Film, Lacan and the Subject of Religion

A Psychoanalytic Approach to Religious Film Analysis

Steve Nolan

• Publisher: Continuum
• Year: 2011
• ISBN:
  9781441166876
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Film History & Criticism

In their study of religion and film, religious film analysts have tended to privilege religion. Uniquely, this study treats the two disciplines as genuine equals, by regarding both liturgy and film as representational media. Steve Nolan argues that, in each case, subjects identify with a represented 'other' which joins them into a narrative where they become participants in an ideological 'reality'. Finding many current approaches to religious film analysis lacking, Film, Lacan and the Subject of Religion explores the film theory other writers ignore, particularly that mix of psychoanalysis, Marxism and semiotics - often termed Screen theory - that attempts to understand how cinematic representation shapes spectator identity. Using translations and commentary on Lacan not originally available to Screen theorists, Nolan returns to Lacan's contribution to psychoanalytic film theory and offers a sustained application to religious practice, examining several 'priest films' and real-life case study to expose the way liturgical representation shapes religious identity. Film, Lacan and the Subject of Religion proposes an interpretive strategy by which religious film analysts can develop the kind of analysis that engages with and critiques both cultural and religious practice.

Part One
Current Approaches to Religious Film Analysis

Introduction to Part One

Cinema’s relationship with religion dates from the earliest period of film history.¹ Following the first commercial cinema screenings, by Auguste and Louis Lumière in December 1895, early cinematographers took Christ’s Passion as the subject for numerous short recordings. In France, the Lumières themselves produced The Passion as early as 1897 and fantasist Georges Méliès made Walking on the Water two years later, while in the United States the Thomas Edison Company released The Passion Play of Oberammer-gau in 1898, and by the turn of the new century Joseph Perry was collaborating with Herbert Booth (son of Salvation Army founder, General William Booth) to make the film Soldiers of the Cross (Butler 1969, 33–54; Kinnard and Davis 1992, 19–35).

Despite the initial potential for symbiosis between religion and film, there has been a longstanding conflict of interests between the two institutions. The film industry’s fundamentally entertainment based, money-making agenda and the Church’s, particularly the Roman Catholic Church’s perception of its role as moral guardian have meant the relationship between cinema and religion has always been troubled (Skinner 1993; Walsh 1996; Johnston 2000, 31–9). Ironically, it was the sexual and sadistic excesses typified by the religious, but commercially cynical, Cecil B De Mille that most offended the Roman Catholics of North America and led to the creation of the Legion of Decency in 1933. However, Christian theologians and students of religion have subsequently developed more sympathetic positions towards film, and an international body of literature has been emerging since the early 1960s that might be traced to the new openness that followed from the Second Vatican Council (Lyden 2003, 22).

Some have analysed theological and religious responses according to type. John May identifies five types of response: religious discrimination; religious visibility; religious dialogue; religious humanism; religious aesthetics (1997, 17–37). Borrowing heavily from May, Robert K Johnston (2000, 41–62) plots his typology of English language response as a shift along a continuum from the avoidance of ethical boycott (Miles 1947; McClain 1970) through dialogue to appropriation and film as divine encounter. Arguing that Christian moviegoers, ‘should first view a movie on its own terms before entering into theological dialogue with it’, Johnston favours dialogue as his own methodological position (2000, 49).

Both May and Johnston acknowledge their debt to H Richard Niebuhr (1951) for a typology of Christian theology and culture, as does John Lyden who, like May, also uses Paul Tillich to divide existing approaches to religion and film between the theological (Protestant-dialogical/Roman Catholic-synthetic) and the ideological approaches (2003, 11–35).² But while Johnston creates difficulty by attempting to find a chronological development for his types of theological response, May’s more generic approach generates its own difficulty insofar as it is dependent on the paradigms of theology and literature.

In their different ways Johnston, May and Lyden highlight three of the main approaches to the theological or religious interpretation of film. Thus, arguing that, ‘Movies have, at times, a sacramental capacity to provide the viewer an experience of transcendence’ (Johnston 2000, 57), Johnston emphasizes the sort of sacramentalist approach that is characteristic of phenomenological interpretations (although, because he privileges narrative above all other aspects of film, Johnston’s approach is actually closer to that of May). By comparison, contending that the religious film analyst ‘must be content with the literary analogues of religious or theological concepts; for example, mythic structures and archetypal images and symbols’ (May 1982, 25), May represents a literary approach to the theological interpretation of film. Finally, Lyden shares Johnston’s desire to understand film in its own terms, ‘even when we do not agree with its messages’ (Lyden 2003, 3), and argues strongly that because films have a ‘religious power’ and perform a religious function for their audiences, they can and should be regarded as a form of religion and interpreted through religious categories.

