Beyond the Image: Approaches to the Religious Dimension in the Cinema

BEYOND

THE

Ronald Holloway

IMAGE APPROACHES TO THE RELIGIOUS DIMENSION IN THE CINEI\N\

film

@oD«@lliJmJD®ITD®

WORLD COUNCIL OF CHURCHES Geneva 1977 in co-operation with INTERFILM

The author, in completing this research, wishes to acknowledge grants from the Rockefeller Foundation and the World Council of Churches. He is particularly grateful to John Taylor, Hans-Rudolf MilllerSchwefe, and Rune Waldekranz for help and assistance.

Cover: John Taylor Cover photo from Ingmar Bergman's "Seventh Seal", Svensk Filmindustri © Copyright 1977 World Council of Churches, Geneva ISBN 2 8254 0538 8

All rights reserved. Except for brief excerpts for review purposes, no part of this book may be reproduced or used in any form or by any means - electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or information storage and retrieval systems - without written permission from the publisher.

Printed in Switzerland by Imprimerie La Concorde

"

For my mother.

CONTENTS A Word of Introduction . . . . . I. A Theology of the Cinema . II. Toward a Religious Cinema. III. From the Passion Play to Intolerance IV. The Importance of Chaplin . V. Inside a Movie Cathedral . . VI. The Political Use of Religion' VII. Cinema as Reflection of Man VIII. Cinema as Religious Dialogue IX. Faith in the Cinema of Carl Theodor Dreyer X. The Filmmaker as Biblical Theologian Bibliography. . . . . . . . . . . Index of Film Titles Index of Names . .

7

9 25 45

61 75 105

123 141

163 177

191 197 207

A WORD OF INTRODUCTION Christian Graf von Krakow humorously commented that a theologian is a man in a dark room looking blindfolded for a black cat that is not there - and who suddenly crIes out: "I've got it!" I had somewhat the same experience when writing this book: when even the word "religion" is a bone of contention today, how is one to interpret the religious dimension in the cinema? However, since few will deny that movies are erotic or political, at least in the eye of the beholder, let us assume too that the cinematic image has a theological implication. Beyond the Image offers ten approaches to the religious dimension in the cinema - a modest survey of a broad field. It owes a great debt to film historians and critics who have covered much of the same ground before, albeit from other angles. Many philosophers, theologians, and other academics have prepared the way for this book with related studies of literature, theatre, and the arts. I have only tried to tie together some of the loose ends related to cinema. Be aware that certain loaded concepts, such as "pietism" and "propaganda," are used in a broad, generalized context - thus "propaganda" means "information of a persuasive nature," the sense in which it is often used and applied in European circles. Film titles, too, differ from country to country and continent to continent: "Cries and Whispers," for example, is the title given to Bergman's film at European festivals. Some confusion may be caused by the ambiguity of the book's title. Beyond the Image, like meta-physics and meta-music, attempts to look "beyond" the immediate image to the traditional, the historical, the religious (there, I've said it) in the seventh art, in order to find the deeper meaning in film esthetics and a better appreciation of the contemporary human condition. RONALD HOLLOWAY

Berlin, January 1977

I.

A THEOLOGY OF THE CINEMA

The history of the cinema is the ~tory of man in the age oftechpology. It is an art completely born-outofth~)~~ust!ia1 age, and since its arrival it has been the chief witness of the passing of one epoch and the beginning of another. A theology of the cinema is therefore essentially related to a theology of technology. But herein lies a difficulty. As-Prof.-Hans-Rudolf Miiller-Schwefe points out in Technik und Glaube, the change-over into a new epoch has brought unrest and underscores "a permanent challenge" between technology and belief: The revolution now in progress changes the position of man to nature. Mother Earth, who bore and nourished mankind, now becomes matter which man processes. In the place of integration into a higher order, and instead of the pious cultivation of nature, order is disturbed by this violent break-in, which brings with it challenge and experiment.

In responding to this challenge, the theologian must overlook the major controversies separating the nineteenth from the twentieth century and rearrange his thinking to focus on the origin of technology, instead of the consequences of it. Thus, when placed into a single package, the social polarities between yesterday's order of kings-and-manners and today's style of living in the world village, as well as the theological differences between liberalism and neoorthodoxy in Protestant circles (to mark the dates: between Adolf von Harnack's 1914 ¥anifesto of !ntellectuals and Karl Barth's 1919 Epistle to the Romans),- tend--to fade quickly into the background. Indeed, the future may eventually judge that much of today's theological squabbling has been the direct result of man's inability to

