Light Shining in a Dark Place

Discovering Theology through Film

Jeff Sellars, Sellars

• Publisher: Pickwick Publications
• Year: 2012
• Print ISBN:
  9781610973090
  9781498260077
• eBook ISBN:
  9781630875831
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Christian Church

In Light Shining in a Dark Place, Jeff Sellars has drawn together more than a dozen scholars around the theme of discovering theology through the moving medium of film. The varied contributors in this collection explore, through their particular lenses, how theological ideas might be seen in and considered through one of the most popular of modern art forms. From subjects of sin, grace, and forgiveness to violence, science fiction/fantasy, and zombies, Light Shining in a Dark Place assists the theologically interested film viewer in tracing the light that might be found in the filmic arts back to the source of all lights. Contributors: Bruce L. Edwards, J. Sage Elwell, Michael Leary, Peter Malone, Kevin C. Neece, Simon Oliver, Kim Paffenroth, J. Ryan Parker, Travis Prinzi, Megan J. Robinson, Scott Shiffer, James H. Thrall, and Alissa Wilkinson

Section I

From Out of the Darkness, Into the Light: Evil, Violence, Depths, and Trauma

1

Representing Evil in Schindler’s List and Life is Beautiful

simon oliver

To argue for silence, prayer, the banishment equally of poetry and knowledge, in short, the witness of “ineffability,” that is, non-representability, is to mystify something we dare not understand, because we fear that it may be all too understandable, all too continuous with what we are—human, all too human.

—Gillian Rose, Mourning Becomes the Law1

The cinematic representation of the Shoah or Holocaust is prolific, running to several hundred films and documentaries.2 Of course, depictions of such horrors raise a number of crucial philosophical and ethical questions. Can the Shoah be represented? In what ways do filmic representations of the Shoah contribute to the writing of history? How is the necessarily privileged position of the camera to be negotiated? Should there be limits to such depictions? Is it right to portray the heroic exploits of certain individuals or remarkable stories of survival when so many millions died as anonymized victims of industrialized genocide?

For some filmmakers, the question of representation is best answered by returning to key locations, the authority of survivors, and the testimony of victims and perpetrators. Film becomes a vehicle for the transmission of historical witness; the medium is rendered as transparent as possible. The most prominent example of such an approach can be found in Claude Lanzmann’s nine-and-a-half hour epic Shoah (1985).3 The impetus towards making films based on survivors’ memoirs using painstaking historical detail has been very strong for a number of reasons. First, the number of witnesses is diminishing as the years pass and memories become cold amongst succeeding generations. Our connection to the events of the mid-twentieth century moves from shared memory towards history as an object of study. Film can be a means to preserve the sources. Secondly, the abhorrent specter of Holocaust denial has ensured that filmmakers pay particular attention to the historical record in its various forms. Deviation from, or even lack of attention to, that record is quickly labeled “revisionist.” Thirdly, many critics, following the lead of Theodor Adorno who famously claimed that “To write poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric,”4 insist that the artistic representation of the Shoah is not possible and only survivors’ first-hand testimonies and documentary footage should be preserved and disseminated.

Lanzmann’s work is sometimes regarded as the culmination of post-traumatic, historical depictions of the Shoah. In its mammoth assemblage of the accounts of witnesses alongside visits to the sites of Nazi murder and genocide, Shoah seemed to constitute the final and authoritative historical rendition of the horror of the concentration camps. Alongside, for example, Alain Resnais’s Night and Fog (1955) and Michel Drach’s Les Violons du Bal (1974), these films attempt to disrupt the present with the particular and personal memories of tragedy and terror that belong to an inevitably fading past. Nevertheless, many other cinematic approaches have been developed and different perspective on the Shoah have been explored, including those of perpetrators, victims, and children. The adaptation of historical novels is a particularly prominent genre. While based on memoirs and first-hand accounts, placing an historical novel on the screen allows the filmmaker greater license to interpret the events and weave together historical and fictional characters in the creation of compelling narratives which are nevertheless in some sense rooted in an historical source. One of the most successful recent examples of this approach is Roman Polanski’s The Pianist (2002) based on the memoirs of the Polish pianist Wladyslaw Szpilman and his survival in Warsaw during the Nazi occupation.