My own typology is less subtle than that of Johnston or May, and in what follows I will simply explore the three approaches to religious film analysis identified here: phenomenological (or sacramental) approaches; literary (or ‘cinematic theology’) approaches and anthropological approaches that regard film as a form of religious practice (religion as film).

Chapter 1
Phenomenological Interpretations: Film as Sacrament

André Bazin: The Parameters of Cinematic Protestantism

Serious comment on film, that is both constructive and religiously informed, can be traced to French Roman Catholic intellectual, film critic and theorist of cinematic realism, André Bazin. Developing theory as a working critic, Bazin discusses the nature of the religious film in a review of Jean Delannoy’s film, God Needs Men (1950). Bazin first locates, and then rejects, three categories of religious film (the ‘catechism-in-pictures’, hagiographies and priest/nun stories) in order to argue for ‘filmic Protestantism’ as ‘the best vehicle for a Catholic novelist in the cinema’ ([1951b]1997, 64). By ‘Protestantism’ Bazin means a simplicity or economy of cinematic style:

Everything that is exterior, ornamental, liturgical, sacramental, hagio-graphic, and miraculous in the everyday observance, doctrine, and practice of Catholicism does indeed show specific affinities with the cinema considered as a formidable iconography, but these affinities, which have made for the success of countless films, are also the source of the religious insignificance of most of them. Almost everything that is good in this domain was created not by the exploitation of these patent affinities, but rather by working against them: by the psychological and moral deepening of the religious factor as well as by the renunciation of the physical representation of the supernatural and of grace. ([1951 b]1997, 64–5)

Bazin is perhaps the first to mark the potential parallels between cinematic and liturgical style, and to report the stylistic unsuitability of liturgy for religious filmmaking. He rejects Roman Catholic sacramental richness because he favours the stylistic economy instanced in the work of Robert Bresson, whose techniques of paring away dramatic dialogue, casting amateurs and beginners, and stripping bare his characters, achieved a ‘form of aesthetic abstraction while avoiding expressionism by way of an interplay of literature and realism’ ([1951c]1967, 132). Ironically, perhaps, the result of filmic Protestantism is itself a form of cinematic sacramentalism, the ‘transcendence of grace’, that offers ‘a new dramatic form, that is specifically religious – or better still, specifically theological; a phenomenology of salvation and grace’ ([1951 b]1967, 134, 136).

Paul Schrader: ‘Protestant cinematic sacramentalism’

While Bazin writes as a Roman Catholic, film writer-director Paul Schrader is informed by his long abandoned Dutch Reformed belief. Schrader is Bazinian insofar as he contends that cinematic style affects the experience of transcendence, and Calvinistic insofar as he claims that his concept of the transcendental in film has been informed by Calvin’s notion of sensus divinitatus, the divine sense:

strip away conventional emotional associations and then you’re left with this tiny little pinpoint that hits you at the end and freezes you into stasis. (Jackson 1990, 29)

Schrader is convinced that ‘transcendental style’ is precisely a style. His point is that as with any style, artists from diverse cultures can use transcendental style ‘to express the Holy’ (1972, 3). Despite obvious problems with his definitions – on his own admission his best definition of ‘the Transcendent’ is a truism: ‘[the] Transcendent is beyond normal sense experience, and that which it transcends is, by definition, the immanent’ (1972, 5) – Schrader suggests that transcendental style is defined by the intellectual and formali-stic work of directors Bresson and Yasujiro Ozu, and that despite cultural differences and volume of output, the work of both directors demonstrates three critical movements built around ‘abundant’ and ‘sparse’ means.

