenging and liberatory theology, deconstructive of the West’s self-righteousness and healing of its spiritual malaise.^[6] Hollywood is in the business of entertainment rather than edification. It favours cultural conformity rather than critical analysis. Hollywood wants us to go on consuming its products, and to believe in the benignity of the economic system that allows us to do so. All will be well, and all manner of material consumption will be well, in the best of all possible worlds, in the land of the free and its dominions.

While Jasper did not doubt that biblical stories and theological themes can be found in modern cinema, and not least in its many ‘Christ-figures’,^[7] he questioned whether these allusions and resonances amounted to much more than narrative traits, borrowings that both repeated and occluded their prototypes, neutralizing the story of Christ through its secular repetitions. Jasper did admit that some film directors are theologically literate, and come close to producing genuine and ‘stimulating theological reflection’ in their films. But they are exceptions, and Jasper named only Martin Scorsese.^[8]

Jasper’s analysis is accurate regarding much that Hollywood produces. Most films, but especially the most popular and successful, demand little more of their audiences than that they sit back and gawp at the spectacle, while consuming the fruits of the concession stand. Audiences feast on highly calorific but nutrionally null food. They are satiated with a void, and so hunger again once the credits have finished rolling - but who waits for the credits? Yet Jasper’s brief discussion of Martin Scorsese reminds us that Hollywood is not ‘all bad’, that it can produce fare that demands more of its viewers than is at first apparent. Jasper is too quick and too generalizing when he tells us that cinema, unlike theatre, is a ‘solitary and finally undemanding medium’, ‘effective in as much as, demanding nothing of the viewer, it seems to offer the viewer the power to understand without the need seriously to think or change’.i. * * ^[9] It may be that before we ask more of film-makers and the systems within which they work, we should ask more of ourselves as viewers, demand more of the films we watch. For when we ask more, we may find that the films have more to give, that their writers and directors have given us more than we first think.

Jasper’s complaint about cinema is not new. Andrei Tarkovsky - for one - distinguished between those who, like himself, strove to turn film into art, and those who produced mere entertainment. ‘As soon as one begins to cater expressly for the auditorium, then we’re talking of the entertainment industry, show business, the masses, or what have you, but certainly not of art which necessarily obeys its own immanent laws of development whether we like it or not.’^[10] One might think that there is nothing much wrong with producing mere entertainment, unless one also thinks that entertainment can be ideology, the projection of a partial view as universal, and one that dulls the wits and turns viewers away from what they should be seeing: the spiritual emptiness of modern life and its possible redemption.

These, then, are the stakes for the encounter of theology with film. Can cinema be more than entertainment, more than ideology? Can it show us what we would rather not view but need to see, if we are to find grace in our lives; if we are to be saved? Theology is an old discipline, even if newly thought each day. It is answerable to both past and present communities, to deeds done - both lauded and repented - and still to do, and it treads a difficult path, having to continually renounce the pictures of God by which it tries to hide from the divine gaze. Film, on the other hand, is new; barely a hundred years old at the start of the twenty-first century, and changing rapidly, developing new technologies and languages, new modes of illumination. It too must answer to a community: of bankers and financiers; and only secondly to wider social concerns and traditions of artistic achievement and, on occasion, religious yearning. Theology on film - as a mode of academic discourse - is newer yet, but the interrelation of film and religion is as old as cinema can be, since religion took an interest in what cinema could show from the first, and from the first cinema was interested in showing religion.6 Both are concerned with the showings of the other.

subject before its subject had first spoken. (Which is not to deny a proper hesitancy, a willingness to wait upon the other’s speaking.) The ‘preferred critical approach’ to theology and film, as Terry Lindvall notes, is ‘tidily labelled the dialogic’.7 There is nothing very wrong with thinking that theology’s interest in cinema should be framed as a kind of dialogue or conversation, akin to that long practised within theology - when honest - and between different religionists. Conversation is an oft-repeated figure for interdisciplinary discourse, and the dialogic is a venerable theological form, as most famously evidenced in Thomas Aquinas’s Summa Theologice, with its questions, objections and responses. But except when discourses on theology and film are reports of actual conversations between film-makers and theologians, such dialogues are nearly always acts of ventriloquism, since film itself is a cultural product about which we may talk, but which is not itself a conversing partner.

It would be unusual for an art critic to seek conversation with an art work, a sculpture or painting, as it would be for the literary critic to enter into dialogue with a novel or poem, since the responses of the latter must be but further acts of the critical imagination, of the reader’s discernment and discretion, or engagement with the readings of other critics. When theology or religious studies turn to consider film they must do so as responsible critics, who bring their own interests and critical tools to bear on the films they seek to illuminate with their own particular lights. Of course we may want to see this as the having of some kind of interchange, a mutual interrogation, since in asking we often receive an answer in the very form of our questioning, in being made to think what the other would say if it could but speak. But academic theology does not enter into some kind of interdisciplinary discourse with film, since film is not itself an academic discipline, but entertainment and possibly art, and possibly a venture upon the religious. Film is not conversational, but epiphanic.

The danger with thinking the relationship between theology and film properly dialogical is that we may be led to forget that theology, in all its conversations, is ultimately seeking to understand that which - in some sense - it is already given to know. It seeks to bring to light, for itself and its conversation partners, that by which it has already been encountered, and thereby given something to think and to say - to proclaim - as its own proper speaking. Theology can never really reduce or denigrate its conversation partners, since it must seek to understand them in the same light as it understands itself. But by the same token it cannot treat them disinterestedly or neutrally, but must seek in them - with them - for that truth which has already called theology forth. This is why theology can really only be undertaken in faith, in the communities and cultures of those who understand themselves to stand in relation to a transcendent source, and recognize and seek to understand such a relationship. Theology undertaken otherwise - outside such a relationship - has no real object of learning, and is a kind of vacuity. At best it is knowledge of discourses about God, and so not theology but history of ideas.8

Since theology is ‘faith seeking understanding’, it is always first and foremost a relationship of knowledge, since one cannot understand that to which one is unrelated. In some sense one must already know what one would seek to understand; and since that which theology knows and seeks to understand is the mystery of the world - its infinite ‘cause’ - there is a sense in which theology must seek to understand everything so as to better understand the source of all things.9 And this limitless pursuit includes the practice of cinema, the making and watching of films. The same can hardly be said of other academic disciplines - such as film and religious studies - except in so far as they recognize their participation in the theological quest.

Unlike theology, religious studies has no proper object of study nor methods of studying. It is now widely recognized that ‘religion’ - understood as a determinate thing, as a unified tradition of beliefs and practices - is very much a conception of Western modernity, used first as a synonym for Protestant Christianity, and then, when pluralized, for such alien forms as Catholicism.10 It was this already polemical category that was then employed to constitute the forms of cultural piety discovered by Christian missionaries in the non-European world. Thus it was that the West gave birth to such ‘world-views’ as Hinduism and Buddhism, which are now so natural as to be used by those whom they characterize and so in part constitute. But while vexed, the problem of ‘religion’ as a disciplinary construct is no more acute than in other disciplines, which also construct their objects of study through their study of them. There is no need to abandon the category of ‘religion’ so long as we recognize its contingency as a term of art.11

Likewise, it is no great problem that religious studies works with borrowed tools, from sociology and anthropology, philosophy and theology. For this - and the elusiveness of its object - has led to the emergence of an eclectic, postmodern religious studies. This embraces both anthropological approaches to religion and a relatively new formation that is more philosophical, influenced by ‘continental philosophy’ rather than Anglo- American analytic philosophy of religion. It is a peculiarly academic mode of ‘religious thought’, which is neither theological nor anthropological, but liminal. ‘Religion and religious studies have . . . become interstitial terms that refer to forms of thought that occur between theological thought and thought “about religion.’”12 Borrowing from Alasdair MacIntyre, Gavin Hyman names this new religious studies ‘a community of contested discourses’,13 and it is within this community that religious and film studies can meet, along with theology, in mutually enriching conversations about what and how they seek to know. But only theology as such will avow its quest to know the unknowable; to guard the grammar of the world’s unassailable mystery.14

We will read a theology of film because it has something interesting to say about film, about the making and watching of films and of particular films watched. And in this process we will discover a return from film to theology, a questioning of theology through its cinematic encounters. But this will not be different in kind from the return that other arts make to theology, when theology is open to seeing itself as it looks from elsewhere, from different theological locations, from different construals of the world.

What I have elsewhere called ‘cinematic theology’ is that kind of looking that seeks to enter into the world of a film before speaking about it, and then using film - the language of cinema - to speak theologically.15 Such looking is of course an exercise of the theological imagination, but one that seeks knowledge through habitation, through dwelling in another place, from where theological critique must become a kind of selfcritique. But except on those occasions when such theology is the fruit of conversations between different interests - the record of real dialogues - all such discourses are forms of ventriloquism, albeit the ventriloquy of an empathetic vocalist, who has sought to learn the language of another.

2. Passionate Conversations

At the beginning of the third Christian millennium, the succes de scandale that was Mel Gibson’s The Passion of the Christ (USA 2004) proved a timely reminder that the relationship between theology and film is both intimate and powerful. While many questioned the religious and aesthetic aspects of the film - the means and morality of its storytelling - none could question its box-office returns. By the end of 2004 it was reported to have earned upwards of $370 million at the US box office alone. While benefiting from extensive and astute publicity, it was amazing that an independent film - made by Gibson’s own company, ICON Productions, and reportedly with $25 million of his own money - and one that was also in effect a ‘foreign language’ film (Latin and Aramaic), was so successful. Liberal critics were aghast.

It is for these reasons that The Passion of the Christ receives an extended discussion at the end of this book. The story of the film’s making and reception demonstrates the necessity of religious studies and theology for fully understanding film, for understanding the practice and possibility of cinema. For as the round-table discussion between the contributors to this book circles around questions of authenticity (to the biblical text and the historical past), antisemitism (the film’s intervention in the still fraught relationships between Jews and Gentiles16) and theology (the film’s near-pornographic portrayal of Christ’s death as a sadomasochistic transaction between Father and Son), it becomes clear that understanding the film and its reception requires multiple considerations of its making and seeing. The film’s contexts and intertexts require lively conversation between film studies, religious studies and theology, and the disciplines on which all of these must draw in order to sustain their engagements (art history, sociology, psychology). To understand a film we have to understand the cultures of its showing and seeing.

Handsomely staged and beautifully lit by cinematographer Caleb Deschanel, Gibson’s movie is something of a curiosity: a two-hour film of a man being tortured to death. As Mark Kermode noted, The Passion of the Christ is a horror film, a ‘gore fest’.17 It opens with clouds shrouding a full moon, and closes with a newly resurrected Christ, who - with his thigh visible through the CGI hole in his right hand - looks like nothing so much as the newly arrived Schwarzenegger at the beginning of the Terminator films, I and II.18 Back from hell, Christ exits screen right, marching off - one might think - toward The Passion of the Christ II: The Return. As if alluding to Martin Scorsese’s The Last Temptation of Christ (USA 1988), Gibson’s Jesus (Jim Caviezel) undergoes a last temptation by Satan in the garden of Gethsemane. Rosalinda Celentano’s Satan bears a striking resemblance to a fleeting image of the demon in William Friedkins’s The Exorcist (USA 1973).19 Thus Gibson’s film translates not only the story of the canonical Gospels but of previous cinematic encounters with Christian demonology. At the same time, early Hollywood biblical epics - such as those of Cecil B. DeMille - are recalled in the use of costume and make-up, most especially in the scene of King Herod’s heavily mascaraed court, which also recalls its twentieth-century rendition in Norman Jewison’s Jesus Christ Superstar (USA 1973).20 All of these filmic phantoms and more, not to mention images from the Western tradition of Christian piety, are skilfully melded together within the film’s design by Francesco Frigeri.

The Passion of the Christ is a translation of the Gospels - not least in translating their original Greek into the film’s Latin and Aramaic21 - but it is more nearly a film of the ‘gothic novel’, The Dolorous Passion of Our Lord Jesus Christ (1833). This is attributed to the German stigmatic and ‘visionary’, Anne Catherine Emmerich (1777-1824), but is more properly the work - forgery - of her devoted amanuensis, the Romantic novelist and poet Clemens Brentano (1778-1842). The first of a projected three- volume work on the life of Christ, The Dolorous Passion was the only one to be published in Brentano’s lifetime, and not the first work in which he had improved on his source material. Between 1806 and 1809, Brentano and Ludwig Achim von Arnim published three volumes of collected German folk songs, Des Knaben Wunderhorn, with many of the songs actually written by their ‘collectors’. It is from the Emmerich/Brentano Dolorous Passion that Gibson and his co-screenwriter, Benedict Fitzgerald, took most of the non-canonical incidents in their telling of Christ’s arrest, trial and execution: the near constant beating of Christ from the moment of his arrest, the near constant presence of his mother and the equally constant presence of a snarling Caiaphas and other priests.22 This last aspect reflects the antisemitic culture of nineteenth-century Europe, and Brentano’s avowed aversion to Jews. In 1811, Brentano and several of his friends founded the Christian-German Table Society (Christlich- deutsche Tischgesellschaft), which explicitly excluded Jews, women and ‘Philistines’.

‘Christianity really is a blood cult and a death cult; as much as they say otherwise and talk about the God of love, it really does focus on the Passion and the bleeding, and those are the images that hit a child.’23 This is Paul Schrader, the writer of Scorsese’s The Last Temptation of Christ, and while one might wish to demur from his estimate of Christianity, it certainly finds support in Gibson’s Passion, which is drenched in Christ’s blood. But, as others have noted, the modern focus on the suffering and death of Christ derives from the late medieval period, and is not that of the early or patristic church. Thus The Passion of the Christ may be understood as a motion picture of Matthias Griinewald’s ‘Crucifixion’ for the Isenheim altarpiece (1515), but filtered through the mawkish sentimentality and antisemitism of a certain German Romanticism. To understand this film we need a theology well versed in the history of modern pieties, and to which it can bring a sure sense of what makes for spiritual sustenance, for what makes for good news in the telling of Christ’s story. Needless to say, this will be a theology of passionate conversations.

3. Video Divina

Cinema verite named both a style and an aspiration, both the desire to picture reality and a means of doing so. The development in the 1950s of relatively small, mobile cameras with synchronized sound recording, enabled documentarists like Jean Rouch and Edgar Morin to develop a more impromptu style of film-making than had previously been possible. Adopting an ethnographic approach to their subjects, these directors foregrounded the effect that their film-making had on the persons and events filmed. Their cameras saw with a subjective eye, an avowed presence, and it was the combination of immediacy with knowingness - a self-conscious ‘detachment’ - that caught the imagination of those film-makers who would become the Nouvelle Vague: Claude Chabrol, Jean-Luc Godard, Jacques Rivette, Eric Rohmer, Frangois Truffaut. The new technology and sensibility allowed them to flee the constraints of the studio, filming by available light, on the streets and in the apartments of Paris, creating a new realism and truthfulness, a cinema suited to the emerging freedoms of the 1960s. However, the return of such techniques - in the films of Dogme 9524 and, more pertinently, in the work of such an established director as Steven Soderberg - indicates how the style of truth has become a signifier for the artifice of cinema verite itself. In one scene in Soderberg’s Ocean's 12 (USA 2004), the use of a handheld camera and apparently natural or found light signifies a kind of truth, but it is the truth of the film’s manufacture, since, as it were, we are seeing the video that one of the characters is filming in the scene, to be spotted in the background of one of the shots. The film becomes a replica of itself: a recurring conceit throughout the movie, which is about - plays with - all manner of doubles and fakes, and above all the fakery of cinema itself, of Hollywood, and, of course, documentary.

Naming a collection of essays Cinema Divinite obviously plays on the idea of cinema verite and the possibility of making truthful films in which reality appears, films in which the ‘religious’ will be honestly displayed and ventured. The naming of the book signals its authors’ concern with both the means by which cinema presents the pursuit of divinity - in the stories and practices of ‘religious’ people - and the possibility of divinity’s appearing in the darkness of the cinema itself, in the flickering of celluloid shadows. The wager of Cinema Divinite is that film can be theology.

Carl Dreyer, Robert Bresson and Andrei Tarkovsky - to name but three of the most illustrious director-theologians - have produced profound and subtle pieces of cinematic theology, exploring in their stories what it might mean to live by the two commandments which rule salvation (Matthew 22.39-40).25 These are directors for whom the challenge of the twentieth century was to show how the mess that is modern life might still disclose grounds for hope and so once more become meaningful. In the work of these directors - in, say, Dreyer’s Ordet (Denmark 1954), Bresson’s Pickpocket (France 1959) and Tarkovsky’s Andrei Rublev (USSR 1966) - cinema inherits the aspirations and achievements, the narrative traditions, of Western art. At a time when the arts had generally become more concerned with questions of aesthetic form than with human transfiguration, cinema remained true to the West’s dual inheritance of biblical and classical narratives, to storytelling as the means by which the tribulations of human life can be borne and its tendernesses rendered significant. In the films of Bresson, Dreyer and Tarkovsky, the world is shown to give unto more than just itself.

Away from Europe, in the North American films of Paul Schrader and Martin Scorsese, but also in those of directors like David Fincher and Quentin Tarantino, we find a willingness to use and cite biblical texts, employ theological motifs, and even venture upon moments of transcendent hope. At the end of American Gigolo (USA 1980), Schrader has his imprisoned protagonist, the narcissistic gigolo of the title, Julian (Richard Gere), reprise the end of Bresson’s Pickpocket, as he finally accepts the relationship, the love, into which he has fallen with Michelle (Lauren Hutton), who sacrifices her reputation in his defence. ‘It’s the acceptance of unconditional goodness, which is the same as spiritual grace.’26 Grace is similarly found and accepted at the end of Scorsese’s Bringing Out the Dead (USA 1999). But we can also find stories of grace in any number of other, less mannered, films: in, say, Isabel Coixet’s My Life Without Me (Canada/Spain 2002) or Nicholas Philibert’s touching documentary about a small country school, Etre et avoir (France 2002). Elsewhere we can find more equivocal examples of cinematic theology, in the work of directors who disavow religious intent but remain haunted by theological themes. For these directors the disparities of life still call for spiritual consolations, even if those proffered by religion are found wanting. Ingmar Bergman and Luis Bunuel might be named in this connection. Bunuel was an atheist, but a devout one, who cleaved to the God he denied.27

Any number of film writers and directors, and their films, can be shown to use, negotiate and display religious and spiritual concerns, to produce, if not cinematic theology itself, then a cinema that engages the theological. Several of these directors and their films are engaged in this book: Joel and Ethan Coen, Francis Ford Coppola, Robert Duvall, Clint Eastwood, Stanley Kubrick, Charles Laughton, Carol Reed, Ridley Scott; Spaghetti Westerns, animation films and film noir.™ These directors and film genres are already the concern of film studies, on which cinematic theology must always be dependent (and more than it has been). But a truly cinematic theology - as performed by theologians rather than film-makers (who of course can be theologians) - must go beyond technical and aesthetic concerns, beyond historical, philosophical and sociological enquiries, and engage with film as theology engages with any other text that may display the source for which all theology seeks. Cinematic theology must engage with film as theology engages with Scripture. It must practise its own form of lectio divina, which, while it seeks to understand Scripture in all the contexts of its formation, transmission and interpretation, seeks also to enter into the text in such a way as to find there - to be found there by - that which is alone worth the finding.29 Ultimately, those who practise lectio divina seek to be read by Scripture, or, better, by that which Scripture discloses to those who read in love-, the love by which they have been read into being. Cinematic theology must risk a similar video divina, in which viewers enter into the world of a film so as to find there the very same truth by which they are encountered, when in love, in Scripture. It is a risk because some films deflect or even defeat the finding of that which would be sought.30 They can endanger their viewers’ moral sense.31 But to practise video divina is to watch films in the belief - common to all theological engagement with the arts - that they may not only disclose a ‘world,’ an interpretation of the world, but that which most fundamentally sustains our world. It is to watch films with love, in love; in the love that makes them to be, to show. This is the venture of cinematic theology, of cinema divinite.

Notes

1. David Jasper, ‘On Systematizing the Unsystematic’, in Clive Marsh and Gaye Ortiz (eds), Explorations in Theology and Film: Movies and Meaning, Oxford: Blackwell, 1997, pp. 235-44 (238).

2. See Lloyd Baugh, Imaging the Divine: Jesus and Christ-Figures in Film, Kansas City: Sheed & Ward, 1997.

3. Jasper, ‘On Systematizing the Unsystematic’, p. 240.

4. Jasper, ‘On Systematizing the Unsystematic’, pp. 242-3. Jasper forgets that in many cultures cinema is more social than solitary. Even when people can watch films alone (on video or DVD) they often choose to watch them with other people in the movie theatre, and talk together about the films afterwards.

5. Andrei Tarkovsky, Sculpting in Time: Reflections on the Cinema, trans. Kitty Hunter-Blair, Austin: University of Texas Press, 1996 [1986], p. 170.

6. See, for example, Terry Lindvall, The Silents of God: Selected Issues and Documents in Silent American Film and Religion, 1908-1925, Lanham, MD: Scarecrow Press, 2001.

7. Terry Lindvall, ‘Religion and Film Part I: History and Cinema’, Communication Research Trends, 23/4 (2004); 1-44 (p. 15).

8. The history of ideas is vastly important for theology, not least for its selfunderstanding. But the history of ideas is ingredient in, not constitutive of, theology.

9. For something on the grammar of ‘first cause’ see Nicholas Lash, Holiness, Speech and Silence: Reflections on the Question of God, Aidershot: Ashgate, 2004, especially ch.4 (pp. 75-95).

10. See Wilfred Cantwell Smith, The Meaning and End of Religion, London: SPCK, 1978, and Peter Harrison, ‘Religion’ and the Religions of the English Enlightenment, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990. ‘“Religions” existed first in the minds of Western thinkers who thought that the lives of other peoples were governed by the kinds of concerns which were really only characteristic of one episode of Western history. The “world religions” were thus generated largely through the projection of Christian disunity onto the world’ (Harrison, p. 174).

11. See Will Sweetman, ‘“Hinduism” and the History of “Religion”: Protestant Presuppositions in the Critique of the Concept of Hinduism’, Method and Theory in the Study of Religion, 15 (2003): 329-53.

12. Gavin Hyman, ‘The Study of Religion and the Return of Theology’, Journal of the American Academy of Religion, 72/1 (2004): 195-219 (p. 213).

13. Alasdair MacIntyre, Three Rival Versions of Moral Enquiry: Encyclopaedia, Genealogy and Tradition, London: Duckworth, 1990; cited in Hyman, ‘Study of Religion’, p. 216.

14. For more on the practice of theology and religious studies in the university, see Gerard Loughlin, ‘The University Without Question: John Henry Newman and Jacques Derrida on Faith in the University’, in Jeff Astley, Peter Francis, John Sullivan and Andrew Walker (eds), The Idea of a Christian University: Essays in Theology and Higher Education, Carlisle: Paternoster Press, 2005.

15. See further Gerard Loughlin, Alien Sex: The Body and Desire in Cinema and Theology, Oxford: Blackwell, 2004.

16. For more on antisemitism in film, see Chapter 16 (‘His blood be upon us, and our children’: The Treatment of Jews and Judaism in the Christ Film), and with particular reference to Mel Gibson’s Passion see the round-table discussion at the end of the book. See also J. Shawn Landres and Michael Berenbaum (eds), After the Passion is Gone: American Religious Consequences, Lanham, MD: AltaMira Press, 2004, Part 3.

17. Mark Kermode, ‘Drenched in the Blood of Christ’, The Observer, 29 February 2004. See further Kermode’s more detailed and highly perceptive review in Sight & Sound, 14/4 (April 2004): 62-3. In the same issue see also Nick James, ‘Hell in Jerusalem’, pp. 15-18.

18. Melanie Wright also sees the Terminator in Gibson’s resurrected Christ. See the round-table discussion at the end of the book.

19. The demon face was that of Linda Blair’s stand-in, Eileen Dietz, in an early make-up test for the possessed Regan. See Mark Kermode, quoting William Friedkin, in The Exorcist, 2nd edition, London: BFI, 1998 [1997], pp. 45-6.

20. This allusion is also noted by Peter Francis. One might also detect a nod to Terry Jones’s Life of Brian (UK 1979), in the scene where the young Jesus builds a ‘tall’ table and demonstrates to his mother how one might sit at it, in ‘tall’ chairs, though he has yet to make these. ‘It will never catch on,’ Mary replies. The scene, however, reminds William Telford of a similar piece of carpentry in Nicholas Ray’s King of Kings (US 1961), and Peter Francis of Jesus’s carpentry shop in Scorsese’s Last Temptation of Christ.

21. The effect of translating the story into virtually unspoken tongues returns to it the power of the written word, through the film’s vernacular subtitles, as in silent film; but not, unfortunately, the power of a distinguished script. As the discussion in the Epilogue makes clear, the use of ancient languages is not for historical but aesthetic reasons; an alienating technique that renders the film ‘foreign’ to all audiences.

22. John Dominic Crossan is probably right when he estimates that 80% of the film is based on The Dolorous Passion, 5 % on the canonical Gospels, and 15 % on Gibson and Fitzgerald’s imaginations. See John Dominic Crossan, ‘Hymn to a Savage God’, in Kathleen E. Corley and Robert L. Webb (eds), Jesus and Mel Gibson’s The Passion of The Christ: The Film, the Gospels and the Claims of History, London: Continuum, 2004, pp. 8-27 (12). See also in the same book, Robert L. Webb, "The Passion and the Influence of Emmerich’s The Dolorous Passion of Our Lord Jesus Christ’, pp. 160-72.

23. Paul Schrader in Kevin Jackson (ed.), Schrader on Schrader and Other Writings, revised edition, London: Faber & Faber, 2004 [1990], p. 5.

24. Examples of Dogme 95 films are Lars Von Trier’s The Idiots (Denmark 1998) and Thomas Vinterberg’s Festen (Denmark 1998). See further Richard Kelly, The Name of this Book is Dogme 95, London: Faber & Faber, 2000.

25. For more on Carl Dreyer see Melanie Wright’s essay below; and on Dreyer and Robert Bresson see Paul Schrader, Transcendental Style in Film: Ozu, Bresson, Dreyer, New York: Da Capo Press, 1988 [1972]. On Tarkovsky see his own inestimable Sculpting in Time; and Vida T. Johnson and Graham Petrie, The Films of Andrei Tarkovsky: A Visual Fugue, Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1994, and Robert Bird, Andrei Rublev, London: BFI, 2004.

26. Schrader in Schrader on Schrader, p. 166.

27. See further Tom Aitken’s essay on Bunuel’s Viridiana (Mexico/Spain 1961) below. When Paul Schrader was a student at Calvin College (Grand Rapids, Michigan) he taunted the authorities by showing ever more challenging films in the College’s film club, reviewing them in the student newspaper, and organizing seminars about the films with the ‘more liberal members of the faculty, particularly the theology faculty’. But it was the showing of Bunuel’s Viridiana that ‘broke the camel’s back’. See Schrader on Schrader, pp. 9-10.

28. See further below the essays by Jeffrey Keuss, Eric Christianson, Peter Francis, Robert Pope and George Aichele.

29. I owe this use of lectio divina to conversations with Robert K. Johnston, who rightly suggested that it provided an appropriate model for what I had been trying to say in talking about entering into the world of the film. For his own approach to theology and film see Reel Spirituality: Theology and Film in Dialogue, Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic, 2000.

30. The Passion of the Christ might be - is - such a film. It would require an extended discussion to suggest how its dramatic choices compound its theological shortcomings, but one point would be to note how the final shot of the resurrected Christ alone inside the tomb eschews the reticence of the Gospels, and thus refuses their insistence that the resurrection is an eminently social event - constitutive of community. Christ will not tarry with Mary Magdalene in the garden because he - and she - must go on ahead to meet with the other disciples (John 20.17-18). The film continually refuses the Gospels’ stress on communion in favour of an individualized spirituality.

31. See further Gerard Loughlin, ‘Looking: The Ethics of Seeing in Church and Cinema’, in Mark Thiessen Nation and Samuel Wells (eds), Faithfulness and Fortitude: In Conversation with the Theological Ethics of Stanley Hauerwas, Edinburgh: T. & T. Clark, 2000, pp. 257-85.

Part i

Key Concepts

i. Through a Lens Darkly:

Critical Approaches to Theology and Film

WILLIAM R. TELFORD

1. Introduction

The Aims of the Chapter

The title of this chapter is ‘Through a Lens Darkly: Critical Approaches to Theology and Film’. Those readers with intertextual expertise, or, simply, with a knowledge of the Bible, will spot that the title is an echo of the words of the apostle Paul in i Corinthians 13.12, ‘Now we see through a glass [or ‘mirror’, RSV] darkly; but then face to face. Now I know in part; but then shall I know [or ‘understand fully’, RSV], even as also I am known [or ‘have been fully understood’, RSV]’ (AV). Snatched out of its context, this verse could well describe the feelings that many of us have in approaching the topic of this essay, namely, cinema spectatorship and the nature and application of film theory, or film criticism, to theology. Most of us have only a partial knowledge of film theory or film criticism, and to that extent ‘see through a lens darkly’. Viewing film in a systematic, critical and insightful way is not an easy exercise, yet film theorists and film critics have engaged in this process for a century now, and offer us the promise of a clearer vision, a purer gaze, of ‘seeing face to face’. The interdiscipline of theology and film requires, indeed, that we (i.e. students and teachers of theology, biblical studies or religious studies) engage responsibly with film studies, and so this, then, is the task before us.1

My aims in this chapter are as follows. In the first part of the chapter, I want to review briefly some of the critical approaches that have been taken to film over the last century, thereafter focusing on two that have a particular relevance for the interdiscipline of theology and film (narrative criticism and cultural studies). In the second part of the chapter, I want to suggest a number of ways that film may be approached critically within our interdisciplinary field of theology and film. In the course of these two discussions, I want, thirdly, to mention some of the key books and articles that have been published recently on the subject. Finally, at the end of the chapter, I shall offer an exercise involving some selected films and film clips that may be watched and commented upon in light of the approaches that have been reviewed.

Approaching Film Critically

Before we proceed to a review of film theory and criticism, let me just say a general word about the notion of ‘approaching film critically’. Many people think of films as entertainment, as a means of escape or recreation, even as ephemeral cultural products on which it is not worth expending any great mental effort or critical reflection. Even so, one observes, films are one of the commonest points of discussion among people today. Everyone likes to give their views on the films that they have seen. Analysis, however superficial, is something we do almost naturally, and to that extent, there ought to be no real conflict between treating films as entertainment and treating them as a subject for reflection.

There is no need to make the case, therefore, for treating films as a subject for reflection, especially to the readership of a book like this. Most of us would share the view, I am sure, that film is not only a source of entertainment or escapism, but also, as one critic has expressed it ‘a representation of universal human values, of the truths of human experience, of insights that will help us to understand better the complexity of human life and human society’.^[11] If we reflect on films naturally, then, it is simply one further step for us to learn to do it better. Sharpening our analytical tools can actually enhance our enjoyment of films. As Timothy Corrigan points out in A Short Guide to Writing about Film (1997):

Every discipline has it own special language or use of words, which allows it to discuss its subject with precision and subtlety .. . With film, too, a critical vocabulary allows you to view a movie more accurately and to formulate your perceptions more easily.^[12]

‘Cleaning the lens’, as it were, can improve the vision. Moreover, reflecting on the lenses through which we personally view films can also be valuable, and this is one of the objectives of this essay.

But what are these lenses? In 2003, in a ‘Theology and Film’ conference discussion group at St Deiniol’s Library, Hawarden, I noted down some of the common ‘lenses’, the ‘wide-angle’ lenses, one might say, that people who reflect on films, and who have been regular participants at these conferences, tend to employ.

• One popular lens is the moral lens, where a response to the film is given in relation to the moral issues it raises, or the contemporary values it reflects.

• A second lens is the theological lens, where the film is engaged with respect to what it has to say about Christian teaching or doctrine.

• A third lens is the textual lens, where the film has interest because of its relation to literature, and especially the Bible.

• A fourth lens is the cultural lens, the film being discussed in relation to

what it communicates about contemporary world-views, ideology or practice.        r

• A related lens is the sociological one, a perspective that views the film in light of its social context or what it says about contemporary society.

• A sixth lens is the psychoanalytic lens that approaches the film with a view to what it discloses about the human psyche.

In common with some of the contributors to this book, I have given a number of presentations over the seven years that the St Deiniol’s conferences have been running (1998-2004). One such presentation reviewed the very rich harvest of films appearing between 1993 and 1999 that engage to a greater or lesser extent with religion, the Bible or theology, or offer scope for religious, biblical or theological reflection.2 * ^[13] Four others treated the biblical epic or the Christ film from the point of view of their representation of women,^[14] of Jewish and Christian ritual, of Jews and Judaism, and of the characters of Peter and Judas.^[15] The most recent, ‘Searching for Jesus: Recognizing or Imagining Christ-Figures in the Movies’ (yet to be published) reviewed the Christ-figures claimed to have been recognized in films (a list of these appears as Appendix 2 in this volume) and explored the question of what constitutes genuine ‘recognition’ and what constitutes mere ‘imagination’ in the alleged detection of such figures.

My own characteristic approach to films, therefore, as a biblical scholar, has been to view them in terms of their form and style, their narrative content (plot, settings, characterization), their relation to the biblical text, and their relation to contemporary culture. My own filmic ‘lenses’, in other words, (to use the jargon) have been those of aesthetics, textual analysis, narrative criticism, intertextuality, social context and ideology, including such contemporary issues as gender and ethnicity.^[16] This essay, however, has given me the opportunity to reflect further on how films can be approached, to extend my knowledge of film theory and film criticism, and to share with the reader something of what I have learned. With these few introductory remarks, let us begin our review.

Film Theory, Film Criticism and Approaches to Film

Up until now I have used expressions such as ‘film theory’, ‘film criticism,’ and "approaches to film’. How are these different? According to Ephraim Katz:

A theory of film attempts to explain the nature of cinema and analyze how films produce emotional and cognitive effects. Often, film theories place cinema in a broader context (social, political, philosophical) and provide a framework for evaluating artistic merit. Unlike practical criticism, film theory seeks to establish principles applicable to all films.9

James Monaco puts it more succinctly: ‘In general, theory is the abstraction; criticism is the practice.’10 Film ‘criticism’ (the practical exercise) can be distinguished in turn from an ‘approach to film’ in that ‘criticism’ often involves distinct procedures, steps or operations which are performed on the subject matter for investigation in pursuance of specific aims, whereas an ‘approach’ is often characterized more by the particular concerns, perspectives or point of view that it adopts towards the cinematic text (or the spectator).

The first hurdle that the amateur must face is the nature and diversity of the theories, criticisms and approaches encountered in film studies. In Text Box 1.1, you will find a small representative list, and you might like to use this in conjunction with the further reading, to learn more about each.

1. Some Theories, Criticisms and Approaches

Aesthetics

Auteur Theory
Cognitive Film Theory
Cultural Criticism
Eclecticism

Expressionism
Feminist Criticism
Formalism

Genre Criticism
Historical Criticism
Marxist Criticism
Narrative Criticism
Postmodernism

Psychoanalytic Theory

Queer Theory
Realism

Semiotics and Structuralism
Thematic Criticism

2. Some Theorists

Louis Althusser
Rudolf Arnheim
Bela Balazs
Andre Bazin
David Bordwell
Gilles Deleuze
Ferdinand de Saussure
Boris Eikhenbaum
Sergei Eisenstein
Sigmund Freud
Siegfried Kracauer
Jacques Lacan
F. R. Leavis
Claude Levi-Strauss
Vachel Lindsay
Christian Metz
Laura Mulvey
Hugo Miinsterberg
V. I. Pudovkin
Andrew Sarris
Peter Wollen

Within the film studies Hall of Fame is a panoply of distinguished or influential theorists. Again consider the list in Text Box i.z.

As with any academic discipline or field, one has also to run a gamut of technical concepts and specialized vocabulary. Text Box 1.3 gives some of them.

All of this can be very confusing until one realizes that the various theories, criticisms and approaches provide in their own way different understandings of the impact of films upon us, various questions with

3. Some Concepts and Vocabulary

The Cinematic ‘Gaze’
Diegesis
Ideology
Mise-en-Scene
Montage
Spectatorship

Syntagmatic and Paradigmatic Structure Voyeurism which we may interrogate them, and alternative perspectives from which to view them.

There is no space in an essay of this kind to summarize the history of film theory, but the books and articles mentioned in note 8 (p. 40), and in the bibliography, offer very good treatments of this fascinating subject, and will introduce you to many of the theories, theorists and concepts listed above.

But how do we make sense of this very confusing array of theories, criticisms and approaches. In analysing how meaning is constructed from literary texts, literary critics focus on a threefold model of communication represented by the author, the text and the reader. In film studies, a similar model can be invoked, namely the film-maker, the visual images that make up the cinematic text or film, and the spectator. Film theories can be seen to differentiate themselves, therefore, in terms of the relative weight given to each member of this triad. Earlier theory, for example, focused on how film created meaning from its raw material (visual images). More recent film theory has turned much more to the relationship between films and audiences, from what can be termed generative theories to theories of reception, from how a film is made to how it affects our lives. In attempting to make sense for myself of all these theories, criticisms and approaches, to develop a ‘taxonomy of approaches’, to employ the jargon, it seems to me that they can be divided more or less into three main categories.

First, there are text-based theories or criticisms, that is, those theories or criticisms that focus on the film text itself, its genre, its author (or auteur, to use the French term beloved by film critics - the director, in other words), its narrative structure (plot, characters, settings, point of view), its surface themes and its deeper structures of meaning.

Second, there are context-based theories or criticisms, that is, those theories or criticisms that focus not on the filmic text but on the film’s social, historical, political or cultural context, and claim that the meaning of a film can be found by examining these.

Third, there are spectator-based theories or criticisms, that is, those theories or criticisms that claim the meaning of a film is constructed by the viewer or the viewing audience in line with social, cultural, educational, racial or political factors.

Two words beloved of literary and cinematic theorists are ‘diachronic’ and ‘synchronic’, the one designating, as its Greek roots imply, an approach to a literary or cinematic text that focuses on the process that brought it into being in the first place (lit. ‘through time’), the second an approach that focuses on the world conjured up or imaginatively projected by the book or film (lit. ‘together with time’). Most of us, when we watch films, approach them ‘synchronically’, that is, we become caught up in the story, the plot, the characters, the acting, the settings, etc. Some of us, however, view films ‘diachronically’, that is, we are interested in the production process, the filming, the composition, the framing of shots, the editing, the subsequent distribution, etc. Both of these dimensions, then, are further useful ways in which to differentiate film theories, criticisms and approaches.

Historical Criticism

One major diachronic, and contextual approach, for example, and indeed one of the most popular in film criticism, as in other fields, is historical criticism, the organization and investigation of films ‘according to their place within a historical context and in light of historical developments’.11

Formalism/Expressionism and Realism

A key issue or debate within the early history of film theory was that between formalism, or the closely related expressionism, on the one hand, and realism on the other. Formalism and expressionism are what I have called text-based approaches in that they are little interested in a film’s social, political or cultural context. Formalism is interested in the structure and style of a film, and expressionism in the power of the film-maker to manipulate images. Here Katz is again helpful: ‘[M]eaning in cinema’, according to formalism, ‘is constructed from the juxtaposition of shots’ while ‘realist theories’, on the other hand, ‘locate the power of film in its ability to capture objective material reality’.12 Formalism, and its sister approach, expressionism, are associated with the names of V. I. Pudovkin and Sergei Eisenstein, among others, and both dominated the film criticism of the 1920s and the 1930s. Realism, on the other hand, linked with theorists such as Siegfried Kracauer and Andre Bazin, was the prevailing influence in the 1940s and 1950s. Each employed different styles and techniques. Formalism and expressionism, with their emphasis on cinematic artifice, preferred close-ups, stylized sets, rapid editing and montage (the rapid juxtaposition of images) for their effects. Realism, with its emphasis on the representation of reality, preferred long takes, sequenceshots and deep focus photography (where foreground and background are both in focus) and it privileged mise-en-scene (literally ‘that which is put into the scene’, or before the camera, with its composite elements of setting, acting style, costumes, lighting) over montage (the succession of images).

Textual Analysis

I have suggested that theories, criticisms and approaches can be divided into three categories depending on whether they focus on the film text itself (textual analysis), the film’s context (contextual analysis) or the observer (spectatorship and audience research).

Genres and Genre Criticism - One form of textual analysis (though it also has a contextual element) is genre criticism.13 Genre criticism encourages us to seek understanding of a film through the recognition of its genre. Films come in a variety of genres depending on their form and content (Westerns, sci-fi films, thrillers, comedies, musicals, biblical epics, disaster movies, film noir, road movies, melodramas, holocaust movies, costume dramas, etc.). Genres have a particular world-view, and their common themes and conventions give us clues as to how to interpret them. A good film-maker will make a creative use of genre by developing, reinterpreting or subverting these conventions.

Auteur Theory/Criticism - Auteur theory or criticism focuses not on the genre but on the film-maker where that film-maker, usually the director, has created a body of work that expresses a very distinctive vision of the world. (Further, see ‘What is Auteur Theory?’, p. 82.)14

Thematic Criticism - Thematic criticism, on the other hand, focuses on the main ideas explored by a film, isolating and analysing its key themes, and often treating these intertextually, that is, comparing them with other films or literary texts in which similar themes are found.15

Semiotics and Structuralism - Semiotics and structuralism move to an entirely different level of textual analysis, analysing not the ideas and themes to be found at the surface of a cinematic text but exploring its deeper structures of meaning. Associated with Christian Metz and derived from the work of Ferdinand de Saussure, semiotics and structuralism investigate the fundamental questions of how film communicates its message, what is the nature of film language, how images and their manipulation convey meaning, what codes are embedded in the cinematic process and how we may unlock these codes to find understanding.16 To examine the meaning conveyed by camera shots and angles, for example, is a ‘semiotic exercise’ (the word ‘semiotic’ itself derives from the Greek ‘semeion’, a sign). It is an investigation on what structuralists call ‘a system of signification’.

Cognitive Film Theory - Allied to semiotics and structuralism but more recent is cognitive film theory which seeks to explain the way we, the individual spectators or the audience, actually come to understand film, how we unpack the various codes that the cinematic experience confronts us with.17

Contextual Analysis

Social Science Approaches - If various forms of textual analysis (genre criticism, auteur criticism, thematic criticism, and semiotics and structuralism) tend to focus on the cinematic text itself (although not exclusively), others engage in contextual analysis, invoking external factors to explain the significance of the film and the viewing experience. Prominent among these are the social science approachesrthat seek to interpret films within their social and psychological contexts. In Eichenberger’s words:

[T]he critics of this ‘school’ are interested more than others, in studying the effects of films on the viewers’ behavior, emotions and attitudes. The critics want to know if and how a movie is affecting the conscious or the unconscious dimension of an individual moviegoer or of a collective audience.18

Marxism - With its distinctive understanding of capitalist society, Marxist criticism, for example, in the hands of influential theorists like Louis Althusser, has contributed, among other things, the notion of ‘ideology’ to film criticism. Ideology relates to the fundamental ideas, beliefs or values that govern our lives, and it is now common to approach films with a view to establishing the particular visions of the world, the specific world-views, which they reflect.19

Psychoanalysis - Another prominent approach has been the application of psychoanalytic tools and concepts to the mental or psychological processes whereby film audiences draw meaning and significance from projected film images. Here the theories of Sigmund Freud - on dreams and the unconscious, on the suppression of emotions like desire, aggression, guilt, on the Oedipus complex and other neuroses, fetishism (‘the pathological attachment of sexual interest to an inanimate object’), scopophilia (‘the practice of obtaining sexual pleasure from things seen, as e.g. naked bodies’) and voyeurism (‘[the derivation of] gratification from surreptitiously watching sexual acts or objects’)20 - and Jacques Lacan (the theory of the mirror stage in infant development when personal identity is first experienced) have proved particularly influential.21

Cultural Studies - Marxist criticism and psychoanalytic theory have been around for a long time, and have to an extent been absorbed by the more recent cultural studies approach which like them examines film with respect to its social and psychological contexts. In R. K. Johnston’s words: ‘It studies the life cycle of a film from production to distribution to reception.’22

Spectatorship and Audience Research

Sociology and Ethnography - Cultural studies or cultural criticism is hence a bridge to the currently popular interest in reception or audience research, an approach to film in which the third dimension of film communication is addressed, namely, the effect films have on spectators and all the social, economic, political, racial, physical or psychological conditions that influence our interpretation of films, or which lead us to accept, resist or modify the ideological messages that films impart.23 Research on cinema audiences has borrowed extensively, therefore, from the social sciences, especially from sociology and ethnography.24 Two factors in particular that influence audiences’ perceptions of films are gender and ethnicity.

Feminist Film Criticism and Queer Theory - Where the former is concerned, film studies have been greatly enriched by feminist film criticism, and latterly, to some extent, by the gay or lesbian perspectives of so-called ‘queer theory’. Employing some of the analytical tools hitherto reviewed, like psychoanalysis, feminist criticism has drawn attention to the cinema’s propensity for cultural stereotyping, highlighted and challenged the cinema’s representation of masculinity and femininity, and even exposed the extent to which the camera itself in its cinematic treatment of women has tended to reproduce the ‘male gaze’.25

Postmodern Eclecticism - Given the plethora of theories, criticisms and approaches that I have attempted to summarize, it is instructive to ask where we are today. The position that film studies finds itself in is one that could well be described as ‘postmodern eclecticism’. No longer can the cinematic experience be explained by one totalizing theory. No longer is film criticism dominated by any one approach. Like the golfer searching in his bag for the appropriate club to play a particular shot, so the film critic selects the cinematic tools best suited to the analytical task. And this, I suggest, is what we ourselves must do in seeking to develop a theological approach to film.

