Sanctuary Cinema
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Sanctuary Cinema

Origins of the Christian Film Industry

Terry Lindvall

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eBook - ePub

Sanctuary Cinema

Origins of the Christian Film Industry

Terry Lindvall

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About This Book

Winner of the Religious Communication Association Book of the Year Award for 2008

Sanctuary Cinema provides the first history of the origins of the Christian film industry. Focusing on the early days of film during the silent era, it traces the ways in which the Church came to adopt film making as a way of conveying the Christian message to adherents. Surprisingly, rather than separating themselves from Hollywood or the American entertainment culture, early Christian film makers embraced Hollywood cinematic techniques and often populated their films with attractive actors and actresses. But they communicated their sectarian message effectively to believers, and helped to shape subsequent understandings of the Gospel message, which had historically been almost exclusively verbal, not communicated through visual media.

Despite early successes in attracting new adherents with the lure of the film, the early Christian film industry ultimately failed, in large part due to growing fears that film would corrupt the church by substituting an American “civil religion” in place of solid Christian values and amidst continuing Christian unease about the potential for the glorification of images to revert to idolatry. While radio eclipsed the motion picture as the Christian communication media of choice by the 1920, the early film makers had laid the foundations for the current re-emergence of Christian film and entertainment, from Veggie Tales to The Passion of the Christ.

