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Religion in Film
Edited by John R. May and Michael Bird
Knoxville, University of Tennessee Press, 1982. 257 pp. $16.50; $7.95 paper.

This is the book "some oil us" have been waiting to see published for a long time. The elitist term "some of us" is risky, for it does imply that

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not everyone is ready for the wisdom and insights of this collection of essays by two professors teaching at Louisiana State University (John R. May) and Rennison College, University of Waterloo, Canada. (Michael Bird). Not everyone is ready, for frankly, this book treats the motion picture form as a serious artistic medium, something neither the average citizen nor established religion has been willing to do.

The book identifies those films which deserve to be taken as art, it examines a few directors who are artists, and it presents essays which will serve as the basis for study of film by anyone who suspects a connection between religion and cinema, but didn't know exactly how to identify the relationship.

This is not the book for those who consider film a mere sociological medium, revealing human foibles and fantasies; nor is it for the preacher-mentality which waits eagerly for screen analogues to bolster shaky theology of the cross and/or resurrection. These are not authors who will salivate over the arrival of E. T. because the little outerspace creature has enough parallels to Jesus to serve as sermonic analogical underpinning for the Risen Christ.

On the contrary, Religion in Film makes exactly the opposite point: film as art presents itself to the viewer not to illustrate, but to open a path to mystery. E.T. was a nice little (albeit expensive) movie that touched human responses because the extra-terrestial was a modern-day Lassie, wise in its own way, helpful to a boy's growing-up process, and vulnerable to the dangers of an adult world. And yet many sermons preached on E.T. wanted desperately to link it with the story of Jesus. For shame!

Editors May and Bird have given us the strongest available argument for experiencing film not as stories about or examples of or analogues to, but as expressions revealing mystery, opening the viewer to Being, through the ordinary and the commonplace. Authors in the book appear to come from an interesting axis, Tennessee, Louisiana, Iowa, and Canada. They share a common approach, the up-front acceptance of film as art, with no need to apologize to academia or religious superiors for spending hours in dark rooms watching flickering lights on a screen. This suggests to me that the schools where they work have provided the proper environment for in-depth pursuit of this particular field of knowledge and experience. It is significant, also, and sad, to note that not a single author in this book comes from a faculty of a theological seminary, Protestant or Catholic.

The rationalist bent of theological training in North America could not be better illustrated than to note that a movie such as Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (written by Edward Albee and directed by Mike Nichols) was widely criticized in religious circles when released in 1966 for its language and apparent endorsement of sexual misconduct. John May, in his essay "The Demonic in American Cinema," points to the tendency in American thought to identify evil as something "outside"

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the human spirit, rather than as an inherent part of each of us. As May puts it, in his script (adapted from his own play) Albee answers the question of his title, Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? "by showing that we all are. Virginia Woolf is Albee's stunningly clever image for the capacity-and need-we have to destroy the protective illusions others live by."

Ernest Ferlita, in an essay "Film and the Quest for Meaning," identifies specific films to illuminate the quest for meanings so effectively presented by Viktor Frank in his writings derived from his horrendous concentration camp experiences. And Ferlita reminds us that Ingmar Bergman's portrayal of a knight's journey in search of meaning (The Seventh Seal) does not conclude with an answer, but it does expose the viewer to a seering exposition of one artist's thirst for God. In addition, Ferlita links his own immersion in film with the thought of the one contemporary author who must be mentioned in any work on meaning: Mircea Eliade. Films have a unique capacity, Ferlita points out, to make us open to mystery, and they do so with a structure that is universal. He employs Eliade to underscore this point. "The most abject nostalgia, Eliade says, discloses the nostalgia for paradise. And Ferlita concludes that "In the same way, the most timorous journey can disclose the journey of the mind to God, who is inexhaustible mystery; and the most ordinary experience of motion, as in film's inevitable portrayal of quest, can open our hearts to mystery."

Linking the writings of Eliade and Frank to motion pictures is an enterprise desperately needed in a religious environment which still insists in living on such a rationalist surface that it is no wonder that charlatan television preachers find mainline church members easy pickings for rationalistic explanations of good and evil.

Religion in Film includes enough basic film theory to make it hard reading for newcomers to the field. It is no primer. But for the reader who wonders why a film like Nashville (directed by Robert Altman) is different from Return of the Jedi for theological reasons this book has the answers.

Henceforth, I will recommend this book to anyone who is willing to "take film seriously." And it ought to be compulsory for every president or dean of any institution training clergy for work in the parish. We send troops into the field without giving them training in how to discover some of the richest resources available to them, resources available at the local movie theater.

James M. Wall
The Christian Century,
Chicago, Illinois.