The Lens of Narrative Criticism: Films approached as Texts

Narrative Theory/Narrative Criticism

Before I go on to do this, in the second part of this chapter, let me briefly highlight two particular approaches to film that I personally think are particularly appropriate for a theological perspective. The first is the lens of narrative theory or narrative criticism. Narrative theory attempts to analyse and explain the mechanics of storytelling, and narrative criticism provides its practical application. Though a prominent method for interpreting literary texts, it is being increasingly extended to films.26

Narrative and Film: Films as ‘Texts’

‘A narrative presents a chain of events which is situated in time and space’,27 and to that extent films can be considered to be ‘texts’, albeit ‘filmic texts’ or ‘cinematic texts’. Treating them as such, of course, has given them a certain respectability, which in small measure accounts for the popularity of this approach among the critics.28 Narrative theory supplies models and narrative criticism offers procedures for analysing the ‘filmic’ or ‘cinematic text’ through concentration, for example, on characters and characterization, plot, settings and point of view.29

Films as More than ‘Texts’

A film is, of course, more than a text, or at least different from a literary text like a novel. The cinematic experience, being visual, is not the same as the reading experience. Images are presented to the moviegoer not constructed by the imagination, and these images are manipulated by the film-maker by means of editing, sound, lighting, music and so on. Novels describe characters, film presents them. Every novel has a narrator but the cinematic equivalent is more difficult to discern.30 Film has a language but that language is communicated not only through the dialogue spoken by the actors but by the camera positions, by montage (the framing and linking of images), by mise-en-scene, costumes, lighting, colour, sound, music, etc.31 In the words of Cook and Bernink:

A fiction film’s narration involves the discursive process of telling the story via various narrating systems such as the selection and ordering of story elements, the narrative voice and point of view, musical interventions, mis-en-scene, sound to image relations, and editing strategies. The textual analysis of any individual film or group of stories involves precisely the investigation of which narration devices are at work for which effects.32

For this reason, although narrative theory and narrative criticism have much to offer us, film must still be respected as film, and film criticism treated not simply as another form of literary analysis.

The Lens of Cultural Studies: Films approached in Context

The second approach to film that I think is particularly relevant for a theological perspective is the lens of cultural studies. This approach, as I have said, views film in its cultural context, and has been applied fruitfully by some recent authors of books on theology and film.

Among the useful recent interdisciplinary treatments is the volume of conference papers edited by J. C. Exum and S. D. Moore, entitled Biblical Studies/Cultural Studies and published in 1998.33 Another is Margaret Miles’s Seeing and Believing. Religion and Values in the Movies (1996), which (according to its cover blurb) ‘refocuses attention from the film as a text to the social, political, and cultural matrix in which the film was produced and distributed’.34 Using cultural studies, Miles focuses on the way religion is presented in modern film, as well as on the values that are ‘imaged’ in film, especially with regard to race, gender and class. A third recent book employing the cultural studies approach is Imag(in)ing Otherness. Filmic Visions of Living Together edited by S. B. Plate and David Jasper and published in 1999. The essays in this intelligent book ‘examine the particular problems of “living together” when faced with the tensions brought out through the otherness of differing sexualities, ethnicities, genders, religions, cultures, and families’.35

3. Through a Lens even more Darkly: Critical Approaches to Theology and Film

Defining Theology and the Theological Approach to Film

If after the first part of this essay, on film theory and film criticism, the reader still ‘sees through a lens darkly’, then I am afraid in the second part we may ‘see through a lens even more darkly’! We turn now to theology and film, and to the critical approaches that currently distinguish this interdiscipline. Let me begin with some definitions. What do I mean by ‘theology’? The word ‘theology’ can be used in three major ways, depending on how widely or narrowly one defines it. At its narrowest, it is used to refer to systematic reflection on the nature and work of God. A slightly wider definition would see it as systematic reflection on Christian doctrine, embracing in addition the traditional categories of Christology (the person of Christ), soteriology (the work of Christ), pneumatology (the Spirit), cosmology (the nature of the world), eschatology (the end of the world), ecclesiology (the Church) and ethics. At its widest, it would embrace other religions and be understood as reflection upon what various religious traditions might regard as the ultimate reality (the sacred, the holy, the eternal).

It can also be understood in two ways. First, as an intellectual or academic discipline which can be engaged upon by believer and non-believer alike (study about God, about religion, about the Bible), or, second, as a spiritual exercise on the part of the believer (the study of God, of one’s religion, of one’s sacred text, the Bible). I myself would approach theology in its widest sense (though with a particular emphasis on Christianity), and understand it in its first sense, that is, as an academic or intellectual discipline capable of being practised irrespective of one’s faith.36 The appropriate subject of enquiry for theology, then, is first, religion(s), their sacred texts, their beliefs and practices, and, second, Christianity, the Bible and Christian doctrine and practice.

How should the two academic disciplines of theology and film relate to each other? And, within the circle of faith, how should the Church relate to the cinema? There has been a lot of discussion in recent books on theology and film on this very issue,37 and the consensus that appears to be being reached is that theology, or the Church, and film studies, or the cinema, should treat each other as ‘conversation1 or ‘dialogue partners’, neither seeking to denigrate the other, neither seeking to judge the other, neither seeking to dilute the integrity of the other by reductionism or misguided attempts at appropriation.

What are the critical tools available to those who wish to participate in this dialogue? From the side of theology, there is a very wide arsenal of analytical methods and procedures, and a very rich technical vocabulary with which to interrogate films theologically. The traditional divisions of Christian doctrine just mentioned (Christology, soteriology, pneuma- tology, cosmology, eschatology, ecclesiology, ethics) are a case in point. From the side of film studies, as I hope to have shown, there is an equally wide armoury of critical approaches that can be employed, a number of them of particular relevance to theology: genre criticism, auteur criticism, thematic criticism, narrative criticism and intertextuality, cultural studies.

Religious Studies Approaches, or ‘Screening the Sacred’

Theorizing the Relation between Religion and Film

In line with my wider definition of ‘theology’ as embracing the study of religion, the study of sacred texts like the Bible as well as the study of theology in its narrower sense, let me now briefly review some of the ways that film has been approached recently within the three academic areas of religious studies, biblical studies and theology. Within the field of religious studies, a key recent book is that by J. W. Martin and C. E. Ostwalt, Screening the Sacred (1995).38 One major contribution of this book is to offer its readers three distinct ways in which to theorize the relation between religion and film: the theological, the mythological, and the ideological. Of the first way, they assert:

The basic assumption behind theological criticism is that certain films can be properly understood, or can be best understood, as an elaboration on or the questioning of a particular religious tradition, text, or theme. Thus, underlying certain films there must be some basic moral, ethical, or theological position upon which the meaning of the film depends.39

What distinguishes the mythological approach is that those who practise it

see religion as a universal and ubiquitous human activity; they assert that religion manifests itself through cross-cultural forms, including myth, ritual, systems of purity, and gods. Myth consists of stories that provide human communities with grounding prototypes, models for life, reports of foundational realities, and dramatic presentations of fundamental values: Myth reveals a culture’s bedrock assumptions and aspirations.40

With reference to the ideological approach, they make the following statement:

In contrast to theologians and myth critics, still other scholars interpret religion in relation to what is not religion; for example, the social structure, the unconscious, gender, and power relations. Although not reducing religion to something nonreligious, they think it is important to situate religion in its historical, social, and political contexts. They focus especially upon how religion legitimates or challenges dominant visions of the social order. In other words, they study the relation of religion and ideology.41

‘Looking af or ‘for Religion’ in the Movies

So how do we look for religion in the movies? The literature I have reviewed suggests different routes using different methods. A classic in the field, Paul Schrader’s Transcendental Style in Film: Ozu, Bresson, Dreyer (1972.) employs a mixture of formalism and auteur criticism to claim that we can recognize religious transcendence or ‘the Holy’ in film by means of its common cinematic style, as exemplified in three very different directors (Yasujiro Ozu, Robert Bresson and Carl Dreyer) working in three very different cultural milieux (Japan, France and Denmark). What Schrader calls transcendental style is characterized by an ‘aesthetic of sparseness’ and this is achieved by such formal devices as ‘austere camerawork, acting devoid of self-consciousness and editing that avoids editorial comment’.42 A much more recent book, R. A. Blake’s Afterimage: The Indelible Catholic Imagination of Six American Filmmakers (2000) also employs auteur criticism to claim that we can observe the religious worldview, in this case, that of Roman Catholicism, in the work of six prominent film-makers (Martin Scorsese, Alfred Hitchcock, Frank Capra, John Ford, Francis Ford Coppola and Brian De Palma).43 Also approaching film via the concept of world-view, but employing the mythological approach is B. B. Scott’s Hollywood Dreams and Biblical Stories (1994).

Instead of propagating its myths round the fireside, as it were, modern society does it through the movies. Drawing on Claude Levi-Strauss in order to expose these myths, Scott brings the Bible into conversation with aspects of American culture and its values: ‘wealth and poverty, race relations, moral aloneness, the superhero and the solo redeemer, violence and war, the mythical West, relations of the sexes, and fears of the future’.44

One very popular route to explore religion and film is to do so by way of religious themes. M. Alsford in What If? Religious Themes in Science Fiction (2000) uses a combination of genre and thematic criticism to explore the religious themes that are reflected in one of the most popular movie genres, science fiction.45 Using cultural criticism, Plate and Jasper in the aforementioned Imag(in)ing Otherness. Filmic Visions of Living Together (1999) cast their net wide over religious traditions like Chan Buddhism, Hinduism, Native American religions, Christianity and Judaism to explore the single theme of ‘otherness’ in film and its implications for ‘living together’ or community. T. Sanders, on the other hand, in the recently published Celluloid Saints. Images of Sanctity in Film (2002) confines herself to Christianity, and largely the Catholic Church, and explores the depiction of saints in the movies.46

So in answer to our question, how do we look for religion in the movies, the classic and current literature seems to suggest that we can do it using different methods, by focusing on transcendental style, on religious auteurs, or on myths and world-views and religious themes.

Biblical Studies Approaches, or ‘Screening Scripture’

Bringing the Bible and Film into Dialogue

A number of books have appeared recently in my own field, biblical studies, that have also reiterated the notion of bringing the Bible and film ‘into dialogue with one another’, or treating them as ‘conversation partners’. ‘Intertextuality’ is the buzzword, and it is exemplified in the work of two scholars, to whom I wish to draw attention, Larry Kreitzer and Robert Jewett, and in a collection of newly published essays entitled Screening Scripture. Intertextual Connections Between Scripture and Film (2002), and edited by George Aichele and Richard Walsh. The essays discuss a variety of films that ‘screen’, ‘project’, ‘quote’ or ‘rewrite’ Scripture in the sense that they make a cultural appropriation of the sacred text and present it to contemporary audiences within a different narrative setting and within a more vivid medium, namely film. What distinguishes the volume is its ‘postmodern world-view’, the contributors (academics all, from established scholars to doctoral candidates) reflecting a variety of multidisciplinary approaches and concerns (some theoretical, some merely personal), whether intertextual, sociocultural, psychoanalytic, gender or sexuality-oriented, or narrative-critical.47 Aichele edited in 1997, along with Tina Pippin, a similar intertextual compilation entitled The Monstrous and the Unspeakable. The Bible as Fantastic Literature (i997)-48

If Screening Scripture focuses on the Bible’s relation to its many filmic ‘tributaries’, then Larry Kreitzer’s book, Gospel Images in Fiction and Film. On Reversing the Hermeneutical Flow (2002), as its subtitle suggests, ‘reverses the hermeneutical flow’ by concentrating on the way that an intertextual study of literature and film can enrich our understanding of the sacred ‘source’.49 Kreitzer, Tutor of New Testament at Regent’s Park College, Oxford, has published three previous volumes with this cross-disciplinary approach in the Biblical Seminar Series: The New Testament in Fiction and Film (1993), The Old Testament in Fiction and Film (1994) and Pauline Images in Fiction and Film (1999).50

While also adopting intertextuality (as well as cultural criticism) as an analytical tool, Jewett’s approach to the dialogue is different. In his Saint Paul at the Movies. The Apostle’s Dialogue with American Culture (1993) and his Saint Paul Returns to the Movies. Triumph over Shame (1999), he proposes the model of the ‘interpretive arch’, at one end of which is the biblical text in its ancient cultural context, at the other the contemporary film in its modern cultural context. In a process that he describes as ‘prophetic’, the task of the interdisciplinary interpreter is to exchange insights between the two while offering each its due respect.51

Intertextuality, then, is an important tool in the arsenal of those who would bring the Bible into relation with contemporary culture, but it is not the only one. As with modern day film studies, many interpreters are eclectic or multidisciplinary in their choice of analytical tools, and in some cases, ‘postmodern’ in their attitudes to the enterprise. I have already referred to B. B. Scott and his combined use of mythological criticism and thematic criticism in Hollywood Dreams and Biblical Stories (1994). My own work, as I’ve indicated, uses a mixture of aesthetics, textual analysis, narrative criticism, intertextuality, social context and ideology, and includes a focus on such contemporary issues as gender and ethnicity.52 R. C. Stern, C. N. Jefford and G. Debona’s Savior on the Silver Screen

1999. employs historical criticism, aesthetics and contextual analysis as the three lenses through which they view the Christ film.53 In Biblical Epics. Sacred Narrative in the Hollywood Cinema (1993), Bruce Babing- ton and Peter Evans employ genre criticism, narrative criticism and cultural criticism in their treatment of the biblical epic, focus on themes of ethnicity, sexuality, gender and religion, and, in their words, ‘deliberately stop short of totalistic theorising, as part of a strategy aimed against reductionism’.54 Finally, sophisticated literary analysis combined with cultural criticism combine in Melanie Wright’s recently published Moses in America. The Cultural Uses of Biblical Narrative (2002).55

‘Looking af or ‘for Jesus’ in the Movies

Just as religious studies approaches to film investigate the ‘Screening of the Sacred’ and ‘look at’ or ‘look for religion’ in the movies, so a major preoccupation in biblical studies approaches is ‘looking at’ and especially ‘looking for Jesus’ in the movies.

This is a subject I have treated more extensively elsewhere,56 but here let me briefly comment on the literature. I have already mentioned R. C. Stern, C. N. Jefford and G. Debona’s Savior on the Silver Screen (1999). To this may be added W. B. Tatum’s Jesus at the Movies: A Guide to the First Hundred Years (1997), one of the most comprehensive recent guides to the story of Jesus on film.571 myself published an essay on ‘Jesus Christ Movie-Star: The Depiction of Jesus in the Cinema’ in C. Marsh and G. Ortiz (eds), Explorations in Theology and Film. Movies and Meaning (1997),58 and there I treated not only the classic Christ films (where Jesus is the central character) but also referred to the more elusive Christ-figures that have made various cinematic appearances. Lloyd Baugh’s book, Imaging the Divine. Jesus and Christ-Figures in Film (1997) is the most comprehensive recent contribution to the subject.59 Among other things, Baugh identifies eight manifestations of the Christ-figure in film: as saint, as priest, as woman, as an extreme figure such as a clown, or fool, or madman, as outlaw, as child, in a dramatic role, and as popular adventure hero.

In my Epworth Review article of 2000, which was based on a presentation I gave in 1999 at the St Deiniol’s Theology and Film conference, I added to the number of Christ-figures that have been or could be detected in the films appearing between 1993 and 1999,60 and in my most recent paper, given at the conference in 2004, this list was further updated (see Appendix 2). Christ-figures in film continue to be spotted and proposed in the current literature. Three candidates nominated (with qualifications) by Christopher Deacy, for example, in his Screen Christologies. Redemption and the Medium of Film (2001) are Travis Bickle in Taxi Driver (1976), Jake La Motta in Raging Bull (1980) and Max Cady in Cape Fear (1991), all films by Martin Scorsese.61 A further candidate, the mentally challenged Karl Childers (played by Billy Bob Thornton) in Sling Blade (1996) has been suggested by Mark Roncace in an essay appearing in Aichele and Walsh’s Screening Scripture (2002).62 This whole area opens up a series of related issues, raising not only the question of how we establish the Christ-figure in film, but even how we read films and how theology and film should relate responsibly to one another.

Theological Approaches or "Looking for Mr Good(bar)’/ "Waiting for God(ot)?’

Theorizing the Relation of Theology and Film

Let me turn finally to the subject of theological approaches to film, and review some of the literature that is appearing on the subject. Theological approaches to film may be concerned to understand the relation between film and theology, or simply interested in the uses of film for theology. They can be ‘cognitive’ or ‘actualizing’, or, to put it another way, academic or practical. And this reveals itself in the literature. Mention has already been made of the valuable essay by David Graham on ‘The Uses of Film in Theology’ in C. Marsh and G. W. Ortiz (eds), Explorations in Theology and Film. Movies and Meaning (1997) and of the perceptive discussion of ‘Film and Theologies of Culture’ by Clive Marsh in that same volume. A miscellany of essays on the relationship between religion and film is also to be found in J. R. May (ed.), New Image of Religions Film (i997)-

What are the approaches that current writers are taking to the relationship between theology and film? I have identified four approaches, each of which works with a different model, and each of which implies a different understanding of the relationship. Some are cognitive in orientation, others actualizing. You might spot your own characteristic approach among these, or, if not, you might like to consider how you might describe or theorize your own personal approach.

Approaching Films Evangelistically - One observed strategy is ‘approaching films evangelistically’. This is the approach taken in Ian Maher’s, Faith and Film. Close Encounters of an Evangelistic Kind (2002), a book that, ‘after addressing some key issues . .. looks at the ways in which discussing films can open surprising opportunities to build bridges and share faith. It concludes by setting out practical ways to use film in the local church and suggests some useful further resources’.63 While seeking to encourage Christian appreciation of the cinema, Brian Godawa’s Hollywood Worldvieivs. Watching Films with Wisdom and Discernment (2002) is a somewhat more aggressive book. Written by a Christian screenwriter, it aims to educate the believer on how to recognize the myths, world-views and (existentialist and postmodern) ideologies promoted by contemporary film, often with a view to resisting or countering them.64 A similarly exclusivist position is taken in P. Fraser, N. Fraser and V. Edwin’s ReViewing the Movies. A Christian Response to Contemporary Film

2000. as the cover blurb indicates:

With film being one of the most powerful cultural influences in America, we Christians cheat ourselves and limit our opportunities to witness to the culture when we label all movies as either ‘completely corrupt’ or as ‘harmless entertainment.’ The one stance thoroughly excludes a possible source of greater understanding; the other allows ungodly values to freely enter our hearts. What we need is the balance that discernment provides.

A film not made solely by or about Christians can still be uplifting and connect with us spiritually - as long as it conveys truth with cinematic excellence. Yet many of us are unequipped to determine which movies meet that qualification. That’s why we need the right tools. With them we can shift to the offensive and intentionally evaluate and discuss how a movie illustrates God’s truth.65

Approaching Films Spiritually - ‘A film not made solely by or about Christians can still be uplifting and connect with us spiritually.’ This last statement illustrates a second observed strategy among those who wish to relate theology to film and that is ‘approaching films spiritually’. The approach was discussed in a special edition of Image. The Journal of Arts & Religion in 1998 entitled Screening Mystery. The Religious Imagination in Contemporary Film, and is one popular among those who take an ‘actualizing’ rather than a ‘cognitive’ view of the relation between film and theology, who welcome the cinema’s treatment of human values, but who are not necessarily supporters of institutionalized religion.66 On the other hand, some recent books are unashamedly devotional in tenor, ‘connect[ing] movies with the spiritual life of moviegoers’ like E. McNulty’s Praying the Movies. Daily Meditations from Classic Films

2001. 67 or, like B. P. Stone’s Faith and Film. Theological Themes at the Cinema (2000) using ‘movies and phrases of the Apostles’ Creed to illustrate basic themes of theology and how they manifest themselves in popular culture’.68

Approaching Films Sacramentally - A third observed strategy, and here we move on to more academic or intellectual ground is ‘approaching films sacramentally’. The concept is introduced in Peter Fraser’s Images of the Passion. The Sacramental Mode in Film (1998). In a manner reminiscent of Paul Schrader but emphasizing content as much as style, Fraser ‘analyses “sacramental” films, where the narrative has been disrupted and redeemed by a divine presence, in an analogy to Christian liturgical and devotional patterns. This presence transforms the film’s narrative into the most recognizable of all Christian narrative patterns: the Passion.’69 Fraser describes the ‘sacramental mode’, in respect of characterization, as follows:

Characters who undergo a Passion experience in a film narrative will first take on a representational role as bearers of the desires of a community . . . The redemptive figure in many films will typically undergo a lonely purgative ritual in the course of the narrative. This ritual includes either physical, emotional or spiritual suffering, and it concludes as the character resigns to the forces compelling this trek and accepts whatever consequences the narrative movements decree.70

Approaching Films Redemptively - A fourth but closely related strategy is ‘approaching films ‘redemptively’. This approach is impressively illustrated in Christopher Deacy’s aforementioned Screen Christologies. Redemption and the Medium of Film (2001), a book that is arguably the most consistently theological reading of film that we have seen recently. Using genre criticism on film noir and auteur criticism on the films of Martin Scorsese, Deacy explores the Christian notion of redemption in relation to the medium of film. In its treatment of the human condition and in its treatment of the film noir protagonist (a functionally equivalent Christ-figure) film noir can become, he argues, a ‘site of redemptive activity’ for the spectator.

‘Looking at’ or ‘for God’ in the Movies

‘The religious imagination is alive and well in the movies.’ This is the conclusion of A. Bergesen and A. M. Greeley’s recent God in the Movies: A Sociological Investigation (2000), a book that employs sociology, cultural criticism and narrative criticism to explore the images of God and angels in the cinema.71 A similar conclusion was reached by J. R. May in New Image of Religious Film (1997), as well as now more than a decade ago in Image and Likeness: Religious Visions in American Film Classics (1992), a collection of essays using ideological criticism to trace ‘America’s religious vision in thirty-five classic American films, from City Lights to Hannah and Her Sisters'12

Conclusion

Film studies and the academic trinity of religious studies, biblical studies and theology are not only established but vibrant disciplines, and it is to be hoped that the relatively recent interdiscipline of theology and film will lead to new and fruitful insights and results. If they are to have a productive dialogue and to function as suitable ‘conversation partners’ then they will need to learn from each other, and this learning process must include an understanding of their respective critical methodologies. I trust that this chapter has contributed to that understanding, and that, even if you still see through a lens darkly, then I can claim to have provided you with more than one lens to do so.

4. Face to Face: Critical Approaches to Theology and Film - Some Selected Films and Clips f

In this section of the chapter, you are encouraged to follow up what has been said by watching three selected films or film clips and commenting upon them in light of the approaches that have been reviewed. To help you do this, I have supplied three further text boxes.

The first text box (1.4), Notes on the Films/Clips Selected, specifies the films selected, and some key descriptors (genre, cast, plot). The brief plot descriptions are taken from a useful tool, J. Walker (ed.), Halliwell’s Film and Video Guide (London: HarperCollins, 2000), as are the short selected reviews. A specific clip, or sequence (together with its approximate time location within the film) is suggested for each film, as is some select reading on it. The second text box (1.5), Critical Methods and Approaches, is a summation of the various theories and criticisms reviewed, together with some of the key questions that they put to films, or by means of which they interrogate them. They are arranged in the form of six lenses, three from each of the two disciplines of Film and Theology: Aesthetics, Textual Analysis, Contextual Analysis, Religious Studies Approaches, Biblical Studies Approaches and Theological Approaches. The third text box (1.6) is a Comment Sheet on which you may wish to note your comments.

4. Notes on the Films/Clips Selected

Apocalypse Now (Francis Ford Coppola, 1979)

Genre: War Film; Literary Adaptation from a novella by Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness

Cast: Martin Sheen, Robert Duvall, Frederic Forrest, Marlon Brando, Sam Bottoms, Dennis Hopper

Plot: ‘A Vietnam captain is instructed to eliminate a colonel who has retired to the hills and is fighting his own war.’

Review: ‘Pretentious war movie, made even more hollow-sounding by the incomprehensible performance of Brando as the mad martinet. Some vivid scenes along the way, and some interesting parallels with Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, but these hardly atone for the director’s delusion that prodigal expenditure of time and money will result in great art. (The movie took so long to complete that it was dubbed Apocalypse Later.)’ (J. Walker (ed.), Halliwell’s Film and Video Guide, London: HarperCollins, 2000, p. 36).

Clip: ‘The Horror! The Horror’ (Kurtz’s Death): c-.02.z9.08-02.31.58

Read: L. J. Kreitzer, Gospel Images in Fiction and Film. On Reversing the Hermeneutical Floiv, The Biblical Seminar, 84, Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, 2002, pp. 45-104; C. E. Ostwalt, ‘Hollywood and Armageddon: Apocalyptic Themes in Recent Cinematic Presentation’, in J. W. Martin and C. E. Ostwalt (eds), Screening the Sacred. Religion, Myth, and Ideology in Popular American Film, Boulder, CO: Westview, 1995, pp. 55-63.

Babette’s Feast (Gabriel Axel, 1987)

Genre: ‘Foodie Movie’; Literary Adaptation from a story by Isak Dinesen (Karen Blixen)

Cast: Stephane Audran, Jean-Philippe Lafont, Jarl Kulle, Bibi Andersson, Bodil Kjer, Birgitte Federspiel

Plot: ‘A French refugee in nineteenth-century Norway wins 10,000 francs in a lottery and spends it all on preparing a sumptuous banquet for her Lutheran employers and their friends.’

Review: ‘Ironic and elegant fable juxtaposing bacchanalian extravagance with narrow piety’ (Walker, Halliwell’s Guide, p. 50).

Clip: ‘An Artist is never Poor’ (Babette’s Verdict on the Feast): c.oi.40.3 2-01.43.43

Read: A. M. Greeley, ‘Babette’s Feast of Love: Symbols Subtle but Patent’, in A. Bergesen and A. M. Greeley (eds), God in the Movies: A Sociological Investigation, New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers, 2000, pp. 49-53; R. Jewett, Saint Paul Returns to the Movies. Triumph over Shame, Grand Rapids, MI and Cambridge, UK: Eerdmans, T999, pp. 38-51; M. C. Maisto, ‘Cinematic Communion? Babette’s Feast, Transcendental Style, and Interdisciplinarity’, in S. B. Plate and D. Jasper (eds), Imag(in)ing Otherness. Filmic Visions of Living Together, 1999, Atlanta, rGA: Scholars Press, pp. 83-98; P. Fraser, Images of the Passion. The Sacramental Mode in Film, Trowbridge, Wilts: Flicks Books, 1998, pp. 107-16; C. Marsh, ‘Did You Say “Grace”?: Eating in Community in Babette’s Feast’, in

100. Marsh and G. W. Ortiz (eds), Explorations in Theology and Film. Movies and Meaning, Oxford: Blackwell, 1997, pp. 207-18.

Brant Stoker’s Dracula (Francis Ford Coppola, 1992)

Genre: Horror Film; Vampire Movie

Cast: Gary Oldman, Anthony Hopkins, Winona Ryder, Keanu Reeves

Plot: Tn the 1480s Dracula curses God and becomes a vampire after his wife, thinking that he has died in battle, commits suicide; 400 or so years later in London he falls in love with a woman who seems to be her reincarnation.’

Review: ‘A lush, over-dressed Gothic romance that plays down the menace and dread of the original, with performances that range from the inadequate to the over-ripe’ (Walker, Halliwell’s Guide, p. 109).

Clip: ‘Where is my God? He has forsaken me. It is finished!’ (The Death of Dracula): c.oi.40.32-01.43.43

Read: T. Pippin, ‘Of Gods and Demons. Blood Sacrifice and Eternal Life in Dracula and the Apocalypse of John’, in G. Aichele and R. Walsh (eds), Screening Scripture. Intertextual Connections Between Scripture and Film, Harrisburg, PA: Trinity Press International, 2002, pp. 24-41; L. J. Kreitzer, Pauline Images in Fiction and Film. On Reversing the Hermeneutical Flow, The Biblical Seminar, 61, Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, 1999, pp. 113-42.

5. Critical Methods and Approaches

1. Lens 1: Aesthetics (Formalism/Expressionism/Realism)

Comment on the mise-en-scene (setting, acting, costumes, lighting, sound, etc.) and montage (camerawork, editing, etc.)

2. Lens 2: Textual Analysis.

1. Genre Criticism

What is the film’s genre and how are thegenric conventions treated?

2. Auteur Criticism

Does knowledge of the director’s other work illumine the film/clip?

3. Narrative Criticism

Comment on the plot, characterization (acting), settings, etc.

4. Thematic Criticism

What themes are treated?

3. Lens 3: Contextual Analysis

1. Historical Criticism

What relation does the film bear to history?

2. Marxist Interpretation

What ideology or world-view is presented and how does it relate to notions of alienation, class conflict, capitalist production, etc?

3. Psychoanalysis

What light is furnished by psychoanalytic or psychological categories (desire, aggression, guilt, sexual interest, the Oedipus complex and other neuroses, personal identity, etc.)?

4. Cultural Studies

What light is shed by cultural factors as well as by matters relating to production, distribution and reception?

5. Sociology and Ethnography

What social or ethnic issues are raised?

6. Feminist Film Criticism and Queer Theory

How is gender configured in the clip under review (masculinity and femininity) ?

4. Lens 4: Religious Studies Approaches

1. Mythological Approach

How is religion presented in the film in terms of cross-cultural forms, including myth, ritual, systems of purity, and gods, etc.?

2. Ideological Approach

How does the film/clip challenge or legitimate dominant visions, world-views, etc. of the social order?

5. Lens 5: Biblical Studies Approaches

1. Intertextuality

How is the Bible treated in the film/clip?

6. Lens 6: Theological Approaches

Does the film/clip have evangelistic, spiritual, sacramental or redemptive significance for you?

6. Comments on Films/Clips

Apocalypse Notv (Francis Ford Coppola, 1979): ‘The Horror! The Horror’ (Kurtz’s Death)

Babette’s Feast (Gabriel Axel, 1987): ‘An Artist is never Poor’ (Babette’s Verdict on the Feast)

Bram Stoker’s Dracula (Francis Ford Coppola, 1992): ‘Where is my God? He has forsaken me. It is finished!’(The Death of Dracula).

Notes

1. For an example of one New Testament scholar’s critical reflection on his interpretative approach to religion and film, see R. Jewett, Saint Paul at the Movies. The Apostle’s Dialogue with American Culture, Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox, 1993, pp. 7-12.

2. A. Eichenberger, ‘Approaches to Film Criticism’, in J. R. May (ed.), New Image of Religious Film, Kansas City, MO: Sheed & Ward, 1997, pp. 6-7.

3. T. Corrigan, A Short Guide to Writing about Film, The Short Guide Series, New York: HarperCollins College, 1994, p. 33.

4. See W. R. Telford, ‘Religion, the Bible and Theology in Recent Films (1993-99)’, Epworth Review, 27 (2000): 31-40 for a popular version of this presentation, and the Appendix of this book for a list of the films reviewed (now updated to 2004).

5. This was published in an expanded form as ‘Jesus and Women in Fiction and Film’, in I. R, Kitzberger (ed.), Transformative Encounters. Jesus and Women Reviewed, Leiden: Brill, 2000, pp. 353-91.

6. These last three presentations are published here.

7. This approach was articulated in W. R. Telford, ‘The New Testament in Fiction and Film: A Biblical Scholar’s Perspective’, in J. G. Davies, G. Harvey and W. Watson (eds), Words Remembered, Texts Renewed. Essays in Honour of J. F. A. Sawyer, Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, 1995, pp. 360-94.

8. See, for example, P. Cook and M. Bernink, ‘Part 7: Theoretical Frameworks’, in P. Cook and M. Bernink (eds), The Cinema Book, London: British Film Institute, 1999, pp. 319-73; R- K. Johnston, Reel Spirituality. Theology and Film in Dialogue, Engaging Culture, Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2000, esp. chap. 7; R. Stam, Film Theory. An Introduction, Oxford: Blackwell, 2000; Eichenberger, ‘Film Criticism’, in May (ed.), New Image, pp. 3-16; D. Browne, ‘Film, Movies, Meanings’, in C. Marsh and G. W. Ortiz (eds), Explorations in Theology and Film. Movies and Meaning, Oxford: Blackwell, 1997, pp. 9-19; Corrigan, Writing about Film; E. Katz, ‘Theory, Film’, in E. Katz (ed.), The Macmillan International Film Encyclopedia, London: HarperCollins, 1994, pp. 1348-9; J. Monaco, How to Read a Film. The Art, Technology, Language, History, and Theory of Film and Media, Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1981.

9. Katz, ‘Theory, Film’, in Katz, Macmillan Encyclopedia, p. 1348.

10. Monaco, How to Read a Film, p. 389.

11. Corrigan, Writing about Film, p. 78.

12. Katz, ‘Theory, Film’, p. 1348. See also Monaco, How to Read a Film, pp. 394-416; Corrigan, Writing about Film, p. 85.

13. See, for example, Johnston, Reel Spirituality, pp. 126-32.

14. See Johnston, Reel Spirituality, pp. 132-9; Eichenberger, ‘Film Criticism’, pp. 7-8; Corrigan, Writing about Film, p. 83; Katz, ‘Theory, Film’, p. 1348.

15. See Johnston, Reel Spirituality, pp. 139-46; Corrigan, Writing about Film, p. 34.

16. See Browne, ‘Film, Movies, Meanings’, Explorations, pp. 12-13, 17-18; Katz, ‘Theory, Film’, p. 1349; Monaco, How to Read a Film, pp. 417-24; Cook and Bernink, ‘Theoretical Frameworks’, pp. 319-32.

17. See Monaco, How to Read a Film, p. 424.

18. Eichenberger, ‘Film Criticism’, p. 8.

19. See Browne, ‘Film, Movies, Meanings’, p. 18; Corrigan, Writing about Film, pp. 86-7; Katz, ‘Theory, Film’, p. 1349.

20. C. Schwarz, G. Davidson, A. Seaton and V. Tebbit (eds), Chambers English Dictionary, Cambridge: Chambers, 1988, pp. 526, 1318, 1656.

21. Cook and Bernink, ‘Theoretical Frameworks’, pp. 335—7, 341—52; Browne, ‘Film, Movies, Meanings’, pp. 18-19; Katz, ‘Theory, Film’, p. 1349.

22. See Johnston, Reel Spirituality, pp. 146-50, and esp. p. 147.

23. See Cook and Bernink, ‘Theoretical Frameworks’, pp. 323, 332-3, 366-73.

24. Browne, ‘Film, Movies, Meanings’, p. 19.

25. See Cook and Bernink, ‘Theoretical Frameworks’, pp. 353-65; Katz, ‘Theory, Film’, p. 1349.

26. See J. Lothe, Narrative in Fiction and Film. An Introduction, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000, esp. p. viii: ‘Another characteristic of recent developments is that, partly as a result of the decreased differentiation between fiction and history, narrative theory is being used to a greater extent in research which is not primarily (or not only) concerned with literature. The link between narrative theory and film studies has also been strengthened.’

27. Lothe, Narrative, p. 3; cf. also pp. 8-9; Corrigan, Writing about Film, pp. 36-7; Browne, ‘Film, Movies, Meanings’, pp. 16-17.

28. See Stam, Film Theory, p. 186.

29. ‘Like narrative, point of view is a term that film shares with the literary and visual arts. In the broadest sense it refers to the position from which something is seen and, by implication, how that point of view determines what you see. . . . Point of view is central to writing about films because films are basically about seeing the world in a certain way’ (Corrigan, Writing about Film, p. 42).

30. For discussion of the differences, as well as the similarities, between literature and film, see Lothe, Narrative, esp. pp. 8, 11-13 (on film communication), 27-31 (on the film narrator), 62-3 (on narrative time in film), 85-91 (on events, characters and characterization in film adaptation). On the difficulties in extending literary models to film, see also Stam, Film Theory, pp. 185-92. On film and the novel, see Monaco, How to Read a Film, pp. 44-8.

31. For discussion of these various elements, see Cook and Bernink, ‘Theoretical Frameworks’, pp. 320-2 and Corrigan, Writing about Film, pp. 47-68.

32. Cook and Bernink, ‘Theoretical Frameworks’, p. 322.

33. J. C. Exum and S. D. Moore (eds), Biblical Studies/Cultural Studies. The Third Sheffield Colloquium, Journal for the Study of the Old Testament Supplement Series 266, Gender, Culture, Theory 7, Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, 1998.

34. M. R. Miles, Seeing and Believing. Religion and Values in the Movies, Boston, MA: Beacon, 1996.

35. See S. B. Plate and D. Jasper (eds), Imag(in)ing Otherness. Filmic Visions of Living Together, American Academy of Religion Cultural Criticism Series, 7, Atlanta, GA: Scholars Press, 1999, cover blurb.

36. For other views, see, for example, Johnston, Reel Spirituality, pp. 16-17.

37. See, for example, Johnston, Reel Spirituality, esp. pp. 41-62, 151-72;

C. Marsh, ‘Film and Theologies of Culture’, pp. 21-34; D. J. Graham, ‘The Uses of Film in Theology’, pp. 3 5-43; T. M. Martin, Images and the Imageless. A Study in Religious Consciousness and Film, Lewisburg, London and Toronto: Bucknell University Press; Associated University Presses, 1991.

38. J. W. Martin and C. E. Ostwalt (eds), Screening the Sacred. Religion, Myth, and Ideology in Popular American Film, Boulder, CO: Westview, 199 5.

39. Martin and Ostwalt (eds), Screening, pp. 13-14.

40. Martin and Ostwalt (eds), Screening, p. 6.

41. Martin and Ostwalt (eds), Screening, p. 7.

42. P. Schrader, Transcendental Style in Film: Ozu, Bresson, Dreyer, Berkeley, Los Angeles and London: University of California Press, 1972, cover blurb.

43. R. Blake, Afterimage: The Indelible Catholic Imagination of Six American Filmmakers, Chicago: Loyola, 2.000.

44. B. B. Scott, Hollywood Dreams and Biblical Stories, Minneapolis, MN: Augsburg Fortress, 1994, cover blurb.

45. M. Alsford, What If? Religious Themes in Science Fiction, London: Darton, Longman & Todd, 2.000.

46. T. Sanders, Celluloid Saints. Images of Sanctity in Film, Macon, GA: Mercer University Press, 2002.

47. G. Aichele and R. Walsh (eds), Screening Scripture. Intertextual Connections Between Scripture and Film, Harrisburg, PA: Trinity Press International, 2002.

48. G. Aichele and T. Pippin (eds), The Monstrous and the Unspeakable. The Bible as Fantastic Literature, Playing the Texts, 1, Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, 1997.

49. L. J. Kreitzer, Gospel Images in Fiction and Film. On Reversing the Hermeneutical Flow, The Biblical Seminar, 84, Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, 2002.

50. L. J. Kreitzer, The New Testament in Fiction and Film. On Reversing the Hermeneutical Flow, The Biblical Seminar, 17, Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, 1993; L. J. Kreitzer, The Old Testament in Fiction and Film. On Reversing the Hermeneutical Flow, The Biblical Seminar, 24, Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, 1994; L. J. Kreitzer, Pauline Images in Fiction and Film. On Reversing the Hermeneutical Flow, The Biblical Seminar, 61, Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, 1999.

51. R. Jewett, Saint Paul at the Movies. The Apostle’s Dialogue with American Culture. Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox, 1993; R. Jewett, Saint Paul Returns to the Movies. Triumph over Shame, Grand Rapids, MI and Cambridge, UK: Eerdmans, 1999.

52. See, for example, Telford, ‘Fiction and Film’ and ‘Jesus and Women’.

53. R. C. Stern, C. N. Jefford and G. Debona, Savior on the Silver Screen, New York and Mahwah, NJ: Paulist, 1999.

54. B. Babington and P. W. Evans, Biblical Epics. Sacred Narrative in the Hollywood Cinema, Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1993, p. 22.

55. M. J. Wright, Moses in America. The Cultural Uses of Biblical Narrative, AAR Cultural Criticism Series, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002.

56. W. R. Telford, ‘Searching for Jesus: Recognizing or Imagining Christ- Figures in the Movies’ (unpublished paper given at the St Deiniol’s Theology and Film conference, April, 2004).

57. W. B. Tatum, Jesus at the Movies: A Guide to the First Hundred Years, Santa Rosa, CA: Polebridge, 1997.

58. W. R. Telford, ‘Jesus Christ Movie-Star: The Depiction of Jesus in the Cinema’, in Marsh and Ortiz (eds), Explorations, pp. 115-39.

59. L. Baugh, Imaging the Divine. Jesus and Christ-Figures in Film, Kansas City, MO: Sheed & Ward, 1997.

60. Telford, ‘Recent Films (1993-99)’, PP- 31-40.

61. C. Deacy, Screen Christologies. Redemption and the Medium of Film, Religion, Culture and Society, Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2001, esp. pp. 123,128.

62. M. Roncace, ‘Paradoxical Protagonists: Sling Blade's Karl and Jesus Christ’, in Aichele and Walsh (eds), Screening Scripture, pp. 279-300.

63. I. Maher, Faith and Film. Close Encounters of an Evangelistic Kind, Cambridge: Grove Books Ltd, 2002, cover blurb.

64. B. Godawa, Hollywood Worldviews. Watching Films with Wisdom and Discernment. Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity, 2002.

65. P. Fraser, N. Fraser and V. Edwin, ReViewing the Movies. A Christian Response to Contemporary Film, Wheaton: Crossway Books, 2000.

66. G. Wolfe, ‘Screening Mystery. The Religious Imagination in Contemporary Film’, Image. A Journal of the Arts & Religion, 20 (1998).

67. E. McNulty, Praying the Movies. Daily Meditations from Classic Films, Louisville, KY: Geneva, 2001.

68. B. P. Stone, Faith and Film. Theological Themes at the Cinema, St Louis, MI: Chalice, 2000, cover blurb.

69. P. Fraser, Images of the Passion. The Sacramental Mode in Film, Trowbridge, Wilts: Flicks Books, 1998, cover blurb.

70. Fraser, Images, pp. 9, 10; see also Eichenberger, ‘Film Criticism’, pp. 14-15 for another application of the ‘sacramental’ approach to films.

71. A. Bergesen and A. M. Greeley, God in the Movies: A Sociological Investigation, New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers, 2000, cover blurb.

72. J. R. May (ed.), Image and Likeness: Religious Visions in American Film Classics, Isaac Hecker Studies in Religion and American Culture, New York: Paulist, 1992, cover blurb.

2. Key Concepts in Film Studies

BRIAN BAKER

This chapter will offer a basic introduction to some of the key concepts used to analyse film, and will treat Cecil B. DeMille’s 1956 film The Ten Commandments as a case study to illustrate ways of ‘reading’ a film. Films make meaning not in one way, but in a plurality of ways. By using one film, and analysing it through a variety of critical approaches, this chapter will hopefully provide a mini-casebook with concrete examples.

1. Mise-en-scene and Narrative

Mdse-en-scene is from the French, literally meaning ‘the fact of putting into the scene’; a term derived from the theatre. It means how the filmed event is staged, in terms of the film frame: physical space, objects, decor, costume, movement and expression of actors, focus and lighting. Reading the mise-en-scene of a him sequence is a kind of visual close reading, paying attention to the way in which the actual composition of the him frame is organized to create meaning.

In The Ten Commandments (1956), the composition of the him frame tends to be fairly static. The him begins with a sequence of static shots: hrst, sunlight illuminating a dark, cloudy sky; second, a blue-coloured, cloudy sky at dawn; third, a line of slaves pulling on a rope leading to a giant Egyptian statue, the frame dominated by red and orange; fourth, a slow zoom onto a baby being laid in a crib, which fades into an interior scene, with low light levels. Although the camera zooms slowly back during this shot (the hfth), the actors stay in the positions we hrst see them in. In the centre of the frame is the old Pharaoh Rameses I, lit against a dark background. To the left are soldiers; to the right, the high priest. The mise- en-scene here expresses the static, hierarchical power and caste structures of ancient Egypt: Pharaoh is in a position of unassailable authority, and though his subordinates offer advice, his central position in the frame signihes his dominance. Throughout the film, De Mille moves the camera very little. The compositions tend to be static, approaching the status of ‘melodramatic and painterly tableaus’,1 or of the religious paintings the film attempts to bring to mind. This is clearest perhaps in the scene of

the first Passover, where Moses, Miriam, Aaron and their family gather around a table, a scene that has the rich, brown tones of ancient varnish. These painterly compositions are not coincidental to the content of The Ten Commandments, of course; not only do they signify that the film selfconsciously places itself in the Western visual tradition of religious art, but also attempts to take on the authority of that art. Curiously, although the film goes on to expose the power and authority of Pharaoh through explicit comparison with Moses, The Ten Commandments assumes a position of authority with regard to its audience. What you watch is not only a spectacular film, it asserts, it is religious art. Its message, therefore, should be accepted without question. We will consider some of the implications of this didacticism later in this chapter.

Another scene that opens itself to close analysis is Moses’ banishment from Egypt. The scene begins with an establishing shot of Rameses (Yul Brynner) standing on a chariot in the background, while soldiers minister to the prisoner Moses (Charlton Heston) who stands in the foreground. The scene is clearly shot in the studio, with a pyramid seen behind through use of ‘blue-screen’ technology. (This process, which films action in front of a blue screen, allows what is filmed to be superimposed on another image, which takes the place of the photographed blue.) High- key lighting plays off the gold that adorns Rameses’s body, but the effect is not of richness or opulence, rather a tinsel-like artificiality. Moses, by contrast, is adorned in the ochre-red Levite cloth, visually echoing the surrounding desert. This sequence is shot using the shot/reverse shot style, which means that if two people are interacting on screen, one faces one way, one the other. It mimics the way we would look from one person to another as they spoke to each other. This is how dialogue is depicted in classical Hollywood style editing. (See Text Box 2.1 for more.) After Heston has been given his robe, and the axle from a chariot as a staff - both of which, and Rameses’s dialogue, indicate that this is a parodic coronation - Heston exits, unusually, forward past the camera, a shadow passing across his face. The film then cuts back to Brynner’s face, and then the next shot is of Heston, standing in a real desert, next to a monumental boundary marker. Moses has walked from the artificiality of Egypt into the reality of the spiritual wilderness. Marc Vernet, in his article ‘Wings of the Desert’, suggests that this is entirely deliberate: ‘The result is parallelism and opposition since De Mille cannot resist contrasting the men aesthetically . . . Nature versus artifice, simplicity versus pride, truth versus trickery, movement versus stasis.’2 Whether this is intended or not, the mise-en-scene of this scene reinforces the symbolic and moral opposition of Egypt and the Hebrews, Rameses and Moses, that the film certainly encodes.