10

BEYOND THE IMAGE

comprehend the great technical power God has seen fit to place in his hands. The permanent challenge between technology and belief may never be satisfactorily resolved, for it is one toward ,partne!s~p and not dominance. That partnership was ultimately brought about by the movie camera, not at all accidentally, but in a very blasphemous way. Cinema as art and the moving picture as documentation were the chief witnesses to the g~l!rise of the gods of nature: it was that small mechanical instrument accompanying mountain expeditions and space flights, raising up man as the idols fell. For a time man trembled before his power, forcing God to remain safely in the heavens as the miracles were accomplished by his minions on earth. Cinema documented the mistake of this venture too, for technology on the loose had a way of making a mess of things. Man discovered to his sorrow that alone, without faith, he could not effectively control his fate. A partnership between technological man and an immanent-buttranscendent God was inevitable. And I think cinema has also documented that partnership in our own time. The history of the cinema has three divisions, reckoning from the usual date of the paid Lumiere exhibitions in the Grand Cafe in 1895. The first, between 1895 and the First World War in Europe and the Stock Market Crash'in America, documents the end of the nineteenth century and the final period of transition from the previous naturecentered epoch. The period still accents theformer mystical bond of holiness between man and the soil, and it tries as a whole to place man within the safe, secure embrace of the universe. The second division, signaling the birth of the sound film and carrying up to the Second World War, traces the rise of the propaganda film and the use of technology to manipulate the thinking of the public and control the masses under a form of hypnosis. This is not to say that the public was completely fooled, or that the cinema of the thirties and forties did not also faithfully reflect the subconscious of the mass public. The emphasis, however, in both the Hollywood Dream Cult and the Nazi propaganda film, was no longer on a form of active participation, but passive identification. The third division, from the Second World War to the present: marks the b!"~~akaway from the captivity of the star system and the development of the -mature theme. Dialogue with the audience was fostered, and the film artist, the individual director, was set free to come into the market-place of

A THEOLOGY OF THE CINEMA

11

philosophical and religi_0"ll~ discussion. Mystical participation, passive identificatIon; the-ological diaIogue:""":'" these are the three main areas of influence a theology of the cinema has to contend with. But there is a pre-history of the cinema too: the origin of the age of technology. An examination of this period is important not only to catch the spirit of the age in relation to the previous one, but also to demonstrate the fundamental reason why theology has conspicuously avoided cinema as a worthy dialogue partner (while all the other art forms were perfectly acceptable). The origin of the motion picture reveals too that this phenomenon belongs to the very essence of technological thought. Pre-history of the cinema

Cinema, or the motion picture, is the outer expression of a philosophy of procession. In theological terms, gra~e in the motion picture is related to personality instead of to nature. ·The cinema is more an existentialisipheilOmenon than an essentialist one. It belongs to the same process of technology that turned matter to energy. The year 1829 marks the date the conversion to energy and movement was felt in the public's consciousness, and it thereby formed the threshold between the two epochs. A new term was coined in Massachusetts physician Jacob Bigelow's book-title Elements of Technology. That year Stephenson's Rocket vividly proved the superiority of steam locomotion over the horse, and the first American railway began operation. It was the same year the Belgian scientist Plateau conceived the idea that pictures could be made to move; he perfected his shutter apparatus and began optic experiments with the sun (resulting in eventual blindness). Twenty years later, in 1849, he demonstrated to a seated audience a genuine motion picture show: his invention, the Phen~ldstiscope (cleceitful vision), employed painted drawings on a glass- dIsk, which, when projected, demonstrated the wonders of an animated cartoon. Plateau recommended photographs in future experiments. Very few of the primitive inventors of cinematography (drawing motion) were scholars in any sense of the word, and as primitives they would have little interest in the present form their inventions eventually assumed. The driving search behind the photograph, the phonograph, the motion picture was "integral realism", that is, the

12

BEYOND THE IMAGE

recreation of the world in its own image. They were guided by the in-depth illusions of the nineteenth-century stereoscope; in Andre Bazin's words, they would settle for nothing less than "the reconstruction of a perfect illusion of the outside world in sound, color and relief." The real primitives of the cinema, existing only in the imaginations of a few men of the nineteenth century, are in complete imitation of nature. Every new development added to the cinema must, paradoxically, take it nearer and nearer its origins. In short, cinema has yet to be invented!

In the context of the previous epoch, this might have been classified as blasphemy. In responding to the challenge of technology, the cinema's first theologians arrived on the scene before the fact. Poet-philosopher Ralph Waldo Emers2n, sensing. the full significance of the industrial age, left the Unitarian ministry in a weary state o{mind in 1832 for a year of travel in Europe; when he returned, he chose the "secular pulpit and secular wisdom" to found the Transcendentalist movement, a mediative philosophy "between Unitarian and commercial times." Like Existentialism to follow, it was basically a religious movement, a style of life, a way "to build your own world" in a climate where everything was on the move and growing more and more impersonal. George Ripley took the message back into the churches to call for a revision of theology based on a new study of human consciousness. Emerson preached a discarding of worn-out religious symbols, the acceptance of the torment of "Unbelief, the Uncertainty as to what we ought to do," and a greater role for love to help us find the way into the future. The outlines of today's theology of secularity are clearly visible. Not all the Transcendentalists had Emerson's courage to face the future, and for this reason the movement as a whole tended to gaze with nostalgia on the "lost innocence" of the past. The best they could do as a group was to formulate spiritual principles: (1) the rejection of all external authority, particularly as known in the Puritan heritage; (2) the strict dependence on an intuitive perception of truth; and (3) the existence