The Routledge Companion to Religion and Film

John C. Lyden

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2009
• ISBN:
  9781135220655
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Medien & darstellende Kunst
• Subtopic: Film & Video

The Routledge Companion to Religion and Film brings together a lively and experienced team of contributors to introduce students to the key topics in religion and film and to investigate the ways in which the exciting subject of religion and film is developing for more experienced scholars. Divided into four parts, the Companion:

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• analyzes the history of the interaction of religion and film, through periods of censorship as well as appreciation of the medium
• studies religion-in-film, examining how the world's major religions, as well as Postcolonial, Japanese and New Religions, are depicted by and within films
• uses diverse methodologies to explore religion and film, such as psychoanalytical, theological and feminist approaches, and audience reception
• analyzes religious themes in film, including Redemption, the Demonic, Jesus or Christ Figures, Heroes and Superheroes
• considers films as diverse as The Passion of the Christ, The Matrix, Star Wars and Groundhog Day.

This definitive book provides an accessible resource to this emerging field and is an indispensable guide to religion and film for students of Religion, Film Studies, and beyond.

Part I History of the Interaction between Religion and Film: Focus on Western Christianity

1 Silent Cinema and Religion: An Overview (1895–1930)

Terry Lindvall

DOI: 10.4324/9780203874752-3

The monk quietly and patiently fiddled with his toy. In 1646, Father Athanasius kircher had experimented with mirrors and light and discovered a process whereby he could project images on the monastery wall or even on billows of smoke. He called his invention a magic lantern, a novelty that entertained his fellow monks, that is until he playfully contrived to show phantasmagoric images of devils and demons to his zealously pious audience. In danger of being exorcised or tortured, he did what any good schoolman would do: publish rather than perish. Thus he wrote his Magnus Ars Umbra et Lucis, the Great Art of Shadow and Light, that explained how he had taken principles of God's natural world and concocted the whole experiment (Godwin 1979). He continued to dabble in his suspect art, but with considerably less publicity.

The connection between a religious cleric and projected images would culminate over 200 years later, when an Episopal priest and amateur chemist, rector Hannibal Goodwin, was tinkering with chemicals and gave birth to celluloid strips. Early churchmen would point to this cleric and urge religious artists to emulate his use of a new medium for the kingdom of God. For example, in 1916, the Reverend Chester S. Bucher would ask:

Jesus used a lost coin, a dead sparrow and a little child as object lessons. Beecher auctioned off a slave girl in a plymouth pulpit. Wilberforce made them shudder when he held up the chains of a fricans and dropped them with a clanking thud on the floor. Why should the churches disregard this great potential asset, especially since it was a clergyman, the Rev. Hannibal Goodwin, who was the inventor of the flexible film that made motion pictures possible? (Bucher 1916: 1825)

The relations between silent American film and religion in general and Christianity in particular began tentatively, but with a remarkable openness to a visionary rapprochement. The relationship was not, as some historians have painted it, extensively negative or hostile. it was in the early years, at worst, ambivalent, and at best, downright optimistic.

By the end of the silent era, Hollywood producer Paul Bern still acknowledged the Church as a determining foundation of the film industry, much like it had been during the creative structuring of cathedrals. In a lecture at the University of Southern California on 6 March 1929, Bern pointed out that early films followed the pattern set down by historical church drama, such as in the miracle and morality plays, in which, he observed, "various characters, so that they might be easily understood by the simple audiences which saw them were named Envy, Sin, Lust, Weakness, Love (something like the pictures of to day)" (Tibbetts 1977a: 67).

In the intervening years between 1896 and 1927 the interface between religion and silent moving pictures would prove a fertile, rocky, and important ground for the sowing and reaping of religion in cinema. in his anecdotal and revisionist history of early film history, A Million and One Nights, Terry Ramsaye opined that early film presented a dangerous rival to moral leaders as worldly amusements that might tempt parishioners astray (Ramsaye 1926). During the time of his writing in the mid-twenties, filled with the controversies of Hollywood scandals and theological rifts between modernists and fundamentalists, moving pictures would indeed become an arena of debate. However, other documents present a much more complex and nuanced set of relationships between religious groups and the silent American cinema during the first two decades. American movies would in fact propagate various themes and icons of religion, especially protestant Christianity.