The first movement is the meticulous representation of the dull, mundane commonplaces of the everyday. Closely akin to Bazinian ‘realism’, this presentation of reality prepares the way for the ‘intrusion of the Transcendent’, by celebrating bare existence (1972, 39). Next, directors Bresson and Ozu posit the disunity between humans and their environment, which Schrader argues culminates in a decisive action, ‘the disparity’ of the second movement (1972, 42). Here dull, everyday reality cracks, creating within the spectator an alternative psychological reality, the ‘schizoid reaction’. While the ‘everyday’ leads the spectator to feel that emotions are of no use, the ‘disparity’ invokes a sense that all is not right in the banality of the everyday. This prepares the spectator for the third movement, which Schrader terms ‘Stasis’, ‘a frozen view of life which does not resolve the disparity but transcends it’ (1972, 49). For Schrader, the cinematic technique most suited to representing the sacred is not the dialectic of resolution but that of transcendence, and he is clear that it is a technique.

Step three may confront the ineffable, but its techniques are no more ‘mysterious’ than steps one and two. There is a definite before and after, a period of disparity and a period of stasis, and between them a final moment of disparity, decisive action, which triggers the expression of the Transcendent. The transcendental style itself is neither ineffable nor magical: every effect has a cause, and if the viewer experiences stasis it is with good reason. (1972, 49)

For Schrader, the moment of stasis is common to religious art in every culture, establishing an image of a parallel reality, by which he means the ‘Wholly Other’. Schrader regards the religious film to be that which balances the abundant and the sparse so as to convey the sense of the Holy. Further, he attributes the failure of the overtly ‘religious’ biblical spectacular film to the fact that it suffers from overabundant means. While it may induce a form of belief, such belief should be ascribed not to the ‘Wholly Other’, but to ‘a congenial combination of cinematic corporeality and “holy” feelings’.¹

The difficulty here is that the kind of sacramentalist approach typified by Schrader expects too much of film, making it a ‘door to the sacred’ (Martos 1981). Schrader borrows the term ‘Wholly Other’ from Rudolf Otto’s notion of the sense of the numinous, the mysterium tremendum (Otto 1958, 12–30). However, Otto would have rejected Schrader’s misappropriation of his term to describe the ‘intrusion of the Transcendent’ insofar as Schrader makes the experience contingent on cinematic style. For Otto, the mental state associated with the numinous is ‘sui generis and irreducible to any other’ (Otto 1958, 7), precisely because the numinous is ‘felt as objective and outside the self’ (1958, 11). The objectivity of the numinous aside, Schrader misappropriates Otto to the extent that his analysis becomes a sophisticated argument towards a cinematic canon formed according to the partialities of his own taste. Thus, he argues asymmetrically: the ‘religious’ film engenders a belief (in spiritual reality) that is contingent on (a previously acquired) ‘holy’ feeling, while the ‘intrusion of the Transcendent’ is contingent on cinematic style alone.

Other Cinematic Sacramentalists: Cunneen, Bird and Fraser

If Schrader effectively articulates the kind of Protestant cinematic sacra-mentalism at which Bazin hinted, others have worked with a sacramentalist approach.

Joseph Cunneen locates the screened sacred in non-Hollywood (specifically European art cinema). Surveying the writings of Eric Rohmer, Andrey Tarkovsky and Krzysztof Kieslowski, Cunneen argues that the reality of the sacred is suggested on screen in moments of impossible ethical dilemma (Cunneen 1993). At such points the human experience portrayed resonates with that of the spectators, each being mutually informed by the memory of a religious tradition. Like Schrader, Cunneen argues that the religious may be encountered in the everyday, and at the point of decisive action. However, he is less clear about the way in which encountering the ethical is specifically religious, or about why this makes for a religious film.

As a philosopher of religion, Michael Bird finds parallels between cinema and religion at the level of the perception of reality. Bird’s variant phenom-enological approach finds a convergence between Tillich’s existentialist theology and the phenomenological aesthetics of Mikel Dufrenne, at the point where they speak of an implicit transcendence, ‘a Real that underlies the real’, encountered in feeling (Bird 1982, 8). The convergence of Tillich and Dufrenne around questions of reality lays a foundation onto which Bird maps the concerns of realist film theory. For Bazin, and fellow cinematic realist Siegfried Kracaur, film’s physical relationship to reality makes it not a reinterpretation but a disclosure of reality. Bird argues that genuinely religious films are those that evoke in the spectator a sense of the ineffable mystery of reality. He concludes:

In these realist statements, one finds something of a creed in which cinema’s technical properties become the vehicle of meditation. This creed requires a particular spiritual sensitivity in which the sacred is sought as the depth in reality itself. (1982, 15)

In this, Bird proposes that the holy is discernible in the cinematic real. For Bird, the cinematic real offers what Mircea Eliade termed ‘heirophany’ (1982, 11).