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Information

Publisher
NYU Press
Year
2011
ISBN
9780814765098

1

The Brazen Serpent

Who first seduced them to that foul revolt?
Th’ infernal Serpent; he it was, whose guile
Stirred up with envy and revenge, deceived
The mother of mankind…
John Milton Paradise Lost I, 33–37
Positive church relations with the moving pictures did not spring forth overnight. A history of theological resistance to images and amusements colored the uncertain reception that church leaders gave to the novel invention. Before the early-twentieth-century church embraced the possibilities of motion pictures, biblical and ecclesiastical notions of graven images and brazen serpents shaped its reluctant affections. Moving images were theologically problematic for many adherents of the second commandment. Of particular relevance was a conception of film as a serpent, of a beguiling intruder into a good, moral life. The origins of the Christian film movement point back to this image, both as a caveat against movies and as a vision for them.
As early as 1909, Garnet Warren, a writer for the New York Herald, noticed that film had a certain hypnotic effect on members of the nickelodeon audience. He marveled at how the moving pictures had for these persons the “obscure fascination of some serpents.”1 His conception of the silent cinema appearing as a legendary cockatrice whose mesmerizing gaze would stun, daze, and devour its victim proved a curious prophecy. Likewise, the witty George Bernard Shaw described the storytelling power of the cinema, unreeling images to the illiterate as well as to the literate, as rhetorical means to keep its “victim (if you like to call him so) not only awake but fascinated as if by a serpent’s eye.”2 Shaw recognized in 1914 that the English mind and ideals, nay, even the entire human conscience, would be shaped by the mesmerizing, serpentine force of cinema.
Ben Hecht, the irreverent screenwriter who mocked Hollywood even as he financially exploited it, confirmed this perception of the cinema in his jaded writings. In a collection of stories entitled 1001 Afternoons, he offered wry accounts of the doings of the celebrities of the 1920s. He spoofed the ubiquitous publicity ploys of the industry and likened them to the dastardly deed of “selling the celluloid serpent.” Rather than viewing film as “ribbons of time” or some other romantic notion, Hecht stripped away the fanciful illusions of the blustering idol-making industry, revealing the dead, empty skin of a dangerously seductive snake and a subsequent huckster marketing of snake oil.3 The winding, charming, mesmerizing, spell-inducing serpent was indeed an apt metaphor for the hypnotic art of the motion picture. Reflecting in the early 1950s over his participation in such a suspect vocation, Hecht claimed it was a dishonest industry that too facilely solved problems of politics, labor injustice, or domestic conflict with a “simple Christian phrase or a fine American motto.”4
Others viewed the snake as that most heinous of seducers that slithered into the Garden of Eden seeking to poison all humankind. American dramatist Walter Prichard Eaton contributed an article in the Freeman on the “Trail of the Celluloid Serpent,” warning of the widening effects of this popular educator in shaping the mores of young audiences.5 Like the serpent, the moving pictures were condemned for being manipulative and compelling, even winding their way into the safe haven of homes and gardens.
In contrast to this nest of evil snake metaphors, I derive my use of the analogical concept of the brazen serpent from the peculiar biblical narrative in Numbers (21:4f) regarding the death of some of the children of Israel in the wilderness. When these people grumbled and complained about the lack of food and water (not only was the food miserable and loathsome, but there wasn’t enough of it either), the Lord sent fiery serpents that fatally bit the people. When Moses interceded for them, the Lord, who had previously commanded that His people neither make nor worship any graven image, instructed his servant Moses to make a fiery serpent and set it on a standard so that anyone who looked at it would live. The bronze serpent thus became, for a season, a symbolic vehicle of healing, of rescue, of life. One could pick up serpents and not be hurt, but healed. In what Sir James Frazer called sympathetic magic, a connection existed between serpents and healing that extends back to Aesculapius, the Greek god of healing whose own symbol was a serpent.6
This curious narrative provides an appropriate theological backdrop for our study of Christian filmmakers, because, first of all, it stands in stark contrast to the imposing second commandment brought down on a tablet of stone from Mt. Sinai, a law that cemented and quarantined the place of the visual arts, seemingly setting them outside the communal life of God’s chosen people. At the very moment when Moses was dutifully engaged in receiving this law amid smoke and thunder on the mountain, Aaron was down on the plain uneasily constructing an idol in the Egyptian form of a calf, gathering the necessary funding for its production, coordinating the various artisans, and celebrating its completion with fitting sacrificial ceremonial rituals.7 Coming down the mountain to this wild, even orgiastic, gathering of idolaters, Moses brought the Decalogue, which dampened the festivities considerably. Already the first two commandments had been broken, specifically the prohibition against making “a graven image, or any likeness of what is in heaven above or on the earth beneath or in the water under the earth. You shall not worship them or serve them; for I the Lord your God, am a jealous God.”8
From its reception of this commandment, an inclination to idolatry seemed to plague Israel, an inclination that only increased after they had conquered and settled down amidst the Canaanites, the Philistines, and other pagan nations of ancient Palestine. The specious promises of the cults with their deified idols seduced the Hebrews. Humanly constructed gods rushed in to fill a void of human longing and desire by insinuating a power to satisfy human needs. What the cultic image could do was arouse instincts and trigger emotions that belong to the realm of worship, even though the graven simulacra could never fulfill the desires they stirred.9 Cults of the nature gods and nude goddesses set upon the high places and beside phallic poles provided adherents with the experience of living in a sort of frenzy of the visible. Baal, at least according to Erasmus, transmogrified into the Babylonian snake god, commanding worship from superstitious and wanton adherents.10 Shrines to fertility and prosperity frequently connected them to an unbridled, licentious immorality.11
The desire for vision was paramount, with adherents of the faith wanting to see and thereby know the power of the gods. One sought to see the heavens by means of the world’s materials, an idea that leads to both idolatry and the Incarnation: invisibilia per visibilia. The devotion and worship of that which is seen could easily lapse into covetousness and moral decline. What is looked upon and seen commands either worship or want.12 Female idols like the Asherim aroused idolatry in wayward Hebrews. Film scholar Scott MacDonald equated erotic idolatry with a repressed and spiritual form of adultery; as Jesus admonished, inasmuch as you look upon a woman with lust, you have committed adultery.13 The phenomenon of idolatry works to seduce faith from its true object to artistic productions, resulting in their gaining power over the viewer. One surrenders, as it were, to the principalities and powers behind a desirable material or sexual graven image. Images become charged with presence, invested with power, brimming with the tease of spurious gratification, so that we find, as David Freedberg astutely put it, that “god is in the image.”14 Freedberg argues for a belief in the efficacy of pictures, whereby both pious and lascivious images call for imitation. Imitation stems from one’s perception, contemplation, and then an ascent or descent into the suggestion of the image. He suggests that the fear of idolatry is rooted in (the often repressed) power of images to arouse and provoke.15 Within a discussion of Nicolas Poussin’s painting of The Dance Round the Golden Calf, that stands as the loci classici of idolatrous image worship, in which the prohibition against graven images is contrasted with the incontrovertible visible evidence of debauched sensuality, Freedberg playfully notes that “the erection and invocation of a material image invariably engages the senses.” He argues, convincingly, that images do have such powers, and while many, especially theologians, seek to repress that idea, pagans are fully aware of the erotic possibilities of the material constructions of their idols.16
In sum, Israel’s problem with idolatry previews the caution and suspicion of the moving image prevalent in many Christian communities. The opportunities and hazards of the medium of the visual rooted in the brazen serpent would inspire and trouble those who wrestled with it. The question for Christian filmmakers would become, in part, whether they could move beyond the idolatry and voyeurism of pagan graven imagery to develop the potential of the visual as spectator sites for religious truth, spiritual healing, and moral discourse. As we shall see, apologists like St. John of Damascus tried to theologically correct and balance judgments by the Church, arguing that such pagan abuses do not make the “veneration of images loathsome. Blame the pagans who made images into gods! Just because the pagans used them in a foul way—that is no reason to object to our pious practice.”17

