After 100 years of movies, can the cinema be a force for good?

R'n ECENT FILM releases have exposed us to worlds as contrastg as Jane Austen's
England and vomiting drug addicts in Edinburgh. As we celebrate the centenary of cinema, more and more films are being made and movie audiences worldwide are increasing. Is film an increasingly important art form or are ephemeral flickerings reflecting a shallow culture?
Alfred Hitchcock once described European films as: "Pictures of people talking to one another". Likewise, European intellectuals have long held a sneering attitude toward Hollywood's unashamed populism. They blame Hollywood for debasing a potentially powerful art form by producing mindless movies to make a fast buck.
But while movie moguls would never deny the profit motive, most movie-makers want to make thoughtful films which are both financial and artistic successes. And social comment isn't enough. Increasingly, film-makers are understanding the mechanics of myth, and how to make films that involve the audience in moral choices and character growth.
They've discovered that films with depth are popular. The really successful movies are not celebrations of sex and violence, but films which take the viewer on an inner as well as an outer quest. They take the audience to the heart of the human condition and, through an emotional transaction, bring them to a new Way of seeing.
But solid Christian folk distrust the blatant emotion of popular culture. Pious people are usually suspicious of the movies because they're "wordly". Like the real world, the movies are full of lust, greed and violent passion. It seems safer to stay with theology's cosy definitions and evangelism's smug catch phrases.
Christian teaching and theology has too often been eerebraI, discursive and abstract. The vital, juicy and dynamic Bible stories have been dissected and boiled down to make the watery doctrinal soup safe, unambiguous and easily digestible.
But the whole JudaeoChristian tradition is story based. The Old Testament stories of salvation history resonate and work on us as myth. We identify with their heroes, we share their joys and sorrows, and enter into their mysterious life of shadow promises. Then in the New Testament, the types and hints come clear as the great myths become fact in the Gospel story.
We connect into this
drama of salvation as we live the liturgical life. The liturgical year takes us into the mystery in a way which is beyond explanation. On a profound level, our lives connect with the universal drama of salvation and we experience redemption.
The same kind of deep emotional interaction has always been the core theory of drama. From the ancient myths of our primitive ancestors through to the Greeks, drama has been understood as a religious experience. The heroes and the gods were made of the same stuff. Sharing in the heroic quest was a redemptive experience which touched and transformed the mind, heart and soul.
One Hollywood scriptwriter has said: "I want to move the audience's emotions so much that they leave the cinema thinking." Good movie makers don't apologise for appealing first to the audience's emotions. They know we arc motivated to action far more by our emotions than by our rational faculties.
The first silent films were able to do this best. Films without words had a visual and emotional purity. When the talkies came along, the drama reverted to dialoguebased story-telling, and much of the emotional impact of the earliest films was lost.
Today's film makers are rediscovering the power of the purely visual image. Scriptwriters are taught to "write for the camera". The pictures tell the story. Dialogue is kept to a bare minimum. As in real life, the actors communicate truth not through earnest discussions, but with a casual glance or the lift of an eyebrow. The inherent visual medium of cinema by-passes words and concepts, grabs at emotions and controls them as no art form can. Far from being a passive activity, cinema viewing leads the audience from the heart with its laughter, tears, suspense and gasps of fear.
The key to our emotional involvement is the hero. At the beginning of the film the scriptwriter employs various devices to engage our sympathy with the hero. Eventually, our sympathy will lead us to identify with him completely. As we identify with the hero through emotion, we can share his moral choices.
It is these moral choices not the film's plot which engage our attention and involvement the most. If the hero is hanging from the edge of a sky-scraper, we feel fear with him. If he is holding his infant daughter in his other hand, we feel even more tension, but if by dropping his daughter he can save himself, we're brought to the brink of a moral choice. Will he gain the whole world only to lose his soul?
The skilful scriptwriter and director manipulate us to bond with the hero and undertake his journey with him. In good films, the outward goal becomes a metaphor for the inner goals of the hero. As he overcomes the villain and wins the prize, he must also overcome his inner demons and allow his best self to prevail. The best films reveal this growth to be the result of a higher power. The hero is blessed. Grace is at work in his life.
Christopher Vogler examines the mythic role of movies in his book: The Writer's journey. He shows how the most
successful films have re-told the universal myth which lie at the heart of our storytelling.
Following the work of Joseph Campbell in The Hero with a Thousand Faces, Vogler shows how the movies are our equivalent to the community storyteller. The movies connect us with the dreams, fairytales, folk-tales, and myths that have fuelled the imagination for ages.
For the Christian, these myths of the hero god who descends to earth to battle the forces of evil are fuelled and perfected in the Gospel story. In Christ, the shadowy universal myths become incarnate and glitter with the hard reality of diamonds. As CS Lewis said in his essay, Is Theology Poetry?, "here myth becomes fact."
A Christian film might successfully portray the life of Christ or the life of a saint. It might also attempt explicit evangelism. It might deal with Christian themes in a symbolic manner. But the most recent Christian film will reincarnate the Christian story by retelling the redemptive myth in a fresh L.nd captivating way.
In this sort of Christian film, eternal truth is deeply embedded in the hero's quest, just as it was deeply embedded in the life of Christ. A truly Christian film will therefore be incarnational. The Christian message will be the hidden gem. It will be appropriated by the audience implicitly, hinting to them of mysteries beyond telling, bolstering an ordered world view and inspiring moral behaviour.
The cinema is the only confessional many people will get. There, in the darkness, a
population, immunised from potent Christianity and biased by their misconceptions of Christ, face their own weak humanity. There, they experience the exaggerated sorrow and joy of the universe through the struggles of their hero.
Cinema may be the only quasi-religious experience much of the population encounter. But, in the face of this, church people are seen as anti-movies. Too often, the only religious voices heard are the Puritans with their shallow depreciations of screen violence and sex.
While lay people make facile claims about movies and societal violence, too many theologians and clergy maintain an academic or spiritual aloofness. Ask a clergyman what movie he's seen lately and the reply will probably be "Goodness me! I haven't been to the movies since 1962." Since the present generation is distrustful of religious jargon and biased towards institutional Christianity, cinema offers a fresh way of rejuvenating old stories. When CS Lewis had a letter from his mother complaining that her son loved Lewis' Christ-like lion Asian more than Jesus, he wrote back telling her not to worry. If the boy loved Asian enough, Lewis wrote, he would surely learn to love Christ when the time was right.
As the cinema celebrates its 100th birthday, many people feel that it is only now that it is coming of age. The time is ripe for theologians, teachers, academics and laypeople to take cinema seriously on every level. With education, involvement, and understanding, the cinema may provide the best chance we've ever had to shed religious jargon and communicate the ancient faith in a fresh way.