Mise-en-scene analysis has often been used in combination with ‘auteurism’ (a form of criticism which places the film director at the centre

1. Summary of Classical Hollywood Style

• The use of the T8o° line’: an imaginary line drawn through a set. The actors stay on one side, the cameras on the other. This ensures that the background remains constant. (It also hides the fact that on film sets, the room is fabricated and open: there is no ‘fourth wall’.)

• There is continuity of direction: if a character walks left to right across the screen, in the next shot s/he will enter from the left and move to the right.

• Individual characters and their personal actions and choices determine the narrative.

• Motivation for action is as clear and as complete as possible.

• Time is subordinate to these events of personal importance. The plot will order the story to present the character-driven causes and effects most clearly.

• There is a strong tendency to avoid subjective effects, and to maintain the illusion of ‘objective’ reality.

• There will be strong closure and resolution to a narrative. Avoidance (wherever possible) of ‘loose ends’.

of film meaning, suggesting that s/he imposes her or his ‘signature’ on films, resulting in a recurrent use of motifs or themes across the director’s work). In this way, as Pam Cook has suggested, mise-en-scene analysis, ‘whereby detailed description of films is seen to be the basis for criticism’, can become rather untheoretical and subjective, treating auteurist films as ‘great art’ and relying on concepts such as ‘style’ and ‘personal vision’.3 Where mise-en-scene analysis concentrates on the visual and relies on close reading of the visual, analysis of narrative tends to be global and structural. Martin Barker’s recent From Antz to Titanic: Reinventing Film Analysis is an accessible re-evaluation of methods of film analysis, which stems from his reading of a book on film theory in his university library, in which a bored undergrad had written ‘this is pants’!4 Barker’s emphasis is narratological, drawing on the work of David Bordwell, film historian and author of the canonical film text Film Art: An Introduction. Bordwell is what Barker describes as a ‘Formalist’ critic. That is, he is primarily concerned with the way in which films are constructed, and the ways in which the viewer makes sense of the film narrative.

Essentially, Barker follows Bordwell in imagining a film viewer who makes sense of the film largely through narrative, and the success or otherwise of the film experience for the viewer is based on her or his competence in assembling meaning from the film’s chosen materials. Some types of film will assume a far greater knowledge of, or engagement with, film history or film styles as a way of creating meaning (the use of inter- textuality, for instance). For a viewer without this competence the film will inevitably be a less rewarding experience. Barker argues about the relationship between film and viewer: the film creates a role (which Barker calls the ‘implied audience’), which is ‘made up of the sequence and the sum-total of cued responses necessary for participation in the world of the story’,5 and the viewer has to agree to that role and be able to perform it. The ‘cued responses’ include: guessing ahead, forming opinions about characters and events ahead; taking sides, and recognizing the moral codings of certain characters; being puzzled and not trusting the information given; revisiting and reassessing previous moments in the film; responding physically, sensually, emotionally, aesthetically, intellectually; to create a possible shape of the film as a whole, and ask the question, ‘what is this film about?’

The narrative of The Ten Commandments is, of course, ‘about’ the biblical story of Moses and the deliverance of the Hebrews from slavery in Egypt. Therefore, there is a predetermined structure to which the film must adhere. However, as DeMille’s introduction to the film suggests (which we shall look at in more detail later), the story of Moses’ life is incomplete in the Bible itself: therefore, the film-makers turned to ‘ancient texts’ (of varying provenance) by Josephus, Eusebius, Philo and the Midrash, and also to contemporary historical novels. What transpires in the film is a narrative organized around a central conflict between Moses (Charlton Heston) and Rameses (Yul Brynner), the two ‘brothers’, over succession to power, which in ancient Egypt was determined by marriage to the ‘throne princess’ Nefretiri (Anne Baxter). Moses, as a prince of Egypt, Rameses, and Nefretiri are then in a Hollywood ‘love triangle’, encouraging the viewer to understand conflict through personal motivation (see Text Box 2.1 for more details on the classical Hollywood style). The Ten Commandments depicts the events in a personalized, emotive manner to encourage audience empathy and identification. However, in the form of Nefretiri, who can only conceptualize Moses’ actions in terms of love or hatred - thinking he can spare her son from the death of Egypt’s firstborn - understanding the grand spiritual narrative in terms of emotion is revealed as limited and self-deceiving. Where, for Rameses, the gods are the inventions of humankind, and his conflict with Moses understood merely in terms of power and conquest, for Nefretiri God is in one man: Moses. It is only Moses who understands the true forces at work. Therefore, although the film organizes its narratives around archetypal (and romantic) personal conflicts, it seeks to disavow those conflicts in the end in the name of a true understanding of the religious import of the story.

The film has a three-part narrative structure: the times of ignorance, testing and enlightenment for Moses. The first is in Egypt, and can be considered as Moses’ time of unknowing, of his own identity, and of his race and religion (which are the same thing in The Ten Commandments). This is inaugurated by the seventh shot of the film, where Moses’ Hebrew mother Yoshabel (Martha Scott) places Moses in the basket and casts him upon the Nile. He is found by Bithia (Nina Foch), the recently widowed princess of Egypt, who was introduced in the film with a gaggle of young women who talk like sorority girls from 1956. This is Moses’ first ‘deliverance’ (he who will be the ‘deliverer’), the first scene of birth or rebirth. Each scene of ‘rebirth’ leads to a different Moses, and a different section of the film. There are, in fact, three versions of Moses in the film, each identity corresponding to the structural needs of the film. The remainder of the first section leaps over childhood entirely, and concentrates on the love triangle between Moses (Heston), Rameses (Brynner) and Nefretiri (Anne Baxter). When Moses’ Hebrew identity is finally revealed to him, he goes to join the Hebrew slaves, understanding domination and oppression from below, as he had tried to soften it from above as a prince. Finally cast out of Egypt, Moses then wanders in the wilderness, a place of testing: having been intellectually enlightened, he is now ‘purged’. This leads to his second ‘rebirth’. Staggering to an oasis, he passes out; the film cuts to another gaggle of young women, this time Sephora (Yvonne de Carlo), his future wife, and her sisters, watering their flocks by the well. They, like the young women of the palace, also talk like bobbysoxers, wanting a ‘man’. As Bithia ‘prayed for a son’, and was given one, they desire a husband, and one emerges from the undergrowth to drive away the brutish Amalekites who threaten the well: Moses.

This announces the second section of the film, where Moses marries, becomes successful, yet is consumed by religious doubt: why does the God of Abraham turn away from the cries of the Hebrew slaves? Once again, this spiritual or religious journey is read in personal terms: Moses desires a direct conversation with God in order for his faith to be proved. When Moses sees the burning bush, the third scene of deliverance or rebirth (this one from fire rather than water), he hears the voice of God, which is, in fact Heston’s own, slowed down and deepened. He becomes not a man, but Moses the Prophet, ‘more than a man’ as Joshua (John Derek) rightly declares. In this third section, Moses acts as an instrument of God’s will, and is in fact largely effaced as a character in his own right. Heston, never the most expressive of screen actors in any case (a fact that suits him to the epic form), becomes increasingly declamatory in his performance, particularly after his encounter with God at the burning bush. To effect this suppression of Moses ‘the man’ and bring forth Moses ‘more than man’, Heston deploys a rather stiff body posture, and his sight-lines disappear well into the middle distance. As the film progresses, Heston downplays Moses’ humanity. Somewhat like the trajectory of Heston’s own star persona, he turns from man to monument.

2. Stardom and Gender

Gender came to the fore as a central focus of film studies in the 1970s. Laura Mulvey’s ‘Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema’ (1975) changed the field of film studies when it was published, and was the entry of psychoanalytical models into a theorization of what we do when we watch films, using Freud’s model of voyeurism. It was a model that would dominate cutting-edge film theory for the next ten years, largely played out on the pages of the British film journal, Screen. Mulvey’s main point was that there is no space for female pleasure when watching a ‘Classical Hollywood’ film. Her thinking is in binaries, but the central one to remember is in who looks: active = male, passive = female. The male looks, and the female is looked at. The male is the subject, the female is the object. Film spectatorship is gendered, repeating the power positions of patriarchal culture. The female body, under this theoretical model, came to be theorized as being objectified, made into a commodity. Mulvey states: ‘In a world ordered by sexual imbalance, pleasure in looking has been split between active/male and passive/female. The determining male gaze projects its phantasy on to the female figure which is styled

2. Laura Mulvey’s Theory of the Gaze

Mulvey suggests that there are three ‘looks’:

• that of the camera towards that which is being filmed (called the pro- filmic event);

• that of the audience towards the screen when watching the film;

• that of the characters within the film towards each other.

In each of these, the male position is dominant. The ‘gaze’ is about power relations as much as it is about desire.

The look or ‘gaze’ of the camera stages and films the event to emphasize the pleasure of the masculine spectator (by shooting the male and female in certain ways).

1. The ‘male’ spectator then identifies with the ‘point-of-view’ offered by the film, which is a masculine one, and is complicit in finding pleasure in what is shown on film (e.g. the image of a woman).

2. The gaze confers power, and the characters within the film world also correspond to this regime: the men look, the women avert their gaze and are looked at.

The power of the masculine position is constantly reinforced. In fact, there is nothing outside it: because the gendered gaze means the female body is displayed to be looked at, female spectators derive no pleasure. To do so, they have to adopt the ‘masculine’ position, and (masochistically) embrace the painful as pleasurable.

accordingly.’6 The female figure, Mulvey argues, is styled, signifying patriarchal/consumer society’s destructive control over female body image. The female body therefore becomes the object, the commodity or spectacle which is then consumed.

In The Ten Commandments, clearly Anne Baxter is the medium of exchange, through which the conflict between Rameses and Moses can be expressed. Although the body of Nefretiri controls succession, she herself cannot succeed: her role is to produce (or deliver) the next Pharaoh through marriage. She is a token of exchange in a game of power, and the way Anne Baxter is presented in the film, ‘mediated by all the stereotypes of the Hollywood femme fatale’’ as Cohan puts it, indicates her status as object rather than desiring subject.7 Either she is dressed in gold, the high- key lighting signifying her body as an object of display; or she is sometimes robed in diaphanous silks, again indicating eroticism and desire: the desire of others rather than simply her own. It is instructive that Nefretiri’s seduction of Moses fails, not once but twice, in repeated scenes on her barge: once when she takes Moses from the mud-pit, then later when Moses returns to Egypt as God’s instrument. The principle of female desire, coding non-patriarchal succession, must be overcome by Moses and his patriarchal will. Cohan notes that Egypt is ‘a “feminized” state in contrast to the federation of patriarchal Hebrew tribes’, because of Nefretiri’s key role in the succession (who she marries will be Pharaoh). However, the film also seeks to contain the historical fact of non-paternal succession by making her ‘the victor’s reward, handed over from father to son to define generational continuity as a homosocial exchange’.8 ‘Homosocial’ is a term that has achieved some currency in the field of gender studies, and particularly studies of masculinity, to describe bonds and relationships between men, which disavow homosexuality but contain a disruptive, if repressed, element of homoeroticism.

Steve Neale’s ‘Masculinity as Spectacle’ (1983), also published in Screen, also discovers the homoerotic within the homosocial. It explored the psychoanalytical model of the Mulvey article to discuss screen masculinities. He wrote that

in a heterosexual and patriarchal society, the male body cannot be marked explicitly as the erotic object of another male look: that look must be motivated in some other way, its erotic component repressed. . . . We see male bodies stylized and fragmented by close-ups, but our look is not direct, it is heavily mediated by the looks of the characters involved. And those looks are marked not by desire, but rather fear, or hatred, or aggression.9

In both Mulvey’s and Neale’s articles, the model of gendered spectatorship (the male looks), has, as its result, a gendering of the object of desire.

Because the look is masculine, in a patriarchal (and homophobic) culture, the possibility for the male look supporting desire for a male body is cancelled. Any (male) desiring gaze is represented as wounding the male body; desire is repressed and channelled into competition, violence and wounds.

Kenneth MacKinnon reworked Mulvey’s article to rethink images of male beauty. He notes that Mulvey’s article ‘also has its uses in impassioned debate well beyond Film or Media Studies’, a project that he is involved in himself.10 He explains Mulvey’s concept of the fetishization of the female body as follows: ‘the female star is “overvalued”, made into a breathtakingly beautiful sight by means of an armoury of effects, such as lighting, gauzes, make-up’.11 Where MacKinnon distances himself from Mulvey’s argument is in Mulvey’s insistence that because the male is reluctant to gaze upon the male figure, it does not happen. He argues:

What is surprising is that the male object could seem to be of such recent invention. He has been there throughout the history of Classical sculpture, of fine art. How can a male be an object if he is so clearly a subject?, it could be counterposed. This is essentially what Laura Mulvey asks rhetorically about the male on the cinema screen. He has the power to initiate action, to create the narrative on which dominant cinema depends. He is clearly, unequivocally, a subject. In diegetic terms, yes, but every character on screen is also an object of the cinema spectator’s gaze.12

MacKinnon suggests that the theorization of ‘disavowal’ of the male gaze, which displaces homoerotic looking at the male figure onto culturally sanctioned behaviour (like sport or combat), still holds in contemporary culture.

This combat is symbolic in The Ten Commandments, but still, like the gladiatorial combat in other epics, sanctions the display of male bodies seemingly without the disturbing element of homoeroticism. In his book Masked Men, Steven Cohan draws upon the work of gender-oriented theorists of film such as Mulvey and Neale, and also the work of Richard Dyer, whose book Stars helped focus upon the ways in which stars and stardom are constructed in film.13 In his reading of The Ten Commandments, Cohan suggests that the star personae of Heston and Brynner are key to an understanding of the film’s binary oppositions, between freedom and tyranny, the Hebrews and Egypt, patriarch and tyrant. Cohan goes further, to insist that it is in the very bodies of the two stars that this difference is played out: ‘Heston and Brynner objectify the American/ alien opposition which ideologically governs the film’s attitudes toward “Hebrew” and “Egyptian.”’14 Cohan suggests that Brynner’s overt sexuality is bound up with the ‘Orientalist’ codings of his persona: his baldness, his ‘mysterious’ origins (Russian, Gypsy, Swiss), and the way in which his body is displayed in The Ten Commandments and in The King and I, which was released the same year, 1956. While not necessarily feminized, as Mulvey’s theory would suggest, Brynner’s body is sexualized, made available as an erotic object. By contrast, Charlton Heston’s ‘monumental’ physique is made much of in the film, and becomes synonymous with the epic genre itself. His is a powerful and patriarchal, rather than a sexual, body, however. (Heston also notably starred in Ben-Hur (1959), which opened as the long run of The Ten Commandments began to wind down.) ‘Heston’s close identification with the epic genre,’ notes Cohan, ‘solidified his emerging star image as a patriarchal male.’15 The conflict between Moses and Rameses, noted above, is in part played out through the gazes of the two men, and in the display of their own bodies. One is sexual, hairless, dangerous, Oriental; the other patriarchal, bearded, monumental, Western. In other films of the epic genre, such as Spartacus (i960), Neale’s ‘wounding’ thesis is much more apparent, but even in The Ten Commandments, Heston must undergo his ordeal of purging and bodily punishment before he can emerge as the instrument of God.

3. Hollywood and the Cinema of the Spectacle

Tom Gunning, a noted film historian, has recently complicated what has been regarded as the ‘history’ of cinema. In the classical conception, early cinema (what Gunning called the ‘cinema of attractions’) is a primitive cinema, one which has yet to develop the narrative strategies of later filmmaking. In the films of Edison and the Lumiere brothers, the spectacle of the cinema (cinema as an experience or event, the primacy of wonder at what the spectator is seeing) was central to its early development. However, the emphasis in film history on the narrative elements of film developed later has led to a downgrading of the spectacular elements, particularly in film criticism and theory.

In her book Cecil B. DeMille and American Culture: The Silent Era, Sumiko Higashi argues that DeMille, and the role of spectacle, plays a key role in the ‘legitimating’ of cinema for a middle-class audience in America. DeMille, Higashi argues, used the ‘genteel’ form of the domestic stage melodrama to bridge the gap between cinema and theatre; and in his determination to make film successful, exploited the elements of spectacle already present in American popular culture: World’s Fair, department stores, museums and civic pageantry such as parades. DeMille’s films, she argues, have an investment in spectacle that goes beyond mere ‘entertainment’, or cinema as an event in itself. Spectacles such as DeMille’s original (1923) The Ten Commandments, which were enormously expensive undertakings, ‘contributed to the evolution of filmmaking as commodification in an Orientalist form, that is, the exercise of hypnotic power through the sheer accumulation of objects displayed as spectacle’.16 DeMille’s biblical epics, according to Higashi, are both expressions of American capitalism’s conspicuous consumption - the high cost of a DeMille epic was widely known, and part of its ‘event’ status - and a quasi-imperialist display of ‘exotic’, therefore titillating, objects and action.

By the time DeMille came to remake his own film in 1956, for Paramount, the Hollywood studio system was in a time of change, if not quite - yet - crisis. The biggest challenges to studio dominance came from two directions: first, the anti-trust legislation that, in 1948, had forced the studios to divest themselves of their movie-theatre chains, depriving them of their major revenue stream; and second, the increasing popularity of television. Technological developments in the 1950s have often been seen in the light of the latter. To differentiate its product from television, it is argued, Hollywood emphasized the spectacular nature of its product, through Technicolor (television still largely being black-and-white in the fifties); through widescreen processes such as Panavision, CinemaScope, Todd-AO and the process used to shoot The Ten Commandments, Vista- Vision; and later, improvements in sound, such as stereo and Dolby sound. As Pam Cook has pointed out, however, Paramount was also at the forefront of exploiting other media to complement its film-making operation. It invested in the CBS radio network in the late 1920s, for which DeMille himself hosted and directed the ‘Lux Radio Theater’, it bought television stations in Chicago and Los Angeles, and involved itself in video production, to the extent of planning theatrical video projection.17 The release of The Ten Commandments in 1956 highlights the kind of efforts the studios made to maximize its profits. It was originally released in New York and Los Angeles on a ‘roadshow’ basis, a travelling event in itself, before being shown across the country. (The massive ‘opening weekends’ of contemporary blockbuster releases, where a film opens at a thousand screens or more, were an invention of the 1970s, particularly with The Godfather and Jams.) By the first anniversary of its release, The Ten Commandments had been seen by over 22 million people in the United States; by the end of the decade, when the film had been in continuous release for over three years, it had been seen by 98 million people.18 Pam Cook states that the film grossed an ‘astounding’ $34.2 million.19

For DeMille, spectacle and narrative are not in opposition: cinematic narrative is spectacle. Brooks Landon has written:

[Gunning] reminds us that the classical style codified by Bordwell, Staiger and Thompson in The Classical Hollywood Cinema was not just the development of primitive cinema, a refinement of its crude attempts at narrative, but the development of one kind of primitive cinema, while the non-narrative focus of what Gunning calls the ‘cinema of attractions’ represents another kind of primitive cinema, whose traditions continued even after the codification of the classical style.20

Landon suggests that this emphasis on spectacle, on wonder, has been inherited by the science fiction film, and particularly in science fiction films special effects sequences. The same argument can be made for the ‘epic’. The effects sequences in the 1956 The Ten Commandments are an integral part of its self-presentation as an object of awe, a monumental spectacle. Geoff King, in his book New Hollywood Cinema: an introduction, suggests that the use of spectacle sequences has changed in contemporary cinema. In classical Hollywood narratives, the action flows ‘a curve, rising gradually, the rate at which it rises accelerating in the latter stages as the film moves towards a climax’.21 In contemporary cinema, however, ‘spectacular moments . . . are both larger and more frequent, fragmenting the narrative’.22 If we look at the spectacle sequences in The Ten Commandments, we can see that they are quite regularly spaced. The first occurs when Moses arrives at court, where tributes from Ethiopia are displayed, just as in Higashi’s argument, for the audience’s visual consumption. The second comes when Moses builds the treasure-city for Sethi: a huge obelisk is spectacularly set in place. These are both in the first part of the narrative. At the end of what we saw earlier was the second part of the narrative, Moses encounters the burning bush and hears the voice of God. The third part does indeed show a ‘rising curve’: there are the plagues of Egypt, notably the burning hail and the death of the firstborn, then the spectacular parting of the Red Sea, then, finally, the writing of the tablets, intercut with DeMille’s signature ‘orgy’ spectacle surrounding the Golden Calf and its destruction. The function of these spectacle scenes is, as in other films, to cause excitement in the viewer, but particularly in the Red Sea and Mount Sinai sequences, to instil a sense of wonder. The ‘cinema of attractions’ here is deployed in the service of quasi-religious feeling. As Cohan has suggested, The Ten Commandments offers itself as an ‘ersatz religious event’.23 This is pointed out to the viewer right at the beginning of the film, in the titles: ‘Those who see this Motion Picture - Produced and Directed by cecil b. demille - will make a pilgrimage over the very ground that Moses trod more than 3,000 years ago.’ To experience the film is to go on a pilgrimage, with Moses and the Hebrews, a rather grandiose, but significant, claim.

The shape of the film is worthy of further comment. We have seen that the narrative falls into three significant parts. However, the film was actually shown in two halves, with an intermission, as its running length is three hours and thirty-nine minutes. Unusually, the film also has a formal musical structure that announces its ‘epic’ status: it opens with an ‘Overture’, has an ‘Entr’acte’ after the intermission, and closes with ‘Exit Music’. The only other contemporary film to use the same devices was David Lean’s similarly ‘epic’ Lawrence of Arabia (1962), the overture to which was played in the darkened movie theatre before the film began, as was the entr’acte after the intermission. Such overt demonstrations of ‘high-culture’ influence indicate to the audience that The Ten Commandments was certainly not television, though, as Sumiko Higashi points out, it is the continued showing of the film on television, at Easter and Passover in the USA, which dominates its contemporary consumption as a spectacle.24

4. The Cold War Context

The Ten Commandments was released in 1956, the era of the Cold War between the United States and the Soviet Union, three years after the end of the war in Korea, the same year as Third World nationalism began to make itself felt, the same year as the Suez crisis. (As Cohan notes, the location shooting for the film was originally negotiated with King Farouk, then had to be negotiated with his successor President Naguib (who deposed the king in a coup), then finally President Nasser, who only allowed filming to continue as Egypt needed the money. The film was in post-production when President Nasser nationalized the Suez Canal and precipitated the unsuccessful Franco-British invasion.)25 Although The Ten Commandments is not ‘about’ conflict in the Middle East-though its focus upon the Hebrews/Israel as God’s chosen people, and the destruction of its Egyptian/Arabic foes, provided convenient propaganda - it most certainly is a political film. This is clearly signified by the short filmed introduction that was shown before the beginning of The Ten Commandments. This introduction features DeMille himself, who stands on a stage, in front of silvery curtains, gripping the microphone stand in the same way that Moses will grip his staff - rather than like that other sensation of 1956, Elvis Presley. DeMille speaks directly to camera, assuming a position of authority, one granted by his own status in Hollywood, and as the ‘Producer and Director’ of the film. DeMille’s own voice is also used to ‘narrate’ the film proper, conferring more authority to the film’s narrative. The didacticism of the film as a whole is revealed in DeMille’s address; and the terms in which the audience should understand the film are set out explicitly. DeMille says:

The theme of this picture is whether man ought to be ruled by God’s Law, or whether they are to be ruled by the whims of a dictator like Rameses. Are men the property of the state, or free souls under God? The same battle continues throughout the world today.

Here, then we find binary oppositions, between freedom and tyranny, between God’s Law and dictatorship, between the ‘free soul’ (or individual) and the state. In 1956, the message could hardly have been clearer: Moses is a proto-American who enjoins Joshua to ‘Go, proclaim liberty’ in his last words at the end of the film. The mission of biblical Israel is paralleled in the American mission of spreading liberty and combating dictatorship. For Rameses, read Stalin or Khrushchev. This is the overt ‘message’ of the film, at least. If we look at the narrative in more detail, however, this rhetoric of ‘liberty’ is somewhat disrupted by the depiction of the ‘people’. On the journey out of Israel, although Moses has delivered them from slavery, when Rameses’s chariots seem to pin them against the Red Sea, Dathan almost manages to get the Hebrews to stone Moses to death. ‘Ten times have you seen the miracles of the Lord,’ declaims Moses, ‘but still you have no faith.’ Again, when Moses is absent on the mountain, receiving the tablets, Dathan (Edward G. Robinson) rouses the Hebrews to ‘sin a great sin’ by orgiastic behaviour and worshipping the Golden Calf. DeMille’s voice-over characterizes the Hebrews as ‘children’. In the rhetoric of the film, what they are missing is a strong father. Although the ‘theme’ of the film is the conflict between liberty and tyranny, according to DeMille’s introduction, the film actually displays great anxiety about the ‘people’: they quickly turn into the ‘mob’, prey to a demagogue like Dathan or weak when left to their own devices. The Ten Commandments is profoundly undemocratic, even anti-democratic: it valorizes the patriarch, Moses, without whom the Hebrews would be in chains. While seeming to critique the ‘dictatorial’ power of Pharaoh, its alternative is a patriarchal authoritarianism.

5. Genre

Genre is at once a seemingly simple means of categorizing and analysing films - the musical, the film noir, Western, the ‘epic’ - and also an area fraught with difficulty, for genres are not fixed, and neither are their boundaries impermeable. Genres tend to have their own productive histories, and some can be understood through the deployment of certain imagery or iconography - particularly in genres such as the Western or the gangster film - or in the recurrence of certain preoccupations or themes. Some genres, such as melodrama, shift their meaning over time: in the first decades of the twentieth century, for example, ‘melodrama’ in Hollywood was today’s term ‘drama’, without the connotations of excessive emotionalism or stereotyping associated with it now; ‘comedy’ seems to have little in the way of commonly identifiable structures, motifs or themes. Genres also transform over time, and seem to gain a kind of productive dominance in some periods while almost disappearing in others (the fate of the Hollywood musical, once accounting for a quarter of all Hollywood films, is instructive). Genres are not timeless, and recent genre criticism tends to historicize films rather than create rigid templates for categorizing them. There is enough diversity within the ‘epic’ form, for instance, to problematize any preconceptions about their narratives or their thematic preoccupations.

The Ten Commandments is only one of many ‘epics’, on biblical or Roman themes, that were made between the end of World War Two and the decline of the studio system in the 1960s. From DeMille’s own Samson and Delilah (1949), to The Robe (1953, the first film released in CinemaScope), The Ten Commandments (1956), Ben-Hur (1959), King of Kings (1961) and the studio-crippling Cleopatra (1963), lavishly expensive spectacles were made by studios to try to keep the audiences in the movie theatres, in a spiralling game of escalating production costs and (hopefully) escalating profits. DeMille himself died in 1959, and the studio system that had borne the weight of his extravagance perished soon after. In a sense, DeMille created his own genre, the ‘sin and sanctimony’ spectacles that put some religious varnish on scenes of monumental production and orgiastic (and exoticized) sexuality. DeMille was careful to promote himself as an ‘auteur’, the director as originator and controller of the film, but most other ‘epic’ films tend to erase the marks of auteurship, even with such noted film-makers as Stanley Kubrick for Spartacus (i960) and Anthony Mann for The Fall of the Roman Empire (1964). The form has been recently revived with Gladiator (2000), directed by Ridley Scott, and 2004’s Troy. In later films in the ‘epic’ mode, religion tends to be sidelined in favour of politics or simply personal narratives of romance or revenge. Between the end of the studio system, and the rise of CGI (Computer Generated Imagery) technologies, ‘epic’ spectacles were also prohibitively expensive. Now the Colosseum in Rome can be generated on computer, rather than a facsimile built on the studio backlot or elsewhere, ‘epic’ cinema once more becomes a productive reality, and sits well in contemporary Hollywood’s economic reliance on the summer blockbuster and the ‘event’ or spectacle film (see ‘What is Genre?’, p. 152).

6. Conclusion

This chapter has outlined some key concepts that have informed the study of film over the last four decades. In the practice of studying film, though, critical approaches now tend to be hybrid rather than discrete. Theories of the gaze can be used in star studies, genre can be analysed with mise-en- scene. As titles of film essay collections like Reinventing Film Studies and From Antz to Titanic: Reniventing Film Analysis might suggest, the field has become less one of theoretical or ideological contestation and more one of plurality. There is now a strong historicist bent to the study of film, whether it is national or institutional film histories, star studies, audience studies, or the reclamation of ‘lost’ films or directors, or revisions of genre histories. This is not to argue, however, that film studies is in a state of moribund consensus. As this collection of essays demonstrates, new avenues of enquiry may be opened to illuminate ‘art’ or classic cinema from Europe, as well as popular film from Hollywood and elsewhere.

Further Reading

The Ten Commandments - Hollywood Biblical Epics and Genre

Steven Cohan, Masked Men: Masculinity and the movies in the Fifties, Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1997.

Jared Gardner, ‘Covered Wagons and Decalogues: Paramounts’s Myth of Origins’, Yale Journal of Criticism, Fall 2.000,13(2.): 361-89.

Sumiko Higashi, Cecil B. DeMille and American Culture: The Silent Era, Berkeley, Los Angeles and London: University of California Press, 1994.

Alan Nadel, ‘God’s Law and the Widescreen: The Ten Commandments as Cold War Epic’, PMLA, May 1993, 108(3): 415-30.

Steve Neale, Genre and Hollywood, London: Routledge, 2.000.

Erica Sheen, ‘The Ten Commandments meets The Prince of Egypt: Biblical Adaptations and Globals Politics in the 1990s’, Polygraph, 2.000, 12: 85-99.

Andrew G. Tooze, ‘Moses and Reel Exodus’, Journal of Religion and Film, April 2003, 7(1), 51 pars.

Marc Vernet, ‘Wings of the Desert; or, The Invisible Superimpositions’, Velvet Light Trap, Fall 1991, 28: 65-72.

Mise-en-scene and Narrative

Martin Barker, From Antz to Titanic: Reinventing Film Analysis, London: Pluto, 2000.

David Bordwell and Kristin Thompson, Film Art: An Introduction. 7th International edn, New York: McGraw-Hill, 2003.

Pam Cook, The Cinema Book, 2nd edn, London; BFI, 1999.

James Monaco, How to Read a Film, 3rd edn, Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2000.

Spectacle and Special Effects

Scott Bukatman, Matters of Gravity: Special Effects and Supermen in the zoth century, Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003.

Geoff King, New Hollywood Cinema: An introduction, London: LB. Tauris, 2002.

Annette Kuhn (ed.), Alien Zone II: The Spaces of Science Fiction Cinema, London: Routledge, 2000.

Brooks Landon, ‘Diegetic or Digital? The Convergence of Science Fiction literature and Science-fiction film in Hypermedia’, in Annette Kuhn (ed.), Alien Zone II: The Spaces of Science Fiction Cinema, London: Routledge, 2000, pp. 31—49.

Christine Gledhill and Linda Williams (eds), Reinventing Film Studies, London: Arnold, 2000.

Tom Gunning, ‘“Animated Pictures”: tales of cinema’s forgotten future, after 100 years of film’, in Christine Gledhill and Linda Williams (eds), Reinventing Film Studies, London: Arnold, 2000, pp. 316-31.

Stars and Gender

Richard Dyer, Stars, London: BFI, 1998.

Paul MacDonald, The Star System, London: Wallflower, 2000.

Kenneth MacKinnon, ‘After Mulvey: Male Erotic Objectification’, in Michelle Aaron (ed.), The Body’s Perilous Pleasures: Dangerous Desires and Contemporary Culture, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1999, pp. 13-29.

Laura Mulvey, ‘Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema’, Screen, 16, 3 (1975): 6-18. Reprinted in Mandy Merck (ed.), The Sexual Subject: A Screen Reader in Sexuality, London and New York: Routledge, 1992, pp. 22-34.

Steve Neale, ‘Masculinity as Spectacle: reflections on men and mainstream cinema’, Screen 24, 6 (1983). Reprinted in Steven Cohan and Ina Rae Hark (eds), Screening the Male: Exploring Masculinities in Hollywood Cinema, London and New York: Routledge, 1993, pp. 9-20.

Notes

1. Steven Cohan, Masked Men: Masculinity and the movies in the Fifties, Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1997, p. 148.

2. Marc Vernet, ‘Wings of the Desert; or, The Invisible Superimpositions’, Velvet Light Trap 28, Fall 1991, pp. 65-72. (67).

3. Pam Cook, The Cinema Book, London: BFI, 1999, p. 269.

4. Martin Barker, From Antz to Titanic: Reinventing Film Analysis, London: Pluto, 2000.

5. Barker, From Antz to Titanic, p. 48.

6. Laura Mulvey, ‘Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema’, Screen, 16, 3 (1975); reprinted in The Sexual Subject: A Screen Reader in Sexuality, London and New York: Routledge, 1992, pp. 22-34 (27)-

7. Cohan, Masked Men, pp. 143-4.

8. Cohan, Masked Men, pp. 142, 143.

9. Steve Neale, ‘Masculinity as Spectacle: reflections on men and mainstream cinema’, Screen 24, 6 (1983). Reprinted in Steven Cohan and Ina Rae Hark (eds), Screening the Male: Exploring Masculinities in Hollywood Cinema, London and New York: Routledge, 1993, pp. 9-20 (14, 18)

10. Kenneth MacKinnon, ‘After Mulvey: Male Erotic Objectification’, in Michelle Aaron (ed.), The Body’s Perilous Pleasures: Dangerous Desires and Contemporary Culture, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1999, pp. 13-29 (13).

11. MacKinnon, ‘After Mulvey’, p. 28.

12. MacKinnon, ‘After Mulvey’, p. 23.

13. Dyer, Richard, Stars, London: BFI, 1998.

14. Cohan, Masked Men, p. 150.

15. Cohan, Masked Men, p. 156.

16. Sumiko Higashi, Cecil B. DeMille and American Culture: The Silent Era, Berkeley, Los Angeles and London: University of California Press, 1994, p. 201.

17. Cook, The Cinema Book, p. 15.

18. Cohan, Masked Men, pp. 122-4.

19. Cook, The Cinema Book, p. 16.

20. Brooks Landon, ‘Diegetic or Digital? The Convergence of Science Fiction literature and Science-fiction film in Hypermedia’, in Annette Kuhn (ed.), Alien Zone II: the spaces of science fiction cinema, London: Routledge, 2000, pp. 31-49, p. 33.

21. Geoff King, New Hollywood Cinema: An introduction, London: LB. Tauris, 2002, p. 185.

22. King, New Hollywood Cinema, p. 187.

23. Cohan, Masked Men, p. 129.

24. Higashi, Cecil B. DeMille and American Culture, pp. 202-3.

25. Cohan, Masked Men, p. 138.

Part 2

Case Studies - Films and Film-makers

3- Shot, Burned, Restored:

Dreyer’s La Passion de Jeanne d’Arc

MELANIE J. WRIGHT

1. Introduction

This essay comments on Carl Theodor Dreyer’s La Passion de Jeanne d’Arc (The Passion of Joan of Arc, 1928) and more generally on religion and film (for a short biography of Dreyer, see Text Box 3.1). I have chosen Dreyer’s Jeanne for several reasons. Its subject matter is the ecclesiastical trial and death of Jeanne d’Arc (1412-31) who believed that she had been divinely commissioned to save France, fought the English and their

1. Carl Theodor Dreyer

Carl Th. Dreyer (1889-1968) was born in Copenhagen. After a brief career as a journalist, he became a writer and director of films.

As a director, Dreyer has a reputation for experimental visual style: while La Passion de Jeanne d’Arc (1928) is characterized by repeated cuts, the later Or det ([The Word] 1955) uses long panning shots that extend over several minutes. Also running through Dreyer’s work is a preoccupation with religion. In such films as Vredens Dag ([Day of Wrath] 1943), Vampyr (1932) and Priistankan ([The Parson’s Widow] 1920) he explores themes including individual faith versus communal intolerance, miracles, martyrdom and witchcraft. In the aftermath of the Holocaust, Dreyer also planned (but did not make) a Jesus film, which he hoped would portray Jesus as an observant Jew and thereby help combat antisemitism.

Some critics regard Dreyer’s interest in the socio-political aspects of religion as reductionist. However, it is essentially an argument for the unity of the natural and the supernatural (rather than a demythologizing of the latter). Thus Ordet portrays with sympathy the lived faith of loving wife and mother Inger - preferring her Christianity to the abstract theological debates that divide her family and have driven her brother-in-law insane, and strikingly depicting her resurrection from the coffin in realistic terms.

Donald Skoller (ed.), Dreyer in Double Reflection (New York: E.P. Dutton, 1973) is a helpful anthology of Dreyer’s writings about cinema, and several of his films are available on DVD from the British Film Institute. Burgundian allies, and was burnt as a heretic-witch; but was subsequently rehabilitated, and ultimately canonized in 1920. Moreover, Jeanne was made by a director who used words like ‘spirit’ and ‘soul’ when talking about film and whose style is often characterized as ‘transcendental’ or ‘purified’.1

There are comparatively few detailed studies of Jeanne. This is partly due to the mythology surrounding Dreyer, ‘whose work everyone reveres and no one bothers to see’.2 But there are other reasons for the film’s neglect. Notoriously, its fate has been almost as remarkable as that of the warrior-peasant herself. Not long after the Copenhagen premier in April 1928, fire destroyed the film’s negative. A replacement was also lost. For many years the most widely available version of Jeanne was one based on a poor print of the second negative, which (to Dreyer’s chagrin) had been augmented with medieval iconography and music in the 1950s. There were more reputable, but differing, versions in archives in Paris, New York and London. In the 1980s, the Danish Film Museum constructed another print, using material from the other versions. In simple terms, then, studying Jeanne has been difficult, because of the ‘instability’ of the film text itself. Which version - if any - was the ‘original’ or ‘authentic’ film?3

This situation altered in 1984, when the Norwegian Film Institute opened some canisters that had been discovered by a cleaner in an Oslo psychiatric hospital some three years earlier. In a discovery paralleling Joan of Arc’s resurrection as French national heroine, they revealed a print of Dreyer’s first negative, in its original wrapping, and bearing the 1928 censor’s seal of approval.4 Just how the print found its way to the asylum remains uncertain. What is clear is that the discovery made Jeanne newly accessible to viewers.

While the problems associated with the copies of Jeanne circulating pre-1985 impeded study, much of the growth of religion and film studies has taken place since 1990, by which time the practical hindrances to research had been overcome. Are there then other factors leading practitioners to shy away from Jeanne? Arguably, much film analysis that takes place in departments of religion over-concentrates on narrative, and largely neglects to engage film qua film. But elements of Jeanne present stumbling blocks to such hermeneutics. Jeanne is a silent film, and silent films are a distinct art form with their own styles of production, exhibition and viewing. Jeanne's consequent distance from the conventions of contemporary Hollywood can make it challenging to study, in the absence of some critical awareness of film practice. Therefore, the challenge of working with Jeanne may serve as a test case for methodologies in religion and film. The otherness of its conventions lends urgency to the requirement for something more than narrative exposition. If our discipline cannot grapple with ‘the affective film par excellence',5 it is scarcely worth pursuing.

2. Analysis

Increasingly, scholars call for a ‘dialogue’ between the worlds of religion and film analysis. But this is rarely achieved. Religion scholars often lack expertise in the analysis of visual culture; for its part, film studies has largely been dominated by theoretical frameworks that assume secularity as a given. Cultural studies offers one space where religion scholars can engage with film on more equal terms, in which the exchange of insight is not envisaged as a one-way process from film studies to religion. Building on older film studies agendas and methodologies, and drawing inspiration from anthropology and the study of religions, it does not automatically privilege the secular, nor does it exclude the possibility that those with an expertise in religious studies may bring to film distinctive and worthwhile competencies and insights.6

In simple terms, traditional film studies looks at the film industry, film production and the technologies associated with those activities. To these, cultural studies adds a range of concerns including: an interest in the marketing, distribution, exhibition and reception of film; questions raised by the new social movements (e.g. the feminist and gay liberation movements). In short, it is a form of film criticism characterized by a heightened interest in the location of film in particular political, social and historical moments. In applying this approach to Jeanne, this essay addresses four areas: narrative, style, cultural and religious context, and reception. This atomization is not without limitations: viewers do not, of course, experience films as a series of discrete dimensions. I trust, however, that the approach is justifiable on the grounds of clarity, and from time to time highlight where aspects intersect.

Film Narrative

When La Passion de Jeanne d'Arc appeared, Joan’s story was a national preoccupation in France. Two accounts of her life are significant for Dreyer’s narrative. The first is a critical edition of the trial account, published by Pierre Champion in 192.1. It portrayed her as a pious peasant, and cast the Sorbonne theologian-priests who condemned her as careerists. The second is a 192.5 biography by Joseph Delteil, who asserted the reality of Joan’s commissioning voices, her virginity and her deserved sainthood.7 The Societe Generale des Films, which commissioned Dreyer, bought the rights to Delteil’s biography, and he wrote a continuity for the film. Dreyer rejected it, preferring Champion’s work, and employing him as a consultant. In addition to these accounts, there was a centuries’ old tradition of re-presenting Joan in art.

One of the dangers in approaching a work like Jeanne, which handles a popular historical figure, is the temptation to evaluate the film not on its own terms, but against what we feel we already ‘know’ of the ‘facts’. This strategy is problematic; it fails to recognize the nature of film and perhaps of history itself. Yet in the case of Jeanne, Dreyer invites the viewer to relate the image to that which lies beyond. It is therefore appropriate to compare the film to the written texts.

Jeanne opens with a shot of the trial transcript, and at various points throughout the film the scribe appears writing or carrying this record of events. (For example, he sits in Joan’s cell during her interrogation, and is in the cemetery when she signs the abjuration document.) This repeated reference to the book is sometimes seen as an implicit argument for film’s historicity - Dreyer’s claim to show the events as they were recorded. But conversely, the motif may be regarded as Dreyer’s acknowledgement of the film’s pre-text:

The [opening] shot is emblematic: we come to a familiar tale, equipped with familiar knowledge. Jeanne’s peasant ancestry, her religious impulses, her military fervor, and her heroic death: Dreyer assumes that we know all this, takes it as the pre-text of his film, and frees the narrative of an expository apparatus.8

Dreyer was striving for realism in Jeanne - but it is a realism that locates authenticity in the evocation of the animating spirit of characters and moments, rather than in the replication of detail. For Dreyer, ‘Realism, in itself, is not art... I try to force the realities into a form of simplification and abbreviation in order to reach what I will call psychological realism.'9

This sense that for Dreyer, an authentic narrative is not necessarily factually reliable, is reinforced by closer analysis of Jeanne. Most obviously, the film attends only to the trial, not to the military campaigns, nor to Joan’s childhood. This cuts across the dominant trends in Joan iconography, which typically showed her as the embodiment of holy simplicity, or as an equestrian soldier. Dreyer also compresses the lengthy trial process into a single day, and locates all the film’s action at various points within a single set. In this respect, he is influenced by conceptions of drama originating with Aristotle’s Poetics and revived by Ibsen and Strindberg, whose work he reviewed when employed as a newspaper drama critic. (The time allowed for the action of a neo-classical tragedy was usually deemed to be 24 hours; the place the stage represented was restricted to points within a single larger area such as a city or palace.) This appeal to classical form further reinforces the argument that Dreyer sought a non-imitative realism. Aristotle’s ‘unities’ of time, place and form were intended to aid the creation of art true to the realities of human nature and experience. They were, to echo Pope and Hurd, ‘nature methodized’.10

Dreyer’s trial retains several features prominent in the medieval transcripts. Joan is questioned on issues such as her adoption of male dress, and she offers a confounding response to the judges’ efforts to manoeuvre her into declaring herself to be in a state of grace (a heresy): ‘If I am, may God keep me there. If I am not, may God grant it to me.’ Dreyer also depicts Joan’s bleeding to lower a fever, though omits the cause of the historical Joan’s sickness, a meal of carp.11 Instead, Joan’s collapse follows an episode in which she is threatened with torture. This presentation would have resonated with audiences in the 1920s, when the human sciences (for example, Freudian psychoanalysis) were offering new, psychological accounts of illness, and sometimes pathologized the religious adherent.

Likewise, Dreyer ‘re-creates’ Joan’s recantation, in a way that some viewers found indefensible, but which resolves inconsistencies in the medieval accounts, which are unclear about whether Joan realized that the retraction she signed stated that she had lied about her voices, and was guilty of deception. It is also uncertain whether Cauchon, a prime mover in the proceedings, wished to help Joan, or sought to manipulate her, knowing that she would renege on her decision and become a relapsed heretic, whom he could hand over for execution.12 In the film, ambiguities are swept aside. Joan signs the recantation in extremis: recently bled and in a weakened state, she gives way after a priest taunts her with the host.

While the narrative of Jeanne is reworked to transform a chaotic and confused series of events into a unified drama, and the bleeding and recantation are recast in simplified but powerful terms, key aspects of the conflict between the historical Joan of Arc and her trial judges are absent from Dreyer’s film, namely, the witchcraft accusations laid against her, and her self-proclaimed virginity. Joan’s alleged crimes included numerous activities commonly ascribed to witches, so it is interesting to consider why Dreyer chose to ignore this. It may be that he felt the medieval preoccupation with magic was alien to modern audiences, who might appreciate the seriousness of theological and political disputes, but lack empathy for characters who took for granted the reality of diabolical powers. Alternatively, Dreyer saw the witchcraft charges as functions of a larger fear of heterodoxy, simply one manifestation of the underlying ideological conflicts at the heart of Joan’s passion. Seen in this light, they could be omitted from the film, with little violence done to the dynamics (realism) of the drama.

Similarly, Jeanne deals with its heroine’s virginity only in passing, and omits the examinations and sexual violence she experienced.13 For the medieval world, Joan’s intactness was inseparable from her identity as France’s saviour: the devil could not deceive a chaste woman. Why, then, does Dreyer not touch on this topic? Propriety is unlikely to have been the primary motivation; neither Delteil nor Champion avoided the issue. Arguably, threats against Joan’s person are present in Dreyer’s film, but the typological construction of its heroine (see later) leads to their being transposed into the tauntings of the prison guards, which Dreyer suggests she endures with Christ-like patience. Tellingly, the film places the taunting of Joan after her recantation and before its withdrawal - that is, at the same point in the narrative at which the rehabilitation witnesses claimed the historical Joan’s guards tried to rape her.