Aesthetic Roots

To See Is to Believe
Rev. J. C. Eason18
Numerous clergy gathered in the hushed and reverent environs of the Eden Musee on February 15, 1898 to watch a film version of The Passion Play. One minister, the Reverend R. F. Putman, was so moved that on his return home, he sat down and immediately wrote a letter to the editor of the Home Journal regarding the screen presentation of so holy a story:
[To] these pictures there can be no objection. One might as well object to the illustrations of Dore and other artists in the large quarto Bibles. Intensely realistic they are, and it is this feature which gives them truthfulness and makes them instructive. Painful they are necessarily to sensitive and sympathetic souls, and so are many of the pictures which surmount some of the altars of our churches. I cannot conceive of a more impressive object lesson for Sunday school scholars.19
Connecting the religious moving picture to pious historical religious illustrations extended legitimacy and credibility to the novel medium. Of the many mediated foundations upon which the art of the religious film evolved, two in particular posed unique opportunities, problems, and controversies for the Church. In partial response to scholar Janet Staiger’s call for more comparative social histories aiming to uncover marginal influences on film history, and to Steven J. Ross’s summons to more fully contemplate audiences and their reception of media, we must focus on the ways in which the advent of the moving picture was understood within the context of previous types of art. By illuminating earlier social and historical contexts we can better understand twentieth-century religious responses to film.20 The first historical challenge for making sense of religious communication resided in the image/icon as a visible means of communication. As the image would form the ontological basis of cinema, the Church struggled with its immediate impact and spectacle. When the photographic image was taken up in the cinema, audiences came to see realistic images dancing upon a screen and joined a public spectacle of visual attractions. Whether the moving picture as a technological mode of visual communication could, legitimately and effectively, be used by the church depended in part upon the acceptance of the image by the historical church.
The other aesthetic root for Christian filmmakers lay in the institution of the public theater, with its pagan ritual of mimesis. Both Greek and Roman civilization established a central place for their dramatic storytelling artists to explore moral themes and notions of fate, to vivify history and myth, and to mock social conventions and authorities. However, by the time the church spread throughout the Roman Empire, the moral quality of dramatic spectacle had declined precipitously, a fact duly noted by early church patriarchs. Dramaturgical modes of communication were suspect and would have to wait until the Middle Ages to be comfortably assimilated into religious culture. Nevertheless, the theater would provide a model for creative teaching and inspiration that the early-twentieth-century church would find heuristic and practical in its ventures into filmmaking. Examining the reception of the cinema within the context of these two ancient ways—theater and image-icon—of communicating religious messages enables us to escape a temporal entrapment and chronological snobbery, of thinking that all responses are novel and unique.

The Priority and Problem of the Visual

While for many evangelicals and conservative Protestants film flickered against the conscience as a technological form of graven images, this was not the case for Orthodox and Roman Catholic Christians. The latter are marked as the aesthetic descendents of the Greeks, with their celebration of the body/Body; Protestants are more closely aligned to the Hebrew, being a people of the ear (the Word) rather than the eye.21 Looking at these two sets of religious communities, film scholar Ingrid Shafer drew a helpful continuum between those who critiqued, rejected, and sought to reform culture on the one hand, and those who adopted, embraced, absorbed, and adapted it on the other. Finding both poles of the continuum necessary and valid, she saw the two balancing themes emphasizing the doctrines of the Fall and the depravity of the human, fractured and bent by sin, and of Creation, celebrating the original goodness of life. While not mutually exclusive, the emphases of these aesthetic categories of “Protestant” and “Roman Catholic” still shaped the differing ways in which certain groups of people tended to see reality.
Dr. Robert Hellbeck conceded in 1931 that it was “harder for Protestantism than for other confessions to take up a positive attitude as regards the film because the illustration of the Protestant idea by means of pictures naturally appeared extremely problematical and delicate to a church founded on the ‘Word.’”22 Historian T. J. Jackson Lears described Protestants at the end of the nineteenth century as suspicious and distrustful of Roman Catholic forms of art, even viewing them as forms of pagan pageants with a barbarous sensuality that would “keep the senses captive.”23 Barbara Nicolosi, founding director of Act One, an educational organization for training Christian film writers, noted distinct differences between Roman Catholic and evangelical film screenwriters. She found that Catholic film scripts were strong visually, but that evangelicals believed that it was doctrinal truth expressed in and through words that transformed lives. Nicolosi explained that Catholics were typically cynical about such a verbal approach. Citing the Pope’s observation that when “artists have no faith, the only thing they’re certain about is the dark side of human nature,” s...

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