The most overtly sacramental interpretation of the effects of cinematic style is offered by Peter Fraser. Fraser regards the essential mode of religious films to be the introduction of the ‘incarnational gesture’ to disrupt and make holy the primary narrative. This disruption ‘typically transforms the narrative of the film into the most recognisable of all Christian narrative patterns, the Passion’ (Fraser 1988, 2). The audience is then invited to participate in the Passion in such a way that, for Fraser, an understanding of Western liturgical tradition is necessary in order to comprehend religious style in films.

Fraser’s emphasis on the narrative pattern of the Passion may seem to be quite close to my own emphasis. For example, he discusses audience participation ‘in the Passion celebration that begins once the divine and the human merge in the film narrative’ (1988, 3); audience identification; and the existence of parallels between film and liturgy. However, my approach differs from Fraser’s in two significant ways.

First, unlike Fraser I do not regard sacramental films to be a distinct cinematic genre discernible according to any particular cinematic technique. Fraser suggests that narrative shifts towards a formalism that ‘intends to describe an underlying concurrent narrative track – the spiritual – [setting] this film apart from the conventional Hollywood drama’ (1988, 1). Like Schrader, Fraser determines this distinct genre, ‘what might be called “the sacramental style”’ (1988, 7), according to an ‘objectivity’ founded on no more than the peculiarities of his own taste.

Secondly, Fraser sees the parallels between cinema and liturgy as formal:

The symbolic functions of space and time within the incarnational moment of the sacramental film make the complete performance of the work a type of liturgical ceremony. As such films often follow a stable ideological base, and urge moral and spiritual enlightenment through the embrace of a form of divine presence, they operate ritualistically. (1988, 8, emphasis added)²

Against this, I will argue in Part Two that a parallel does exist, but only insofar as cinema and liturgy can be regarded as representational media. In addition, I will argue that the significance of this parallel is not that it can affect an encounter between the individual and the sacred, but that it can enable a deeper understanding of the operations of liturgical representation, in particular with regard to the construction of religious identity.

Critique of Cinematic Style as Sacrament

Those who propose what amounts to a genre of cinematic sacramentalism ultimately expect too much from film. In his discussion of directors whose work affects for him the ‘intrusion of the Transcendent’, Schrader universalizes his experience and fails even to acknowledge the possibility that others may not be similarly affected. More significantly, while he takes his lead from Bazin, Schrader loses sight of Bazin’s realist emphasis on the representational character of film, what Bazin termed ‘The ontology of the photographic image’ (Bazin [1945]1967). Instead, Schrader pursues a moralist agenda that is effectively rooted in Bazin’s Personalist values.³ Bazin clearly locates his conception of realism as a given in the very objectivity of photography, and argues that mechanical reproduction represents the real in a way that has ontological connectedness with the object represented. In other words, film is a representational medium. To regard it as anything else is to impose upon it the demands of an alien agenda. (In Part Two, I will argue that Bazin’s ontological realism is itself the product of an aesthetic convention, a cinematic anti-style, in which the impression of reality is, ironically, an idealist effect founded on a materialist base. My point will be to indicate the limits of the parallel to be found between cinema and liturgy when regarded as representational media, and so to deepen understanding of the operations of liturgical representation.)

Two Other Phenomenological Interpretations: Martin and Thompson

Two other phenomenological interpretations can be contrasted with those of Schrader and the ‘sacramentalists’. In different ways, both these interpretations have specific relevance to the thesis I am developing insofar as they more accurately understand film as a representational medium. In finding parallels between religion and visual art, Thomas Martin describes a parallel of participation in representation, while John O Thompson is concerned with how spectators consume cinematic representations of Christ. I will consider briefly how both these approaches relate to my argument.

In proposing that a form of kinship exists between religious experience and the ‘participative experience’ of the visual arts, Martin premises his thinking on the idea that both share the same empirical grounds, which he locates in the operation of the image. Martin’s phenomenological approach poses epistemological questions about the way images operate in human consciousness. He argues that they are interpretative spatial arrangements developed in conscious ...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of Abbreviations
• Introduction
• Part One: Current Approaches to Religious Film Analysis
• Part Two: Representation in Liturgy and Film
• Part Three: What Can Film Theory Offer Liturgy?
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Indexes