Film Style

Studying La Passion de Jeanne d’Arc demonstrates the need to attend to style; it is the film’s aesthetics (photography, sets, editing) that are commonly thought to define it as avant-garde rather than popular. More generally, there are specific reasons for its being important for religion and film practitioners to consider style. Subject matter alone does not make a ‘religious film’ (however defined). It is necessary to discern carefully the qualities of Dreyer’s Jeanne that lead many to speak of it in religious or quasi-religious terms.

One approach to film art is the thematic one, which reads stylistic effects as symbolic or metaphoric expressions of narrative themes. This is a satisfying method of ‘reading’ film; it leads to the construction of portable meanings, which can be described in straightforward terms. In religious studies contexts, it is a popular strategy since it allows us to identify works as expressive of specific religious concepts or dilemmas, or as typological representations of religious events or figures (witness the popularity of the quest for Christ-figures in film). But the search for aspects of a film that can: (a) be read as metaphors, and (b) cohere to form a narrative, can lead to the inappropriate forcing of both individual moments and entire films to illustrate preconceived themes, which may exist only in the critic’s mind. Intrinsic, too, to thematic criticism is the danger of confusing the act of ‘translating’ a symbol with understanding, or explaining it. Why might a director use metaphor? (How) have viewers responded to symbolic cues in a film? These are questions the thematic approach cannot tackle adequately.

In reaction against tendencies to privilege those aspects that are linked with narrative continuity and thematic coherence, formalists emphasize the aesthetic (unities and) disunities in a given film. According to this approach, the most discussion-worthy aspects of (for example) Jeanne are those that disrupt viewer expectations of the basic grammar of film - the structuring of shot and cut. The fundamental emphases of the film are perceptual contradiction and discontinuity. Thus according to Bordwell, Dreyer’s goal in Jeanne is to ‘withhold the smoothly flowing pleasure of viewing’, to make it hard for audiences to consume his art.14

Again, there is some appeal in this position. Its emphasis on disruption highlights aspects of Jeanne that strike even the most casual of viewers, such as the reliance on close-ups and ellipsis. However, taken in isolation, it creates an account of film that affords little room to the complexities of viewer experience. In Jeanne, Dreyer defamiliarizes and disorients viewers, but the film is about much more than a desire to challenge the expressive style of his contemporaries, and audiences do not relate to films as formalists classically view them, that is, as series of minute units, able to be expressed in diagrammatic or tabular form.

This section will discuss Jeanne's style in a way that treads a path between thematic and formalist criticism. While Dreyer’s style is often strange, and is not only a function of the film’s themes, at the same time, style and narrative are not wholly unconnected in Jeanne.

The film’s title itself suggests that Dreyer intends to draw comparisons between the experiences of Joan and Jesus of Nazareth, and there are repeated visual references to the crucifixion as the drama unfolds. Crosses are formed by the bars on the windows of Joan’s cell, and their shadow projected by sunlight onto its floor. They appear on the gravestones in the cemetery and on top of distant churches. Finally, a crucifix is held by and then before the burning Joan. It is significant that the cleric Loyseleur, who treads on the shadow cross in Joan’s cell, is later the one who decides to use the torture chamber, and who guides her hand as she struggles to sign the abjuration. The implication is that his piety is a sham. Additionally (as noted earlier) Joan is tormented by jailors, who, evoking Mark 15.17-19, dress her in mock regal garb (a straw-crown; a sceptre made from an arrow). As she goes to the stake, a bystander offers Joan a drink (Mark 15.21-23), and another later declares, ‘you have burned a saint’ (echoing Mark 15.39).

In what sense are viewers being encouraged to read Joan’s suffering as a rehearsal of the Christ-event? Perhaps the images are intended to suggest that this is how Joan interpreted her experiences. Changing facial expressions imply that she feels strengthened by the appearance of the shadowcross on the cell floor. And it is at the moment when the prison guard is sweeping away the straw-crown that Joan makes the decision to withdraw the recantation and reassert the reality of her voices, a move the trial clerk notes as ‘responsio mortifera'. The crown becomes for Joan the symbol of her torment, and provides the sense of her purpose as one of martyrdom. This is perhaps the crucial point at which the film best captures the dynamics of religious experience: Joan perceives her mission as suprahistorical. Ordinary discourse is turned inside out; she will save France not by intervening in earthly affairs, but by dying at the stake. Her stance becomes visionary. Of course, it remains unclear whether Dreyer intends the audience to comprehend Joan’s self-understanding intellectually, or to empathize with her, or as Baugh suggests to share the meanings she finds in her experience, also seeing her as Christlike.15 In all likelihood the ambiguity is intended.

Exegesis determined by Jesus typology does not exhaust Jeanne. There are many dimensions of the gospel that are absent from the film, and other aspects are not helpfully described as ‘Christ-like’. If the Jesus typology allows some viewers to feel ‘at home’ with dimensions of Jeanne, as touched on earlier, Dreyer’s organization of shot and cut.are often perceived to make the film an exhausting, disorienting one for the audience.

All critics who discuss Jeanne comment on its unrelenting close-ups. There are almost no true establishing shots in Jeanne. Joan’s (Marie Falconetti’s) face is present in almost every frame, filmed without makeup, and so tightly that small movements, blemishes and pores are visible. Joan is also characterized by stasis, the lack of movement giving her character a near statuesque quality. According to Dreyer, the use of close-up was suggested by the trial transcript, where one encounters a series of ‘talking heads’ engaged in combat.16 Certainly, the spoken word is strikingly prominent in this silent film, and the reliance on the close-up, and the large number of cuts, serve to emphasize this feature.

The close-up does not only focus our attention on verbal combat. For Deleuze, the close-up is the ‘affection-image’. Seen at such close quarters, faces look alike; hence we are absorbed in a way going beyond intellectual or cognitive processes. In psychological terms, our individuation is suspended - hence the feelings of disorientation and exhaustion. In using this technique, Deleuze says, Dreyer is able to show both the trial (the historical ‘realities’ - the characters, the connections between them) and the passion - the internal and the suprahistorical dimension of Jeanne’s experience.17

Almost as remarkable as Jeanne’s use of close-ups are the framing and the cuts between shots. Conventional editing privileges continuity, typically achieved either by the shot/reverse shot, which (for example) establishes visually the relation between the faces of two partners in a conversation, or by the carrying over of figures or objects from one shot to another. Jeanne subverts these norms by including few matches. It also films characters from unusual angles and rarely places the principle action in the centre of the frame. At times, Joan’s face is cut (horizontally, vertically, obliquely) by the frame edge. From a thematic perspective, these elements might be illustrative of Joan’s isolation from her interlocutors. For formalists, they are about perceptual contradiction and a desire to foreground film as film. But it is equally possible that the unorthodox techniques are intended to serve rather more conventional functions. For example, we may be arrested by the unexpected appearance of a priest’s head in the bottom or side of a frame, as he questions Joan. This is visually striking, but (in part) also a stock move: Dreyer shows in the frame what Joan sees, depicting her point-of-view. Similarly, two rapid camera movements in opposite directions evoke the feelings of chaos that sweep through the judges, when they are disturbed by Joan’s responses to their questions. And when, in one of the film’s most famous moments, in a down shot of an alley, English soldiers appear as helmets, swinging arms and shouldered spears, the function of this ellipsis is to suggest that they are less people than tools of an occupying authority.

At this point, it is worth relating the style of Jeanne to that of one of Dreyer’s earlier works. Many commentators have noted that the sets were designed by expressionist Hermann Warm (renowned for The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, 192.0) and are characterized by a simplicity that negates viewers’ sense of depth and perspective. It is possible to read this design choice as a piece of avant-garde experimentation, but since the film was originally intended for a popular audience (see ‘Reception’) there are other plausible explanations. Jeanne's set represents a deliberate departure from the mistakes of an earlier Dreyer film, Once Upon a Time (192.2.). The film was based on a popular Danish fairy strory, but the characters offered by folklore proved too flimsy and two-dimensional. The conventions of the period drama overwhelmed, and Dreyer discovered that ‘one cannot build a film from atmosphere alone’.18 Read against this experience, the choice of minimalist sets for Jeanne allows us to gain a sense of Dreyer the craftsman, feeling his way towards a style that does justice to history without succumbing to the temptation to picturesqueness. The film’s aesthetics reflect an assessment of the best ‘tools’ for the job of connecting, undistracted, with Joan.

In short, the close-ups, the repeated and challenging cuts, the negation of depth and so on are partly about reminding us that meaning is enacted. But in combination they also divert attention away from externals in a way that encourages viewers to be absorbed by the film in quasi-mystical terms. This emphasis on interiority resonates with the ideological subtexts of the film (against which the Roman Catholic Church reacted in the 1920s) by suggesting that religiosity, or spirituality, stands in opposition to institutions and outward forms. So it is to this aspect of Jeanne, its place in the wider cultural context, to which the analysis must turn.

Cultural and Religious Context

Dreyer’s Jeanne could never be 'the Joan’. As a representation of Joan of Arc it exists inescapably in relation to other images, and needs to be understood with reference to them. This section will locate the film within two frameworks, namely, Joan’s use by ultra-nationalists in turn-of-the- century France, and the European cinema debate in the early twentieth century.

Joan’s persistence is testimony to her malleability. Those who would claim her as their own are able to select those elements of the Joan myth that resonate with their (sometimes contradictory) causes. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, right-wing nationalists in France appealed extensively to Joan. Specifically, her Catholicism, patriotism, royalism and chastity made her the ideal symbol for the Action Frantpaise, who rejected the values of the Republic in favour of a mystical Catholicism, xenophobia, and a glorification of violence and war. As one Action text described it in 1920: ‘Joan of Arc ... is the eternal youth of our people, who after heroism produce work and, after death, bring forth life.’19

Understanding this history of the use of Joan by reactionary forces, and noting that there was a flurry of popular pageantry accompanying her declaration as venerable (1903), her beatification (1909) and canonization (1920), and the quincentenary of her victories (1929) helps us to appreciate why Dreyer’s film proved so controversial (see ‘Reception’). The film does not depict Joan in battle and largely ignores her virginity and her relationship with Charles VII, for whom she fought, and whose coronation she attended in 1429. But Dreyer’s depiction of Joan is nevertheless political. By ignoring her military genius, and leaving the question of the authenticity of her voices ‘open’, Dreyer challenged the Joan myth that the right wing was working to establish. More significantly, in depicting Joan’s recantation (albeit in largely sympathetic terms) Dreyer’s film drew attention to precisely that element of the story that the nationalists most desired to forget.

Dreyer was not ignorant of the meanings attached to Joan in 1920s France. Arguably, his focus on the passion is in itself a critique of those who located her significance in patriotic militarism. But this is not to say that Jeanne is completely at odds with the wider cultural context.

In a creative addition to the trial accounts, Dreyer shows Joan’s death prompting a riot among the gathered crowds, who turn their anger against the English and their allies. This scene, with its anachronistic shot of traversing cannon, is Dreyer’s salute to Sergei Eisenstein’s Battleship Potemkin (1925). Reinforced by the final intertitle, which speaks of ‘Jeanne, whose heart has become the heart of France; Jeanne, whose memory will always be cherished by the people of France,’ it also evokes modern conflations of Joan and French national destiny. Schrader (adopting a thematic approach) dismisses this as the point at which Dreyer retreats from the transcendent (defined by Schrader as a deeply felt unity between humanity and ‘the AH’): the film’s attention to social context gives space for viewers to evaluate Joan’s martyrdom in historical terms, and debases its value as religious art.20 However, this reading ignores the return to the stake and the cross in the final shot, and the assumption that social concerns are necessarily opposed to religious ones is not obviously a correct one. Dreyer’s depiction of the riot does not preclude the possibility of viewers experiencing the film religiously. It could resonate with the perspective of those viewers for whom Joan’s death transcended the simple historical event, and attained the status of a crucial moment in the divinely ordained life of the nation.

Just as Dreyer was not apolitical so more generally the world of cinema was not immune to such preoccupations. When the Societe Generale des Films commissioned Dreyer to work onJeanne, other possible subjects for the film were Marie Antoinette and Catherine de Medici21 - like Joan, they were both controversial women from France’s past. The Societe was one of several bodies then seeking to address the growing dominance of Hollywood in world cinema. (The rise of American cinema was a particular concern in France, whose own film-makers had enjoyed a position of pre-eminence before World War One.) Across Europe, the concept of ’national cinema’ was being explored. Its proponents believed that each country should aspire to create annually a small number of films bearing the distinctive imprint of that nation’s character. This might be achieved by producing films based on famous literary texts, or which referenced visually the country’s geographical or artistic heritage.

Just as he could not have avoided Joan’s status as nationalist icon, so Dreyer would have been aware of the national cinema debate in France. In such an atmosphere, Parisian viewers might have approached Jeanne expecting to see a celebration of the nation, with the virgin as a kind of ambassador for her homeland. The distance between this expectation and the reality of Dreyer’s film in part explains its controversial reception. Interestingly, Jeanne also exemplifies the reasons for the failure of the national cinema project. As a concept, the idea of a national cinema ignored the fact that cinema personnel have always crossed national boundaries: Dreyer was, after all, a Dane commissioned to make a Trench film’. Moreover, European organizations lacked the resources to compete with the industrial production methods of an ascendant Hollywood: Dreyer originally wanted to shoot Jeanne as a sound film, but the available European studios lacked the necessary equipment.

Reception

La Passion de Jeanne d'Arc is widely hailed as a masterpiece of silent cinema. But Dreyer did not make the film with the delectation of future cinephiles in mind; he wanted Jeanne to be his commercial breakthrough, for it to attract a mainstream, popular audience.22 Likewise, the Societe, in their desire to bolster French cinema, hoped for a film with mass appeal. At the instigation of the Societe, Jeanne was even shown to an early focus group in Paris in April 1928. According to Dreyer, the feedback was such that if all objections to the film were acted upon, nothing would be left to screen, which suggested that it should in fact appear without any further revision. However, the staging of this preview itself indicates that prior to its release, there was a distinct feeling of unease amongst Dreyer’s backers.

In Copenhagen, unemployed Danes were invited to a free screening at the instigation of a Social Democratic politician. The audience was encouraged to fill in response cards, which were generally positive, and illustrated the tendency for viewers to draw links between their own day and that of Joan. ‘There are women today who are as tortured morally by society as was Jeanne d’Arc,’ commented one.23 But in France, where viewers had more firmly established ideas about the narrative and meanings of Joan’s life and death, the film was condemned. For nationalists, the fact that a Scandinavian had been chosen to make a film about Joan was a scandal: the involvement of a foreigner could only be detrimental to the French national culture. The Catholic Church had additional difficulties with the film: even before the preview, the Catholic Archbishop of Paris threatened a boycott. Much dissent turned on the handling of the role of the Church authorities in Joan’s death. The canonization document described her as a loyal Catholic who was attended regularly by her confessor; it depicted her judges as schismatics. Moreover, it characterized her as a virgin, not a martyr as Jeanne suggests. Although Dreyer does have one cleric declare her ‘a saint’ (like Benedict XV) he presents Joan’s conviction about the truth of her inward experience as being in fundamental and inevitable conflict with the institutional Church. Specifically, Cauchon is shown attempting to pressurize Joan into signing the retraction, by taunting her with the Eucharist. This scene (cut for the Paris screening; missing from the London print) proved highly offensive to Catholic sensibilities. It suggested not just that leading Church figures were devious, but also demeaned the host, implying that it could be used as a political weapon. Perhaps in this troubling scene, we see the limits to the ability of the Catholic Church and Dreyer, whose Protestant desire (his adoptive parents were Lutherans) was to subordinate externals to ‘the spirit in and behind things’, to comprehend one another.

While the New York Times praised Falconetti for revealing the ‘faith that guided the girl knight of France’ and found the cinematography ‘effective’,24 other objections to the film came from the English authorities, where Jeanne was banned for a year because of alleged anti-English bias. Joan’s story was not in itself the problem. The British press reported the quincentenary celebrations of her victories in detail and with some sympathy, in features illustrated by stills from Dreyer’s film.25 The widely perceived similarity of the helmets worn by Dreyer’s soldiers and those donned by English troops in World War One, and the depiction of Warwick, pressing for Jeanne’s conviction and determined to deny her ‘a natural death,’ were sources of contention. Eventually, however, the film was screened in London in November 1930, when reviewers and advertisers carefully avoided any reference to politics and stressed style, instead finding Falconetti ‘poignant’ and the photography ‘beautiful,’ but suggesting that the style was somewhat ‘strange’.26

There were reservations in Britain and elsewhere, too, about inaccuracies of detail. Critics ridiculed the bespectacled priest, pointing out that glasses had not been invented in Joan’s day. However, in the context of Dreyer’s project, to focus on such issues is the product of a misplaced sense of what ‘realism’ entails. Verity does not lie in the recreation of ‘the look’. (Similarly, attending only to the use of twentieth-century scissors in the scene where Jeanne’s hair is cropped seems reductionist in the extreme.)

While in the 1920s most negative responses to Jeanne stemmed from the film’s lack of fit with prevailing versions of the Joan myth, and so can be attributed to wider cultural and religious factors, in more recent years the film’s reception has been shaped by other forces. As noted in the introduction, engagement with Jeanne has been circumscribed by the lack of availability of a stable print. But as the decades have succeeded, Jeanne has been subjected to many different forms of criticism. In the theoretical seventies, Nash’s study, heavily influenced by Marxism and psychoanalysis, pronounced Jeanne to be a rehearsal of ‘politico-religious doctrinal struggles within the context of a patriarchal order marked by Judeo- Christian monotheism’.27 Scholars of religion and film might find value here, while questioning some of Nash’s fundamental assumptions, not least the misnomer, ‘Judeo-Christian’. Just a few years later, Malpezzi and Clements assessed Jeanne quite differently, declaring the film to be a masterpiece precisely because it transcended politics.28 This essay has argued that such an interpretation of the film is not plausible. However, one of the advantages of studying such an old film as Jeanne is that by comparing how different scholars have evaluated it, we can chart both changing trends in cinema studies, and the general contours in a particular film’s reception over time: each study referred to in this paper forms part of Jeanne's reception history.

While for multiple reasons, La Passion de Jeanne d’Arc has been a difficult film to watch, it continues to attract the interest (but not necessarily the viewership) of arthouse film-goers, and students of film, including those of religion and film. Why is this? Without doubt, ‘myth’ and mystery play a significant role here. As outlined earlier, there are arresting resonances between the fate of the historical Joan and the film that bears her name. Both were railed against and ravaged by fire, only to be restored to better fortunes some years later. Similarly, Dreyer’s choice of actress Marie Falconetti for the starring role was fortuitous. The historical Joan’s early death ensured her status as icon. Had she lived, the truth of her voices would have been in doubt. Instead, she remains forever young, an unfailing hero in whom much meaning may be invested. Likewise, Jeanne is the only cinema appearance of Falconetti, which makes her brilliant performance in the film all the more compelling. Like Joan, her appearance attains a special status partly because it leaves us pondering what might have been, and because there are no disappointing follow-up roles to tarnish her reputation.

3. Conclusions

This essay is at its end. A more extended study of La Passion de Jeanne d’Arc would attend to many other issues, such as the film’s engagement with emerging social science discourses (especially those of psychology and psychoanalysis). However, I hope that I have done enough to say something of value about Jeanne and to model a way of approaching film that goes beyond that sometimes practised in religion and film studies. Above all, this essay will have succeeded at least in a small way if I have encouraged others to return to what one early critic called a work of film art that ‘takes precedence over anything that has so far been produced’29 - that is, if I have shared with you a little passion for Jeanne.

Notes

1. See for example, Mark Le Fanu, ‘Bewitched’, Sight and Sound 13.7 (2.003): 30-2.

2. Tom Milne, ‘Darkness and Light: Carl Theodor Dreyer’, Sight and Sound, 34-4 (1965): 167.

3. On this issue generally see Tony Pipolo, ‘The spectre of Joan of Arc: Textual Variations in the Key Prints of Carl Dreyer’s Film’, Film History, 2.4 (1988): 301-24.

4. Mark Nash, ‘Joan Complete: A Dreyer Discovery’, Sight and Sound, 54.3 (1985): 157-8.

5. Gilles Deleuze, Cinema 1: The Movement-Image, London: The Athlone Press, 1992, p. 106.

6. Matthew Tinkcomm and Amy Villarejo, ‘Introduction’, in Matthew Tinkcomm and Amy Villarejo (eds), Keyframes: Popular Cinema and Cultural Studies, London: Routledge, 2001, pp. 1-29 (13).

7. On both works see Nadia Margolis, ‘Trial by Passion: Philology, Film and Ideology in the Portrayal of Joan of Arc (1900-1930)’, Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies, 27.3 (1997): 445-93.

8. David Bordwell, The Films of Carl-Theodor Dreyer, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1981, p. 84.

9. Donald Skoller (ed.), Dreyer in Double Reflection. Translation of Carl Th. Dreyer’s Writings about the Film, New York: E.P. Dutton and Co., 1973, p. 145.

10. Michelle Gellrich, Tragedy and Theory: The Problem of Conflict Since Aristotle, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1988, pp. 233-5.

11. Marina Warner, Joan of Arc: The Image of Female Heroism, London: Vintage, 1991, p. 21.

12. Warner, Joan of Arc, p. 141.

13. Warner, Joan of Arc, p. 106.

14. Bordwell, The Films of Carl-Theodor Dreyer, p. 65.

15. Lloyd Baugh, Imaging the Divine: Jesus and Christ-Figures in Film, Franklin: Sheed and Ward, 2000, p. 213.

16. Quoted in Mark Nash, Dreyer, London: British Film Institute, 1977, p. 53.

17. Deleuze, Cinema 1, p. 106.

18. Quoted in Casper Tybjerg, ‘ Dreyer and the National Film in Denmark’, Film History, 13.1 (2001): 32.

19. Martha Hanna, ‘Iconology and Ideology: Images of Joan of Arc in the Idiom of the Action frangaise, 1908-1931’, French Historical Studies, 14.2 (1985): 227.

20. Paul Schrader, Transcendental Style in Film: Ozu, Bresson, and Dreyer, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1972, pp. 125-6.

21. Nash, Dreyer, pp. 52-3.

22. Nash, Dreyer, p. 54.

23. Bordwell, The Films of Carl-Theodor Dreyer, p. 216.

24. Mordaunt Hall, ‘Poignant French Film - Maria Falconetti Gives Unequaled Performance as Jeanne d’Arc’, New York Times, 31 March 1929, s.8, 7.

25. See unattributed articles, ‘St. Joan’, The Times, 27 April 1929, 10; ‘Joan of Arc. Celebrations in France’, The Times, 27 April 1929, 13-14, and ‘Joan of Arc. Celebrations at Chinon’, The Times, 29 April 1929, 14.

26. See the unattributed ‘Film Society: The Passion of Joan of Arc’, The Times, 17 November 1930, 10.

27. Nash, Dreyer, p. 19.

28. Frances M. Malpezzi and William M. Clements, ‘The Passion of Joan of Arc (La Passion de Jeanne d’Arc)’, in Frank N. Magill (ed.), Magill’s Survey of Cinema: Silent Films Volume 2, Epping: Bowker Publishing Company, 1982, pp. 854-7.

29. Hall, ‘Poignant French Film’, p. 7.

4- Reading Stanley Kubrick:
A Theological Odyssey

JEFFREY F. KEUSS

During the 71st Academy Awards, Steven Spielberg eulogized the passing of director Stanley Kubrick with these words:

He died before he could witness the century he had already made famous with 2001: A Space Odyssey. Stanley wanted us to see his movies absolutely as he envisioned them. He never gave an inch on that. He dared us to have the courage of his convictions, and when we take that dare, we’re transported directly to his world, and we’re inside his vision. And in the whole history of movies, there has been nothing like that vision ever. It was a vision of hope and wonder, of grace and of mystery. It was a gift to us, and now it’s a legacy. We will be challenged and nourished by that for as long as we keep the courage to take his dare, and I hope that will be long after we’ve said our thanks and good-byes.1

Born 26 July 1928 in New York City, Stanley Kubrick remains one of the most talked about film directors of the past century. He went on to receive Best Director Academy Award nominations for Dr. Strangelove, 2001: A Space Odyssey, A Clockwork Orange and Barry Lyndon. Each of those films also earned Kubrick Best Screenplay nominations, as did Bull Metal Jacket. In addition, Dr. Strangelove, A Clockwork Orange and Barry Lyndon received Best Picture nominations. Kubrick’s only Oscar came for the special effects in 2001: A Space Odyssey. In 1997, he received the D. W. Griffith Award for Lifetime Achievement from the Directors Guild of America. That same year Kubrick began shooting Eyes Wide Shut, returning to film-making after a ten-year absence. He died in his sleep on 7 March 1999, soon after turning in his final cut of the film. (For a filmography of Stanley Kubrick, see Text Box 4.1.)

Part of the importance of Kubrick’s vision as a director was that he was someone who immersed himself in the world of words as well as vision. Kubrick began his adult career as a photographer before making the move to film but was always deeply interested in narrative. Only Kubrick’s first two feature films, Fear and Desire and Killer’s Kiss, were based on original stories that he created (the former with Howard O. Sackler).

1. Filmography of Stanley Kubrick

1951 Day of the Fight

Director/Photography/Editor/Sound: Stanley Kubrick

Documentary short on Walter Cartier, middleweight prize fighter

Running Time: 16 minutes

1951 Flying Padre

Director/Photography/Editor/Sound: Stanley Kubrick

Documentary short on the Reverend Fred Stadmueller, Roman Catholic missionary of a New Mexico parish that covers 400 square miles Running Time: 9 minutes

1953 The Seafarers

Director/Photography/Editor: Stanley Kubrick

Documentary short in colour about the Seafarers International Union

Running Time: 30 minutes

1953 Fear and Desire

Producer: Stanley Kubrick

Director/Photography/Editor: Stanley Kubrick

Running Time: 68 minutes

1955. Killer’s Kiss

Producers: Stanley Kubrick, Morris Bousel

Director/Photography/Editor: Stanley Kubrick

Script: Stanley Kubrick, Howard O. Sackler

Running Time: 64 minutes

1956. The Killing

Producer: James B. Harris

Director: Stanley Kubrick

Screenplay: Stanley Kubrick, based on the novel Clean Break, by Lionel White

Running Time: 83 minutes

1957. Paths of Glory

Producer: James B. Harris

Director: Stanley Kubrick

Screenplay: Stanley Kubrick, Calder Willingham, Jim Thompson, based on the novel by Humphrey Cobb

Running Time: 86 minutes

i960 Spartacus

Producer: Edward Lewis

Director: Anthony Mann, Stanley Kubrick

Screenplay: Dalton Trumbo, based on the book by Howard Fast

Original Running Time: 196 minutes

Released Running Time: 184 minutes

1962 Lolita

Director: Stanley Kubrick

Screenplay: Vladimir Nabokov, based on his novel

Running Time: 153 minutes

1964 Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb

Producer/Director: Stanley Kubrick

Screenplay: Stanley Kubrick, Terry Southern, Peter George, based on the novel Red Alert by Peter George

Running Time: 94 minutes

1968 2001: A Space Odyssey

Producer: Stanley Kubrick

Director: Stanley Kubrick

Screenplay: Stanley Kubrick, Arthur C. Clarke, based on Clarke’s short

story ‘The Sentinel’

Running Time: 141 minutes

1971 A Clockwork Orange

Producer/Director: Stanley Kubrick

Screenplay: Stanley Kubrick, based on the novel by Anthony Burgess

Running Time: 137 minutes

1975 Barry Lyndon

Producer/Director: Stanley Kubrick

Screenplay: Stanley Kubrick, based on the novel by William Makepeace

Thackeray

Running Time: 185 minutes

1980 The Shining

Producer/Director: Stanley Kubrick

Executive Producer: Jan Harlan

Screenplay: Stanley Kubrick, Diane Johnson, based on the novel by

Stephen King

Running Time: 145 minutes

1987 Full Metal Jacket

Producer /Director: Stanley Kubrick

Screenplay: Stanley Kubrick, Michael Herr, Gustav Hasford, based on the novel by Gustav Hasford

Running Time: 117 minutes

1999 Eyes Wide Shut

Producer/Director: Stanley Kubrick

Screenplay: Stanley Kubrick and Frederic Raphael, inspired by Arthur

Schnitzler’s novella Traumnovelle. (English title: Rhapsody, a Dream Novel.)

Running Time: 159 minutes

When he teamed up with producer James B. Harris in the early 1950s, they began looking for literary properties to adapt, since that was Harris’s speciality and at that time it was easier for young film-makers to get a film made based on an existing work.

Kubrick had always been a voracious reader and the success of his next few films convinced him that he was better at adapting stories that interested him than inventing his own material (although of course he made significant contributions to the finished screenplay on all of his films).

1. Viewing vs. Reading Film

To begin our discussion of Kubrick as a film-maker is to begin with a reminder that Kubrick’s films should be ‘read’ as opposed to ‘viewed’. I am differentiating between these terms ‘viewing’ and ‘reading’ as passive and active ways of approaching film. Too often, the notion of film as something we view rather than read results in a great loss of riches that film by directors such as Kubrick have to offer.

As a medium we merely ‘view’, film becomes something we ‘understand’ without struggling to improve our understanding. For example, the photographic image stands in contrast to a text, which, with a single word, can shift from representation to reflection. We look at a photo and recall its source - its very ‘stillness’ seems to allow and encourage us to make a reference - e.g. Who is this in the picture? When was it taken? Where was that building in the background? It is this that led cultural theorist Roland Barthes to call the photographic image pure contingency - that is, the photograph is always something that is representational and therefore contingent on something ‘other’ for meaning to arise. In contrast, more so than other arts, film offers an immediate and fully contextualized presence to the world - it is self-referential and makes its own reality. Ironically, it is precisely because, as James Monaco notes,

2. What is Auteur Theory?

What role does the director of a film play in the overall film? This is a point that has been greatly debated. Auteur theory is the school of thought that argues that for some film productions, the role of the director is not only central to understanding the overall meaning of a film but that it is vital. Auteur is French for ‘author’ and the politics of auteur, or politique des auteurs, were first stated by director Francois Truffaut in his article ‘Une certaine tendance du cinema francais’ in Cahiers du cinema (Notebooks on Cinema) in 1954. Truffaut postulated that one person, usually the director, has the artistic responsibility for a film and reveals a personal world-view through the tensions among style, theme and the conditions of production. In short, auteur theory argues that films can be studied like novels and paintings as a product of an individual artist. Truffaut’s pronouncement helped defend the Hollywood system of film-making in the late 1950s against France’s popular criticism. Truffaut maintained that the work of an author could be found in many Hollywood films and it was the quality of the director that was the measure of the work, not necessarily the work itself.

Examples of those film-makers often referred to as auteurs include Stanley Kubrick, Alfred Hitchcock and Woody Allen.

Most people now refer to ‘new auteur theory’. In current film criticism, there is widespread acknowledgement that films are not the product of merely one auteur or creator but collective efforts. Although the director still receives most of the credit for the voice of the film, many of the current directors who are considered auteurs use the same cast and crew for most if not all their films. This raises the question, if the crew is the same in every film, is it possible to distinguish the voice of the director from that of the collective (screenwriters, actors, production designer, all those responsible for creative decisions)? Contemporary auteurs such as the Coen brothers, Wes Anderson and Christopher Guest almost always use the same creative team. New auteur theory holds that those responsible for the creative decisions that influence the form of the film are always the same group of individuals.

films ‘so very clearly mimic reality that we apprehend them much more easily than we comprehend them’.2 Film semiologist Christian Metz comments that, as an easy art, cinema is in constant danger of falling victim to this easiness as he surmises: ‘A film is difficult to explain because it is easy to understand.’3 This power, inherent in the cinematic image, seduces: we lay ourselves open to the massive doses of meaning and information movies convey without questioning how they tell us what they do tell us. It is in reading film, seeing deeply with a critical turn - reading as opposed to merely viewing - that is essential to plumbing the rich depths of films.

Film and the very nature of the cinematic image itself resists reading: its immediacy, its lack of distance, its illusion of pure reference does make this difficult. In short, movies need ‘unpacking’ and critical analysis no less than other ‘texts’.

2. Reading the Religious in Stanley Kubrick

One aspect of Kubrick not fully addressed however is that he was deeply concerned with the religious aspects of life as well.4 While not overtly playing his cards in any dogmatic pronouncements, reading the films of Kubrick shows a director who invokes an experience of the numinous and the predestined, what theologian Rudolf Otto would call the experience of the holy, the mysterium tremendum et fascinans.5 It is a mystical experience, an ecstasy at the end of things, that continually threatens to consume or immerse the subjects of his films and ultimately draws us as viewers into this experience of the holy as well.

Anthropologist of Religion Mary Douglas has written that a ‘person without religion would be the person content to do without explanations’.6 To read Kubrick’s films is to partake of films that display a profound discontent with the state of modern humanity akin to the fervour of an evangelist calling for an encounter with something more, something larger, and ultimately something transcendent.

One of the early sages of film critical theory is media theorist Marshall McLuhan. In The Medium is the Massage, McLuhan insisted that we cannot understand the technological experience from the outside as a ‘viewer’ from an objective space. We can only comprehend how the electronic age ‘works us over’ if we ‘recreate the experience’ in depth. He makes this point with regard to mass media:

All media work us over completely. They are so persuasive in their personal, political, economic, aesthetic, psychological, moral, ethical, and social consequences that they leave no part of us untouched, unaffected, unaltered. The medium is the massage. Any understanding of social and cultural change is impossible without knowledge of the way media work as environments.7

In short, to read film is to first accept the fact that it will take work and is not a passive enterprise - but that should not take the joy out of it. Merely ‘viewing’ any image is ultimately a form of both idolatry (passively becoming the object rather than the subject) and iconoclasm (seeing only the surface and not into the depth of a thing is ultimately to destroy it). This is the task of religion and the call of people of faith.8 Whether it is the empty cross or a filled chalice, Christian theology has ample reason to attend to images, both because we do not want to be in their thrall unawares and because their power already signals some sort of ‘religious’ resonance. We know the power of certain images to hold sway over the imagination. Media mediates through and with images - we are expected to know the meaning of the void created in the New York skyline after September nth and the toppling of Saddam’s image in central Baghdad, played over and over on television screens. We know at an innate level that something is going on when certain images hit us - their power to embody and make present the very being of their object. Profound responses in the presence of images (desire, fear) transcend the sorts of boundaries academics establish between the canon of so-called high art, folk and tribal arts, popular logos from Starbucks to Nike, and the devotional images found in our places of worship. Film is a medium of immediate imaging - where some images and texts require some reflection and repose prior to understanding, most film demands and gets an immediate reaction and understanding. It displays a world much more convincingly and immediately than any other symbolic form. As mechanical reproduction, it gives the illusion of pure reference. As moving picture, it seems to offer an ongoing experience of time present and therefore of presence.

Three Pointers for Film Reading

These are three ‘pointers’ that Barbara De Concini9 suggests as a way of beginning to school ourselves in ‘reading’ films. We shall apply these to a representative viewing of three of Kubrick’s films. As she suggests, since the viewer tends to identify with the camera’s lens as the authoritative angle of value to be considered (which is roughly equivalent to the point of view in a novel), we should school ourselves to pay attention to the camera - what it does, what and who it shows and doesn’t show. De Concini suggests the following:

1. How the camera frames and holds the subject. How much of the human figure is in view, how much of the surroundings? What happens to our perceptions when the character is presented to us in extreme long shot, a mere speck on the screen as opposed to in extreme close-up, and where the individual face can become a whole spiritual landscape? An image in painting or a photograph can be rich with symbolic import, but it must achieve its effects within the frame. A movie is a moving picture, a multiplicity of frames (astoundingly, as many as 180,000 in a two-hour film).

2. The camera’s angle of vision. The angle from which a subject is photographed has an impact on how the image ‘reads’. As Louis Giannetti demonstrates in Understanding Movies, an eye-level shot suggests parity between viewer and subject, while high angles reduce the subject’s significance, suggesting vulnerability, and low angles do the opposite, creating a sense of dominance over the viewer.

3. Camera shots tend to acquire meaning when they are seen in relation to other shots. Images that are created within the context of the film gain meaning through their associations with other images clustered within the film. In addition, as viewers we bring our lived experience to these images and they gain further meaning. This is one of the most characteristic ways in which the cinematic image expresses the ‘something more’. We can call it symbolic and we will not be incorrect. But, as people who are used to the written text, our expectations of the symbolic may mislead us. Here the process is often a quite humble one which falls into a sort of middle range of meaning between the immediacy of the iconic and the latency of the symbolic. Through editing, the film-maker elaborates visually on some natural links and fairly straightforward connections, piecing together sets of visual associations, patterning thematic and metaphorical affinities for us through the iterative process of the cinema.

In contrast to paintings and photographs, a film can build its effect gradually, even modestly and quietly, alternating stretches of restraint, when the image is less saturated with meaning, with the occasional epiphany. A surprising amount of the connotative power of film depends on this ‘cinematic shorthand’ of metonymy - that is, a figure of speech in which an attribute of something is used to stand for the thing itself, such as ‘laurels’ when it stands for ‘glory’ or ‘brass’ when it stands for ‘military officers’ - this use of associated detail to evoke an idea or represent an object. Our understanding of how a film means and how it directs our attention towards its meaning can be greatly enhanced and complicated merely by bringing this associative resonance of the cinematic image to the level of our awareness.

3. Lolita (1962) - Temptation and at the End of it All

... Desire

We begin with the first lens of film reading and consider what the camera frames into our view through a look at Kubrick’s 1962 film Lolita. This was the film in which Kubrick began to develop his signature style of long, leisurely paced scenes that force the audience to step back and consider the overall setting and story, rather than getting caught up in the emotion of the scene itself. Kubrick felt this was the style that best suited Vladimir Nabokov’s controversial story, and also helped manoeuvre it around the strict censorship standards of the time. What we notice in Kubrick’s command of the camera as director is the way he not only shows us the images on the screen, but communicates rather subtly that he knows what we are watching and knows why we are - we are being watched as we watch.

Filmed in 1962 directly after completion of Spartacus, Kubrick shot most of the film in long master shots, sometimes up to ten minutes per take. Later, to give the film an even more literary quality, Kubrick and editor Anthony Harvey inserted fade-outs and fade-ins as scene transitions, with unusually long shots of black in between.

One aspect of film’s power is the illusion of looking in on a private world, the ordinary magnified to the scale of spectacle, from our vantage of security and anonymity. This juxtaposition of intensity and detachment suggests a role not merely as viewers, but as voyeurs. As Laura Mulvey notes in her essay, ‘Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema’, among the possible pleasures the cinema offers is that of looking itself. Who would deny that the magic of Hollywood style at its best has always arisen from ‘its skilled and satisfying manipulation of visual pleasure?’ Could it be, as Mulvey argues, that movies correspond not only to our needs for ego identification, but also to our erotic desire to see that which is private or dangerous or forbidden, to gaze at the other as object from our own position of security, thus having it both ways? Movie theatres as venues of projection: both of images and of repressed desires!

In a representative scene from Lolita, Kubrick draws the viewer into the temptation of the protagonist Humbert Humbert (played by James Mason) as he gazes upon young Lolita Haze (played by 14-year-old Sue Lyon) while in the continued company of Lolita’s mother Charlotte (played wonderfully by Shelley Winters). As the viewer is drawn to look upon Lolita Haze (an appropriate surname evoking a dreamlike quality of Nabokov’s character and well framed by Kubrick) swirling with her hula-hoop, we are brought to account for our ‘viewing’ by the burst of the flash from Charlotte’s camera. The dream/temptation bursts apart with - of all things - a burst of light that breaks the clouds or ‘haze’ away. Cinematically, we have been caught in the act of ‘looking’. A whole body of critical literature has developed out of this argument concerning cinema’s manipulation of the gaze (what theorist Jacques Lacan terms la regard) and how it reflects our deep psychological obsessions and the society that produces it. Throughout this film of temptation, Kubrick continues slowly to allow the approach of Lolita and Humbert, but akin to the classic tale of Tristan and Isolde they are continually pushed back over and over again leaving desire rather than consummation as the mark of the human dilemma.

Desire is an important aspect of faith. In a sermon entitled ‘The Depth of Experience’, theologian Paul Tillich states that it is desire that marks one of the essential aspects of our humanity and is one of the evidences of the imago dei - the image of god. For Tillich, it is our desire for what is truly desirable’ that drives so much of our activity (you can possibly hear Freud and his disciples chanting ‘Amen! Amen!’) but Tillich goes on to note that it is conversely desiring and finding disappointments in this life that ‘the truth of which does not disappoint dwells below the surface in the depth’.10 Here Tillich sees ‘depth’ as that meaning-making encounter that evidences our meeting with the divine or as Tillich states ‘the name of this infinite and inexhaustible depth and ground of all being is God. That depth is what the word God means.’11

Kubrick’s films were manifestations of a search for ‘this infinite and inexhaustible depth and ground of all being’ and calling the film reader to account as to that which they seek and desire and exposing the film reader to their own act of desire. One has only to look at Kubrick’s film A Clockwork Orange, which provides a number of instances of exposing the nature of desire as both a key to our downfall and also a mark of the divine spark in us.

4. The Shining (1980) - The Steady View of Fear

For a second lens - the camera’s angle on the subject - we now look at Kubrick’s 1980 retelling of Stephen King’s horror classic The Shining.

Directors can be said to fall into two camps - trackers and zoomers. The use of the zoom lens draws the subject of the film out to the audience and this is a technique often favoured by today’s directors. It is easy to do - merely change lens and re-frame the camera - and it doesn’t alter the set too much. The other option - use of the track whereby the entire camera is placed on a track and moved - is very laborious, as well as time and money intensive. One of the great effects of tracking however is the ability to draw the viewer into the shot in a way that doesn’t distort the image framed on screen. The reality of this use of the camera is that the viewer is ‘taken along for the ride’ as is seen in Kubrick’s turn to the horror genre in his 1980 film of Stephen King’s The Shining.

Prior to the mid-1970s, the only ways to move the camera within a closed-set scene were via a dolly apparatus or by having the operator hold the camera and walk around himself. The dolly allowed the camera extremely fluid movement, but required either an ultra-smooth surface or the laying down of tracks, plus several camera assistants to operate. Handheld camera shots, by their nature, tended to be somewhat unsteady, and were usually used to give a certain documentary-style effect (something Kubrick himself had done in his films on several occasions).

Then around 1974, a camera operator and inventor named Garrett Brown invented what he called the Steadicam. Essentially it was a small movie camera mounted onto a harness rig that could be carried and operated by one man, but which used a system of gyroscopes to keep the camera steady and the motion fluid. The result was a perfect hybrid of hand-held and dolly movement, and gave film-makers a new, very flexible tool for moving the camera.

However, the Steadicam was still considered an experimental device in 1978 when Kubrick decided to use it extensively for The Shining. In fact, Kubrick had the interior sets of the Overlook Hotel designed specifically with the Steadicam in mind, using only natural lighting and designing the corridors and rooms to gain the maximum effect from the device.

In a classic scene from The Shining, Danny Torrance (played by Danny Lloyd) is racing his Big Wheel tricycle through the hallways of the Overlook Hotel. As the viewer watches, we are placed in Danny’s viewpoint, tracking through the hallways from his low riding vantage point and moving with his reckless speed, quickly taking corners without any awareness of what lies ahead. Garrett Brown came up with extenders and other modifications to give Kubrick more flexibility, including a ‘low mode’ for shooting the scenes of Danny riding his Big Wheel throughout the hotel’s corridors.

Kubrick ended up shooting almost the entire film using the Steadicam, and The Shining was lauded for showing the device’s potential and making it a virtually standard piece of camera equipment from that point forward. As the set of the Overlook Hotel was constructed, Kubrick built the set - the rooms, the hallways, the angles of the windows - around how the Steadicam camera could be used to best advantage. What Kubrick demonstrates is a profound shift - he does not begin with a set then try to find a way to get the right shots through adjusting the camera technology to ‘fit in’. Rather, his universe begins with the principle of how things are to be seen - the angle of the shot first - then he builds the world around that.

In Kubrick’s universe, seen especially in The Shining and 2001, the camera angle provoked through the Steadicam tracking gives the viewer a steady view of fear, the anxiety of not being able to ‘see’ what comes around the next corner and thereby reminding us that in addition to desire, we as film readers must acknowledge the nature of fear and that unlimited space does not solve this but in many ways makes us realize how little we do ‘know’ and apprehend. Jeff Smith, in an article entitled ‘Careening Through Kubrick’s Space’12 notes that Kubrick’s use of space and how he fills the screen in his shots, for example in The Shining’s reduction of ‘environment’ to a particular place - a huge empty hotel cut off from human contact - and the elimination of 2001’s visual expansiveness in the middle section of the film in the space journey - both leave a ‘space’ so that the astronauts, whether on Earth amidst the open country or on a spaceship in the vastness of space, have no universe except their claustrophobic hotel/spaceship. The huge hotel and the large spacecraft Discovery are still not big enough — relationships begin in uneasy balance and gradually break down into menace and terror. What Kubrick proposes through his use of infinite space is that freedom is not found in lack of boundaries. Ironically, it is the seeming infinite space that is both physically and psychologically imprisoning for the winter occupants of The Shining and the space travellers of 2001.

In The Shining , the many doors of the Overlook open only onto more hotel, and the mirrors, deceptively breaching or enlarging space, ultimately turn one’s view inward and collapse the prospect of space back onto itself: the equation of space and the self in a paradox of identity tracing a line back to Narcissus. This is not the Interior Castle of St Theresa of Avila where through the many rooms and water wheels one finds a unifying embrace from God. Maybe the greatest fear is that we are truly isolated - that around each corner is another corner and another hallway and we have been ‘abandoned’ to our fears.

