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Theology in Film,

Film as Theology

Debates about Religious Imagery

A Rough Overview

Icon/Iconoclasm

  • 15th Century BCE: Moses receives the Decalogue, including the first commandment

"I am the Lord your God: you shall not have strange gods before me. You shall not make for yourself a graven image" (Exod 20:2-4).

  • 8th Century BCE: King Hezekiah of Judah purified the temple of Solomon.

"He removed the high places, smashed the sacred stones and cut down the Asherah poles. He broke into pieces the bronze snake Moses had made, for up to that time the Israelites had been burning incense to it" (2 Kgs 18:4).

  • Image of Edessa
  • 754 CE: Council of Hieria (Turkey), summoned by the iconoclast emperor Constantine V; excluded the five main episcopal sees, including Rome.
  • "Christianity is the revelation not only of the Word of God but also the Image of God" (L. Ouspensky)

"If anyone ventures to represent the divine image (charaktēr) of the Word after the Incarnation with material colours, let him be anathema!"

  • "icon": from the Greek eikon ("likeness," "image")
  • "iconoclast": from the Greek eikonoklastes ("image" + "breaker")
  • 787 CE: the ecumenical Second Council of Nicaea overturned the rulings of Hieria.
  • "iconoclasm": the rejection of religious images as heretical.

"[Representational art] is quite in harmony with the history of the spread of the gospel, as it provides confirmation that the becoming man of the Word of God was real and not just imaginary, and as it brings us a similar benefit. For, things that mutually illustrate one another undoubtedly possess one another's message."

Theology of the Icon

  • ca. 726-740 CE: St. John of Damascus writes Three Treatises on the Divine Images.
  • John's views prevailed at Nicaea in 787:

Paul Tillich (1886-1965)

Film as Site for Scholarly Reflection

1) An image is a likeness of something else, but it is not identical to that thing.

Towards a Theology of Film

Three Ways to Relate Theology and Film

1) Discrimination (heteronomy): theology judges film by particular religious standards.

2) An image "makes manifest...something hidden," i.e., something that is not available to our faculties; thus it is "to guide us to knowledge."

  • Theology has engaged film from the latter's inception, albeit in ad hoc fashion.
  • Raised in Germany; later taught at Harvard and Chicago.

Iconoclasm in the Reformation Period

  • Synthesized theology and existentialism

2) Humanism (theonomy): theology finds points of overlap between ideas expressed in film and those of Christianity; indeed, the latter is implicitly desired by the former.

  • Oct. 31, 1517: Luther nails his 95 Theses to the door of Castle Chuch, Wittenberg.

3) There are a variety of images, including those that "convey a faint conception of God" and those that "arouse the memory of...events," both past and present, good and bad.

  • 1979: George Atkinson opens the first video rental store in Los Angeles; his enterprise turned into The Video Station, the first major rental chain and a progenitor of Netflix and other similar companies.
  • Method of correlation: "Philosophy formulates the questions implied in human existence, and theology formulates the answers implied in divine self-manifestation under the guidance of the questions implied in human existence."

3) Aesthetics (autonomy): theology recognizes the independence of film from its purview.

  • 1536: John Calvin publishes his Institutes of the Christian Religion in Geneva.

(Cf. the dicussion of H. Richard Niebuhr's Christ and Culture in Deacy and Ortiz)

  • Calvin: "We must cling to this principle: God's glory is corrupted by an impious falsehood whenever any form is attached to him" (Institutes 1.11.1).

4) "We...venerate the images, not by offering veneration to matter, but through them to those who are depicted in them."

  • Atkinson et al. changed viewing habits and made it possible to study film; the field of theology and film soon "came to life."
  • August 1566: the so-called Beeldenstorm ("storm on images") breaks out in the Low Countries: "All the churches, chapels and houses of religion utterly defaced, and no kind of thing left whole within them, but broken and utterly destroyed, being done after such order and by so few folks that it is to be marvelled at."

Theology's Appropriation of Film

Or Seeing Film as...

1) ...a ministerial aid, which might help spread the gospel and change lives.

2) ...a site for scholarly reflection on the various issues raised by a given film.

Thinking about God

Or the Many Faces of Theology

3) ...a means of contemplation (icon), wherein one might genuinely experience God's presence.

  • Theology = theos + logos

Andrei Tarkovsky, Nostalghia (1983)

  • Aquinas: "In [theology], all things are treated of under the aspect of God: either because they are God Himself or because they refer to God as their beginning and end" (ST I, Q 1, A 7)
  • Edward Farley: traditionally, "theology" has had two main senses--that of wisdom about God and that of a scholarly enterprise featuring various sub-disciplines.

Film as Ministerial Aid

Other Examples of Film as Icon

Key Debate

(Pattison, 229-39)

  • Moreover, there is a recent shift to seeing theology as preparation for action, especially ministerial action.

1) What is Benjamin's critique of cinema?

2) Why does Pattison think that Benjamin is wrong? With whom do you agree?

  • Film's first and most traditional use.
  • Kracauer, Bazin: cinema is to attend to the real world, facilitating new ways of seeing.

3) Pattison uses Tarkovsky as an example of a filmmaker sensitive to theology. Can you think of your own examples?

  • Contemporary apologetics.
  • Leo Braudy, The World in a Frame (2002): "open films," which "have faith in nature, in the power of objects to communicate truth."
  • Two main approaches:

1) Documentaries (e.g., Bishop Robert Barron's Catholicism)

2) Feature narrative films (e.g., PUREFLIX)

  • Krzysztof Kieślowski: deliberate pacing; contemplative attention to objects (abstraction); open-ended meaning; liminality.
  • How is this form of cinema seen in the wider culture?
  • "Liminal": from the Latin limen ("threshold")
  • The "liminal image" is one in which attention to "ordinary events" manifests "the minimiracles happening all around us," thereby showing the intersection of "the rational and the nonrational" (41).

Film as Hierophany

Paul Schrader (1946-)

Towards a "Transcendental Style"

  • "transcendent": from Latin trans (beyond) + scandare (to climb)
  • The transcendent is manifested in film through a common expression:
  • Author: Transcendental Style in Film: Ozu, Bresson, Dreyer (1972)

I. Ascetic Aesthetic

II. Crisis

  • Screenwriter: Taxi Driver (1976), Raging Bull (1980), The Last Temptation of Christ (1988), Bringing out the Dead (1999); all directed by Martin Scorsese.

III. Stasis

  • Writer and Director: American Gigolo (1980) and Affliction (1997)

"Films exposing glimpses of the transcendent are often those that end on a note that is at once satisfying (catharsis) and whole (stasis), but also still in want." -- B. McCracken

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