Key early narratives centered upon the familiar stories of the Bible. The importation of the Oberammergau passion play found ready and receptive audiences, particularly in churches (Gunning 1992). The French Roman Catholic publishing house La Bonne Presse saw fit in 1897 to reproduce the famously pious Horitz narrative on the back lots of Paris rather than in Bohemia. In 1898, the same year that Pope Leo XIII granted permission for W. k. L. Dickson to film His Holiness at the Vatican so that his pontifical blessing could be conveyed to congregants in America, a series of religious subjects debuted in the United States. Churches frequently served as sites of sanctuary cinemas, so much so that in 1910 Pope Pius X stopped the desecrating practice of charging money for showing biblical spectaculars in Roman Catholic churches. Tableaux versions of the filmed passion play would premiere in January 1898 on Broadway with full orchestra to rave reviews, drawing together elite cultural groups and various religious leaders.

Where films had gone like John Wesley's itinerant preaching out into the countrysides and fairgrounds, various evangelists exploited the new medium for revival services. The consensus was that the kingdom of God had nothing to fear from this instructional and inspirational tool. In fact, a former corporation lawyer and New York journalist (two occupations of which he repented), Colonel Henry H. Hadley, was converted and found that he could combine dramatic showmanship with evangelism, particularly in his obsession to illustrate the iniquities of hard liquor When he viewed a photoplay version of the passion play, he obtained a print as an illustrative accessory for his camp meetings in merry-go-round gospel tents in Atlantic City and Ocean Grove, New Jersey.

Hadley prophesied that these "pictures are going to be a great force. It is the age of pictures; these moving pictures are going to be the best teachers and the best preachers in the history of the world. Mark my words: there are two things coming, prohibition and motion pictures. We must make people think above the belt" (Ramsaye 1926: 375). Thousands attended his spectacular revivals that combined movies with music (Ave Maria, O Holy Night, etc.) to draw in crowds to hear and see the Gospel message. it was the beginning of a movement that was to embrace the possibilities of enabling the eyes to see the wonders of God.

Passion plays baptized the medium with their holy sights and biblical scenes. Pathé director Ferdinand Zecca coordinated a colored tinted feature in the early twentieth century while, in 1912, kalem director Sidney Olcott's From the Manger to the Cross (1912) generated an even greater sense of credibility with its authentic locations in Palestine and e gypt functioning as key sites of piety for both Protestant and Roman Catholic audiences. Even when trickster producer Sigmund Lubin shot his own version of the Oberammergau drama on a philadelphia rooftop, with the actor for peter often on a binge and other disciples playing dice, crowds would flock to storeroom chapels to see the film. (And when the pianos were added, so were the hymns.) In these films one not only heard of God but also could now see Him starring and making cameos in films. Illiterate audiences around the world could be simultaneously instructed and entertained through these technological signs and wonders.

A moral Methodist filmmaker

The emergence of a director like Biograph's D. W. Griffith ushered in an era of Victorian religion, one emphasizing respectability, tradition, Southern chivalry, and deep sentiment, especially toward the home and mothers. While developing a grammar for the cinema (of close-ups, parallel editing, lighting, and many other devices he claimed to have invented), he also shaped the moral imagination of early film audiences. Griffith, the archetypal director of the early silent films, defined his purpose as to make his audience see.

In many ways, Griffith centered on the sanctity of the religious home. Rooted in the narrative action and social morality of Charles Dickens, Griffith sought to reinvigorate middle-class mores with high culture, demonstrating that beauty is the handmaiden of truth. With protestant reformers Washington Gladden and Walter Rauschenbusch emphasizing the plight of the poor, Griffith would echo their diatribes, castigating the greed of financial speculators in such films as A Corner in Wheat (1909). The photoplay paralleled the progressive movement with many of the same concerns. For Griffith, the camera was a "God given means for communicating." Historian Lary May pointed out that "such a power allowed the director to work like those revivalist preachers he must have heard as a child. Using images of sin and salvation, he might provide an experience that could convert the soul from evil to good. In fact, Griffith saw himself as a secular preacher, spreading the Word far beyond that methodist Church in La Grange" (May 1980: 72–3). In A Drunkard’s Reformation (1909), an abusive father and husband is shown the evil of his way not through preaching but when he accompanies his daughter to a stage production where his vices are dramatically re-presented in a moral melodrama, suggesting that the theatre and movies could reform erring sinners more effectively than sermons (Gunning 1988).