In other words, The Shining depicts a chaotic and relativistic universe devoid of higher agencies, one whose very size and emptiness infuriatingly underscores human limitations and forever condemns humanity to endure her own grotesque self. According to philosopher and mystic Simone Weil ‘we fly from the inner void, since God might steal into it. It is not the pursuit of pleasure and the aversion for effort which causes sin, but fear of God. We know that we cannot see him face to face without dying, and we do not want to die.’13 With God displaced, the weak and conflicted self comes to the centre position - many of Jack Nicholson’s shots in The Shining as we see him slowly slip into insanity are framed in the centre of the screen and fill most of the view - doomed to the endless deceptions of its own doors and mirrors. Toward the middle of the film, Jack makes a devil’s pact - stating he would give his soul for just one drink - which materializes the demons of the Overlook and brings the long- faded ghosts back to life. The devil’s pact offers no reward in a universe where certainty of knowledge is not possible. Man defines himself existentially only by his own dehumanizing actions - hence Jack’s ultimate reduction to pure act, and his likely readiness to anoint yet another as having ‘always’ been the caretaker.

This is a theme through much of Kubrick’s work - the loss of humanity and the search for some ultimate ‘meaning’ which, in the end, will only remove us from humanity at large. As seen in The Shining and 2001, HAL and Jack Torrance are obsessed about their ‘missions’ or ‘jobs’ - HAL with his ‘mission’ and Jack with his caretaking contract with the Overlook (and, by extension, with his pseudo-job of writing his book). Just as HAL says to Bowman ‘this mission is too important for you to jeopardize it’, Jack goes ballistic whenever it is suggested that the family leave the Overlook (and also when Wendy interrupts his ‘writing’). What is lost in embrace of one’s mission or vocation as a singular focus is ultimately one’s humanity. For both HAL and Jack, the inward turn towards an all-consuming ‘mission’ leaves them stripped of their possible humanity and care for others - in short, finding only isolation and fear.

5. 2001 - An Agnostic Prayer

For our third lens for film reading - how camera shots tend to acquire meaning when they are seen in relation to other shots - we will reflect on the nature of the jump-cut technique in respect to 2001: A Space Odyssey.

In a recent documentary looking back at Kubrick’s work, Christiane Kubrick, Stanley Kubrick’s widow, spoke of 2001: A Space Odyssey as Kubrick’s ‘agnostic prayer’. Upon its initial release, the Vatican contacted Kubrick and invited him to come for a special showing of the film. Christiane Kubrick said that, as the images of the film filled the ancient wall of St Peter’s where the movie was being viewed, Stanley smiled and said ‘now I am beginning to understand my religion - this is an agnostic prayer, a plea for the “something” that must be out there somewhere’.

Kubrick was often pressed to interpret his work - as though to give an author’s read of the film as text that would somehow be authoritative. With regard to his 1965 sci-fi film 2001: A Space Odyssey, he responded in this way:

How could we possibly appreciate the Mona Lisa if Leonardo had written at the bottom of the canvas: ‘The lady is smiling because she is hiding a secret from her lover.’ This would shackle the viewer to reality, and I don’t want this to happen to 2001.14

Ultimately, as Christianity looks back over its shoulder to its origins and finds at the heart great disruption - creatio ex nihilo, floods, famine, captivity, warfare, crucifixion and resurrection - moments of certainty seem to give way to kenotic emptying, books get consumed by prophets, feet of clay turn to dust and dust gets spat upon in order to overturn blindness for sight. Religion, time and time again, peers into the primeval chaos.15 Chaos is the beginning to which, in the great Romantic traditions, we ultimately return. For anthropologist Clifford Geertz, religion - conceived in terms of religious symbolism - negotiates ‘at least three points where chaos - a tumult of events that lack not just interpretations but interpretability - threatens to break in upon man’.16

2001: A Space Odyssey was and is such an event - a tumult of events that lack not just interpretations but interpretability - that draws the viewer into a journey of epic proportions. The fact that David Bowman’s ship is named Discovery should not be lost on us.

One thing immediately noticeable about 2001 is just how much of a true ‘film’ it is — it is a vision that brings its narrative forward in a visual linguistics - making iconic connections that deepen language beyond utterance into image and experience. One technique Kubrick uses in the film is an editing technique known as ‘jump cut’ - making immediate leaps from one point of reference in time and space to another that enable him to move through millennia within a split second while maintaining continuity. The scene that transitions from the ‘Dawn of Man’ sequence of the film to the ‘Dance of the Stars’ is such an instance.

As Paul writes in 2 Corinthians, such a notion is deep within the Christian story:

all of us, with unveiled faces, seeing the glory of the Lord as though reflected in a mirror, are being transformed into the same image from one degree of glory to another . . . For it is the God who said, ‘Light will shine out of the darkness’, who has shone in our hearts to give the light of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Christ.17

2001 operates as a journey in a truest sense of calling and transformation from one degree of glory to another - a calling to go as Abraham is called to go but not necessarily told where. The forming of the journey is what gives it meaning - not a map given beforehand, but footprints along the way that show that one has moved from somewhere to somewhere else, creating a ‘poetic cartography’ where one can orient oneself and be invited to search for the nexus of the subject and the sacred - to touch the wounds of the past and truly to believe. One of the many narrative threads throughout this ‘agnostic prayer’ of Kubrick is that something is out there - that there are connections of intentionality in the creative story of our universe that show ‘something’ going on - not a random haphazard milieu per se - but connections and movement toward something. The desire we have for something more - something of infinite and inexhaustible depth and ground of all being - is hoped for and like the announcing angels of the incarnation, this hope for the infinite and inexhaustible depth and ground of all being can be a solace of ‘Fear Not’ as we fear what lies around the bend. In some ways, Kubrick’s films are worth reading deeply for the simple fact that they read humanity’s desires and fears so well, yet map out a way that has no boundary or ‘edge’ that would announce the end of the world or a limit to the universe that creates a sense of beginning and end, but is fully enclosed and three-dimensional, moving itself in the fullest breath, depth, and height of time and space18 as one who comes unannounced - akin to the monolith that reappears and calls out as an euangelion - bearing gospel or good news that can be a blessing and terrifying in the same instance.

Meister Eckhart has aptly characterized true encounter with the divine as an ‘un-becoming’ (‘Entwerdung’}. As Eckhart states ‘when I reach the depths of divinity no one asks me whence I come and where I have been, and no one misses me, for here there is an un-becoming’ V Kubrick’s films end as an un-becoming either with the apocalyptic scope of the birth of the Star Child in 2001 or freezing of Jack Torrance in the everlasting maze of the Overlook in The Shining - or the un-becoming of the self as seen in Lolita through to Eyes Wide Shut. Yet it is in this kenotic un-becoming that we can begin to ‘open the pod doors’ to what Kubrick worked for.

Notes

1. American Academy of Motion Pictures and Film database - www.oscars.org

2. James Monaco, How to Read a Film: The World of Movies, Media, and Multimedia: Language, History, Theory, 3rd edition, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000, p. 15.

3. Christian Metz, Film Language: A Semiotics of the Cinema, reprint edition, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990, p. 5.

4. There have been numerous studies of Kubrick’s work from many different angles, notably Luis Garcia Mainar, Narrative and Stylistic Patterns in the Films of Stanley Kubrick, London: Camden House, 1999; Michel Chion, Kubrick’s Cinema Odyssey, London: British Film Institute, 2001; Thomas Allen Nelson, Kubrick: Inside a Film Artist’s Maze, Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1982. However, there is still a lack of critical reflection upon the theological concerns related to Kubrick’s filmic poetics.

5. See Rudolph Otto, The Idea of the Holy: An Inquiry into the Non-Rational Factor in the Idea of the Divine and Its Relation to the Rational, London: Oxford University Press, 1950.

6. Mary Douglas, Implicit Meanings, London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1975, P-76.

7. Marshall McLuhan, (with Quentin Fiore), The Medium is the Massage, New York: Bantam, 1967, p. 26. McLuhan’s most vivid description of the ‘technological sensorium’ is provided.

8. Babara De Concini’s article ‘Seduction by Visual Image’, The Journal of Religion and Film, 2(3) (December 1998): Section 1.

9. De Concini, ‘Seduction by Visual Image’, Section 1.

10. Paul Tillich, The Shaking of the Foundations, New York: Charles Scribner’s, 1948, p. 53

11. Tillich, Shaking of the Foundations, p. 57.

12. Jeff Smith, ‘Careening Through Kubrick’s Space’, Chicago Review, 33(1) (Summer 1981): 62-73.

13. Simone Weil, Gravity and Grace, New York: G. P. Putnam & Sons, 1952.

14. Gene D. Phillips, Stanley Kubrick: A Film Odyssey, London: Popular Library, 1977.

15. This is the view of religion as it is investigated by twentieth-century anthropologists. For Mary Douglas, a ‘person without religion would be the person content to do without explanations’ (Implicit Meanings, p. 76).

16. Clifford Geertz, The Interpretation of Cultures, New York: Basic Books, 1973, p. 100.

17. 2 Corinthians 3.18; 4.6 NRSV. David Ford in his recent book, Self and Salvation, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999, has an extended reflection on this notion of ‘facing’ in relation to the figuring of Christ.

18. 1 am seeing this notion of ‘poetic cartography’ as akin to the attempts put forward by women mystics such as Theresa of Avila. See E. Ann Matter, ‘Internal Maps of an Eternal External’ and Laurie Finke, ‘Mystical Bodies and the Dialogics of Vision’, in Ulrike Wiethaus (ed.), Maps of Flesh and Light, New York: Syracuse University Press, 1993, pp. i8ff.

19. Cited by Rudolf Steiner, Mysticism at the Dawn of the Modern Age, New York: Garber Communications, 1996, p. 80. Originally published in 1923 as Die Mystik im Ausgange des neuzeitlichen Geisteslebens und ihr Verhaltnis zur modernen Weltanschauung.

5. Sacrilege, Satire or Statement of Faith?

Ways of Reading Luis Bunuel’s Viridiana

TOM AITKEN

In 1961, Luis Bunuel, the Spanish film director, had been in exile from his native land since 1938, living in Los Angeles, New York and Mexico. Before he left Europe he had made two surrealist films with Salvador Dali and Land without Bread (1932), a documentary in which peasant poverty was contrasted with ecclesiastical wealth. It was 18 years before he returned to directing, in Mexico, where he developed a reputation as a director who finished films on time and under budget. During this period he learnt his trade. That done he turned to making films that reflected his iconoclasm and hatred of the Catholic Church and bourgeois morality, and of the unholy mixture of the two that, in his view, characterized Franco’s Spain. He later wrote, in his autobiography, My Last Breath (1984): ‘I have always been impressed by the famous photograph of . . . ecclesiastical dignitaries standing in front of the cathedral of Santiago de Compostela in full sacerdotal garb, their arms raised in the Fascist salute .. . God and country make an unbeatable team; they break all records for oppression and bloodshed.’1

However, although he delighted in being a hostile critic of the Church, he was also an obsessively fascinated one. His anticlerical iconoclasm was linked with his attachment to anarchism and surrealism, but also to his feeling that there was a great deal of social injustice in the world. He sought to expose this injustice, while supposing that attempts to ameliorate this and other evils were bound to be ineffectual. In Los Olivados (The Young and the Damned) (1950), about juvenile delinquents in the slums of Mexico, he returned to something like the mood of Land Without Bread. In Nazarin (1958), he portrayed a humble and unworldly priest who attempted to live according to the example given by Jesus but was despised for doing so by those for whom religion was no more than a formal public observance. In 1996 Nazarin appeared on a list of approved films issued by the Vatican to mark the centenary of the cinema. Despite being a parable that could be read as less an attack on religion than on the complacency of the faithful it was glossed as ‘an indictment of Christianity’. (See Text Box 5.1 for some of Bunuel’s other films.)

Bunuel himself might have been happy with the Vatican’s assessment.

1. Twelve Other Films by Luis Bunuel (1900-83)

Un Chien Andalou (France, 1928)

A short surrealist film, which begins with a woman’s eye being sliced by a razor.

L’Age d’Or (France, 1930)

An anticlerical dream in which two lovers are constantly interrupted.

Los Olivados (The Young and the Damned) (Mexico, 1950)

The corruption of an innocent in the slums of Mexico City.

Nazarin (Mexico, 1959)

A naive and unworldly priest attempts to live according to the teachings of Christ.

The Exterminating Angel (Mexico, 1962)

Guests mysteriously unable to leave a dinner party descend into bestiality and cannibalism.

Diary of a Chambermaid (France, 1964)

A sexy chambermaid uncovers the sexual, social and religious tensions of a provincial family.

Simon of the Desert (Mexico, 1965)

St Simon Stylites, atop his desert column, resists temptations from a hermaphroditic Satan.

Belle de Jour (France/Italy, 1967)

A bored bourgeois wife works as a prostitute during the afternoons.

The Milky Way (France, 1969)

Two tramps on pilgrimage to Santiago de Compostela encounter strange people.

Tristana (Spain, 1970)

A progressive, agnostic Spaniard lusts after his youthful ward in a repressive provincial city.

The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie (France, 1972)

A dream-like film in which bourgeoisie wanting dinner are repeatedly frustrated.

That Obscure Object of Desire (France, 1977)

A rich businessman enjoys being humiliated by his maid, who is played by two actresses.

He tells us that he was relieved that Nazarin did not win a Catholic prize, although there was a strong chance at one point that it would.2 His ‘relief’ is interesting. He very genuinely did not want to be patted on the head by the Church. His reluctance was part of a larger disinclination to have people making assumptions about what his films ‘meant’. He claimed that any interpretation of Nazarin that depended upon his supposed feelings of sympathy for the priest was a misunderstanding. (Nonetheless, we might note in passing his comment on one of his uncles, a priest, and ‘a sweet, gentle man’.)3 One explanation for his rejection of such interpretations was, however, that some people persisted in seeing Nazarin as a conscious attempt at self-rehabilitation on his part.

When, two years later, Bunuel set about making a feminine companion piece to Nazarin, its making was enmeshed in bizarrely comic events. The comedy appears to have been conceived in Buhuel’s own mind, and stage-managed by him. The rest of the world, including the Franco government, obligingly played its appointed roles. In the case of the Franco government, the role was that of incompetent idiot.

In i960, having been a Mexican citizen for ten years, Bunuel applied for a visa to return to Spain and to his surprise was given one. He revisited the scenes of his childhood, weeping as he walked down certain streets.4 After the visit, on the boat back to Mexico, he decided ‘to write my own screenplay about a woman I called Viridiana, in memory of a little-known saint I’d heard about when I was a schoolboy. As I worked, I remembered my old erotic fantasy about making love to the queen of Spain when she was drugged, and decided somehow to combine the two stories.’5

The film was to be made in Spain itself. Viridiana is a quintessentially Spanish story but there was also an element of careerist calculation involved. Much of his best work was virtually unknown in Europe and America and he could not establish a position for himself in the international film world, if he continued working only in Mexico. He enjoyed a high degree of co-operation in Spain - including the 50% subsidy given to productions deemed to be ‘in the national interest’. The explanation is simple. He was the country’s only internationally applauded film director, and Franco would have been delighted, could he have achieved the coup on his own terms, to have Bunuel back there, to inspire and lead a Spanish school of film-makers. Meanwhile, Bunuel was in trouble with his friends. The project outraged his associates among emigre Spanish Republicans in Mexico. He was accused of treason, of kowtowing to the hated dictator. Republican anger, however, was assuaged when the film proved to be less a gift to Franco than a bomb that exploded in his face.6

What Bunuel concocted by combining his half-remembered saint with his schoolboy erotic fantasy turned out to be, like all of his narrative films, a plain tale plainly told. Viridiana, a novice about to take her final vows, visits her uncle, Don Jaime, a landowner who has allowed his estate to fall into decay since his wife died on their wedding night 20 years before. He proposes marriage, and when Viridiana rejects him, tries to trick her into it by claiming that he ravished her while she was unconscious.

Don Jaime dies and Viridiana and Jorge, Jaime’s illegitimate son, jointly inherit the estate and set about running their shares of it in quite different ways. He attempts to restore the estate as a working farm, while she, having abandoned convent life, throws open the outbuildings, which are all she will accept of the property, to a collection of beggars and outcasts, from whom in return she demands only a little routine work and attendance at her daily religious observances.

One afternoon when Viridiana, Jorge and Ramona, the housekeeper, are absent on errands in the nearby town, the beggars break into the main house and, in its luxurious dining room, stage a riotous party, which concludes with them assuming the postures of Jesus and the disciples in Leonardo da Vinci’s painting of the Last Supper. Further sensational events ensue before the police arrive to restore order.

The script had to be passed by the Spanish censors, who suggested a number of changes. One concerned phallic symbolism when Don Jaime dies. There was complaint about Viridiana using her eponymous saint’s emblems: a crown of thorns, a hammer and a nail. The last scene should be changed. Viridiana should not be shown knocking on her cousin’s door, and entering, the door closing behind her. Bunuel suggested that instead she should be shown settling down to a three-handed card game with Jorge and Ramona and this was accepted. In Buhuel’s mischievous view (which, of course, he kept to himself) this merely made the ending more suggestive.7 (There is also some suggestion that he saw the card game as a symbol of the elaborate game he himself was playing with the Franco government.)

Notice the word ‘mischievous’. Disguise, deceit and practical jokes were second nature to Bunuel and much of Viridiana evolved in a spirit of mischief. His dream of making love to a drugged queen of Spain led him to the story of ‘a young woman .. . drugged by an old man . . . completely at the mercy of someone who, otherwise, could never have held her in his arms. It struck me that the woman should be pure, and I made her a novice.’ It amused him to imagine that the novice would become mistress of a rowdy household that turned on its head the pious exactitude of the convent. He realized that the beggars’ riotous dinner evoked Leonardo da Vinci’s Last Supper only after he had set up the scene. He linked the Hallelujah Chorus with the beggars’ subsequent dance and orgy to make it ‘more startling’ than if he had accompanied it with rock and roll.8

The film was entered, very late, in the Cannes Film Festival, where it shared the Palme d’Or and won a special French critics’ prize for black humour. The Palme d’Or was proudly accepted by the Spanish undersecretary for Cinema, the functionary who had discussed with Bunuel the changes required by the censors. Not having seen the finished film, he realized too late that Bunuel had made only one of these alterations. Bunuel himself, who was in Paris, was incredulous. How could even Fascists be so stupid?

A day later the Vatican newspaper, L’Osservatore Romano, ran a piece by a Spanish Dominican describing the film as ‘sacrilegious and blasphemous’. Franco sacked his under-secretary for cinema and suppressed all of Bunuel’s films. (Bunuel, anticipating this, had taken a set of negatives of Viridiana with him to Paris.) When Franco finally saw the film, years later, he reportedly wondered what the fuss was about. Bunuel responded to that by wondering how you could shock a man who had committed so many atrocities. Asked later which he considered his most important film, he said ‘See Viridiana.'’9

How well does the film fit the terms listed in my title: sacrilege, satire, statement of faith? The conventional idea would be that the first two terms are so obviously apt as to be banal, while the third is a non-starter. Did not Bunuel say, not long before he died, ‘Thank God I’m still an atheist’?

A majority of critics have seen Viridiana as a more or less straightforward satire, in more or less bad taste, on the Catholic Church. As to the bad taste, many, while praising the film, even perhaps considering it Bunuel’s masterpiece, have disliked it. Parker Tyler says it leaves a bad taste in the mouth. Isabel Quigly wrote in The Spectator that ‘Bunuel has all the hatred: what he lacks is the necessary antidote - love’. Christopher Tookey writes that it is ‘a nasty piece of work, concerned with emphasizing all that is most ungrateful, cruel and insensitive in human nature.’ The orgiastic parody of the Last Supper, he adds, looks ‘like a juvenile attempt to shock’. Vittorio de Sica, the Italian maker of Bicycle Thieves, asked Bunuel, after he had seen Viridiana, ‘What has society done to you? Have you suffered so much?’ and went on to ask Jeanne Bunuel whether her husband beat her when they made love.10

People who consider the film a satire often read it as a parable about the condition of Spain. Parker Tyler tells us that

the film’s leading allegorical figures represent the Church (Viridiana herself), old world aristocracy (Don Jaime), male youth as it inherits the modern tradition of forthright, cynical agnosticism (Jorge) and last but not least, the pariahs that form a universal underground in our harassed world: the sheer have-nots devoid of all scruple and possessing a potential of combustion parallel with that of the atom bomb itself.11

On this reading, the estate (in which, we are told by its owner, ‘the weeds have spread in twenty years’, while ‘the house is overrun with spiders’) is Spain itself, presided over by an ageing, weary dictator, emotionally stultified by events that happened decades ago, who passes his time in playing and listening to various masses and requiems. Don Jaime’s attempt to seduce his niece Viridiana represents . . . Well, what does it represent? Viridiana herself is well-meaning, naive, sentimental in a cold-hearted way, applying, arguably, the wrong solutions to problems she has failed to identify accurately. So what, in terms of political parable, can Don Jaime’s attempt to ravish her mean? Had Franco’s establishment ravished the Church? That, surely, would be to imply that the Church had resisted Franco, an implication Bunuel would reject. Whatever Viridiana’s character and her uncle’s attempt to ravish her mean (if either ‘means’ anything) neither seems to me to constitute an attack on the Church by the maker of the film. Viridiana is sincere in her behaviour throughout. She is more than a little tactless, even rather cruel, in her dealings with her uncle, but she is honest and never underhanded.

Dilys Powell preferred the notion of parody to that of parable and thought the result ‘superb’. ‘Bunuel’, she writes, ‘goes far beyond attacking professional religion and the practices of celibacy and selfmortification. He assaults the very basis of a creed which he sees as upholding a callous and decaying society.’ The drunken dinner and dancing to the Hallelujah Chorus are not ‘the simple derisive reaction against the forms of religion which many inquiring minds go through in early life . . .’ but ‘the expression of a hatred which has developed, which has matured. For Bunuel the Church is anti-life.’12

I think parts of this reading are seriously flawed, since they require us to assume that Bunuel rejoices in the actions of the outcasts - that, as an antifascist, anarchist and reputed Communist, he must be their supporter. (Bunuel denied ever joining the Communist Party and, by the end of the Fifties, felt that its dogmas left out at least half of what makes us human.)13 In Viridiana, although he probably enjoys contemplating the beggars as lords of misrule, he presents them very critically. He may be in sympathy with them in the same way as is Viridiana: they are lost souls destroyed by society. But as a group, he makes it clear, they are ungrateful, selfish, stupid and incapable of co-operating with each other. They are liars and cheats. They hate each other at least as much as they hate wealth and privilege. If they, in their muddled drunken way, think that they are paying back society and the Church for the evils they have suffered, the film seems rather to be telling us that they are cutting their own throats. Our sympathy remains firmly with Viridiana, and is reinforced by a brutal attempt to rape her.

But if this film is a parable or allegory, Viridiana cannot represent the Church as hated by Bunuel. She does little to deserve such hatred. She could be kinder to her besotted uncle, but after all, she has her virginity to defend. (I don’t think that Bunuel tries to make us think the worse of her for this.) She is also a bit of a bossy boots. But, misguided and unaware as she may be, she is hardly an oppressor. But if she does not represent the Church, who or what does? The Mother Superior of Viridiana’s convent appears twice. The first time you might think that she is telling Viridiana to visit her uncle merely because he gives money to the convent. Later, she may seem unfeeling about Viridiana’s decision to leave the convent, but, essentially, is sensible to the point of neutrality. Similarly, Don Jaime’s taste for doodling sacred songs on the harmonium, while not notably cheerful, hardly amounts to an intolerable weight of stifling dogma and intolerance.

Can we then deny that Viridiana is in any sense satirical? That might be difficult. Samuel Johnson tells us that in satire wickedness and folly are censured, and Bunuel clearly supposed that he was doing something of that kind in his film. He fits easily enough into that strand of satire that is produced by people we might describe as anarchic reactionaries: Jonathan Swift; Evelyn Waugh; Private Eye, even. Satire, of course, is not mere mud-slinging born out of dismissive contempt. It is rather an attempt to contrast what some institution or person claims to be, and should be, with what in fact it or they are. Something of the sort is clearly involved here, but it is a good deal more subtle than most commentators make it seem.

Bunuel described himself as ‘a fanatical anti-fanatic’, and this, I think, gives us the clue we need. The idea that is satirized, both in individual scenes and in the film at large, is the folly of trying to right the wrongs of the world. Viridiana is essentially a bleakly ironic tragicomedy about the ineffectuality of good intentions. In one scene Jorge frees a dog he sees being mistreated, while failing even to notice another one being treated in exactly the same way. (The dog he has freed, incidentally, does not appear to want to be taken from its inconsiderate master.) According to Bunuel’s sister he loved animals and suffered grievously when shooting the scene because the reality was so common, and trying to break Spanish peasants of their ingrained habit of cruelty was like tilting at windmills.14

Similarly, if Viridiana had succeeded in redeeming her beggars, there would still have been other beggars left in the world. But she was in any case doomed to failure. Like the dog, they are ungrateful for the kindness they have been offered. Her insistence that they participate with her in devotional exercises indicates her naivety and impracticality. Making the beggars recite the Angelus when they could be getting on with some work (the Angelus is counterpointed by the activities of Jorge’s workmen) is not awfully sensible but hardly a crime. (As with all the music in this film, Bunuel has chosen here something precisely and mischievously relevant to his theme, since this devotional prayer includes the words ‘Behold the handmaid of the Lord, be it done unto me according to your word.’ Viridiana, casting herself by implication as ‘the handmaid of the Lord’ is being presumptuous, but it is her ineffectuality that most amuses Bunuel.)

These two scenes suggest that Viridiana is at least in part a satire, but

5- Sacrilege, Satire or Statement of Faith? ioi what is being satirized is an aspiration rather than an institution, and it’s an aspiration which is found as much among unbelievers as among Christians.

Turning to another term from my title: You will remember that L’Osservatore Romano’s Spanish Dominican denounced the film as ‘sacrilegious and blasphemous’. I’ll come to ‘sacrilegious’ shortly: let’s look at ‘blasphemous’ first (for definitions of blasphemy, sacrilege and other terms, see Text Box 5.2). You will notice that I have not actually included it in my title. Why not?

The word derives from Greek roots that together suggest damage to reputation. Within Christian theology the basic meaning is speech, thought or action manifesting contempt for God. Aquinas defines it as a sin against faith that attributes to God that which does not belong to him or denies him that which is his due. Is Viridiana therefore blasphemous?

Here we must take into account cultural differences between Spaniards (at least in Bunuel’s day) and the rest of us. Blasphemy has, or had, a special role in Spanish life. Bunuel tells us that ‘the Spanish language is capable of more scathing blasphemies than any other language I know .. . blasphemy in Spain is truly an art; in Mexico ... I never heard a proper curse . . .’15

In Viridiana, in fact, God is hardly mentioned. His name is sung in the Hallelujah Chorus during the beggars’ riotous party, but we should surely draw a distinction between Bunuel showing us beggars being blasphemous, and Bunuel making a blasphemous film. Often blasphemy is in the eye of the beholder, and even good intentions are no defence. In 1879, for instance, Max Lieberman’s painting The Twelve Year Old Jesus in the Temple showed a precocious but no more than human boy talking with intense interest to the priests. To my eyes the picture is charming and acceptably naturalistic, but in its day it stirred intense controversy because of its ‘blasphemy’.16 At one point in Viridiana, a white bird is killed (off camera). Some have seen this as a blasphemous reference to the Holy Spirit. Again, the point remains that it is a despicable character in the film who kills the bird. Perhaps, in a grown-up world, ‘blasphemy’ is not a useful concept. Perhaps a ‘blasphemous’ treatment of the Church or its doctrines requires a reasoned response - which condemnation is not.

The charge of ‘sacrilege’ is easier to sustain, but you don’t have to have been educated by Jesuits - as Bunuel was - to question it. Sacrilege is the violation of any sacred person, place or thing. Thus, the attempted rape of Viridiana when she is a novice might be sacrilegious, although perhaps it isn’t quite, since she isn’t quite a nun. Her subsequent misadventures occur after she has abandoned the cloister, so do not count.

Three major works of Christian art, one pictorial, two musical, are treated disrespectfully. Leonardo’s painting is imitated fairly exactly, as anyone can see by comparing the painting and the scene in the film, but is the picture violated or profaned? More seriously, is the Last Supper itself damaged by the parody?

That depends. The moment when the drunken beggars suddenly pose for a photograph, and the photographer lifts her skirts at them, is usually thought of as a straight gesture of despite by Bunuel -< who, however,

2. Some Catholic and Literary Technical Terms

Agnosticism: the belief that we cannot know that God exists.

Angelus: a thrice daily act of devotion that honours the incarnation of Jesus by celebrating his mother, ‘the handmaid of the Lord’, signalled by the tolling of church bells.

Atheism: denial that God is real.

Blasphemy: contemptuous language addressed to or used of God.

Celibacy: renunciation of marriage.

Dogma: a definitive or infallible teaching of the Church. Not every doctrine is a dogma.

Dominican: an order of preachers and teachers of the gospel, founded in 1216.

Heresy: formal and deliberate rejection of a dogma by a baptized person. Iconoclasm: destruction of Christian images.

Idolatry: the worship of persons and things other than God as if they were God.

Jesuit: member of the Society of Jesus, founded in 1540 for the propagation of the faith and well known for its schools; a practitioner of casuistry, the art of resolving problems of conscience by drawing implausibly fine distinctions between what is and is not illegal or improper.

Novice: one in training who has not yet taken vows which admit them to a religious order.

Parable: a short, simple story that conveys a moral or spiritual meaning. Parody: an imitation of the style and ideas of an author, sometimes affectionate, sometimes intended to make them seem ridiculous.

Paradox: an apparently self-contradictory statement which partially or totally reconciles its conflicting elements.

Retablo: carved panels behind an altar, of which there are spectacular examples in Spain.

Sacrilege: the violation or contemptuous treatment of any sacred person, place or thing.

Satire: A work in which the wickedness and folly of humankind are exposed, censured and scorned.

Surrealism: literary or visual works which attempt to express the non- logical and distorted working of the unconscious mind.

Superstition: a morbid, exaggerated reliance upon aspects of religion or supposed supernatural forces.

5- Sacrilege, Satire or Statement of Faith? 103 notoriously despised picturesque groupings in films. But the scene includes complexities and resonances that render the epithet ‘blasphemous’ seriously inadequate. I have barely mentioned surrealism, which was another of the complex loyalties that most fuelled Bunuel’s creative drive, because I don’t consider this a notably surrealist film. However, since surrealism itself was for him a way of rebelling against those aspects of reality that he detested, this beggars’ riot is perhaps surrealist in mood. It is an inexplicable event in which reality is both present and, as it were, left behind. Its lack of logic may be presumed to reflect the workings of the subconscious mind. Considered as an act of rebellion it relates to another of the complications of Bunuel’s personality: he advocated revolution but was appalled when it occurred. When, in 1936, civil war broke out in Spain and the shooting began, he writes, ‘I, who had been such an ardent subversive, who had so desired the overthrow of the established order, now found myself in the middle of a volcano, and I was afraid.’17

Perhaps, if we want a rational explanation for the scene, we may assume that the beggar who is himself a painter of religious pictures has put the others up to the jape and coached them in what positions to adopt - although in that case we might expect him to sit where Judas sits in Leonardo’s painting, which he doesn’t. But if we ask why Bunuel conceived or reconceived the scene in terms of Leonardo’s picture, interesting answers present themselves. Obviously, for the film’s likely audience, it is probably the best known of the many artistic representations of the subject, and the shock - the sacrilege or blasphemy, if you will - is therefore maximized. But there is another reason, one very much more relevant to the film as a work of art. Whereas, in portraying this scene, many older painters had represented, as Kenneth Clark expresses it, ‘the moment of communion, a moment of calm in which each apostle might wish to sit alone with his thoughts’, Leonardo ‘chose the terrible moment in which Jesus says “One of you will betray me”.’18

The beggars’ party is, is it not, a betrayal of Viridiana - she who has fed, clothed and sheltered them and generally done her best, according to her own lights, to rehabilitate and redeem them. What do we hear in the moment of silence as the pose is struck? A cock crowing, a reminder of the moment when Peter denied knowing Jesus. If this scene (as well as being ‘surreal’) is a sacrilegious gesture on Bunuel’s part, it is a very carefully worked out and deliberately ambiguous one.

The two extracts from sacred choral classics that are used in the film are similarly there for other reasons than mere shock value. Early in the film Don Jaime plies Viridiana with wine and drugs and is only prevented from ravishing her by a last-minute accession of conscience. This takes place to the musical accompaniment of that part of the Mozart Requiem in which the words ‘let eternal light shine upon them with Thy saints’ are being sung. Even given that Bunuel would have denied the reality of the eternal light and the saints, his choice of music is hardly unsympathetic to Viridiana.

The Hallelujah Chorus, which accompanies the party scene, is used in a more obviously frivolous way. (We might wonder, very unfairly no doubt, whether a Spanish Dominican was really so very upset to hear, in this disgraceful context, a work by a German Protestant set to English words.) But it is surely significant that the choir is cut off in mid-phrase, at ‘And He shall reign . . .’ omitting ‘for ever and ever’. It is obviously a denial of the proposition that ‘the Lord God omnipotent reigneth’, but although this, according to Aquinas’s definition quoted earlier, is at least technically blasphemy, since it denies God that which is his due, at the same time it makes the use of this music in this scene a statement of belief (or disbelief) rather than a juvenile attempt to shock.

We might also reflect that Leonardo’s picture and Mozart’s and Handel’s music are not objects of worship. They are objets d’art, and before we start saying that they are or ought to be revered we might consider two other items in the dictionary of misdemeanours: idolatry and superstition.

Let us agree for the moment, then, that neither ‘blasphemy’ nor ‘sacrilege’ offer complete accounts of what Bunuel is doing in this film. What of the third of my terms: a statement of faith?

Five years after 'Viridiana appeared, a Spanish historian and translator, Fernando Diaz-Plaja, published The Spaniard and the Seven Deadly Sins. In it he refers to ‘the bold way in which religious subjects are treated by most Spaniards’. He also tells an illustrative anecdote, which I feel may be relevant to our apprehension of Bunuel. A bootblack in Cadiz mocks a passing priest. His client, a Protestant traveller, seizes the opportunity to explain the advantages of Protestantism. ‘Save your breath, mister,’ says the bootblack. ‘I don’t believe in my own religion, which is the true one, so how am I going to believe in yours?’ Diaz-Plaja asks, ‘Who can doubt that the blasphemer ... is a believer at heart? How can one offer gross insults to something which does not exist?’19

Obviously Bunuel’s attitude to God was significantly entangled with his attitude to the Church in Spain and the Catholic dictatorship of General Franco. As an institution that embodied a particular system of belief and set of social attitudes, he despised it. Let me quote again his remarks about ‘ecclesiastical dignitaries ... in full sacerdotal garb, their arms raised in the Fascist salute . . . God and country make an unbeatable team; they break all records for oppression and bloodshed.’ But he was more ambivalent about Franco than he was sometimes prepared to admit. In My Last Breath he claimed not to have been a fanatical opponent of Franco, whom he thought had possibly saved Spain from Nazi invasion.20 His collaborator Jean-Claude Carriere believed that this statement contributed to national reconciliation during the turbulent decade after

Franco s death in 1975- Bunuel also gave the dictator credit for having helped save Spanish Jews.21        ‘

His attitude to the Church had similar touches of ambivalence. He wrote that the only civilization he admired was that in which he was brought up. He loved the cathedrals of Segovia and Toledo and ‘that incomparable spectacle of the retablo, with its baroque labyrinths, where your fantasies can wander endlessly in the minute detours. I love cloisters too.’22

The very title Viridiana embodies a curiously gentle side to his attitude

3. Spain During Bunuel’s Lifetime (1900-83)

According to Hugh Thomas (The Spanish Civil War, p. 190),‘the twentieth century saw an awakening of the Spanish spirit: the political volatility of the years between 1898 and 1936 ... was an expression of a vitality which extended through most spheres of national life’. Bunuel’s contemporaries in the arts and literature included the painters Picasso, Dali and Miro; the writers Garcia Lorca, Jimenez, Antonio Machado, Pio Baroja, Uamuno and Ortega; and the musicians de Falla and Casals.

1909-23: General strike and convents burnt in Barcelona; street riots throughout Catalonia; Spain is neutral during World War One; strikes and industrial unrest. Gang warfare in Barcelona.

I923-3O: Primo de Rivera governs as a military dictator; resigns after losing support of the Right.

1931-4: Second Republic proclaimed; abortive military coup; Right wins general election. Insurrections by miners and Republicans in Asturia and Catalonia crushed.

1936: Popular Front wins general election; military uprising in Morocco spreads to Spain; civil war between Republicans and Nationalist rebels begins; Nationalists murder the poet and playwright Federico Garcia Lorca in Granada. (During the war tens of thousands of Spaniards are murdered by both sides.)

1937: General Franco becomes leader of Nationalists; German Condor Legion destroys the ancient Basque capital, Guernica, in an air raid; Picasso paints Guernica, expressing outrage.

I939-4O: Nationalists win the war; fierce repression of the Popular Front; Spain neutral during World War Two; Franco meets Hitler.

1946-7: The UN boycotts Spain; Bunuel emigrates to Mexico.

1955: Spain readmitted to UN; twenty years of gradual, restricted liberalization begins.

1961: Bunuel makes Viridiana with Franco’s support.

1975: Franco dies; Juan Carlos crowned king; democratization of Spain begins.

towards the Church. As I have mentioned he derived the name from a little-known saint he had heard about when he was a schoolboy. Not only was she little known, she was Italian. She lived in Castel Fiorentino in the thirteenth century, spending 34 years of prayer and penitence in seclusion there, although in 1221 she was visited by St Francis. Her death, in 1242, was announced by a sudden miraculous ringing of bells in Castel Fiorentino. Her life of seclusion (she had earlier been married, probably under some pressure from her parents) may have been inspired by a pilgrimage to Santiago de Compostela, which may be the connection in which Bunuel heard of her.23 But why should he have remembered her? Perhaps because the Latin root of her name suggests greenness, with its overtones of innocence and freshness.

As Nazarin and Viridiana show, Bunuel thought Christianity impractical and naive. But, although he proclaimed Jesus an idiot, it is not difficult to detect, in both films and in The Milky Way, an implication that there is, at least theoretically, a truer, more admirable version of Christianity than that practised by the Church. But, of course, like Viridiana herself, that truer Christianity is necessarily so vulnerable to attack and betrayal as to be useless.

Many observers would suppose that Bunuel had good reason to despise at least some aspects of the Catholicism of Franco’s Spain. If we accept this, it may follow that Bunuel’s view of Christianity in general was necessarily a distorted one. I am not trying to make him out to be any kind of closet Christian, nor to suggest that anything he thought was necessarily true, but his films are among the fruits of Catholic Spain and ‘by their fruits shall ye know them’. However, although the uncompromisingly violent anger that is commonly attributed to him might seem to be the only possible response to the privileges and wealth enjoyed by the Church in his youth - when so many Spaniards lived in abject poverty - ironic amusement seems more characteristic of many of his films, including Viridiana. He frequently denied that his films attacked anything. The Milky Way, he said, is neither for nor against anything at all.24 The actress Stephane Audran said of him, ‘He wasn’t attached to anything. His vision of human beings was . . . amused. Like God, watching us doing crazy things, but with love.’25

Sometimes, it must be said, his characters utter quasi-religious sentiments that seem entirely sincere and are not being mocked by the director. One says, ‘My hatred of science and my horror of technology will finally bring me round to this absurd belief in God.’ In The Milky Way, he uses an image derived from one of his own vivid dreams. The Virgin, shining softly, holds out her hands to the dreamer.

She speaks to me - to me, the unbeliever - with infinite tenderness . . . suddenly I feel myself inundated with a vibrant and invincible faith.

When I wake up ... I hear my voice saying: ‘Yes! Yes! Holy Virgin, yes, I believe!’ It takes me several minutes to calm down.26

Bunuel even argued, when provoked, that Viridiana was essentially a devout film, ‘because in every scene there is an underlying sense of sin. The old man cannot violate his niece because of this.’ The Mexican cameraman Gabriel Figueroa believed that Bunuel was ‘only irreverent; not against Catholicism. The irony is [says Figueroa] that even though his films are labelled anti-religious and anti-Catholic, Bunuel is actually preparing for his next life, trying to come nearer to God all the time. He is one of the most religious of men.’27 Be that as it may, he did not feel called upon to practise the Christian virtues. In 1977, while making That Obscure Object of Desire, he was approached by an elderly Dominican who confessed that he had written the article in L’Osservatore Romano denouncing Viridiana. He had now changed his mind and asked Bunuel’s forgiveness. I’m sorry to say that Bunuel threw him off the set.28

Perhaps Figueroa was engaged in wishful thinking. Orson Welles, rather more sharply, said of Bunuel that he was ‘a deeply Christian man who hates God as only a Christian can ... I see him as the most supremely religious director in the history of the movies’.29 During the last months of his life Bunuel became dependent upon the visits of a Catholic priest with whom he became friendly. Every afternoon at five, Father Julian Pablo turned up (in non-clerical garb, at Bunuel’s request). Sometimes they sat in silence, sometimes they debated points of Catholic dogma. Both denied that the priest was trying to persuade Bunuel to be reconciled with the Church. ‘He knows more about the Church and its doctrines than I do,’ was the priest’s comment.30

I don’t think it is either over-ingenious or merely provocative to say that for Bunuel, atheism was indeed a faith, and one which he devoted much of his life and work to stating. Atheism, he said, forced him to live ‘in shadowy confusion’,31 thus keeping his moral freedom intact. (Nevertheless, he was very upset when, during the war, the Museum of Modern Art in New York, acting under pressure from Cardinal Spellman, fired him because Salvador Dali, in a much publicized and scandalous autobiography, had written of him that he had attacked Catholicism in a primitive manner and was an atheist. Bunuel desperately needed the salary he lost, and had no taste for martyrdom.)32

To conclude, Viridiana illustrates in a coolly detailed way the atheism which Bunuel embraced with such fervour. He could not simply ignore ‘this absurd belief in God’, but was driven, as Orson Welles said, to hate the object of that belief. If the Last Supper scene in Viridiana is a wild parody of Leonardo’s painting, so also is Bunuel’s life and work a parody - sometimes wild, often anything but - of faith.

There is something much more than mere jokey paradox in his utterance, which I quoted earlier: ‘Thank God I’m still an atheist.’

Select Bibliography

John Baxter, Bunuel, London: Fourth Estate, 1994.

Luis Bunuel, My Last Breath, trans. Abigail Israel, London: Vintage, 1994.

Raymond Carr (ed.), Spain, A History, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000.

F. L. Cross and E. A. Livingstone (eds), The Oxford Dictionary of the Christian

Church, 3rd edn., Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997.

Fernando Diaz-Plaja, The Spaniard and the Seven Deadly Sins, London: Victor Gollancz, 1968.

Ephraim Katz (ed.), The Macmillan International Film Encyclopedia, 2nd edn, New York: Macmillan, 1994.

Richard P. McBrien (ed.), The HarperCollins Encyclopedia of Catholicism, New

York: HarperCollins, 1995.

Hugh Thomas, The Spanish Civil War, Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1977.

Christopher Tookey, The Critics’ Film Guide, London: Boxtree, 1994.

Parker Tyler, Classics of the Foreign Film, London: Spring Books, 1966.

Philip Ward (ed.), The Oxford Companion to Spanish Literature, Oxford:

Clarendon Press, 1978.

Notes

1. Luis Bunuel, My Last Breath, trans. Abigail Israel, London: Vintage, 1994, p. 170.

2. Bunuel, My Last Breath, pp. 215-16.

3. Bunuel, My Last Breath, p. 12.

4. Bunuel, My Last Breath, p. 232.

5. Bunuel, My Last Breath, p. 234.

6. John Baxter, Buiiuel, London: Fourth Estate, 1994, pp. 2-3, 255-6; Bunuel, My Last Breath, p. 234.

7. Baxter, Bunuel, pp. 6-7. This is what you would expect Bunuel to have said if you accept the usual interpretation of Viridiana. There are, however, two problems. Baxter cites Buhuel’s My Last Breath, but I cannot find the passage in the 1994 edition, which gives no indication that it has been abridged or re-edited in any way from the edition published ten years before, which Baxter uses. But even if we suppose that Baxter found his quotation elsewhere and misattributed it, I think we should heed the words of D. H. Lawrence: ‘Never trust the artist, trust the tale.’ There is a great deal more to the scene than is indicated by Bunuel’s words.

8. Baxter, Bunuel, p. 4.

9. Parker Tyler, Classics of the Foreign Film, London: Spring Books, 1966, p. 244.

10. Bunuel, My Last Breath, p. 238.

11. Tyler, Classics of the Foreign Film, p. 245.

12. For the quotations from Isabel Quigly, Christopher Tookey and Dilys Powell, see Christopher Tookey, The Critics’ Film Guide, London: Boxtree, 1994, pp. 905-6; for those from Parker Tyler see Classics, pp. 244-7.

13. Buhuel, My Last Breath, p. 166.

14. Buhuel, My Last Breath, p. 3 8.

15. Buhuel, My Last Breath, p. 159.

16. See Jaroslav Pelikan, The Illustrated Jesus Through the Centuries, New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1992, p. 197.

17. Buhuel, My Last Breath, p. 153.

18. Kenneth Clark, Leonardo Da Vinci: An Account of His Development as an Artist, revised edn, Harmondsworth: Penguin, T958, p. 93.

19. Fernando Diaz-Plaja, The Spaniard and the Seven Deadly Sins, London: Victor Gollancz, 1968, pp. 39-40.

20. See Buhuel, My Last Breath, p. 170.

21. Baxter, Buhuel, p. 243.

22. Buhuel, My Last Breath, pp. 220 and 222-3. (A retablo is a series of carved panels behind an altar and there are some particularly spectacular examples in Spain.)

23. I am indebted to Michael Walsh, sometime librarian at Heythrop College, for this information.

24. Buhuel, My Last Breath, p. 245.

25. Baxter, Buhuel, p. 313.

26. Buhuel, My Last Breath, p. 95.

27. Baxter, Buhuel, p. 256.

28. Baxter, Buhuel, p. 256.

29. Baxter, Buhuel, p. 2.

30. Baxter, Buhuel, p. 312.

31. Buhue/, My Last Breath, p. 174.

32. Buhuel, My Last Breath, p. 182 and Baxter, pp. 184-86.

6. An Ethic You Can’t Refuse?

Assessing The Godfather Trilogy

ERIC S. CHRISTIANSON

‘Make an ice-blue, terrifying movie about people you love.’