Two important stylistic marks shaped Griffith's visual sermons films. The first was what May defined as his Southern Methodist upbringing that would emphasize both a traditional moral order and an abiding sentimental concern for the poor and downtrodden. Second, Griffith was haunted by a sort of Christ consciousness, where Jesus would make cameos in films ranging from The Avenging Conscience (1914) to The Birth of a Nation (1915), culminating in the fourth narrative episode of Intolerance (1916). Yet Griffith also had an ingrained reaction to humbuggery in religion. Religious women in The New York Hat (1912) gossip so much that they almost ruin the reputations of a young woman (Mary Pickford) and the local minister (Lionel Barrymore). In Intolerance, Griffith attacks self-righteous reformers and smug, hypocritical "uplifters" when he adds an inter-title that reads: "When women cease to attract men they often turn to Reform as a second choice." Under the guise of reform, pharisee Uplifters practiced intolerance toward others. In his The Reformers (1913) the prissy and prune-faced League of Civic purity assert their political power in stopping drinking, smoking, blackfaced vaudeville skits, terpsicord dancing, and Shakespeare's Othello and Macbeth in pictures in the name of progressive reform. In Way Down East (1920), priggish church people send Lillian Gish out into the freezing ice floes to an almost certain death. In The Reformers, a character whose own children have strayed even makes a vaudeville audience sing "Lead kindly Light for I am Far from Home." Griffith demonstrates his ill-advised efforts as instead of beer and fellowship in the taverns, there is now bootleg whiskey in the streets.

Not only was Griffith's style marked by Victorian dualism and respectability, but Griffith's eschatology leaks through his films (Holloway 1977). Millennialism infused some of his films, particularly his Birth of a Nation, in which all Aryans gathered together in an antebellum South. When he was directing Lillian Gish and she insouciantly called them flickers, Griffith reproved her: "never call them flickers, as they will usher in the Millennium" (May 1980: 72). For Griffith, everyone could understand the silent image, direct, and concrete; it was a "universal language" (Gish and Pinchot 1969). For such visionaries, film communicated directly through the eyes, the windows of the soul, and could thus transport viewers to a more spiritual realm of existence. In 1919, Griffith addressed thousands of Methodists at their Columbus Ohio Centenary and motivated them to adopt moving picture projectors and use them for teaching, preaching, and worldwide mission work (Lindvall 2007).

Religious prophets and the movies

During the period Griffith was working out his moral religion, church leaders debated the dangers of "worldly amusements." While some found the theaters as the devil's workshop and a menace (even more so in the 1920s after the Hollywood scandals), many more religious leaders commended films for beneficial church use. As early as 1910, the Congregationalist and Christian World periodical devoted two issues to argue for a case for motion pictures as "a modern force for brotherhood" (Anderson 1910: 46). Editor George J. Anderson summoned the reputable genius of Thomas Edison to speak to his readers on the educational and religious opportunities provided by this novel medium.

One Congregational minister and apologist who saw the potential of the film both to battle Satan ("seize his guns and turn them upon him" as K. S. Hover wrote in 1911) and to articulate a vision for the Church was the Reverend Herbert A. Jump. Jump penned a classic essay in 1911 entitled "The Religious Possibilities of the Motion Picture" (Jump 1911). It would be the first significant document reflecting on the religious and cultural potential of film. For example, whereas numerous civic leaders were concerned with the boxing-film genre as detrimental to social order, Jump found a biblical model for such films, in that the Apostle Paul had used boxing images drawn from the brutal Roman arena games to express theological ideas.

Jump recommended Jesus' parable of the Good Samaritan as the ideal model for Christianity to speak to all people. He saw it as a dramatic sermon-story that shared certain characteristics with the motion picture. It was taken from contemporary sources, not from the Bible of Jesus' day. Like the western, it contained violence and provided an exciting robber adventure. And like the later films of the "good/bad man" William S. Hart, Jesus' ...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half-Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table Of Contents
• List of illustrations
• Notes on contributors
• Introduction
• Part I History of the Interaction between Religion and Film: Focus on Western Christianity
• Part II Depictions of and by religious practitioners in films
• Part III Academic approaches to the study of Religion and Film
• Part IV Categories applicable to religion and film studies
• Index