Al Ruddy, answering Paramount Head Charlie Bludhorn when asked what he would do with The Godfather, given the chance to produce it (he got the job).1

I have long had an interest in the seeming mass appeal of stylized (one might say, rhetorical) and extreme violence in a morally ambiguous context. In every genre one need not look hard to locate protagonists (or appealing ‘anti-protagonists’) for whom violence is not offered for our scrutiny but rather merely for our field of vision, our ‘entertainment’. So, for example, the Western offered us The Man With No Name, the crime thriller the Tarantino-esque witty style icon (and ambiguously violent cops, too, such as Popeye Doyle of The French Connection), and of course there is the ubiquitous action hero (in the mould of Arnold Schwarzenegger, Bruce Willis, etc.), whose righteousness rarely requires any argument. Comedy has its own strange brand of often extreme violence (of the Home Alone variety, or the black humour of a Prizzi’s Honour, or of that marvellous film noir comedy, Pulp Fiction). My question for investigation here is, What ethics are at work in the presentation of screen violence? Since its appeal is not in question, how is that appeal achieved? And what factors shape our response? (I am assuming that viewers should respond and reflect, but that is open to question.) To achieve this I will assess the moral argument of a film series that spawned a host of imitations but also emerged at the very start of what film critics refer to as Hollywood’s golden age of violence (which also produced, for example, Bonnie and Clyde, The Wild Bunch, A Clockwork Orange): The Godfather (and its two sequels), directed by Francis Ford Coppola.

It is just over thirty years since The Godfather was first screened, and it is hard to overestimate the impact and lasting influence of The Godfather trilogy of films, particularly the first two (for a synopsis of the films, see Text Box 6.1). As Nick Browne suggests,

the first two films amounted to a social phenomenon - they entered into every level of American culture - high and low - sometimes by attitude, sometimes by quotation, and sometimes through their iconic, signature scenes. The first two films entered not only movie history, but American mythology as well, and have stayed there for [over] twenty-five years.2

1. The Godfather Trilogy: Synopsis (spoilers included!)

• Part I (1972) takes place in New York in 1945 and traces the murderous struggle of the Corleone family to achieve dominance over other rival Mafia families. While the family is headed by The Godfather, Don Vito Corleone (Marlon Brando), the real focus of the film is the family itself, enshrining its traditions and assessing the various relationships among the Don and his three sons. After the murder of the eldest son, Sonny (James Caan), and the death of the Don, it is Michael Corleone (Al Pacino), the youngest, and not number two, Fredo, who inherits the throne. Michael’s WASP wife Kay (Diane Keaton) at first enjoys a close relationship with Michael, but ends up being all but cut out of his life (the film ends with Michael symbolically closing the door on her).

• Part II (19 74) interweaves two stories, one of the young Vito Corleone, his violent coming of age and rise to power, first in Sicily (where he witnesses the murder of his brother and mother) and then as an enterprising immigrant (Robert de Niro) in New York, c.1917. That story is deliberately contrasted to the rise of the Corleones under Michael’s leadership. It begins in the late 1950s in Lake Tahoe, significantly outside of the traditional homestead. Don Vito’s story is a romantic counterpoint to the course that Michael takes, which is one of dishonesty and ruthlessness that culminates in the murder of his brother Fredo and results in alienation from his family and from his own ideals. The last frame shows Michael alone and bereft against a cold autumn sky, possessing everything and nothing.

• Part III (1990) opens eight years after Part II ended, in the late 1970s, with the desolation of the Lake Tahoe compound, Michael now having moved back to New York. Throughout the film he is haunted by his sins and openly seeks redemption from the Church and from his family. He embarks, however, on some very shadowy and complex financial dealings with the Vatican and discovers that the power and corruption to which he has accustomed himself is present at the highest levels. His attempt at redemption fails. Michael ‘adopts’ his brother Sonny’s bastard son, Vincenzo, who eventually becomes Don in his place. The film ends with the tragic murder of Michael’s daughter, Mary, and then with the final image of the unceremonious death of Michael, slumped in his chair in the Sicilian sun.

As an American I can vouch for the all-pervasive influence of the films in every area of popular culture, from advertising to social parlance. Then there is the influence on other films, not only in the crime genre (notably Scorsese’s Goodfellas and Casino), but even in the spawning of a whole new genre, the Mafia comedy (such as Mickey Blue Eyes and the much funnier Analyze This). Reference to The Godfather films has become shorthand in a range of films and cultural phenomena for Old World values; the request for loyalty backed by the promise of violence. And there is no doubt as to the enduring popularity of the films themselves. The Internet Movie Database provides a respectable indicator. In its poll, with over 100,000 voters rating it an average of 9.0 out of 10, The Godfather ranks as ‘the greatest film ever’. Part II, with 8.9, is ranked number four (Part III, alas, is absent from the top 250 films list, though still garners a respectable 7.3 rating).3 Finally, one of the most innovative television series of recent years, The Sopranos, frequently references the films. From the first scene in the first episode, it is clear that The Godfather films provide not just comic relief, but a whole framework of meaning in which to understand the workings of ‘the family’ (Silvio, one of Tony Soprano’s henchmen, mimics Al Pacino in Part III: ‘Just when I thought I was out, they pulled me back in . . .’).4

The Godfather was something very new in 1972, at least not something seen for over 30 years. Here was a film that refused to interpret the activities of criminals as unambiguously wrong. It was not since films such as Little Caesar (1931), The Public Enemy (1931) and Scarface (1932) that the activities of criminals were at the centre of the narrative and were so brutally, vividly and even sympathetically portrayed. These films sparked off a series of others in which the gangsters were clearly more appealing than their law-enforcing counterparts. As Martin Quigley Jnr puts it,

The postscript [to The Public Enemy screenplay] said that the producers wanted to ‘depict honestly an environment that exists today in certain strata of American life, rather than glorify the hoodlum or the criminal.’ The film had a different effect: [James] Cagney was playful and dynamic, and so much more appealing than the characters opposed to him that audiences rooted for him in spite of themselves.5

But the Hays Production Code successfully put a stop to audience sympathy. (This is not to say that ambiguity around the act of violence would not itself flourish in the following years; see my essay on film noir in this volume, Chapter 9.) The debate surrounding the gangster films of the early 1930s, which the Code sought to address, was largely to do with, as an early draft of the Code had put it, ‘the effect which a too-detailed description of these [criminal activities] may have upon the moron’6 (read ‘the viewing public’!).

Here are a few relevant examples from the Code:7

1. No picture shall be produced that will lower the moral standards of those who see it. Hence the sympathy of the audience should never be thrown to the side of crime, wrongdoing, evil or sin.

3. Law, natural or human, shall not be ridiculed, nor shall sympathy be created for its violation.

Crimes Against the Law

1. Murder

2. Brutal killings are not to be presented in detail.

3. Revenge in modern times shall not be justified.

The Code made a particular distinction that seems presciently to have had The Godfather in mind. Under the heading, Reasons Underlying the General Principles, the following is noted:

We may feel sorry for the plight of the murderer or even understand the circumstances which led him to his crime: we may not feel sympathy with the wrong which he has done. The presentation of evil is often essential for art or fiction or drama. This in itself is not wrong provided:

1. That evil is not presented alluringly. Even if later in the film the evil is condemned or punished, it must not be allowed to appear so attractive that the audience’s emotions are drawn to desire or approve so strongly that later the condemnation is forgotten and only the apparent joy of sin is remembered.

2. That throughout, the audience feels sure that evil is wrong and good is right.

(While I do not wish to enter the debate of the impact of films on the viewer’s moral behaviour, one early critic’s thoughts on the matter are worth citing here: ‘These gang pictures . . . [are] doing nothing but harm to the younger element of this country. I don’t blame the censors for trying to bar them . . . these gang movies are making a lot of kids want to be tough guys and they don’t serve any useful purpose.’8 Given the critic’s name - Al Capone - readers will draw their own intriguing conclusions.)

The Code was decisively in effect for over 20 years. It was not until sweeping reforms by the US Supreme Court in 1966 that it was finally put to rest, just four years before The Godfather really began production. The Godfather returned the criminal/gangster to the true centre, a place it generally had not been allowed to occupy for over 30 years. And yet it went beyond the pre-Code gangster films in portraying the life of Italian- Americans with some dignity and realism (in interviews, Coppola speaks frequently of how his memories of growing up in a large Italian-American family made their way into the films, particularly in ‘event’ scenes such as marriages, meals and baptisms). Coppola’s depiction of the united, convivial and cosy Mafia family, in the first half of Part I especially, created an inviting aura around criminal life. It is most clearly achieved in the opening sequence of the wedding of Michael’s sister, Connie, in which the Don generates warmth and genuine respect in all of his social interactions.

In most senses the Corleones are an ideal 1940s family. As such, this is a white, male fantasy world, where the women are quiet and largely do as they are asked; with, of course, the fascinating exception of Michael’s wife, Kay. Apart from Kay, the women of Parts I and II are little more than animate props and plot devices. But it is from Kay’s perspective that we are first introduced to the brutal violence of the family.

In the acclaimed opening wedding sequence of Part I, the business of the family is confidently displayed. The sun-kissed, festive party, full of lights, paper globes and tarantella (Italian folk-music) dancing, is buzzing with family ‘business’. Envelopes of cash are passed between ‘family’, the Don meets serenely with those who ask his favour, as if he is capable of bestowing divine beneficence. Having returned from army service, Michael makes his first appearance in uniform and introduces Kay, his WASP fiancee, to the family. To Kay’s surprise, famous crooner Johnny Fontaine arrives to sing. Kay asks how the family knows Johnny and Michael relates how his father helped Johnny by getting him out of a binding contract early in his career:

Michael: Now Johnny is my father’s godson, and my.father went to see this bandleader and they offered him 10,000 dollars to let him go, but the bandleader said no. So the next day my father went to see him, only this time with [his henchman, whom Kay has just seen and been frightened by] Luca Brasi, and within an hour he signed a release for a certified cheque of 1,000 dollars.

Kay: Well, how’d he do that?

Michael {with alarming detachment)-. Luca Brasi held a gun to his head, and my father assured him that either his brains or his signature would be on the contract. (Kay is visually stunned, speechless.) That’s a true story. That’s my family, Kay, not me.

The central place enjoyed by the family in The Godfather indicates another significant move away from the old gangster genre. Gone is the old antithesis between criminals and the law. The only law enforcers in The Godfather are either corrupt or simply ineffective. The new framework of meaning is the family, namely the struggle of one family to dominate other families, and to look after their own. If one can identify ‘The Law’ in The Godfather, it is the law of the family, which itself is nostalgically linked to the law of the ‘Old Country’; the law is about loyalty, honour and the wisdom of silence. To put it another way, the Hays Code was now replaced by the Code of Sicily (to which I will return). For good or ill, this is the paradigm now at work in many crime dramas of the big and small screen, and we have The Godfather to thank for it.

The Godfather series is not a simple matter of the support or critique of one ideology. There is more than one prominent ideology and the films variously support and critique ideologies in turns. Glenn Man suggests that The Godfather fits a particular type of ideological discourse in that it is ‘basically conservative but containjs] radical elements that disrupt the text’.9 The Godfather is an extreme example of this type. ‘Part I plays up the tensions between a prosocial myth and the myth of the romanticized gangster, never quite resolving the conflict between the two, whereas the other two films pursue a relentless critique of American capitalism and the American dream.’10

There are at least three points of view to which we are drawn in assessing the mythology of The Godfather films. The first is that of Vito Corleone. The scenes that attempt most clearly to legitimize violence appear in the sequences of Part II of the young Vito in Sicily and New York. The act of violence that signals Vito’s future power and status is the murder of the flamboyant and repulsive Fanucci, a neighbourhood tyrant who takes advantage of poor immigrant families. He is not unlike the overlord who is responsible for the deaths of Vito’s brother and mother in Sicily. He is easy to hate. But everything about Vito is charmed, confirmed by his being rendered in soft focus and sepia tones, the theme music played on an evocative music box, all conjuring up Old World values.11 Vito and his friends are warm and open and they like to joke around. Vito is a local hero, looking after the underprivileged. It is also significant that Vito is aligned with what film critic Vera Dika has identified as ‘La Via Vecchia’, a real Sicilian code of honour. It is at work throughout The Godfather films. It includes the code of silence with respect to the ‘family business’, an expectation that men will not abuse ‘their women’ and that all business will be conducted with honesty. The same disarming charm follows the older Vito from the opening scene of Part I, Amerigo Bonasera’s pleading with the Don for justice:

From the start of The Godfather, Coppola restrains us from classifying Don Corleone as a comic-book villain. The Don fixes Bonasera with an imperious stare . . . The camera’s computer-timed lens retreats with scarcely perceptible stealth back past the head of Brando’s Don . . . The Don sits in monolithic silence, stroking a cat in a telling visual metaphor for the hooded claws of his domain. All these elements, and the conspiratorial shadows of Gordon Willis’s photography, evoke the intimacy of some pagan confessional.12

Beneath the Don’s tranquil veneer constantly lurks the threat of violence, like the cat that might suddenly hiss and lash out, yet it is something we never see. This is, as we will see, a disingenuous strategy with which some have taken issue.

Within the logic of Part I, then, suggests Dika, those who violate the codes (as Don Vito represents them) ‘deserve everything they get. So, since [police chief] McClusky is a vulgar cop who violates the law, and [Connie’s husband] Carlo is a wife beater and a traitor to his family, they become worthy of their punishment’13 (and I would add to the list Tessio, an old friend who is punished for betraying the family). So here is a deeply sympathetic portrayal. Vito’s violence is to be understood and, through the flawless editing of Part II, it is deliberately contrasted with the second significant point of view, that of Michael Corleone.

I have noted how The Godfather opens with Don Vito Corleone gracefully in control at the wedding of his daughter. He insists that the family photograph be delayed so that Michael can appear in it. He hears all who want to see him and his authority is never questioned. Traditional music provides the ambience and there is genuine joy and conviviality. It is a master class in character establishment. When we are introduced to Michael in Part II, it is at the christening of his son, Anthony. He has left the roots of New York and followed the money, to Lake Tahoe. Michael looks out of place and rarely smiles. When he meets with the corrupt Senator Geary we see his authority challenged. An old family friend, Pentangeli, tries to get the band to play the same tarantella music played at Connie’s wedding in Part I, but he is mocked by a rendition of Pop Goes the Weasel instead. Connie is now out of control and Michael’s brother, Fredo, violates the Via Vecchia by ‘losing control’ of his drunken wife. In contrast, Don Vito was rendered as a genuinely loved and warm person who cared for his family. The only murders in which he participated appear to have been revenge killings or were directly related to a wrong done against him or an attempt to provide for his family. Michael starts this way. With his wife Kay he is at first warm and even a good listener. But the deeper he falls into the family business, the more he shuts Kay out. (This is an effective motif: Kay gets the door shut on her several times throughout the films.)

By the end of Part III, The Godfather has come full circle. In a sense, Michael has become what, according to Part II, drove his father to crime: a wealthy landowning Northern Italian involved in shadowy business. That is not to say that his attempt at reform is not genuine, but it seems it is too late for him, that at some point he has crossed a personal Rubicon. Everything about Part III supports this view of Michael, even the presentation of violence. In Parts I and II, the language around vengeance and ‘business’ is jovial; there are happy meals and nearly always it is the ‘right’ people who die. The exception is Fredo, who is the linchpin between Parts II and III. Everything about the business in Part III has become ugly and demeaning. There is no jovial warmth and Michael discovers that hypocrisy is at work in the highest places. Killing is not as clean as it once was. The fantasy of power is laid bare in Part III. Gone are any noble motivations of vengeance; the only motive left in Part III is greed. Of course the whole denouement is only made possible by the romanticiz- ation of the Mafia myth in Part I, and the seeds of its destruction sown in Part II.

Kay offers us a third perspective from which to view the mythology, as an outsider from the ‘real world’, and it is perhaps the most satisfying. Towards the end of Part II, Kay critiques (for us?) the whole rationale of Michael’s life. After Michael has returned from a long absence, the two meet at a hotel. As their children play in the hallway, Kay confronts him in his hotel room and informs him that she and the children are ‘going’. They begin to talk, calmly at first. Michael, quietly and threateningly, asks, ‘Do you expect me to let you take my children from me? . . . Don’t you know that that’s an impossibility?’ Kay then informs him that he is ‘blind’, and that what he had previously been led to believe was a miscarriage of her last pregnancy was in fact an abortion:

An abortion, Michael. Just like our marriage is an abortion; something that’s unholy and evil. I didn’t want your son, Michael. I wouldn’t bring another one of your sons into this world ... I had it killed because this must all end ... I knew . . . there would be no way you could ever forgive me, not with this Sicilian thing that’s been going on for 2,000 . . . [Michael cuts her off and slaps her viciously in the head, knocking her down.)

Kay’s revelation causes Michael to lose control, to violate the Via Vecchia. Her voice in Parts II and III is the clearest critical moral voice. My question is, What is our response to Kay’s assault on Michael in this scene ? Is it sympathy for Michael? Or do we see this as the harvest of what he has sown? When she challenges ‘this Sicilian thing’, with whom do we find ourselves aligned? Are we outraged at her mockery of the Old World? I think it is to Coppola’s credit that he does not instruct us how to assess his characters. But does The Godfather trilogy ask us to understand (in the manner of critique) the Corleones’ violent ethic, to assent to it or merely to be entertained by it?

Having considered The Godfather’s mythology, I would now like to ask where exactly the appeal to The Godfather lies. Whereas the Hays-Code gangster offered us something against which to oppose ourselves (gangsters as ‘pathological, morally reproachable’, etc.), does The Godfather offer us ‘a man that we want to be, or that we can’t help being’? Is Alessandro Camon right when he states, ‘As much as we enjoyed [Michael’s] affirmations of power (carefully set up in the film as righteous revenges, almost supernatural in their efficiency), we empathize with his suffering the consequences’?14 Or is it all simply a case of ‘bad guys’ being redeemed by their interaction with ‘worse guys’?15

I am certain that Coppola and author and screenwriter Mario Puzo sought to elicit audience sympathy, particularly for Michael. They both eventually agreed that in Part II Michael could not murder his brother Fredo until their mother had died. As Puzo put it, ‘Psychologically I felt that . . . the audience would never forgive him.’16 Coppola wanted the acts of violence to be committed with rhetorical flourishes to make them ‘poetic’ (according to Coppola, ‘there was always some weird detail’),17 and this distances the viewer, shifting interest from consequence and realism to aesthetics. One spectacular example of that rhetoric in Part I is Michael’s initiation into violence. The scene is set in a small Italian restaurant, with few patrons present, at night, as Michael sets about the shifty murder of Sollozzo and corrupt police chief McClusky (played by film noir veteran, Sterling Hayden), who both attempted to kill his father. The effect of the cinematic rhetoric (from the widely acclaimed use of sound to the mists of blood that fill the air in the moment of impact) is that we are not so much appalled as entertained, even amused. This is intensified by the use of extremely low lighting by cinematographer Gordon Willis, which weaves deliberate ambiguity into the stories. As he comments, ‘There were times in some of [Brando’s] scenes where I deliberately did not want to see his eyes, so that you saw this mysterious human being thinking about something . . . but you didn’t really know what the hell was going on.’18

Film critic Roger Ebert suggests that it is because the world of The Godfather is a closed one that we find it so easy to be drawn to their central characters. In other words, that world is presented on its own terms, the way it would ‘like’ to be received. For example, the somewhat infeasible decision of Vito Corleone, in Part I, that the family not be involved in drug trafficking (Vito: ‘How did things ever get so far? ... I believe this drug business is going to destroy us in the years to come’) could be seen simply as a cynical attempt to make the family more palatable to us.19 As Ebert remarks, ‘During the movie we see not a single actual civilian victim of organized crime. No women trapped into prostitution. No lives wrecked by gambling. No victims of theft, fraud or protection rackets.’20 David Denby takes a similar view, seeing this closed world as a subtle but disingenuous strategy of Coppola and Puzo. So effective is the presentation of the piety of the family that ‘By the time Michael Corleone shoots his father’s enemies in the restaurant scene, Coppola had most of us where he wanted us . . . we accepted the notion that Michael’s violence was an act of family piety, a way of accepting his father, his family past, his natural destiny.’21 As James Caan put it (and, judging by his hard-boiled delivery, meant it) in a recent interview, ‘It’s almost like you forgave everybody everything because they did it for the sake of family.’22 Their world becomes odd and even funny, but there is no real tragedy, no ‘everyday victims of Mafia extortion’.23 It is this sterility, this banality, that William Pechter has suggested is the most morally audacious aspect of the films:

The gangster here . . . has become . . . only another instance of the banality of evil. Who is this good husband and father, this man who must occasionally kill people in order to provide? .. . What are we that in this outsize, driven figure and his terrible excesses we can see the image, however extravagant and distorted, of ourselves?24

Denby also identifies a ‘sociological argument’ at work in the films: that is, that the Mafia was necessitated by the failure of the American judicial system. The argument is there from the opening speech of Bonasera in Part I, as he pleads with the Don to revenge the rape of his daughter: ‘I believe in America. America has made my fortune ... I went to the police, like a good American ... They [the offenders] went free ... Then I said to my wife, “For justice we must go to Don Corleone”.’ This ‘sociological’ view of Vito has a softening effect. Interestingly the actors clearly held to the argument themselves while making the film. In a 1971 documentary with interviews of the actors in costume, Pacino suggests that an island invaded as much as Sicily needed to form a bond of trust found uniquely in the ‘family compound’.25 Richard Castellano, who played Clemenza, put the case more authoritatively: ‘See, there is a necessity for Don Corleone . . . There is a necessity for the syndicate. If there were no necessity, it wouldn’t exist.’ Denby also suggests that the ultimate message of Part II, that ‘extreme success in America isolates you from everything worth striving for’, is simply boring and is too easy an irony.26 Ironically this is precisely what many critics see as the great strength of the trilogy. In the words of Coppola himself, at the end of Part II Michael ‘has damned himself and lost everything that is worthwhile’.27

Part III provides another clue as to the massive appeal of The Godfather Parts I and II. Part III is often derided as inferior to the first two films, and in polls ranks well below the first two. It is certainly flawed, yet as one reviewer put it, if it stood alone it would probably rate far better. The unpopularity of Part III might in part be due to viewers’ reluctance to see a vulnerable Michael, being made weak by his struggle with diabetes, no longer being a ‘step ahead’ of the bad guys. Coppola has said that he knew he was taking a risk by portraying Michael seeking redemption. Michael couldn’t be a ‘slick, lethal killer, the Michael Corleone people love’.28 The murder of his brother Fredo in Part II hangs like a dark shadow over Michael’s ultimately failed attempt to redeem himself. In Part I it was perfectly acceptable to see Vito in a state of weakness, for we knew that Michael was on the rise; Vito somehow managed to make us feel that he was a good man. With Vito’s demise we do not think he is being left to the devil, but with Michael we can be certain that he has not managed to break away from his pact. And yet this interior judgement of the film presents another problem. The film is asking us to judge Michael not by an external moral standard, but by the life of arch-criminal Vito Corleone; that is, by Vito’s idealized motivation of love for family. Michael’s ‘sins’ are to do with the betrayal of family. This presents an insurmountable problem to the whole ambition of Parts II and III; for to believe that Michael’s redemption is a worthy goal we must assent to everything for which Vito Corleone has stood: all of the untold and unseen social consequences of the Mafia lifestyle, implicitly and superficially rationalized by ‘love of family’.

I have discussed the diverse ways - technical and emotional - in which Coppola and crew sought some kind of viewer identification, even empathy, with the Corleones. But what exactly are we empathizing with? Clive Marsh has recently explored the question of identification in films, asking what films actually do to us as viewers. Drawing on the work of Berys Gaut, Marsh argues that viewers

do not (cannot, usually) identify with characters in all respects. What happens is that in a variety of ways viewers end up empathising, and sometimes sympathising, with characters. Sometimes this is a result of film technique (particular camera angles which require us to take up particular viewpoints); at other times it may result from what the viewer him- or herself brings to the film.29

With Vito are we aspiring to the kind of charm that is able to distance one from evil? Is that an appealing approach to coping with personal evil? Or to be more specific, coping with localized social oppression? With Michael are we empathizing with his loss of control (and ultimately, of love), even though his takes place in a context and at a level that most of us can never grasp? Marsh’s brief reference to The Shawshank Redemption in the context of his discussion of identification is particularly apt here: ‘Few viewers of The Shawshank Redemption will identify with Red because of their own experience as murderers ... The real emotion that viewers do bring to this film is the sense of guilt or remorse that they feel about a past action of their own.’30 If that is so, what of The Godfather films? Although they have apparently found a receptive and empathetic audience among real mafiosi, perhaps it is not such a specific emotional and social context that the films are touching on with most viewers. The films touch a more universal nerve and somehow allow viewers, seemingly without a sense of guilt or irony, to identify with the Corleones.

The moral arguments of The Godfather are certainly flawed, but that might be missing the point. The Godfather films neither clearly glorify nor condemn the mafia myth, but portray it in all of its moral ambiguity, and perhaps this is a strength of the films.31 When asked by Playboy if he thought he was guilty of romanticizing the Mafia, Coppola replied, ‘Remember, it wasn’t a documentary about Mafia chief Vito Genovese. It was Marlon Brando with Kleenex in his mouth.’ Of course he is underestimating the power of his own filmic rhetoric, but he has a point. Why do we not apply the same ethical questions to other romances?

And this leads me to contrast a final parallel. The way we ‘read’ The Godfather films is of particular interest to me as a Bible exegete, for we bring our reading ethic to other ‘texts’, and reading the Bible presents us with some surprisingly similar moral quandaries. The most consistently comparable feature is the refusal of the Bible’s narrators to guide our assessment of the moral actions of its protagonists. Lot is prepared to hand over his daughters to certain death to save his skin; Jacob lies to his father’s face to steal a birthright; a concubine is left for dead and the Levite does nothing but gruesomely desecrate her body with a violence that would not pass the censors. In each case (and there are more) we are offered little or no moral guidance by the narrator or the narrative presentation generally. (Although this often enables a critical encounter with the text because multiple readings are possible.) And then there is David. His was a story of house against house, the defeat of one family by another. David’s ‘rustic’, even romantic, beginning was to be overshadowed and consumed by his violent rise through the echelons of power. His is a story of loyalty, corruption and tragedy through moments of moral weakness. It is a story of Old World values moving inexorably towards an institutionalized form of power. And in his ignoble end (in bed with a concubine probably young enough to be his granddaughter), having lost his son, and lost any moral voice within his family, I am reminded of Michael Corleone’s lonely and feeble demise.

Notes

1. Cited in Peter Cowie, The Godfather Book, London: Faber and Faber, 1997, p. 8.

2. Nick Browne, ‘Fearful A-Symmetries: Violence as History in The Godfather Films’, in Nick Browne (ed.), The Godfather Trilogy, Cambridge Film Handbooks; Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000, pp. 1-22 (2).

3. Source: http://imdb.com/Top/, 16 September 2004. When the figures are broken down into male and female voters, The Godfather unsurprisingly ranks first with men and is still an impressive fourteenth with women.

4. On the many ways in which The Godfather films inform The Sopranos, see D. Pattie, ‘Mobbed Up: The Sopranos and the Modern Gangster Film’, in D. Lavery (ed.), This Thing of Ours: Investigating The Sopranos, New York: Columbia University Press, 2002, pp. 135-45.

5. Cited in John Walker (ed.), Halliwell’s Film and Video Guide, London: HarperCollins, rev. 12th edn, 1997, p. 604.

6. Cited in Richard Maltby, ‘The Spectacle of Criminality’, in J. David Slocum (ed.), Violence and American Cinema, AFI Film Readers; London: Routledge, 2001, pp. 117-52 (120).

7. All citations from the Code are taken from S. Prince’s superb study, Classical Film Violence: Designing and Regulating Brutality in Hollywood Cinema, 1930-1968, New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2003, Appendix B: The Production Code, pp. 293-301. It is also available at ArtsReformation.com, http://www.artsreformation.com/aooi/hays-code.html.

8. Cited in Maltby, ‘Criminality’, p. 118.

9. Glenn Man, ‘Ideology and Genre in The Godfather Films’, in Browne (ed.), The Godfather Trilogy, pp. 109-32 (128; drawing on the work of Louis Camolli and Jean Narboni).

10. Man, ‘Ideology’, p. 128.

11. As Cowie puts it, ‘Brando’s Don radiates an irresistible charm and nobility, and in the “prequel” De Niro’s Vito adroitly reflects these qualities. As a consequence, the audience allows itself to be duped, lulled into accepting the legitimacy of the budding Don’s crimes’ (The Godfather Book, pp. 181-2).

12. Cowie, The Godfather Book, p. 171.

13. Vera Dika, ‘The Representation of Ethnicity in The Godfather', in Browne (ed.), The Godfather Trilogy, pp. 76-108 (90).

14. Alessandro Camon, ‘The Godfather and the Mythology of Mafia’, in Browne (ed.), The Godfather Trilogy, pp. 57-75 (70).

15. Camon, ‘Mythology’, p. 75 (referring to Tarantino’s Pulp Fiction).

16. ‘Coppola and Puzo on Screenwriting’, Bonus Materials DVD, Paramount Home Video, 2001.

17. DVD director’s commentary to Part II, Paramount Home Video, 2001.

18. ‘Gordon Willis on Cinematography’, Bonus Materials DVD, Paramount Home Video, 2001.

19. Cowie agrees, and gives examples of mafiosi being involved in the drug trade as early as 1935 (The Godfather Book, p. 173).

20. Roger Ebert, ‘The Godfather’, The Chicago Sun Times, 1999; http://www.suntimes.com/ebert/ebert_reviews/1999/1o/god1o28.html.

21. David Denby, ‘The Two Godfathers’, in Browne (ed.), The Godfather Trilogy, pp. 173-80 (175).

22. ‘The Godfather Family: A Look Inside’, Bonus Materials DVD, Paramount Home Video, 2001.

23. Denby, ‘The Two Godfathers’, p. 174.

24. ‘Keeping Up with the Corleones’, in Browne (ed.), The Godfather Trilogy, pp. 167-73 (I72-~'3)- Critics at the time of the release of Part I also identified a moral vacuity. So, for example, Robert Hatch in The Nation wrote, ‘The success of The Godfather is deplorable if you believe that popular entertainment both reflects and modifies social morale. In a sentence, the picture forces you to take sides, to form allegiances, in a situation that is totally without moral substance ...’ (cited in Cowie, The Godfather Book, p. 69).

25. Bonus Materials DVD, Paramount Home Video, 2001.

26. Denby, ‘The Two Godfathers’, p. 178.

27. DVD director’s commentary to Part IL

28. DVD director’s commentary to Part II.

29. Clive Marsh, Cinema and Sentiment: Film’s Challenge to Theology, Carlisle: Paternoster, 2004, p. 90.

30. Marsh, Cinema and Sentiment, p. 92.

31. So Camon,‘Mythology’, p. 75.

7- Was Judas The Third Man)
The Lost Childhood in the Cinema of
Graham Greene

TOM AITKEN

In 1947, the year during which, on 27 September, he conceived the story of The Third Man (or so he says, although elements of it come from much earlier),1 Graham Greene published an essay called The Lost Childhood. This discussed the special pleasure and excitement the young derive from reading, a pleasure and excitement that, he found, diminished somewhat with maturity. That special pleasure and excitement, he thought, made the books we enjoyed when young stay with us and influence us forever. He himself had been impelled to become a writer when he read Marjorie Bowen’s The Viper of Milan, a ripping yarn about evil in Renaissance Italy.

At the end of his essay he quotes ‘Germinal’, a poem with a broadly similar theme, by the Irish poet George William Russell, who wrote as ‘A.E.’, which asserts that both good and evil deeds have roots in childhood; the reason for the betrayal of Christ, for example, was buried in ‘the lost boyhood of Judas’.2

This reference to Judas, I think, takes Greene’s essay into more suggestive territory than it has previously entered. It also provides a cluster of meanings and associations which taken together epitomize much of Greene’s work. Anyone may write about lost childhood. Anyone may write about betrayal. But throw in Judas and Jesus and the mix becomes specifically Greene. No mean betrayer himself, he returns over and again to situations in which religion and betrayal are closely linked - almost two sides of the same coin. (For a chronology of Greene’s life, see Text Box 7.1.)

Thus, in The End of the Affair - almost unique in Greene’s work in that it has now been the subject of two fairly and variously respectable screen adaptations (for further screen versions of Greene’s fiction, see Text Box 7.2) - when the adulterous Sarah becomes a Catholic and refuses to have anything further to do with her lover Bendrix, he feels betrayed and bitter. And, be it noted, Sarah’s conversion is shown as deriving from an incident lost so deep in her childhood that she has completely forgotten it (largely

1. Graham Greene: A Chronology

1904-35: Born at Berkhamsted, Hertfordshire. Educated at Berkhamsted School (where his father was headmaster) and Balliol College, Oxford.

1926: Converts to Catholicism in order to marry Vivienne Dayrell- Browning in 1927.        .

1929-31: Publishes three novels, two of which he later rejects. Only the first, The Man Within, remains in print.

1932-9: Writes two novels and three ‘entertainments’ (his word for thrillers), establishing his characteristic world of seedy disappointment, now known as ‘Greeneland’. The novelist J. B. Priestley threatens a libel action against the first of the ‘entertainments’, Stamboul Train.

1937: Greene suggests in a review of a Shirley Temple film in the magazine Night and Day that the studio ‘procured’ its star ‘for immoral purposes’: widespread outrage and closure of the magazine follow.

1938: Travels through Mexico in order to report on the condition of the Catholic Church there in The Lawless Roads. Later, in The Power and the Glory, he reuses much of the material as fiction.

1938-61: From Brighton Rock to A Burnt-Out Case, writes five novels in which Catholicism is central. The last makes Evelyn Waugh fear that he has abandoned Catholicism, which he denies.

1947: Begins a drunken, intense affair with Catherine Walston.

1955-88: Returns to political themes in The Quiet American, but later becomes eclectic in subject and approach. Our Man in Havana (1958) and Travels with My Aunt (1969} are comedies, while Monsignor Quixote combines comedy with Catholicism.

1966: Begins affair with Yvonne Cloetta.

1978: Death of Catherine Walston.

1993: During Greene’s last illness his long-separated wife Vivienne asks to see him but he refuses. She and his mistress Yvonne Cloetta meet for the first time at his funeral.

perhaps because when it happened she did not understand it). Bendrix is told at Sarah’s funeral that when she was two, her mother, on holiday in France without her atheist husband, had her secretly baptized. The sacrament had clearly, her mother believes, ‘taken’ even though Sarah was unconscious of it. Bendrix, a man of no religious belief, is outraged. He has been betrayed not merely by Sarah herself but, as he sees it, by a piece of mumbo-jumbo enacted during her lost childhood.

In The Fallen Idol, made in 1948, the year before The Third Man, betrayals are multitudinous and of many kinds. Baines, butler in the London Embassy of a foreign power, has betrayed his wife by falling in love with a secretary. He has betrayed the secretary by failing to leave his wife. He has betrayed the trust, almost hero worship of the ambassador’s lonely son, Felipe. Mrs Baines has in some sense betrayed her husband by being or becoming an ill-tempered, house-proud shrew, and, worse, is very unkind to Felipe, for whom Baines harbours a love as if for his own unborn son.

Events are seen from Felipe’s point of view, but the audience is placed outside him, watching in anguish as he is tricked into betraying what he knows of Baines’s affair to Mrs Baines and, when talking to the police at

2. Ten Other Screen Versions of Greene’s Fiction

(Films marked * scripted by Greene himself)

Went the Day Well (Alberto Cavalcanti, 1940) German soldiers infiltrate an English village.

The Ministry of Fear (Fritz Lang, 1943)

Guilt-ridden mercy killer becomes involved with German spy ring.

Brighton Rock (John Boulting, 1947)*

Childlike waitress falls in love with a sadistic baby-faced criminal who loathes women.

The Fallen Idol (Carol Reed, 1948)*

Small boy loses his trust in the butler he has hero-worshipped.

The Heart of the Matter (George More O’Ferrall, 1953)

Catholic policeman in West Africa agonizes over an adulterous affair.

Our Man in Havana (Carol Reed, 1960)*

English vacuum cleaner salesman becomes an inventively fraudulent spy.

England Made Me (Peter Duffell, 1973)

British siblings in Thirties Germany troubled by their unacknowledged incestuous attraction.

Monsignor Quixote (Rodney Bennett, 1985; made for television) Elderly priest and Marxist sparring partner bicker amiably as they drive around Spain.

The End of the Affair (Neil Jordan, 1999)

An adulterous affair in wartime London provokes a crisis of conscience.

The Quiet American (Phillip Noyce, 2002)

Political and sexual discord between cynical Brit and idealistic American in 1950s Saigon.

the film s climax, almost incriminates Baines after Mrs Baines has accidentally fallen to her death. Felipe is left feeling that the entire adult world has betrayed him - or perhaps it would be better to say that it has let him down. He cannot understand why people should be so upset about a few clandestine meetings in tea rooms, why Baines should lie to him, and why, when he decides to tell the exact truth about what has happened (‘Please! Please listen to me! This is important.’) he is patted on the head and ignored. And, of course, his childhood, previously idyllic, is lost.

Greene regarded his original story, The Basement Room, as unfilmable, and in his conferences with the director Carol Reed, he writes, it ‘was quietly changed so that [it] no longer concerned a small boy who unwittingly betrayed his best friend to the police, but dealt instead with a small boy who believed that his best friend was a murderer and nearly procured his arrest by telling lies in his defence’.3 This permits a halfway happy ending. Similarly, in Brighton Rock, young Rose is saved by a scratched gramophone record from what the novel calls, in anticipation, ‘the worst horror of all’, Pinkie’s abusively contemptuous parting message to her - another betrayal of innocent trust. But although The Fallen Idol is given a comfortable rather than a disastrous ending for Baines (and therefore for the audience, since Baines is a sympathetic character), it is a sad one for Felipe: his idol has fallen indeed, and with him, for the time being at any rate, any wish Felipe might have to enter the adult world.

A more dubious kind of innocence is examined and in due course betrayed in The Quiet American, set in Saigon during the rebellion against the French. In this, detachment (in the person of Fowler, a sceptical British journalist) is pitted against involvement (in the person of Pyle, a younger man from the American legation). When Pyle’s naive political views and actions lead the French colonial police into thinking him a menace, Fowler (admittedly almost by omission) helps them lure Pyle into a situation in which he can easily be killed. Like some other betrayers in Greene whom I will mention later, he washes his hands of the matter, reflecting that ‘Sooner or later, one has to take sides - is that not so?’ Nonetheless, he is aware of what he has done, and, like others of Greene’s erring atheists, yearns for somewhere to unload his guilt. ‘Even betrayal of someone you neither like nor respect feels like betrayal. You hand it over to that somebody in whom you don’t believe,’ wishing that ‘someone existed to whom I could say I was sorry’.

Many of these betrayers who so fascinate Greene act out of conflicting feelings of love and malice. Their betrayals are never performed out of pure self-interest; there is always a mixture of moral or ideological complication, amounting at times almost to the sense that the deed is done in the victim’s best interests. Their betrayals take many forms: espionage, quisling-like treason, failure to observe priestly vows, adultery, stealing a friend’s mistress, failure to intervene to save another’s life, pretence of love, adulteration of medicine, failure to live up to an acquaintance’s high opinion. And, frequently, the betrayed are also betrayers, as in The Fallen Idol and The Third Man.

In The Third Man, Holly Martins, after realizing how far he and others have been betrayed by Lime, is persuaded to co-operate with the authorities. But after he has done what he has to do, Martins still feels that he has betrayed Lime; and not just Lime himself, but their friendship - a friendship that was a whole greater than the sum of its parts, and might somehow have been able to transcend the desolating truth about Lime the betrayer: of the sick children of Vienna, of Anna, his mistress, of Martins himself and of all civilized feeling. It is not ideology or conscience which takes precedence in Martins’s far from incisive mind, so much as the sentimental romanticism of the cheap Westerns that he writes.

The Third Man was not an adaptation of an existing work, but an original story. We shall come later to the question of just how original it is. Greene, as he usually did when starting a film from scratch, began by writing a prose draft, which in this case was subsequently published. (It differs considerably from the finished film.) Greene’s idea concerned a man apparently dead who turned out not to be dead after all. Alexander Korda, at that time the sole producer of the proposed film, wanted it set in post-war Europe and suggested Vienna and Rome. Greene spent some time living in the Sacher Hotel behind the Vienna Opera, at that time occupied by the British military, gathering atmosphere for his story. Eventually he decided that Rome would not be necessary. While in Vienna he visited many less respectable haunts than the Sacher, as was his wont: Elizabeth Montague, who had been sent by Korda to look after him, recalled asking him how he squared his religious principles with sitting in a brothel getting drunk - and being almost convinced by the brilliant equivocations in his lengthy response.4

All this is described in Charles Drazin’s book, Tn Search of The Third Man, published in 1999, which also covers in entertaining detail the no less brilliant equivocations Greene and Reed used to circumvent demands for change emanating from the American producer, David O. Selznik, who came on board when Korda (as he often did) had a cash-flow problem. Selznik complained that the script made it look as if the British were the most important power in Vienna, and that of the two Americans on view, Lime was a racketeer and Holly Martins a crass drunk. It is impossible to deny that he had a point, but we can nevertheless be glad that many of his suggestions (which amounted quite often to commands) were ignored. He was, however, responsible for the amazing final shot in the film, in which Anna walks away from Lime’s grave, ignoring Martins, who, in his bumbling way (he has told her, ‘I’m just a hack writer who drinks too much and falls in love with girls’) wants to replace Harry in her affections.

Before I examine how ‘Catholic’ the film is, and the various other meanings it has, I want to address the question of just how ‘original’ its story is. I have said that The Third Man is about betrayal, and it is easy to argue that not only is it about betrayal, but also that in constructing his plot Greene in a sense betrayed two other writers and, covertly, a close friend. Philip French, in a cogently argued review when the film was re-released in 1999, draws attention to marked resemblances between Greene’s story and that of Eric Ambler’s thriller, The Mask of Dimitrios, published in 1939. In this, a naive, not very good writer of detective stories visits Constantinople in search of Dimitrios, a criminal who has victimized many, and has now disappeared. (‘Until nearly the end’, Ambler himself cells us, 'the reader sees Dimitrios only obliquely, through the eyes of those he has victimized and through the mind of Latimer, the scholarly detective story writer in search of reality.’5) Greene, of course, presents Lime in exactly the same way in The Third Man. Like Martins, Latimer refuses to take the advice of the local police chief (who has read his books, just as Paine, Calloway’s assistant, has read Martins’s). We have here, surely, in Dimitrios, Latimer and the police chief, speaking likenesses of Harry Lime, Holly Martins and Major Calloway. In The Third Man itself there is one highly suggestive reference, otherwise apparently irrelevant. The film begins with a voice-over commentary on the Viennese situation, spoken, incidentally, by the director, Carol Reed. It begins: T never knew the old Vienna before the war, with its Strauss music, its glamour and easy charm - Constantinople suited me better . . .’ Is this mention of Constantinople a nod in the direction of Ambler’s story? Surely it cannot be mere coincidence. Various people involved in the new film had worked either with Ambler, or on his books, in the not too distant past and there may have been a shared feeling that he was owed something. Reed had collaborated with Ambler on a wartime documentary, The Way Ahead, in 1944. Orson Welles had part-directed a film of Ambler’s Journey into Fear in 1942.. Greene had praised Ambler’s thrillers.

There is a faint possibility, perhaps, that Greene and Ambler may have colluded in some way. In 1944, Warner Brothers had produced an undistinguished film of The Mask of Dimitrios, one which (as Ambler again tells us) simply ‘ignored’ the complexities of his narrative, introducing Dimitrios right from the start. Ambler may have allowed Greene to take over the central elements of his story in order to see what could be done with them by a good director and cast. Ambler, however, makes no such suggestion in his autobiography, Here Lies, and Greene was unlikely to advertise any borrowing of the kind. As was the convention, he took sole writing credit for the film, although Carol Reed, Peter Smollett (of whom more later) and Mabbie Poole, wife of the playwright Rodney Ackland, all worked on the script.6 Also, as is well known, it was Orson Welles, playing Lime, who wrote Lime’s speech about the cuckoo clock - although he in fact lifted the idea from the American Artist James McNeil Whistler. More important than any of these in the script-writing team was an American screenwriter, Jerome Chodorov, who was brought in to make Holly Martins’s dialogue more convincingly idiomatic. (Chodorov appears to have done rather more than that, in fact. Many of the changes in Martins’s dialogue between Greene’s shooting script and the finished film are not merely more idiomatically American, they define Martins’s character more sharply and interestingly than the lines they replace.)

When Philip French asked Ambler whether he had noticed the resemblance between The Third Man and The Mask of Dimitrios, Ambler replied drily, ‘Yes, I have.’7 But whatever the truth of the Ambler connection (almost a title for one of Ambler’s own books), the elements of deception and sharp practice involved would have appealed to Greene. I would add, however, that the context of occupied Vienna transforms the atmosphere surrounding the story. Ambler’s pre-war yarn shows an innocent Englishman getting into trouble with devilishly cunning Levantine criminals. In The Third Man, the evils of the war and the rampant corruption that has succeeded it are everywhere apparent and essential to the story and, taken together with the religious and moral elements, lend The Third Man a resonance and power that is missing from Dimitrios. As Greene suggested elsewhere, when a country hands itself over to moral and social collapse it is every man for himself. And, to a much greater extent than Ambler’s Charles Latimer, Holly is Everyman, adrift in a world where he understands neither the language nor the conventions. He gives this tale something for everybody. Perhaps we have an illustration here of the First Law of Plagiarism: If you plagiarize, do so with improvements.

Another unacknowledged source for Greene’s plot was his friendship with Kim Philby. Philby was a British diplomat and double-agent who worked in liaison with the CIA but also spied for the Russians. He defected to Russia in 1963 after being warned that his cover had been blown. Philby had been in Vienna in February 1934, when the Austrian Chancellor, Englebert Dollfuss, suspended parliamentary government and drove the Socialists into revolt. There Philby met a young communist called Litzi Friedmann, and some of the things that happened to her seem to have suggested things that happen to Anna in The Third Man. During a military siege of the Karl Marx Hof, a municipal showpiece housing estate half a mile long, Litzi and Philby helped besieged Socialists to escape through the city’s network of sewers. When they had themselves to flee to safety, Philby - unlike Lime with Anna - married Litzi in order to take her to London; although they subsequently split up.

Litzi had meanwhile introduced Philby to a local journalist called Peter Smolka (mentioned above under the name he used when he too took refuge in London, Peter Smollett), who would become another of Greene’s unacknowledged sources for The Third Man. By the time Greene went to

3. Post-war Vienna

July 1945 Vienna divided into four zones administered by France, Britain, the United States and Russia respectively. The central area of the city is administered jointly by all four.

Four famous hotels are commandeered as military headquarters.

Theatres, restaurants and other places of public resort and entertainment continue to function, largely without customers.

The state-run pawn shop, the Dorotheum, does a roaring trade.

The black market thrives and is powerful.

Rural peasants decorate their homes with the possessions of the urban rich, bartered for food.

1948 While The Third Man is being made, the Cold War begins. The Russians blockade Berlin and the Western powers airlift food and other supplies into the city. This continues for over a year until September 1949, the month in which the film opens.

Vienna in 1948 with Elizabeth Montague to research for the film, Smolka was back there, and they met, possibly not for the first time. Smolka showed Greene stories he had written; three of which featured, respectively, the network of sewers under Vienna, the penicillin rackets that were practised in the city and the way in which jeeps carrying soldiers from each of the four occupying powers patrolled the city. Greene lifted all this material without acknowledgement, but when Elizabeth Montague realized what he had done, Smolka was given 200 guineas and appointed as an adviser and location assistant on the film, in addition to helping with the script.8 As with Ambler, there is in the film (but not in the script) a typically covert acknowledgement. When, after Lime’s supposed funeral, Calloway gives Martins a lift back from the cemetery and offers him a drink, he tells the driver what we assume is the name of a bar. The name is ‘Smolka!’

Aside from questions about how much or little of his story Greene actually invented, the Philby/Smolka connection has suggested to some commentators that, in the character of Harry Lime, Greene is making a coded confession that he knew all about Philby’s double life. It is at least an ingenious interpretation and may even be true. It would not necessarily have needed to be consciously true.9 Either way, Greene was careful, then and later, to cover his tracks.

Thus, The Third Man is not only about betrayal; it is in itself a complicated act of betrayal. Is it also about Catholicism? Although none of the four leading characters in The Third Man is announced as a Catholic (although Anna may be, and we can assume that all the Austrian supporting characters are), the film comes at approximately the central point of Greene’s most Catholic phase as a writer. Between Brighton Rock (1938) and A Burnt Out Case (i960) most of Greene’s novels (as opposed to the fictions he called ‘entertainments’) had explicitly Catholic themes, exploring the idea of ‘the appalling strangeness of the mercy of God’. Two of the most explicit of all, The Heart of the Matter and The End of the Affair, appeared respectively in 1948 (the year before The Third Man) and 1951, two years after it. Alongside ‘the appalling strangeness of the mercy of God’ and the lost childhood of Judas, there appears a third concern, derived from Browning’s poem ‘Bishop Blougram’s Apology’:

Our interest’s in the dangerous edge of things.

The honest thief, the tender murderer,

The superstitious atheist. . .10

These ideas found their way into many of the more than 20 films, scripted either by Greene himself or by others, based on his fiction. When I began work on this essay I wrote that ‘there is only one scene with any particularly Catholic resonance in The Third Man (which in many respects resembles an ‘entertainment’), albeit an important one’. Then, experiencing a serendipitous twinge of nervous caution, I watched the film again and realized that in fact it is stuffed with them.

When Martins arrives in Vienna he goes to Harry’s flat, expecting to see him. He meets instead the porter, who speaks very little English. (The actor who played him, we are told by Drazin, spoke none at all, and had to be taught the English words by rote. If so he did a remarkable job.) Be that as it may, he tells Martins that Harry is dead, gives the first of many conflicting accounts of the ‘fatal’ accident, and adds, of Lime ‘Already in hell . . .’ (pointing upwards) ‘. . . or’ (after a pause to signal dubiety) ‘in heaven’ (pointing downwards). The moment, which is not in Greene’s shooting script, is a remarkably subtle one. The joke about the porter’s grasp of English is obvious, but we have to decide whether the porter has actually confused the two words. Any impartial judge knowing the truth about Harry would naturally assume that he had gone to hell. The porter, however, is an innocent-seeming chap, vaguely aware that it may be dangerous to say too much about Harry (his strapping wife sharpens his perceptions on this matter from time to time) but perhaps, like Martins and Harry’s girlfriend Anna, is unwilling to believe that Harry was anything other than the charmer he seems. Later, however, when pressed about the accident, the porter backtracks in a way which in the context of Austria just after the war, is significant. ‘I saw nothing,’ he says. ‘It is not my business.’ What else, we wonder, has he failed to notice in the past 15 years because it was not his business?

From Harry’s flat Martins goes to Harry’s funeral, where another subtlety not in Greene’s shooting script has found its way into the film. A priest (‘mumbling rapidly’, as the script commands) is reciting from the missal, but not the words about resting in peace that Greene originally used. Instead he seems to be reciting the Creed, at the point at which Pontius Pilate is mentioned - the man, of course, whose response to a difficult problem was to wash his hands. The hand-washing that goes on in The Third Man - a film whose climax, let us remember, occurs in a sewer - is extensive and practised by many characters. Furthermore, the mention of Pilate immediately precedes mention of the resurrection, relevant in a somewhat improper fashion to Harry Lime.

Furthermore, implausibly, the priest is speaking not Latin but German. Is he telling us subliminally that the whole funeral service is a fraud? Well, perhaps, perhaps not. Soon after this, misled by Sergeant Paine’s announcement that Martins is a ‘very good’ writer, Crabbin, who is busy culturally re-educating the Viennese, invites Martins to give a lecture on the modern novel. At a subsequent meeting he is more specific: ‘They want you to talk on the Crisis of Faith.’ Startled, Martins asks, ‘What’s that?’ Crabbin says, ‘I thought you’d know, you’re a writer . . .’ Then he laughs. ‘Of course you know.’ No doubt Greene is having a little private joke here about the subjects readers at this time wanted to discuss with him, but we may note that Martins is on his way to a major crisis of faith of his own when the friend he has trusted and admired to the point of worshipping is revealed as a despicable crook.

Meanwhile, Martins has interviewed two Viennese friends of Harry’s. The second of these, Lime’s medical advisor, Dr Winkel, is a precise, fastidious man whose waiting room is described in Greene’s directions as reminding us of ‘an antique shop that specialises in religious objets d’art\ In the film Martins and Winkel fill most of the screen, but the room is clearly much as Greene imagined it. I continue with his description:

There are more crucifixes hanging on the walls and perched on the cupboards and occasional tables than one can count, none of later date than the seventeenth century. There are statues in wood and ivory. There are a number of reliquaries: little bits of bone marked with saints’ names and set in oval frames on a background of tinfoil. Even the high- backed, hideous chairs look as if they had been sat in by cardinals.11

In the shooting script there is a brief conversation about a crucifix on which Christ hangs with his arms above his head. Winkel explains that it is a Jansenist crucifix and the posture reflects (he does not say how) the Jansenist belief that Christ died only for the elect. In the film these lines are cut, and the curious choice of decoration for a doctor’s waiting room is not alluded to; it is merely there. It is possible, I think, that Greene intended a veiled comment on those Viennese Catholics, some of them among the most antisemitic in Europe, who lived through the Nazi period apparently blind to any conflict between Nazi and Catholic beliefs. This corruption and wilful blindness is echoed by Winkel’s reiterated response to questions about Harry’s death: T cannot give an opinion. I was not there.’ (This, of course, raises the question of Greene’s own antisemitism, which I think we may say was of the relatively mild semiautomatic sort common in Western Europe and elsewhere during the inter-war years. After the war, as Michael Shelden in his notably unsympathetic account expresses it ‘he had the good sense to back away’12 from this earlier attitude; I think we may see The Third Man as a stage in that process.)

The last of the scenes in the film that explicitly mentions Christian belief is the meeting between Lime and Martins on the big wheel on the Prater. Martins asks Lime if he has ever seen any of his victims. Lime is evasive, then scathing.

‘You know, I never feel comfortable with these things . . . Victims?

Don’t be melodramatic. Look down there. Would you really feel any pity if one of those dots stopped moving for ever? If I said you can have twenty thousand pounds for every dot that stops, would you really, old man, tell me to keep my money - or would you calculate how many dots you could afford to spare? And free of income tax, old man, free of income tax.’

[After further dialogue, Harry adds,] Tn these days, old man, nobody thinks in terms of human beings. They talk of the people and the proletariat, and I talk of the suckers . . .’

[Martins says,] ‘You used to believe in a God.’

A shade of melancholy [Greene tells us] crosses Harry’s face. ‘Oh, I still believe, old man. In God and Mercy and all that. The dead are happier dead. They don’t miss much here, poor devils.’

(In a way, ironically, Lime is here almost echoing Calloway, who has earlier told Holly, ‘Death’s at the bottom of everything, Martins. Leave death to the professionals.’)

Whether or not we can believe Harry’s assertion of belief - and perhaps we can - Harry is voicing a colder, more clinically detached, version of the same corrupt excuse-making and hand-washing we have already seen from the porter, Kurtz and Winkel: times are bad, how can we be any better than the times we live in? ‘We aren’t heroes, Holly, you and I,’ Lime says. ‘The world doesn’t make heroes outside your books.’ Given this view of the world, then for the ‘suckers’, death is the lesser of two evils. Even at this point, looking down from the zenith of the turning wheel, like Satan on the desert mountain top, Lime tries to tempt Martins into joining him.

Let us accept, then, that the action of The Third Man is coloured by Greene’s Catholicism. Further, in leaving the ideas of Christian morality to be expressed by the powerless and ineffectual Holly Martins, Greene offers a version of the old saying that this world is a vale of tears within which evil is largely invincible. He also, however, uses a feature of Martins’s own genre, the climactic shoot-out between goodies and baddies, to give us a temporal, in-this-world resolution. The death of Lime at Martins’s hand will not, of course, eliminate evil from the world - not even from Vienna - but it allows us to feel, with Calloway, Anna and, very reluctantly, Martins himself, that with Lime’s death the world has changed for the better.

Nevertheless, Martins, like young Felipe, has lost his childhood by losing the picture of Harry he has lived with all these years. As he has told Anna, ‘I knew him for twenty years - at least, I thought I knew him. I suppose he was laughing at fools like us all the time.’

‘He liked to laugh,’ says Anna.

But even though Lime ‘liked to laugh’ and is a betrayer not only of those who buy his adulterated penicillin, but of his oldest friend and his mistress, we have perhaps arrived at the point where I must abandon my characterization of him as Judas. In the film he is altogether too large a figure for that to be adequate. He is, rather, Satan, or his alter ego, Lucifer, as described by Isaiah13 (in various translations) as ‘Son of the Morning’, ‘Daystar’, ‘the fallen Angel of Light’.

Select Bibliography

Eric Ambler, Here Lies, London: Weidenfeld and Nicholson, 1985.

        The Mask of Dimitrios, London: Macmillan, 1999.

Charles Drazin, In Search of The Third Man, London: Methuen, 1999.

Quentin Falk, Travels in Greeneland, 3rd edn, London: Reynolds & Hearn Ltd, 2.000.

Philip French, review of a re-release of The Third Man, London: The Observer, 18 July 1999-

Graham Greene, Collected Essays, London: Penguin Books, 1970.

        A Sort of Life, London: Bodley Head, 1971.

        The Third Man and The Fallen Idol, Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1975.

        Ways of Escape, London: Bodley Head, 1980.

Graham Greene and Carol Reed, The Third Man: A Film by Graham Greene and Carol Reed, London: Lorrimer, 1969.

Michael Shelden, Graham Greene: The Man- Within, London: William Heinemann, 1994.

Notes

1. Graham Greene, Ways of Escape, London: Bodley Head, 1980, pp. 122-7, and Charles Drazin, In Search of The Third Man, London: Methuen, 1999, pp. 2-3-

2. Graham Greene, Collected Essays, London: Penguin, 1970, p. 18.

3. Graham Greene, The Third Man and The Fallen Idol, Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1975, p. 123.

4. Drazin, Search, p. 6.

5. Ambler, Here Lies, London: Weidenfeld and Nicholson, 1985, p. 224.

6. Drazin, Search, p. 8.

7. The Observer, 18 July 1999. I have recently discovered that The Mask of Dimitrios was among the books which Graham Greene took with him to West Africa in 1941.

8. Drazin, Search, pp. 7-9. Drazin notes that this was a generous payment for the use of three short stories and that Smollett/Smolka accepted the situation cheerfully.

9. See Drazin, Search, pp. 144-54, and Michael Shelden, Graham Greene: The Man Within, London: William Heinemann, 1994, pp. 310-24.

10. See Graham Greene, A Sort of Life, London: Bodley Head, 1971, p. 115.

11. Graham Greene and Carol Reed, The Third Man: A Film by Graham Greene and Carol Reed, London: Lorrimer, 1969, p. 55.

12. Shelden, Greene, p. 151.

13. Isaiah 14.12.

8. Artificial Bodies:

Blade Runner and the Death of Man

GEORGE AICHELE

[T]he great cosmos itself is a vast computer and ... we are the
programs it runs.1

Postmodernism deconstructs the humanist oppositions of reality/appear- ance, nature/artifice, symbol/meaning, signifier/signified and organism/ machine. Postmodern thought recognizes that existence precedes essence, and nothing is less natural, more artificial, and more ideological, than ‘human nature’. What makes us human is indeed what separates us from nature. Human nature is a ‘reality effect’2 or ideological construction, a simulacrum. ‘The simulacrum is not a degraded copy. It harbors a positive power which denies the original and the copy, the model and the reproduction.'’3 ‘Today abstraction is no longer that of the map, the double, the mirror, or the concept. Simulation ... is the generation by models of a real without origin or reality: a hyperreal.’4 (For brief explanations of some of the technical terms in this chapter, see Text Box 8.1.)

The postmodern subversion of belief, even of beliefs demanded by modernist atheism, is suggested already by Nietzsche’s madman’s phrase, ‘God is dead.’5 If God did not exist, then God could not die. The madman’s claim is a strange confession of faith, and it is the beginning of the end of ‘man’. As Michel Foucault says, ‘[t]he death of God does not restore us to a limited and positivistic world, but to a world exposed by the experience of its limits, made and unmade by that excess which transgresses it’.6 It is an apocalyptic moment, a rediscovery of humanity - but an apocalypse, finally, that uncovers questions, not answers. When God dies, the human being is revealed to be an artifice, a posthuman cyborg. If modernism is the philosophy of man, then postmodernism is the philosophy of hyperreal humanity, or posthumanity.

Katherine Hayles concludes her book with the comment that ‘[w]e have always been posthuman’.7 Human beings are fabricated beings - one might even say essentially artificial. It does not require surgery, implants or drugs to transform humanity, for human beings have been doing that to themselves over and over again for thousands of years, beginning with simple tools, language, clothing, the use of fire and agriculture. The

1. Some Technical Terms

Apocalypse - the revelation of some secret, especially concerning the end of the world.

Cyberpunk - cybernetic + punk. A type of story in which the distinction between human being and machine (especially computers) is blurred or erased.

Deconstruct - to disassemble a system of ideas by uncovering the inherent incoherence or incompleteness that makes that system possible.

Gnosticism - ancient belief system, especially widespread in early Christianity, that taught that salvation was to be achieved through secret knowledge (gnosis) brought to humanity by a divine redeemer.

Postmodern/postmodernism - ‘that which, in the modern, puts forward the unpresentable in presentation itself’ (Jean-Francois Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge, trans. Geoff Bennington and Brian Massumi, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984, p.81).

Simuiacrum/simulation - the idea that everything is artificial, and that whatever we consider to be ‘natural’ is an ideological illusion. Also known as ‘hyperreality’.

hyperreality of everything human becomes particularly evident in relation to the human body. After the death of God, the status of the soul becomes problematic. The deconstruction of the body/soul opposition leads to recognition that although the body is the point at which every human being is most natural, nevertheless the body is also both tool and signifier. We have modified and extended our bodies, both internally and externally. On one hand, the body is simply ‘meat’, the living flesh that sustains human consciousness. On the other hand, the body is augmentable and even replaceable, not only through drugs and surgery, but by means of biomechanical prostheses such as hearing aids and heart pacemakers as well as external supplements such as telephones and computers. The body has been reduced to code (and not merely DNA) - code that can be endlessly replicated or revised.

This is a recurring theme of‘cyberpunk’ fiction.8 Cyberpunk is a recent form of science fiction that combines in speculative narrative imaginary technological innovations (usually in the near future) and the gritty urban realism often associated with ‘hard boiled’ detective stories. Genetic or cybernetic tools or processes so modify the human body that questions of human identity and nature can be explored through plots that realize ‘the expression of deep, unconscious, collective fears about our social life and its tendencies’.9 The story is often narrated from a cynical or paranoid first-person perspective. Cyberpunk contrasts strongly with epic-heroic science fiction of the Star Wars or Matrix variety. The stories often feature a strong dose of ironic social commentary, and the principal characters are typically marginal hustlers and con artists, alienated ‘street people’ who survive in a grim, violent world — often a police state ruled by giant corporations - through their ability to slip through the cracks in a disintegrating community order and to manipulate the massive cybernetic powers that hold that world together.

These cyberpunk themes appear in Philip K. Dick’s novel, Do Androids Dream of Electronic Sheep?, which served as the basis for Ridley Scott’s movie, Blade Runner. Like a fine translation, Scott’s movie complements and illuminates Dick’s novel. However, it is by no means a literal translation, and even to say that both film and novel represent ‘the same story’ is quite a stretch. Indeed, there are numerous versions of Scott’s movie, which are also arguably not ‘the same story’.10 I will be discussing both the US theatrical release and the ‘director’s cut’ versions, and relevant differences will be noted. Nevertheless, despite numerous and substantial differences between the novel and the film, or perhaps because of them, the movie does an excellent job of reflecting the enigma that defines the novel - namely, the paradoxical relation between human beings and ‘nature’, as both embodied and surpassed in the machines that humans build. As a work of narrative art, the movie is just as interesting as the novel that it is derived from, and both Dick’s novel and Scott’s movie have on their own merits achieved .‘classic’ status in their respective media. Indeed, Scott’s film has had such impact on awareness of Dick’s novel that later printings have been retitled Blade Runner, and unless otherwise indicated, I use this title to refer both to Dick’s novel and Scott’s film.

The novel and the movie agree on the following: early in the twenty-first century (approximately 50 years from the novel’s publication in 1968), there has been a nuclear war. That and the resulting nuclear winter have eliminated most animal life on Earth. Many of the surviving humans are emigrating to colonies elsewhere in the solar system, seeking ‘a new life’ where they are assisted by androids (‘andys’ in the novel, ‘replicants’ in the movie). These androids are not the tin-man robots of early science fiction, nor are they electronic computers; instead they are cyborgs, fusions of organic tissue and inorganic machine - simulated life. In the movie, this is emphasized in the death scene of the replicant Pris, in which her twitchy, toy-like death spasms contrast with the gore of her bullet wounds. Androids are technologically constructed organic beings, DNA-based, who closely resemble human beings, and who have quickly ‘evolved’ (as a result of design improvements and market demand) to a point where they are equal or superior to humans in intelligence and strength. They also pass Descartes’s humanity test: ‘I think, therefore 1 am,’ Pns tells the human J. F. Sebastian in the movie. Later, the replicant Roy accuses the human Deckard of being irrational.

The newest android models, the Nexus-6, even have false memories built into them, giving them the illusion of having grown up and lived for many years as ‘real’ human beings. They may not even realize that they are not natural human beings. In the words of their human creator, they are ‘more human than human’. (This phrase appears only in the movie, but it nicely summarizes the novel as well.) The main limitation of these synthetic human beings is that they have a lifespan of only four years, which may or may not be an inevitable result of the technology itself. Near the beginning of the movie, the police chief, Bryant, states that this feature was deliberately designed into the androids as a fail-safe control mechanism, implying that it is not necessary. Indeed, the controversial ending of the theatrical release version of the movie depends on the possibility that this limitation might be suspended. In contrast, there is no doubt of the inevitability of this ‘accelerated decrepitude’ in the novel, and instead in that story the androids’ lack of empathy is their ‘deliberately built-in defect’.11

The androids are treated as slaves in extraterrestrial colonies and are not permitted on Earth. They have no rights and are regarded as ‘it’, not ‘him’ or ‘her’, even though their bodies appear gendered. Because their bodies look like human ones (both internally and externally), detection of more advanced androids is possible only through tests of empathic response to hypothetical situations involving living organisms. A machine called the Voigt-Kampff Test detects the presence of the human ‘group instinct’ that is empathy, which the androids lack (BR, 26). However, as they have increased in sophistication, the newer androids have begun to develop human-like emotions, including the desire to live in freedom, as humans do, and they are also starting to fall in love with one another. As a result, there is some doubt as to whether the Voigt-Kampff device can successfully distinguish real human beings from Nexus-6 androids. Some of these androids escape and flee to Earth, where they are hunted down and ‘retired’ by police bounty hunters (‘blade runners’). One of these hunters is Rick Deckard, who lives in San Francisco (Los Angeles in the movie) and who is assigned the task of retiring a group of escaped Nexus-6 androids. As he hunts the androids, Deckard comes increasingly to question his own humanity and to suspect that these androids actually are more human than he is. He also becomes attracted to an android woman, Rachael, and he begins to wonder if he might be an android, paradoxically, when he begins to feel empathy for the simulated humans that he is hunting.

One important difference between Dick’s novel and Scott’s movie lies in their respective treatments of religion. Like many of Dick’s writings,

Do Androids Dream of Electronic Sheep? presents an extended meditation on religion.12 In the devastated post-nuclear world of this story, the human survivors have become obsessed with Mercerism, a religion that incorporates elements of Christianity and Buddhism. Mercerism advocates the unity and sacredness of all living things. Although no organizational aspect of this religion is described, its adherents make regular use of another electronic device, the ‘Mercer box’. This machine both replays sensations of the final moments of the religion’s founder, Wilbur Mercer, and stimulates the user’s nervous system to produce a strong sense of empathy. Mercer himself is a mysterious figure, who may have been an ordinary human being, or possibly a radioactively mutated ‘special’, or perhaps even a superhuman ‘archetype’ from the stars (BR, 20, 61). The Mercer box artificially fuses the user’s mind with Mercer’s, and through Mercer with everyone else who uses a Mercer box, and the user vicariously experiences in her own body Mercer’s physical sufferings and death. This intense bodily experience can be shared with other humans, even ‘specials’, but androids are unable to experience it.

Near the end of the novel, it is revealed (by a popular television performer who is himself an android) that the Mercer images produced by the boxes are fraudulent, staged simulations. ‘Mercer’ himself was an actor who was filmed on a Hollywood stage set (BR, 182-4). The empathy that the boxes generate has no real object. Despite this revelation, and as he is about to destroy the final androids, Deckard has a vision of Wilbur Mercer - one that does not involve a Mercer box - and he is compelled to go out into the dangerously radioactive desert where he personally and physically re-enacts Mercer’s final moments. This experience brings Deckard to an ambivalent peace and acceptance of his own general lack of empathy. Although everything appears to be simulated - Deckard concludes that ‘Mercer isn’t a fake . . . unless reality is a fake’ - nevertheless, ‘everything is true’ (BR, 207, 201).

Thus in the novel, religion plays an important role in deconstructing the opposition between ‘natural’ human being and ‘artificial’ android. Through the empathy produced by the Mercer box, Mercerism emphasizes both the interdependence of all life and the radical difference between living creatures, especially human beings, and non-living simulations - that is, androids. By celebrating the sufferings of living bodies, Mercerite empathy contributes to the persecution and suffering of simulated living bodies. Nevertheless, and ironically, Mercerism is itself shown to be an unnatural and probably fictitious construct - a simulated religion built upon an artificially generated sense of empathy — which continues to have very real effects, perhaps not unlike a gripping novel or movie - such as Blade Runner itself!

In contrast to the novel, the movie makes no reference to Mercerism. Instead, it presents a highly secularized human world, in which the supernatural appears only in the form of rare albeit highly symbolic events, in each of which the androids figure prominently. The two most important of these events appear near the end of the film. In the first, Roy Batty (Baty in the novel), the leader of the renegade androids, rides an elevator up the side of a Babel-like skyscraper/pyramid to confront Eldon Tyrell, the man whose corporation designed and manufactured him and his friends. ‘It’s not an easy thing to meet your maker,’ Roy tells Tyrell, and then, Job-like, he presents his demand: ‘I want more life, fucker.’ Death is the problem, Roy says. Tyrell calls him ‘the prodigal son’, after which Roy admits that he has done ‘questionable things’ but insists that his deeds are ‘nothing the god of biomechanics wouldn’t let you in heaven for’. He confesses and is absolved by the god himself: ‘[y]ou were made as well as we could make you,’ Tyrell tells him. Roy is acknowledged and simultaneously abandoned by his creator. In response, the android kisses and then kills his god, crushing the human’s skull in his bare hands.

The second symbolic event occurs when Roy finally confronts Deckard. Roy is filled with very human grief over the death of the android woman, Pris, whom he loved and whom Deckard has just retired. ‘Unless you’re alive, you can’t play,’ Roy says bitterly. However, the last few seconds of Roy’s own abbreviated life span are ticking away. He jams a large nail into his hand in order to keep his body from shutting down before he can kill Deckard. Surprisingly, he then saves Deckard’s life, catching Deckard’s falling body with his impaled hand, just as his own life finally breaks down. ‘Maybe in those last moments he loved life more than he ever had before. Not just his life, anybody’s life, my life,’ says Deckard in voice-over (only in the theatrical release). As Roy expires, a dove that he had been holding flies up into the perpetually raining clouds just as they open briefly to let blue sky peep through. Roy’s death becomes baptism, crucifixion and ascension (and Deckard’s salvation) all at once.

These two episodes, with their heavy-handed religious imagery,13 establish Roy as an android messiah, a warrior-king who fails to liberate his people, although his death makes a profound impression on his enemy (cf. Mark 15.39 par.). He is a rebel against the old god and the old covenant, with a body that is not human - a gnostic redeemer figure and Lucifer who makes war on ‘the god of biomechanics’ and on all of his human allies. Roy does not come to visit humanity on behalf of any god or to share any higher truth with us. Instead, he seeks escape from the hell of his slave’s existence and entry into a more heavenly, albeit earthly, realm. He is both Christ and Satan at once - but he is also an android, and his final undoing is not Deckard’s work but simply the expiration, like a clock running down, of mechanisms built into his artificial body four years earlier.

Through the intensity of passion that links the symbolism of Roy’s murder of Tyrell to that of Roy’s own death, Deckard comes face to face with his own lack of humanity, and he is redeemed through this revelation. However, neither of these two scenes, or anything corresponding to them, appears in Dick’s novel, in which Roy plays a less significant role.

The ending of the movie is less ambiguous than is that of the novel, and for this reason, some viewers prefer the director’s cut version of the movie, which ends in greater ambiguity, although not as the novel does. This is partly because of the different roles played by religion (and by Deckard) in each of them. Through both the universality of Mercerism and the televised revelation that the religion is based on falsehood, the novel identifies Deckard as a symptom and representative of humanity as a whole. Although he is the central character of the story, he is not a particularly sympathetic one, thanks largely to his own lack of empathy. Dick’s novel is itself a literary Mercer box, a test of the reader’s empathy with Rick Deckard. In contrast, the movie focuses on Deckard as a unique individual - as evidenced by his feelings that emerge (‘there it was again - feelings in myself,’ in voice-over in the theatrical release) in regard first to Rachael and then to Roy — and the movie’s symbolic events have no apparent universal implications. In the film, Deckard is a highly sympathetic character struggling to get by in a harsh, dehumanized world.

Despite important differences between the novel and the film, in both of them Deckard encounters the unexpected humanity of the simulacrum. His meeting with the synthetic messiah, whether android replicant or replicated Mercer, and his attraction to the female replicant, bring him to something like a crisis of faith, after which his life can no longer be the same. Deckard becomes fully human - indeed, posthuman - only when he recognizes his own android qualities, reflected in the artificial Other. Only the simulacrum can be ‘more human than human’.

Neither Deckard nor the reader/viewer ever knows for certain whether he is truly human or android. However, both Dick’s novel and Scott’s movie contain versions of a remarkable scene in which the young woman, Rachael, discovers that she is an android, after she has been tested by Deckard. In Rachael’s case, false memories implanted in her brain when she was manufactured had kept her from this awareness. Her new awareness disturbs her deeply; it is an apocalyptic moment (BR, 51-2).14 Nevertheless, there is little positive content to the new knowledge that Rachael gains. Instead, everything that she already knows acquires a whole new set of meanings. Rachael’s most intimate memories turn out to have been recordings of the experiences of a stranger, and her personal identity is not a natural product of years of growing up as a human being, as she had believed, but rather a construct implanted in a body that is much younger than it appears. Rachael’s body is not a truly human body; it is artificial. It is not even her body, because she is now ‘it’, a ‘skin job’ with no rights and no possessions.

This crisis that both Deckard and Rachael go through is a kind of repentance. These episodes depict a realization that your deepest beliefs and values are mistaken and that the very fabric of reality itself is quite other than what you had previously thought. Something previously hidden has been revealed; it is the apocalyptic moment that was mentioned above. This is not repentance in the traditional ‘biblical’ sense. Neither Rachael nor Deckard feels any regret or remorse, although Deckard is increasingly resistant to the idea that androids are non-living, non-human objects. Nor does either of them experience conversion, in the sense of religious or even non-religious change from one world-view or lifestyle to another: there is no indication that either Deckard or Rachael has made such a change. Deckard remains a bounty hunter at the end of both novel and film, although his future in that line of work is unclear at best. This crisis is not a moment of conversion, but rather subversion, or perhaps even perversion.15

The less overtly theological sense of repentance as ‘change of mind (or heart, or purpose)’ comes closer to the experience depicted in Blade Runner, but even that is not enough. A better depiction appears in the central image of Jean-Paul Sartre’s novel, Nausea. Nausea results when that novel’s main character, Antoine Roquentin, makes a self-shattering discovery, after which his orientation toward life has been profoundly changed.16 It is not a discovery of meaning, but rather of profound meaninglessness. This experience is the ‘vertigo of the simulacrum’17 in which modernist ‘man’ and the modernist world disintegrates. As Deckard’s experience makes clear, the shock is not in the discovery that you are a simulacrum, but rather the discovery that everything is simulated and that none of the modernist oppositions works any more, and perhaps even that they have never worked.

This sort of paradox appears in many of Dick’s stories. Discussions among the movie’s fans about whether or not Deckard himself is a replicant miss this crucial point. Everything in the world of Blade Runner is fake, and yet everything is true. This is a far more stunning realization than the discovery that ‘I am a replicant.’ All of reality is a construct, although not in any sense that might be contrasted to some opposite, nonconstructed thing. There is no non-simulacrum; nothing is natural. It is the realization that, as Hayles argues, we have always been posthuman.

Deckard’s and Rachael’s repentance is not ‘biblical’, but something rather like it does appear in the Gospel of Mark. At Mark 1.15, Jesus preaches ‘the gospel of God’: ‘The time is fulfilled, and the kingdom of God is at hand; repent, and believe in the gospel’ (RSV). ‘Repent’ in Mark 1.15 resonates with ‘turn again’ in 4.11-12: ‘for those outside everything is in parables; so that they may indeed see but not perceive, and may indeed hear but not understand; lest they should turn again, and be forgiven’. Jesus quotes Isaiah 6.9-10, God’s instruction to the prophet to speak in parables in order that the people will not ‘understand with their hearts’.

The Gospel of Mark’s ‘repent’ denotes a paradoxical disruption of understanding, or a disruptive understanding, apart from which there can be no belief in the gospel or recognition of the kingdom of God (see Text Box 8.2). Understanding might lead to turning, and thus to forgiveness, and Jesus rebukes his disciples in Mark 4.13 for their failure to understand the parables. This matter appears yet again in 8.17-18, where Jesus again criticizes the disciples: ‘Do you not yet perceive or understand? Are your hearts hardened? Having eyes do you not see, and having ears do you not hear? And do you not remember?’ Once more there is seeing without perceiving, and hearing without understanding, and understanding is opposed to hardened hearts and an inability to remember. Seeing and understanding lead to turning, that is, to hearts that are not hardened and to remembering (or in Rachael’s case, un-remembering) - that is, to repentance.

Both Deckard and Rachael perceive and understand, and they turn away from what they had been thinking and doing before. As Gilles Deleuze says, ‘the paradox is the force of the unconscious: it occurs always in the space between consciousnesses, contrary to good sense .. .’18 The Greek verb translated as ‘repent’ in Mark 1.15 is metanoed, which along with the noun, metanoia, plays an important role in the New Testament. Paradox as the space between (meta) consciousnesses (nous) is the place of metanoia. Repentance is ‘contrary to good sense’.

The phrasing of Mark 1.15 is often read as though it were ‘repent and then believe’ or ‘repent in order to believe’. However, this conjunction of terms suggests that repentance does not end when belief starts; they are not distinct events. In the Gospel of Mark, belief is not reassuring and comfortable; instead, it is the opposite: ‘whoever loses his life for my sake

2. ‘Kingdom of God’ and ‘Son of Man’

In Mark 1.15, Jesus’s call to repent brings into play the phrase, ‘the kingdom of God’. However, in the Gospel of Mark the kingdom is not a locus of meaning but rather a disruptor of meaning, a ‘secret’ (see Mark 4.10-12). The kingdom is the subject of Jesus’s parables, which have as their goal to keep people from understanding.

Like the rumours about Mercer, the son of man takes on two forms in Jesus’s sayings. On one hand, the son of man is a supernatural being who will come in glory and power in the near future (Mark 8.38—9.1), like the one to whom an everlasting kingdom is given in Daniel 7.13-14 (where he is ‘one like a son of man,’ i.e. explicitly a simulacrum). On the other hand, the son of man is a human being who will suffer and die, but then rise up again (Mark 8.31). As in Mercerism, these two forms of the son of man oscillate in a cycle of death and resurrection.

and the gospel’s will save it’ (8.35). Belief recognizes the timeliness and the nearness of the mysterious kingdom, but in order to recognize the proximity of the kingdom, you must turn the world upside down and reverse the ground rules. Like the women at the tomb, you must be astonished - and nauseated! In other words, that which was clear and stable must become unclear and unstable, paradoxical.

It should be evident by now that reading the Gospel of Mark in juxtaposition to Blade Runner puts both texts in a rather different light. Mark becomes a paradoxical machine, not unlike a Mercer box or Voigt-Kampff device. The Mercer box and Voigt-Kampff Test provoke responses in connection with scraps of narrative, responses that reflect inner states of the user. These machines are non-human mirrors of humanity, and they provide evidence for judgement regarding the user’s status as a human being. According to Mark’s Jesus, his parables are semiotic machines, scraps of narrative that distinguish between insider disciples and ‘those outside’, who ‘see but [do] not perceive, and may indeed hear but not understand’ (4.11-12).

Indeed, the Gospel of Mark not only includes parables as part of its story about Jesus, but it itself appears to be a great parable, a semiotic machine to which readers respond either as insiders or outsiders. This opposition is deconstructed in the course of Mark’s story, for outsiders sometimes understand Jesus (12.34) and insiders often do not. Understanding is always in jeopardy in the Gospel of Mark (7.18, 8.17), and therefore ‘let the reader understand’ (13.14). According to Mark, to believe in the gospel is before all else to read Mark’s book and understand it - but whether this book itself can be understood is another matter. Mark’s text both demands and resists understanding.

Indeed, the more you read this paradoxical text, the less you understand. Jesus says that only by losing your life can you save it (Mark 8.3 5). But if you lose your life in order to save it, then you have sought to save it - and therefore you will lose it. In order to save your life, you must not want to save it - but then your life is worthless to you (8.36-37), and why should you wish to save it? Likewise, if you repent in order to believe, then you have not truly repented. But once you have repented in the way that Rachael repents, there is no ‘you’ left to believe anything, or to be saved.

Both Rachael and Deckard are stunned by a violation of proper meaning. They give up what was most precious for something that was insignificant, and they become nauseated. The truth is inverted. The convictions that had previously made their lives meaningful are demolished. The only way they can continue to live is by abandoning their deepest beliefs and attitudes. This ‘repentance’ is not something that you make happen, but rather something that happens to you - as Deleuze says, ‘the paradox .. . occurs’. Perhaps that is why repentance is conjoined to belief in Mark 1.15, for just as you cannot choose to believe - you can only choose to make believe — so you cannot choose to repent, not in this sense of the word. Repentance arises in lived paradox; it happens for no good reason. It cannot be explained or justified or controlled.

According to Mark’s Jesus, if you repent, then you become a son of man. Readers often identify the son of man in the Gospels with Jesus himself, but in Mark this is not clear. In Blade Runner, the distinction between human being and android is progressively erased, and in the Gospel of Mark, the distinction between ‘man’ and ‘son of man’ is also erased. In Mark 3.28, the ‘sons of men’ are both plural and fallible (sinful and blasphemous), but they also appear to be the ‘brother and sister and mother’ of Jesus: that is, those who ‘do the will of God’ (3.34-35). In Blade Runner, Deckard and Rachael both ‘repent’ when they discover ‘the kingdom of God’ in the paradoxical (and nauseating) realization that ‘reality is a fake’ and yet ‘everything is true’. The experience of these two sons of men leads to paradoxical salvation and bleak knowledge. They turn to the only god left after the death of God, the hyperreal saviour, Wilbur Mercer (in the novel), or the android messiah, Roy Batty (in the movie). For Rachael and Deckard, the kingdom of God is the new world of hyperreality and the simulacrum, a world beyond good and evil, and beyond the death of man.

The son of man in Jesus’s sayings points beyond the death of man, and hyperreal humanity, or posthumanity, appears in this mysterious character. Like Rachael and Roy, the son of man replicates humanity. She is a simulacrum. Mark’s Jesus is also a simulacrum. Indeed, all of the Jesuses of the New Testament - the four Jesuses of the Gospels, as well as the Jesuses of Paul and Revelation and the other writings - all of these Jesuses are simulacra. Nevertheless, no character in Mark’s story experiences anything like the repentance of Rachael and Deckard in Blade Runner. Instead, that repentance is reserved for the Gospel of Mark’s reader, whose empathic fusion (or lack thereof) is not with Jesus or any other specific character in the story, but with the one to whom the virtual Jesus says, ‘repent, and believe in the gospel’.

Notes

1. N. Katherine Hayles, How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature, and Informatics, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999, p.239.

2. Roland Barthes, The Rustle of Language, trans. Richard Howard, Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1986, pp. 141-8.

3. Gilles Deleuze, The Logic of Sense, trans. Mark Lester and Charles Stivale, New York: Columbia University Press, 1990, p. 262, his emphases.

4. Jean Baudrillard, Simulacra and Simulation, trans. Sheila Faria Glaser, Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1994, p. 1; see also p. 123.

5. Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science, trans. Walter Kaufmann, New York: Random House, 1974. See section 125.

6. Michel Foucault, Language, Counter-Memory, Practice, trans. Donald F. Bouchard and Sherry Simon, Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1977, p. 32..

7. Hayles, Posthuman, p. 291.

8. For detailed discussions and examples of cyberpunk, see Larry McCaffery (ed.), Storming the Reality Studio, Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1991, and Hayles, Posthuman (especially chapters 7 and 10).

9. Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or the Cultural-Logic of Late Capitalism, Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1991, p. 282.

10. For information on the various movie versions, see Paul M. Sammon, Future Noir: the Making of Blade Runner, New York: Harper Collins, 1996, pp. 394-408. For detailed discussions of the making of the movie, see Sammon’s book as well as Judith B. Kerman (ed.), Retrofitting Blade Runner, Bowling Green, OH: Bowling Green State University Popular Press, 1991, especially pp. 132-77. Two ‘sequels’ to Blade Runner were written by K. W. Jeter after Dick’s death in 1982. These two novels are sequels to Scott’s movie, not to Dick’s novel, and they do not share the paradoxical features of either the novel or the movie.

11. Dick, Blade Runner, New York: Ballantine Books, 1982, pp. 173, 162. Hereafter cited in the text as BR.

12. On religion in Dick’s writings, see Roland Boer, ‘Non-Sense: Total Recall, Paul and the Possibility of Psychosis’, in George Aichele and Richard Walsh (eds), Screening Scripture: Intertextual Connections Between Scripture and Film, Harrisburg, PA: Trinity Press International, 2002, pp. 120-54; Michel Desjardins, ‘Retrofitting Gnosticism: Philip K. Dick and Christian Origins’ in George Aichele and Tina Pippin (eds), Violence, Utopia, and the Kingdom of God, London: Routledge, 1998, pp. 122-33; and Hayles, Posthuman, pp. 160-91.

13. According to Scott Bukatman, Blade Runner, London: British Film Institute, 1997, the released dove is ‘easily the most banal image in the film’ (p. 85). Be that as it may, the dove image also suggests a gnostic Christ who abandons the crucified Jesus when he returns to the eternal realm.

14. In Dick’s novel, it is revealed later that even this discovery may have been simulated by Rachael (BR, 174-5). In the movie, Rachael’s discovery is a worldshattering revelation for her. Dick’s fascination with ancient Gnosticism is well- known, and he could be described as a latter-day Gnostic. See Boer, ‘Non-Sense’, and Desjardins, ‘Retrofitting Gnosticism’.

15. Deleuze, The Logic of Sense, pp. 127-33.

16. Jean-Paul Sartre, Nausea, trans. Lloyd Alexander, New York: New Directions, 1964, pp. 126-35.

17. Deleuze, The Logic of Sense, p. 262.

18. Deleuze, The Logic of Sense, p. 80.

Part 3

Case Studies - Genres

9- Why Film Noir is Good for the Mind

ERIC S. CHRISTIANSON

A young soldier, Mitchell, hides out in an all-night movie-house. His face occasionally lit by the screen, bewildered at the fact that he is being framed for murder and resigned to finding no way out, he shares his dilemma with his sergeant, Keeley:

Mitchell: Keeley, what’s happening? Has everything suddenly gone crazy? I don’t mean just this, I mean everything. Or is it just me?

Keeley: Ah, it’s not just you. The snakes are loose. Anyone can get ’em.

I get ’em myself, but they’re friends of mine.

Like Mitchell, in Edward Dmytryk’s film noir, Crossfire (1947), the shady characters who inhabit the dark corners and wet streets of noir are invariably troubled. And as the films themselves are played in retrospectives and (probably more often than we realize) on television, their gritty people with their hard-boiled words become even more deeply embedded nostalgic icons, signs for coping with the uncertainty of dangers long gone and yet strangely familiar. Andre Bazin captured it in his own eulogy to noir icon Humphrey Bogart, who was important because ‘the raison d’etre of his existence was in some sense to survive’ and because the alcoholic lines visible on his face revealed ‘the corpse on reprieve within each of us’.1 Noir films are full of moments where the plot has become inconsequential (noir is famous for incomprehensible plots anyway) and the simple experience of disorientation, of ambiguity, is expressed with sublime poignancy. Such moments do not make for passive spectatorship, but engage viewers in a risky negotiation of meaning. As such, as I hope to show, they are good for the mind.

Film noir has become a concept of enormous proportions (see Text Box 9.1). My interest is in one of its particular core features: ambiguity. That is because ambiguity is more than a theme of noir. It is a lens through which characters struggle to make sense of the world, themselves and each other. It is an intellectual and spiritual condition, a stance of being in relation to others. Through all of the gaps and unanswered questions noir poses, viewers are engaged in an intellectually demanding process. I will argue that it is a process that resonates with some of the most provocative material of the Hebrew Bible.

1. What is ‘Genre’?

In film criticism, ‘genre’ (from the French, meaning ‘genus’, ‘kind’ or ‘family’) is a term for categorizing films by type, arguing for distinctive features that mark off a film as belonging to a significantly represented group of films. The idea has its roots in the ancient literary criticism of Aristotle (Poetics) and Horace (Ars Poetica), and the seductive charm of its argument has never left the critical scene. What has changed, however, is that while early critics proposed genres with the same certainty they would a scientific genus, an observable biological ‘truth’, more recent critics have become increasingly less certain. They have recognized the importance of, for example, the reader’s expectations, the vagaries of the production process and the historically conditioned nature of interpretation. All of these factors must now temper what we mean by ‘genre’.

Criticism apart, most of us organize our thinking and talking about films along the lines of genre. Ask someone today what their favourite ‘sciencefiction’ film is, or ‘comedy’ or ‘gangster’ movie and most will likely give an informed answer. Film reviewers often frame their reviews in terms of the accepted conventions of a certain genre, how a film defies or conforms to these. The ubiquity of ‘genre’ is partly due to Hollywood’s romance with the genre film. Early cinema is littered with bio-pics (often based on the Bible), Westerns, melodramas, the gangster movie and the musical. The cynical reason is cash. When something works in Hollywood, you will see its type again. Whatever the case, ‘genre’ will no doubt remain not only a useful critical concept, but a way of talking about film for all of us. (Further, see ‘Genre’, p. 56.)

Ambiguity can manifest itself many ways in noir, and these instances are intriguing attempts at frustrating clear lines of meaning for viewers to pursue. They are achieved through visual style (unusual and unexpected camera angles with unconventional frame composition), narratorial judgement (that is, a lack of it), story gaps, and linguistic play.2

Ironically, to a large degree we have the censors to thank for the frequent appearance of the last item. To get around the injunctions against the depiction of sex and sexual intent imposed by the many censorial bodies of this highly regulated era, screenwriters invented whole new signifiers of innuendo. One of the best examples is the infamous ‘racehorse’ banter between Marlowe (Humphrey Bogart) and Vivien (Lauren Bacall) in The Big Sleep (1946). Marlowe suggests to Vivien that in order to ‘rate her’ he has to see her ‘over a distance of ground’ first. Otherwise, as he puts it, ‘I don’t know how far you can go.’ Bacall replies with, ‘A lot depends on who’s in the saddle. Go ahead, Marlowe, I like the way you work.’ (The censors were either bored or asleep.)3 In early noir the hard- boiled hero was expert at the verbal spar. A fine example comes again

9.2 What is Film Noir?

• Critics often refer to the ‘classic film noir’ period as being inaugurated roughly with John Huston’s The Maltese Falcon (1941) and ending roughly with Orson Welles’s Touch of Evil (1958). However, there are clear forerunners of the genre as early as 1931, and most critics agree that its key themes have never left the cinema.

• The term ‘film noir’ was coined by French critics just after the second world war. Their discussion (and admiration) was prompted by the simultaneous group release in Paris in 1946 of The Maltese Falcon (1941), Double Indemnity (1944), Laura (1944), Murder, My Sweet (1944) and The Lost Weekend (1945). These films (the first four especially) would come to be regarded as proto-typical of an emerging category. For the French the term reflected a darkening of mood, subject matter and visual style.

• Although critics can differ significantly on what makes a film noir, there is considerable agreement regarding its core themes and stylistic devices, for example:

o The protagonist is caught in an often life-threatening dilemma, such as being framed for a crime, or seeking out a new life and being drawn unwillingly into his past. Protagonists are almost always men.

o It is a woman who often obstructs the man’s desire for ‘truth’ or social progress, or facilitates his destruction (usually bringing about her own in the process): the so-called femme fatale.

o Noirs usually employ extreme contrasts between light and shadow {chiaroscuro), unusual camera angles, often in an urban landscape, typified by night time and rain - lots of rain.

o Noirs often have ‘hard-boiled’ dialogue, which has its literary roots in the likes of James M. Cain, Raymond Chandler, Graham Greene and Ernest Hemingway.

o Some critics suggest that noir is best defined by the wartime and post-war social anxiety it reflects, particularly its often deliberately confused approach to morality and sexual identity.

from the Bogart stable, from Sam Spade’s first exchange with Kasper Gutman (Sydney Greenstreet) in John Houston’s 1941 The Maltese Falcon (Gutman to Spade: ‘I distrust a close-mouthed man. He generally picks the wrong time to talk and says the wrong things. Talking’s something you can’t do judiciously, unless you keep in practice. Now then, we’ll talk if you like. I’ll tell you right out, I’m a man who likes talking to a man who likes to talk’ - and so on). Even by the simple invitation to be dazzled by verbal skill, the linguistic ambiguity of both characters frustrates lines of moral inquiry.

The mise-en-scene of most noir films contributes to the sense of uncertainty from the perspective of characters and, most effectively, of the audience. We are left in the unlit corners where darkness gathers. Chiaroscuro, the play between darkness and light, does not clarify morality, but renders it complex and problematical.4 As is so well demonstrated in Orson Welles’s Touch of Evil (1958), audiences are generally morally disempowered, not offered a secure vantage point from which to pass judgement. In Touch of Evil this extends to the cacophony of characters’ voices, which seem simultaneously to vie for the audience’s empathy. A sense of powerlessness pervades this Wellesian vision of Mexico. Indeed, throughout classic noir, modes of narration are tenuous linchpins for the viewer’s grasp on competing claims to truth. This is pronounced in The Killers (1946), in which Edmund O’Brien’s insurance investigator seeks to discover what ‘Swede’ (Burt Lancaster) meant when on his deathbed he pronounced, T did something wrong . . . once.’ Nearly everyone in the film gets their chance to put forward their spin on Swede’s life, everyone, that is, but Swede himself (his voice-over is filled with uncertainty). His fate has been commandeered by the subjective position of others and by overpowering circumstance. This is resignation on a grand scale. As such he is what Andrew Spicer terms the film’s ‘enigmatic absent centre’.5 Key to the ambiguous and pervasive quest (usually for the truth about the past) so common to noir, the voice-over is widely commented on as a film noir innovation. Time shifts between the ‘real’ present and a much less stable remembered past. Some noir films invite us

to inquire about the motives of narrative voices, how much they know and whether they are telling the truth, when and to whom they are speaking. If the dominant Hollywood style provided all the information spectators would need to follow the narrative, Film Noir seems to emphasize narrative gaps, and even the possibility of narratives that can deceive.6

The flashback structure engendered by this device also has the effect of alienating the viewer and producing a distinctly ‘detached’, almost semidocumentary style. 7 In such experimentations with classical modes of linear narration, in which gaps and ambiguities were minimized, the noir style succeeds in questioning our grasp of the past. Who, if anyone, has any control over the events leading to the predicament in which protagonists find themselves?

From its start the terrain of Jacques Tourneur’s Out of the Past (1947) is clearly marked: the oblique past of Jeff Bailey (Robert Mitchum). It is not a place to which he wishes to return, but once he does he is gripped by a fatal and wistful nostalgia (clarified by Nicholas Musuraca’s sumptuous, sparkling photography). In the opening sequence, Jeff is fishing, idly romancing his gal and running his own small business - he has made good. In noir, however, such a condition rarely lasts long. And so a snake slips into the garden in the form of Joe. Dressed in a black trench coat, Joe is a charmer who can barely conceal the threat of violence in his request for Jeff to return to his former mobster employer (Joe: ‘The guy just wants to see you.’ Jeff: ‘When you put it that way, what can I do?’ Joe: ‘You know any other way to put it?’). We are inexorably drawn into the search for what brought Jeff to this confrontation as well as his motives. Immediately his self-potential (the simple life he has achieved) is under threat. In other words, as I will explore in more depth below, in noir the promised American dream is constantly under threat.

In Carol Reed’s The Third Man it is Orson Welles’s enigmatic Harry Lime who not only casts an enormous shadow by his mythic absence, but provides a flashpoint of ambiguity. Indeed the whole film becomes about how Harry’s friends are to read who and what he has become, and it is precisely this issue that ultimately fractures the fragile love affair of Holly Martins (Joseph Cotten) and Harry’s ex-sweetheart, Anna (Alida Valli). Habitually the potential lovers and Harry’s nemesis, Major Calloway, return to the issue of how to assess him. It is Calloway who eventually forces Holly to come to a moral assessment of Lime. But because Anna remains sympathetically unpersuaded and oblivious to Harry’s malevolent crimes, viewers are left to decide for themselves who and what Harry is and may even represent in themselves. The film also seeks to question what we do with our knowledge of the self once we get it. As James Naremore puts it, ‘After Lime is gone, the film does nothing to assuage the sense of moral ambiguity he has created.’8 (Further on The Third Man, see Chapter 7.)

In its visual and narrative modes, noir reflected a shift from certainty to uncertainty, with a new-found ‘pronounced interest in the characters’ “uncertain psychology”’.9 Men in particular seem at odds about their place in the world. As such noir can be characterized ‘by a certain anxiety over the existence and definition of masculinity and normality’.10 There are few better examples of such uncertainty than the nameless man who (seems to) live in the apartment of ‘tart-with-a-heart’ Ginny (noir regular Gloria Grahame) in Crossfire. In pre-production the nameless man troubled the regulators at the Breen Office. The script suggests that Ginny is a prostitute and the man is her customer. Joseph Breen granted approval of the film on the condition (among others) that ‘this man . . . should definitely be indicated as Ginny’s divorced or separated husband who is trying to win her back’.11 In the film, however, the man arrives when the haunted Mitchell is waiting there for Ginny at her invitation. The man asks ‘You’re wondering about this set up, aren’t you?’ He then spins one feasible scenario after another and calmly declares them each a lie. Naremore’s comments are worth citing:

‘I want to marry her,’ he says to Mitchell at one point. ‘Do you believe that? Well, that’s a lie, too. I don’t love her and I don’t want to marry her. She makes good money there. You got any money on you?’ By turns sinister, pathetic, and comic, he seems to mock the conventions of realist narrative, and as a result he opens his part of the story to all sorts of scandalous interpretation.12

Is he mad? Is he a defiant statement to Joseph Breen? Is he capable of believing anything? Does he function as a sign of a broader systemic uncertainty? At points he mentions he is a soldier, that he has ‘gone to the war’ (do we believe him?). His final words (spoken for the first time with anxiety) are ‘I’m so restless. I don’t know what I want to do.’

Strangely, noir brought some uncomfortable realities to the silver screen. I say strangely since, as many students of noir suggest, the cycle is one of the most subversive series of films to emerge from mainstream Hollywood. It is perhaps surprising, then, that from the conservative America of the 1940s and 1950s emerged a movement (of sorts) that would provide heroes for French intellectuals. Film noir had a long-recognized relationship to existentialism in Europe, and the influence was two-way. Some of the hard-boiled writers who provided the raw material for noir, such as Ernest Hemingway, Dashiel Hammett and Graham Greene, themselves brought, if not direct existential thinking, a critical awareness of relevant writers and thinkers. Many of the early noir directors were European immigrants who brought with them a distinctly sceptical and artistically expressionist sensibility. Also, post-war French intellectuals were totally enamoured with the film noir product. Unlike in the USA, where films would pass through local picture houses for a week or two and then disappear, in France batches of films would arrive and remain playing in cinemas for up to a year. Nino Frank, writing from Paris in 1946, describes the appeal:

Here we are one year after a series of poor quality American movies made it seem that Hollywood was finished. Today another conclusion is needed, because the appearance of half a dozen fine works made in California compels us to write and affirm that American cinema is better than ever. Our film-makers are decidedly manic depressive.13

(It is interesting to note that in Paris the classical film noirs continue to get a fairly regular outing in the cinema circuit.) Cine-clubs arose, settings where debate and discussion could be held at the end of a screening.14 Some particular figures became heroes: Humphrey Bogart because of his tragic face; Raymond Chandler because he wrote with unflinching honesty of the human condition; director Nicholas Ray because he depicted ‘moral solitude’ so well.15

As A. MacIntyre suggests, ‘stress on the extreme and the exceptional experience is common to all existentialism’.16 It is the hero in some excessive and dangerous situation, caught in a trap not necessarily of their own making, that defines the noir protagonist. Sometimes sociological arguments are articulated in the films themselves (e.g. Criss Cross, Gun Crazy, Try and Get Me), and often there is a sense that evil is endemic, insidious and irretrievable, embedded in unchangeable systems that can entrap (e.g. Force of Evil, Touch of Evil). The noir hero sets themselves against such a fate, but rarely successfully. Where there is some success it is always tempered by ambiguity. So in the conclusion to The Maltese Falcon, when Sam Spade ‘turns over’ his lover, Brigid O’Shaughnessy, for killing his partner, he is doing the right and noble thing. But even in this case the ending is boldly cracked open when Spade expresses his insecurity over what it means to love a woman and also to avenge his partner.

Many noir heroes at some point resign themselves, in true Camusian style, to their fate. One of the finest examples of this is found in the opening of Robert Siodmak’s marvellous noir, The Killers. Two professional killers arrive in a sleepy town to kill Swede. In establishing Swede’s whereabouts they manage to bewilder and terrorize the two staff and customer of a small diner. When the customer runs ahead to warn Swede of his imminent execution he finds him lying on his bed, still and lifeless,17 his face obscured by dark shadow, seemingly aware of his fate. The customer, who knows Swede, is unable to comprehend his apathy. As Swede is dispatched with grim efficiency, he remains motionless, and we see only his hand losing its grip on the bedpost. (This whole opening sequence is a remarkably faithful adaptation of Ernest Hemingway’s short story of the same title from 1927.) As I have already mentioned, throughout the rest of The Killers, Swede’s past is under constant interrogation from a range of perspectives. As Michael Mills suggests, the ‘disjunctive use of time, the unrelated flashbacks, all combine to put us in the voyeuristic position of knowing not only what will become of him, but more importantly why’.18 Walter Neff (Fred MacMurray) and Phyllis Dietrichson (Barbara Stanwyck) in Double Indemnity (1944) provide a similar picture. It always seemed to Neff that their perfect murder, their attempt to beat the system, would all fall apart. His walk became, as Neff’s voiceover puts it, ‘the walk of a dead man’, imbued with a sense of dread. ‘Straight down the line for both of us’ is the couple’s fatalistic catchphrase to each other.

In one of the first and most influential studies of noir, Raymond Borde and Etienne Chaumeton concluded that ‘the moral ambivalence, the criminality, the complex contradictions in motives and events, all conspire to make the viewer co-experience the anguish and insecurity which are the true emotions of contemporary film noir’.19 Indeed, their study recognized ambiguity as the core factor of characterization across noir types: victims, protagonists and femme fatales.20 This overwhelming ambiguity frustrates our ultimate assessment and knowledge of a person. It is perfectly illustrated in the closing scene of what is widely regarded as the swan song of classic film noir, Touch of Evil (1958). Captains Quinlan (Orson Welles) and Vargas (Charlton Heston), who have clashed with their opposing ethics of compromise and idealism respectively, have their final showdown. Quinlan is killed by Vargas, and as his body floats down the river, Tana (Marlene Dietrich), a gypsy who was Quinlan’s enigmatic confidante, arrives and speaks to Schwartz, an officer on .the scene:

Tana: Isn’t somebody going to come and take him away?

Schwartz: Yeah, in just a few minutes. You really liked him, didn’t you?

Tana: The cop did . . . the one who killed him. He loved him.

Schwartz: Well, Hank [Quinlan] was a great detective alright.

Tana: And a lousy cop.

Schwartz: Is that all you have to say for him?

[at this point a pause, as wistful cabinet piano music fades in and the camera lingers closely on Dietrich’s luminous, world-weary face}

Tana: He was some kind of a man. What does it matter what you say about people?

Schwartz: Goodbye Tana.

Tana: Adios.

In Nicholas Ray’s In a Lonely Place (1952.) the viewing experience begins quite comfortably from the perspective of Bogart’s existentially struggling screenwriter, Dixon Steele. When a murder takes place and he is the prime suspect, our perspective is subtly and expertly nudged to that of his love interest, Gloria Grahame’s Laurel Gray. The film is less about the murder and more about how we are to interpret this man’s outer mask (the working title of the film was Behind This Mask) and his, as well as our own, capacity for violence. Steele refuses throughout to explain himself and his motives; he guards his inner life for all he is worth. (Parallels to the concurrent McCarthy trials are instructive.) Towards the second half of the film, Laurel’s trust in Steele is tested to the limit when she witnesses him lose control in a confrontation with a young man, coming close to killing him. After the incident, in a moving sequence we see how she is able to help him to confront his inner demons and to find the beginning of his redemption. A fascinating defence of Steele (and of one of the main themes of existentialism, the primacy of a person’s essence) comes from one of his best friends, his agent Mel. At the moment Laurel fears the worst about Steele, Mel comes to his defence:

Laurel: Why can’t he be like other people? Why?

Mel: [in disbelief} Like other people? Would you have liked him? You knew he was dynamite. He has to explode sometimes ... always violent . . . Why, it’s as much a part of him as the colour of his eyes, the shape of his head. He’s Dix Steele. And if you want him, you gotta take it all - the bad with the good.

Steele’s relationship to Laurel is refreshingly against type. Through her eyes we are asked what kind of man Steele is. At the moment of the final denouement, Steele believes he is tantalizingly close to his own redemption, and his true history is left an open question until that point. ‘Steele is a noir hero trapped in a compulsive role; caught, almost frozen, between the dark past and a bleak future, he is unable to see a continuum that valorizes the present except through Laurel.’21 The film is remarkable for its immeasurably sad ending. The original script finished with Steele strangling Laurel to death in a final loss of self-control. After filming that version Ray rescinded and improvised a new ending on the spot. By this time Laurel’s fear has defined her actions. She has told Dix she will go away with him but is planning instead to leave him. When the travel agent phones, Dix discovers her plans, becomes violent and begins to strangle her (and in the original, kills her). The phone rings again. He stops. He answers. It is the police. Dix is finally cleared and there is for a moment a hope for a new beginning. He hands the phone to her (‘A man wants to apologize to you’). As she listens to the news (‘Mr Steele’s absolutely in the clear’), Dix begins despondently to walk away. Laurel speaks into the phone: ‘Yesterday this would have meant so much to us, now it doesn’t matter, it doesn’t matter at all’. We then see, from Laurel’s view, only Dix’s back as he shuffles away and leaves the court of her apartments. She cites a line that was once their romantic refrain: ‘I lived a few weeks while you loved me ... Goodbye, Dix’. That ending takes us even closer to Dix’s redemption without delivering it.

The power of the ending of In a Lonely Place resides in its unflinching portrayal of loss, namely of self-potential, infused with ambiguous motives and confused desires. In fact, this is one of noir’s most outstanding and overwhelming themes: the systematic disenchantment with the facade of progress, of the possibility of ‘making good’, of finding something of lasting worth in America. Although it is there in the fatalist and ‘social problem’ films of the 1930s (e.g. I Am a Fugitive from a Chain Gang, 1932; Fury, 1936) and in a smattering of wartime films (e.g. They Drive by Night, 1940; I Wake up Screaming, 1941), it comes breath- takingly to the fore in post-war films (e.g. Mildred Pierce, 1945; Scarlet Street, 1945; The Killers, 1946; Out of the Past, 1947; Force of Evil, 1949; Gun Crazy, 1949; Sunset Boulevard, 1950; Try and Get Me, 1950; In a Lonely Place, 1952; The Big Heat, 1953), some of which also deal with the ex-soldier’s sense of dislocation (e.g. Crossfire, 1947; Act of Violence, 1949). Notable from the above are Edward G. Robinson’s Christopher Cross in Scarlet Street, Burt Lancaster’s Swede in The Killers, Robert Mitchum’s Jeff Bailey in Out of the Past, Frank Lovejoy’s Howard Tyler in Try and Get Me, and William Holden’s Joe Gillis in Sunset Boulevard (1950) - each of these show a nuanced side to the noir cycle, a development that creates, as Spicer says of Out of the Past, ‘through the careful tonal shadings of its black-and-white cinematography, a melancholy romanticism that shifts noir’s axis away from the toughness of Powell’s Marlowe to the desolate fatalism of Mitchum’s Bailey’.22 In all of the above films the protagonist fails to find self-redemption. Each implies a desire for something better. In the case of Try and Get Me, the protagonist’s loss of self-potential is expressed as an oppressive social structure that produces unachievable material objectives, and that is at least partly responsible for crime culture. After being villainized by the press, two petty thieves (Frank Lovejoy and Lloyd Bridges) are lynched in one of the most terrifying sequences in noir. It is made all the more frightening by its semi-documentary style and the fact that it is based on real events in California in the early 1930s. It is also a stinging indictment of the massmedia judgement of character that typified the McCarthy era.

In Fritz Lang’s Scarlet Street, Edward G. Robinson’s protagonist is an emblem of lost fulfilment. Cross is a bank clerk (note: every film generation has a symbolic ‘loser’ job) who wanted most of all to be a painter, and it is that skill that is exploited by an exceptionally nasty femme fatale (Joan Bennett), with the result that Cross can never lay claim to what he regards as the most redeeming aspect of his humanity. In fact, a series of films expressed a profound distrust of America’s ability to produce an empowering socialist democracy. As Naremore puts it,

The despairing tone of The Prowler, Try and Get Me, Force of Evil, Gun Crazy, All the King’s Men, and In a Lonely Place is clearly related to the politics and historical circumstances of individual writers, directors, and stars. As Joseph Losey remarked in 1979, the Left in Hollywood was utterly demoralized by Truman, the atomic bomb, and the HUAC [House Un-American Activities Committee] investigations, and it was beginning to recognize ‘the complete unreality of the American dream’.23

Whether or not noir was addressing a perceived social need for metanarratives that acknowledge the moral complexity of the world, it is clear that its ringing endorsement of the sanctity and inviolability of human essence was at least directed against those exerting social control, against the univocal concerns of McCarthyism, which so many of the key noirmakers managed to defy.24

Noir spoke as well to other social realities. Its visual style took root in what the film industry itself termed the ‘psychological thrillers’ of the early 1940s and 1950s. Demographically the films appealed to a youth- and male-dominated post-war culture, an audience that ‘no longer wanted opulent settings, “an exotic and make believe world”, but films which allowed them to understand themselves and society’.25 As Porfirio suggests, ‘The atmosphere is one in which the familiar is fraught with danger and the existential tonalities of “fear” and “trembling” are not out of place; even less that sense of “dread” which is taken to mean a pervasive fear of something hauntingly indeterminate.’26 Such a context makes sense of the failure of a now famous film that framed film noir within its fantastical borders. The noir world is perfectly captured in Frank Capra’s It’s a Wonderful Life. It is the potential world that George Bailey (James Stewart) is shown, on the presumption that he did not exist.27 It has become lawless and is made up of dark street corners and seedy clubs patrolled by femme fatales. To Bailey, and implicitly the viewer, it is a nightmare world. It’s a Wonderful Life did not perform well in 1946, a classic noir year that saw the release of The Big Sleep, The Blue Dahlia, Gilda, The Killers, Notorious, The Postman Always Rings Twice and The Strange Love of Martha Ivers. It was a time when audiences were already accustomed to hard-boiled detectives and dangerous alleyways in their film diet, and the world in which Bailey did exist had no bite, no resonance with the socially disorientating world post-war America was inhabiting. Just as noir is the antithesis of Capra’s world, it is also of early Hollywood entertainment generally, and its protagonists of the mainstream hero figure. The ‘ideal noir hero is the opposite of John Wayne. Psychologically he is passive, masochistic, morbidly curious; physically, he is “often mature, almost old, not very handsome. Humphrey Bogart is the type.’”28

Recently some broad affinities of noir to Hebrew biblical literature have been recognized independently by three scholars. Cheryl Exum sees in Delilah the figure of the classic femme fatale. Audiences and film-makers in the 1940s and 1950s, she argues at length, generally demanded that the bad women of the cinema either be reformed or die. Neither happens to the Delilah of the Bible, but in retellings of her story she is either reformed (Milton’s Samson Agonistes), knocked off or both (as in De Mille’s 1949 film, Samson and Delilah).29 Carol Newsom recognizes in the neo-noir film, Fatal Attraction G9^7)-> the ‘strange woman’ of Proverbs 1—9:

The ‘strange woman’, Alex, is portrayed as belonging to the margin in many ways . .. She has no husband or recognized lover. She stands outside the realm of socially ordered sexuality . . . Like the strange woman of Proverbs 7 she has a brilliant power of speech, always more than a match for her male victim ... It is ‘the wife of his youth’ who must rescue him. The wife has been presented, as is the wife of Proverbs 5, as herself a deeply erotic, desirable woman . . . Her symbol is the house, where, more than once we see the brightly burning kitchen hearth.30

The most sustained theological dialogue with noir appears in Christopher Deacy’s Screen Christologies. Starting by recognizing film as both a bearer and locus of religious meaning and reflection, Deacy develops the idea of film noir being particularly concerned with the activity of redemption. Films provide viewers the opportunity to examine the human condition as ‘privileged witnesses’.31 The eventual focus of the study, however, is the noir-ish films of Martin Scorsese. Early in his study Deacy develops an intriguing comparison of classic noir to the book of Ecclesiastes, suggesting that for Qoheleth (i.e. ‘the Preacher’ of Ecclesiastes) as in noir, there is little hope under the sun except for finding a way out through a transformation of everyday existence32 - what Ecclesiastes would call enjoying all the days of your absurd life under the sun.

To his analysis I would add that particular existential themes have been identified in Ecclesiastes by a range of scholars (among whom I include myself), such as the experience of extreme circumstances and the judgement of the world as absurd. Perhaps most interestingly, however, Ecclesiastes presents a developed attempt at asking what the self is made of, and it does so through a disjunctive and radical use of first-person narrative - a melancholy investigation into the protagonist’s past. Like Mitchum’s Jeff Bailey, and other noir ‘heroes’, Qoheleth is brought tantalizingly close to his own redemption and finds it always beyond his reach. Finally, just as in noir, in Ecclesiastes’ emphatic judgement of the absurdity of the world is implied a desire for something better.33

More can briefly be said regarding the shared themes of noir and the Hebrew Bible. In the same way that the noir world threatens the stability of the American dream, narratives like Judges and Samuel threaten the stability of Israel’s covenantal relationship, and exposit the contingency of access to the promised land. The cycle of judges stories destabilizes the reader’s ability to come to a positive assessment of Israel’s relationship to the land because of the fundamental ambiguity of its stories: narrative gaps, lack of narratorial judgement and conflicting testimony all mean that we cannot know whether the judges experiment was ultimately good (further on which, see Chapter 12 in this volume, ‘A Fistful of Shekels’). Also, the judges of Israel, even Gideon and Samson, deliver at the microlevel, specifically not the macro. That is, there is a resignation in the judges cycle to Israel’s reliable rebellion and the consequent transient nature of deliverance ‘for a time’. This social observation is present in noir. Describing Raymond Chandler’s Philip Marlowe, Spicer suggests that unlike ‘Sherlock Holmes, Marlowe realizes that although he may solve an individual case, it is part of a wider corruption that is too deep to be eradicated’.34 And right to the end of the classic noir cycle, those who represent the law fail spectacularly. These are only outlines of what I am convinced is a fruitful area for reflection.35

In his absorbing study, The Flight from Ambiguity, Donald Levine suggests that ambiguity offers a positive model for reflection: ‘it appears that to become aware of the multivocality of certain central concepts is not necessarily to identify a need to eliminate their ambiguities . . . The toleration of ambiguity can be productive if it is taken not as a warrant for sloppy thinking but as an invitation to deal responsibly with issues of great complexity.'36 (Of the Hebrew Bible, Levine suggests that its ‘sparse detail has been a standing invitation for evocative interpretations’.37) Helpfully in relation to noir, Levine identifies an ‘American aversion toward ambiguity’.38 Citing a ‘Nigerian novelist’ who had lived in the USA for more than 20 years, he suggests that ‘Americans tend to be direct and literal rather than allusive and figurative, stark rather than subtle. They are happier dealing with statistics than with nuances.’39 Levine further points to tendencies in governmental policy towards the openness of information and privacy: ‘Americans resent esoteric knowledge of any sort as symptomatic of “undemocratic” snobbishness.’40 Levine traces the particularly extreme forms of American aversion to ambiguity to Puritanism, which ‘discouraged aesthetic pleasures, including the enjoyment of ambiguous figures in repartee . . . Puritanism stressed the moral imperative of honesty . . . that came to be cherished to a remarkable degree in American society’.41 Univocal and unambiguous discourse are to be aligned with human ‘capabilities for gaining cognitive mastery of the world’.42 Ambiguity answers ‘the need for expressivity under a regime of . . . formal rationalities, and the need to protect privacy in a world of extended central controls’,43 (This latter descriptive fits perfectly the noir response to censorial controls.)

To view film noir, and to read it carefully, is to engage with ambiguity borne not of ‘sloppy thinking’, but of rigour, tolerance of multivocality and willingness to question conventions and norms. It offers always an invitation to deal responsibly with issues of great complexity. Such valuable intellectual structures are produced within the ebb and flow of cultural ideas. As David Aaron comments in his recent study of the Hebrew Bible, Biblical Ambiguities,

One generation’s solutions to the unknown become another generation’s source of uncertainty . . . The tolerance for uncertainty constantly shifts with an era’s preferences. There is no progression from concrete to abstract, literal to metaphorical, plurality of meaning to singularity of meaning. All of these are natural by-products of the human struggle to make sense.44

‘Movements’ like noir, or indeed the texts of the Bible that are counter- conventional, cannot be manufactured. As is widely recognized, the makers of noir had no cognizance of a ‘genre’, of the term ‘film noir’, yet alone a series of films to be practically venerated in years to come (Robert Mitchum: ‘Hell, we didn’t know what film noir was in those days. Cary Grant and all the big stars got all the lights. We lit our sets with cigarette butts’).45 Yet within the discourse of film viewing and study, film noir has become a critical idea greater than the sum of its parts. It was a luminous and influential moment of cinematic defiance (and sadly for those who fell victim to McCarthyism, one coupled with resignation and personal loss), and thankfully it continues to exercise the mind.

Notes

1. As cited in James Naremore, More Than Night: Film Noir in Its Contexts, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998, p. 25.

2. It is worth noting here that noir films do not generally exhibit a radical ambiguity or nihilism. They are stable texts. But they make use of fixed meanings and conventions in order to disorient and to question. Noir’s ambiguity as I am discussing it cannot (did not) function outside of a mainstream and conventional sign system. Compare Robert Porfirio: ‘What keeps the film noir alive for us today is something more than a spurious nostalgia. It is the underlying mood of pessimism which undercuts any attempted happy endings and prevents the films from being the typical Hollywood escapist fare many were originally intended to be’ (‘No Way Out: Existential Motifs in the Film Noir’, in A. Silver and J. Ursini (eds), Film Noir Reader, New York: Limelight Editions, 1996, pp. 77-93 (80)).

3. Apparently the scene was filmed almost a year after the rest of the film, in order to capitalize on the sexual chemistry between Bogart and Bacall that had made To Have and Have Not (1944) so popular.

4. Compare Paul Schrader: ‘film noir's techniques emphasize loss, nostalgia, lack of clear priorities, insecurity; then submerge these self-doubts in mannerism and style’ (‘Notes on Film Noir’, in Silver and Ursini (eds), Film Noir Reader, pp. 53-63 (58)).

5. Andrew Spicer, Film Noir, Inside Film; Harlow: Longman, 2002, p. 78.

6. Michael Mills, ‘Narrative Innovations in Film Noir’ (http:/Avww.modern times.com/palace/inv_noir.htm; accessed April 2003).

7. So Robert Porfirio, ‘The Killers: Expressiveness of Sound and Image in Film Noir', in A. Silver and J. Ursini (eds), Film Noir Reader 2, New York: Limelight Editions, 1999, pp. 177-87 (179).

8. Naremore, More Than Night, p. 80.

9. Spicer, Film Noir, p. 2.

10. Richard Dyer, ‘Resistance through Charisma: Rita Hayworth and Gilda', in E. Ann Kaplan (ed.), Women in Film Noir, new edn; London: BFI, 1998, pp. 115-29 (115).

11. Cited in Naremore, More Than Night, p. 117.

12. Naremore, More Than Night, p. 119.

13. Nino Frank, ‘A New Kind of Police Drama: The Criminal Adventure’ (trans, by A. Silver), in Silver and Ursini (eds), Film Noir Reader 2, pp. 15-19 (15).

14. Naremore, More Than Night, pp. 13-15.

15. Naremore, More Than Night, pp. 21-6.

16. ‘Existentialism’, in P. Edwards (ed.), The Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Macmillan, 1967, III, pp. 147-59 (149).

17. Here, as in his other noir films, Lancaster ‘kept his energy levels under rigid control, rarely extending himself and then only to withdraw quickly like a hunted animal’ (Porfirio, ‘No Way Out’, p. 85).

18. Michael Mills, ‘Two from Siodmak: The Killers, Criss Cross’ (http://www.moderntimes.com/palace/kc.htm; accessed April 2003).

19. ‘Towards a Definition of Film Noir1, in Silver and Ursini (cds), Film Noir Reader, pp. 17-25 (25).

20. ‘Towards a Definition of Film Noir’, p. 22.

21. Julie Kirgo and Alain Silver, ‘In a Lonely Place (1950)’, in A. Silver and E. Ward (eds), Film Noir: An Encyclopedic Reference to the American Style, rev. 3rd edn; Woodstock, NY: The Overlook Press, 1992, pp. 144-6 (146).

22. Spicer, Film Noir, p. 56.

23. Naremore, More Than Night, p. 130.

24. For an incisive account of the most politically and philosophically articulate maker of noir, Abraham Polonsky (writer Body and Soul, writer and dir. Force of Evil), and of the cultural climate of the McCarthy era, see P. Buhle and Dave Wagner, A Very Dangerous Citizen: Abraham Lincoln Polonsky and the Hollywood Left, Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001. Most of the Hollywood Ten who stood against HUAC were involved in producing noir.

25. Spicer, Film Noir, p. 41 (citing R. Sklar).

26. ‘No Way Out’, p. 92.

27. See Christopher Deacy, Screen Christologies: Redemption and the Medium of Film, University of Wales Press, 2001, pp. 28-9.

28. Naremore, More Than Night, p. 20 (citing Borde and Chaumeton).

29. J. C. Exum, Plotted, Shot and Painted: Cultural Representations of Biblical Women, Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, 1996, pp. 204-37.

30. ‘Women and the Discourse of Patriarchal Wisdom: A Study of Proverbs 1-9’, in P. L. Day (ed.), Gender and Difference in Ancient Israel, Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1989, pp. 142-60 (157-8).

31. Deacy, Screen Christologies, p. 18 (with reference to Paul Gallagher). See also pp. 13-15, 21-3.

32. Deacy, Screen Christologies, pp. 59-64.

33. The existential themes of Qoheleth are explored in Eric S. Christianson, A Time to Tell: Narrative Strategies in Ecclesiastes, Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, 1998, pp. 259-74.

34. Spicer, Film Noir, p. 7.

35. I will be further developing the biblical comparisons in an article: ‘The Big Sleep: Strategic Ambiguity in Judges 4-5 and in Film Noir’, in D. Shepherd (ed.), That We May See and Believe (Semeia Studies, SBL, forthcoming).

36. Donald N. Levine, The Flight from Ambiguity: Essays in Social and Cultural Theory, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985, p. 17 (my italics).

37. Levine, Flight from Ambiguity, p. 24.

38. Levine, Flight from Ambiguity, p. 31.

39. Levine, Flight from Ambiguity, p. 28.

40. Levine, Flight from Ambiguity, p. 33.

41. Levine, Flight from Ambiguity, p. 37.

42. Levine, Flight from Ambiguity, p. 39.

43. Levine, Flight from Ambiguity, p. 40, my italics.

44. David H. Aaron, Biblical Ambiguities: Metaphor, Semantics and Divine Imagery, Leiden: Brill, 2001, p. 199.

45. Cited in Arthur Lyons, Death on the Cheap: The Lost B Movies of Film Noir, New York: Da Capo Press, 2000, p. 2.

io.        Speaking of God and Donald Duck:
Realism, Non-Realism and Animation

ROBERT POPE

The inspiration for the title of this chapter comes from a passage in a book by Don Cupitt. Perhaps the best known of British non-realists, Cupitt’s case is that the category ‘God’ can be profitably employed in order to ensure the living of an ethical life, but to believe that we have knowledge of God, and even that we have language adequate to describe God, belittles God and makes him part of the world of experience. Instead of this, ‘God’ is merely a linguistic sign that personifies the ‘religious requirement’. In other words, ‘God’ may or may not be real. What matters is whether or not our views of God help us in the business of living. Perhaps more accurately, then, he suggests that ‘God’ only has reality as a ‘sign’, and he uses the cartoon character Donald Duck to explain this.

Each and every Donald Duck image published by the Disney Studios really is Donald Duck himself; there is no superior original. Donald Duck is a vivid character to millions, maybe billions, but he simply doesn’t need to have any existence outside his own iconography. It would be a pedantic mistake to try to establish the existence of a real Donald Duck independent of the standard image, and then to investigate whether the standard Donald Duck image is in fact an accurate likeness. No, the vitality and cultural influence of Donald Duck does not depend at all on any such question. It depends entirely on the vitality of his image and the way it behaves. And because signs are infinitely multi-pliable, and each of them is the real thing, Donald Duck can be omnipresent.1

As in most of his work, Cupitt’s point is patently clear: human beings cannot really know ultimate reality. God, in the way we understand the term, is no more than a projection, a human construction in the same way as human beings draw cartoon characters. We cannot know whether or not those constructions correspond with a reality. Of course, Cupitt’s approach may be flawed simply because it could be the case that our conceptions of God, however incomplete and faltering, in fact correspond with an actual reality. Furthermore, he may be right in suggesting that we cannot prove the validity of the correspondence, though that, in itself, does not disprove it. What he seems to be saying is that this does not in the end matter. What matters is whether or not our ideas of God are sufficiently real to have the kind of effect on human beings that is desirable, namely that they will then act in appropriate ways towards each other and towards their environment.

Cupitt’s point is not that Donald Duck is as real as God (or vice versa), but that the iconography surrounding our use of the word God is the same kind of human construction that surrounds the cartoon character. In the same way that all that matters about the cartoon character is the image being watched, rather than any archetype, so all that matters about God is what we have to say about him, rather than knowing accurately the reality of God’s nature or, indeed, whether or not God exists. It seems, quite plainly, to be an apologia for the Kantian distinction between appearance and reality: all we know is the appearance, the phenomenal. We cannot know the real and noumenal. Our purpose, then, is to live meaningfully in the phenomenal realm of appearances. We do not need to know the extent to which the appearance corresponds to the reality. And one tool that helps us to live meaningfully is myth. ‘Myth consists of stories that provide human communities with grounding prototypes, models for life, reports of foundational realities, and dramatic presentations of fundamental values: myth reveals a culture’s bedrock assumptions and aspirations.’2 In other words, myths are stories created by human beings in order to give meaning to their lives.

There is much here that resonates with the recent interest in the theological interpretation of film. Just as the reference in the quotation is to Donald Duck, we could now claim that animation as well as film should be the subject of theological reflection for it, too, gives expression to modern myths. Three questions are raised in this chapter. First, what kind of justification is there for interpreting film theologically? Second, to what extent are films which employ animation able to provide us with material to do theology? Third, is it ‘realism’ or ‘non-realism’ which provides the philosophical background to make such interpretations possible?

1. The Theological Interpretation of Film

The theological tradition in the West during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries developed in such a way as to accommodate the development of cinema and its interpretation as a means of conveying value and of experiencing transcendence. The priority of human experience and ability to reason, finding their modern roots in Schleiermacher and Hegel respectively, have opened the way to seeing all experience and all human musings as potentially revealing connection with the divine. Paul Tillich’s insistence that the revelation of God was ‘one moment of great beauty’ but that it has imbued all subsequent moments with potentially revelatory beauty, has resulted in a more open approach to culture both as a means for God and reality to be revealed and as a means for human creativity to be seen as analogous to God’s creativity because it reflects the all-pervasive consequences of creation in imago Dei. The presence of a religious dimension means that everything can be explained in religious terms.3 H. Richard Niebuhr is often appealed to4 with his fivefold categorization of Christ against culture, Christ in paradox with culture, Christ the transformer of culture, Christ above culture and the Christ of culture.5 To interpret film theologically it seems that a ‘Christ of culture’ model must be employed,6 for it appears to confirm the existence, importance and significance of the spiritual within a cultural context that has become secularized. It is a way of appealing to, and tapping into, today’s fascination with spirituality - a deliberately loose and slippery term which at best recognizes that human beings have an inherent yearning for the other, for reality, for transcendence or for God, a yearning immortalized by Augustine in his confession that ‘you have made us for yourself, and our heart is restless until it rests in you’.7 At worst, it reflects the attempt to find meaning in anything now that traditional sources and forms have been discarded. As a means of conveying meaning and value, film is supported, theologically, by all these movements and can be seen in either a negative or positive light. At the very least it may be a useful tool in order to begin a debate on value and principles in a postmodern culture that has abandoned consensus and, as a result, is in danger of moral disintegration.8

Alongside theological developments, the twentieth century witnessed several shifts in social value within Western culture. One factor in this was the almost spectacular decline in religious observance in Britain and Europe,9 but there were others too. For a time at least, people found value in politics through their commitment to socialist theory in the Labour Movement or capitalist ideology in Thatcherite Britain. Harold Wilson’s somewhat contemptuous dismissal of political dogma as ‘theology’ helped neither the retention of particular values in politics nor the cause of the theologian to be taken seriously in the modern world. Value in politics has been replaced with pragmatism and expediency. This element has always been present, and necessary, as political ideal met empirical reality, but appears now to have taken the primary role in a political system in which parties strive to be electable and create the kind of image necessary to be so elected without necessarily providing the requisite substance once power has been achieved. At one time, value could be found in the workplace where ideals of industry, honesty and reliability were exalted as of utmost importance. Changes in working patterns have seen it displaced here too, the victim partly of an all-pervading individualism and partly of job insecurity. One place that is left for value to be affirmed is in leisure and this is where the cinema and television both become important. It is through the secular imagery of the soap opera, the period drama, the mini-series, the sitcom or the feature film that meaning and value are now conveyed. It is they that provide the raw material or the basic narratives for our conversation and the moral dilemmas through which people decide what is, and what is not, an acceptable lifestyle. The effect is that meaning and value are dissociated from specifically religious sources.

If the television and the cinema have played a part in this development, then what is of vital significance is that they provoke a discussion of value and meaning through fictional images that are mobile and not static. The image does not wait for a final analysis but has moved on almost before the interpretation can be completed. In one sense, this has created the sound-bite generation. Substance has had to be sacrificed in favour of effect.10 But, in another sense, the communication of meaning through a moving image opens the way for endless interpretations. When an image is static, it has certain boundaries; when it is moving a whole new dimension is added to what is being observed. When this is considered alongside the fact that film thrives on illusion and appeals primarily to the world of the imagination, it can be seen what a complex means of conveying information it really is. Mircea Eliade called the cinema a ‘dream factory’ simply because of the way its imagery appeals to the imagination,11 concentrating as it does on localizing the eternal battle between good and evil by allowing the audience to personalize abstract concepts and condense them into the characters of the hero and the villain and thence to empathize and identify with them. In this way, films allow the viewer to transcend his or her own life and context and experience the ‘other’.12 The sense of otherness is heightened through the use of excess. Films appeal simply by releasing their audiences, even fleetingly, from the restrictions placed on their lives. They enable them, through imagination and appearance, to fly, to kill, to have perfect and frequent sex; they thrill, excite and move before ending and sending them back out into the real world. In so doing they enable people to experience a certain transcendence, the feeling that there is something beyond the confines of the self as we empathize with, and almost live the life of, the character portrayed on the screen.

If it is the case that the cinematic experience is one of transcendence, this transcendence is more the recognition of human need than a response to contact with the divine. It may be a transcendence of the self, of personal limitations, and the fleeting, imaginative experience of ‘the other’ who is liberated from the limitations under which the audience still live. But is this really an encounter with the ‘wholly other’ as some would claim?13 More importantly, is it only the appearance of the real or the noumenal that religious encounter and experience have usually been held to be? We see here, in a sense, an appeal to non-realist thinking. Transcendence is achieved not through contemplating higher things, not through contact with God and not through the ritual of, and divine presence in, the Eucharist, but through imagining that the bounds of human capability can be crossed. Meaning is created and located within humanity as myths are heard, watched and responded to by human beings. Films convey meaning through the creation of atmosphere where the audience is led to anticipate activity which fulfils, if not also surpasses, human potential. Horizons are broadened and even challenged as the story is worked out and human capability is glorified. Through such portrayals, an audience confronts otherness with all its potential to transcend the present, the historical and the contingent. It expands the imagination and thus creates an expanded world-view.14

If film is a means of representing (re-presenting) what is real in such a way that it appeals to the imagination, then it follows that, however much subject to interpretation, it reflects something of ourselves, of human achievement and aspiration. It offers meaning by allowing us to see familiar images, whose very familiarity opens up a range of interpretation and construes meaning for the viewer. But in the end it claims that meaning belongs not in the noumenal realm but in the phenomenal realm for, imagined or otherwise, it is meaning through visual appearance that is conveyed.

2. Animation

If film appeals to the imagination and achieves its goals through illusion, then animation (see Text Box 10.1) appeals by its very unreality. It is this that allows for particularly imaginative, indeed, fantastical, interpretations of reality to flourish. It releases its audiences into a fairy-tale, make- believe world where the usual laws of cause and effect are reinterpreted or suspended. Even if Sylvester catches Tweety Pie, or Tom catches Jerry, we are secure in the knowledge that the bird and mouse will not suffer the same fate as those caught by cats in our own back gardens, while the retribution invariably meted out on the cats is nothing but a momentary setback for them despite its apparent severity. Wil E. Coyote can plummet down ravines or be caught and blown up in his own traps, but will still return to resume his quest to stop the Road Runner. In animation, animals talk to each other, they walk around on their hind legs as human beings, they can attack with a tremendous force of violence but never expire. It is pure escapism.

Other animated programmes are more sophisticated and can be ‘read’ at different levels. At one level, Bart Simpson is the paragon of the all- American mischievous schoolboy, but retains an endearing innocence and naivety which seems always to come good in the end. On another, the whole programme is a highly perceptive comment on modern society, exposing the emptiness of postmodern life, which is void of meaning save the disvalues of hedonism and acquisition. However, it never becomes merely cynical, and retains hope through maintaining a semblance of the ideal of family life, behind which lies the absolute certainty of the existence of a benevolent God whose demands on human beings relate primarily to the way in which they love their neighbour.15 A similar message

1. Animation - Some Landmarks

• Animation can be defined as ‘the technique of filming successive drawings or positions of models to create an illusion of movement when the film is shown as a sequence’ (Oxford English Reference Dictionary).

• The advent of celluloid in 1913 heralded the rapid development of

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[1]        The Importance of Film

[2]Cinema-going is increasing in the UK with 78 % of the population going to the cinema at least once a year. Statistics tell us that 25 % of the population

[3]        Religion, Theology and The Bible in Film

[4]The title of this volume accurately reflects not only the content but also the make-up and interests of those who attended the colloquia as well

[5]as the perspectives and expertise of the contributors. Together the contributors embrace the academic disciplines of religious studies, Christian

[6]        Dialoguing with Movies

[7]While the interest of most film studies has been to think about film in its

[8]various aspects - aesthetic and technical, sociological and philosophical -

[9]the interest of theology is often presented as a wish to enter into a dialogue

[10]or conversation with film, as if theology hesitated to speak about its

[11]        Through a Lens Darkly: Critical Approaches to Film

[12]The Critics’ Lenses: Some Traditional Theoretical Frameworks

[13]Let me start with a review of the traditional theoretical frameworks that

[14]have been adopted in film studies. There isn’t space to do more than briefly

[15]summarize these, but those readers who wish to delve further will find use

[16]ful discussions in the books and articles listed in the notes at the end of the