In this essay, I intend to assess theologically two very different examples of film’s approach to the Shoah, the first of which is an adaptation of an historical novel. Measured in terms of box office receipts and awards, Stephen Spielberg’s Schindler’s List (1993) is not only the most successful film to date about the Shoah, it is also one of the most successful films ever made. It is based on Thomas Keneally’s historical novel Schindler’s Ark, the story of the German business man Oskar Schindler and his rescue of over one thousand mainly Polish Jews during the Second World War. Coupled with his “Film and Video Archive of the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum” (now including 1,005 hours of archival footage relating to the Shoah), Spielberg has had an enormous impact on debates concerning the representation of the Jewish experience in the mid-twentieth century. Despite receiving criticism for rendering mass extermination “consumable” according to the priorities of Hollywood, Schindler’s List has been the focus of considerable critical acclaim. Its commercial success suggests that it is by far the most influential film about the Shoah ever made.

The second focus of this essay is Roberto Benigni’s Life is Beautiful/ La vita è bella (1997). This film has also enjoyed considerable world-wide success: Benigni won the Oscar for Best Actor and the film won two other Academy Awards. The film also won the award for the Best Jewish Experience at the Jerusalem International Film Festival and the Grand Prix at the Cannes Film Festival. Nevertheless, it has proved very controversial because of the use of Chaplinesque comedy in its approach to a horrific period in European history. Gerald Peary, writing in the Boston Phoenix in November 1998, states, “Life Is Beautiful isn’t just the film title, it’s Benigni’s reprehensible moral. He dares to assign a transcendent meaning to the Holocaust, which to most Jews resonates with non-meaning, a hollow waste of many millions of lives.”5 Writing in the same month in Time, Richard Schickel writes, “Sentimentality is a kind of fascism too, robbing us of judgment and moral acuity, and it needs to be resisted. Life Is Beautiful is a good place to start.”6

I am returning to these familiar, much-discussed and commercially successful films in order to assess them in relation to a particular theological perspective on the nature of theological language and the ontological status of evil. They offer fundamentally different approaches to the questions of representation that continually surround Holocaust film. I will argue that the delicate use of allegory and comedy in Life is Beautiful at once resists establishing the Shoah as unrepresentable and therefore definitive of history’s meaninglessness while also maintaining the devastating incoherence, and therefore “unspeakable,” nature of genocide. Contrary to Peary’s assessment, it is precisely Bengini’s refusal to assign any transcendent meaning to the Shoah which renders Life is Beautiful an insightful approach to the subject. By contrast, the cinematic spectacle of Schindler’s List, while doubtless heightening public awareness of the terrors of the Shoah and helping to assuage what Gillian Rose calls “knowledge-resistance to the Holocaust,” nevertheless renders the experience of Jews and Germans in mid-twentieth century Europe too accessible on a pietistic and literal plain, and therefore “comprehensible.” I begin, however, with the theological background against which I will read these films.

Privative Evil

Both the ancient Jewish and Christian traditions, influenced by the legacy of Platonic philosophy, insisted on the supreme reality, and therefore intelligibility, of the Good. According to Plato’s famous allegory of the sun in the Republic, just as the light of the sun makes all things visible and therefore knowable, so too the “light” of the Good preserves all things and renders them intelligible.7 By an intensifying participation in the Good, visible created things are more fully themselves. I know the desk at which I am sat is a desk and not a chair or a pile of firewood precisely because it is a good desk. When we speak of someone as a true friend, we mean also that this person is a good friend. So the good and the true are intimately intertwined in Plato’s metaphysics. Knowledge of things (epistemology) cannot be separated from what things are (ontology). The Good is that which, in itself, is most supremely intelligible. All other things are intelligible insofar as they participate in the Good. This is to say that, the more fully something is fulfilled or actualized, the more intelligible it becomes.

The Jewish and Christian doctrine of creation diverged from the ancient Greek philosophical tradition in insisting that God creates ex nihilo. Nevertheless, the Platonic character of theological approaches to creation was maintained in other crucial respects. For example, just as for Plato the Good is the only source of intelligible light and being, so for later theologians there is only one source of being, namely the divine. Created being is a participation in being-itself and has no self-standing ontological status outside of this participative relationship. The insistence on God as the ex nihilo source of all things who at once enfolds the transcendentals of the Good, the True, and the Beautiful has consequences for the theological understanding of evil. For the Neoplatonists, Jewish thinkers such as Philo of Alexandria, and the theologians of the early church, evil is a privation of the good. Contrary to Gnostic and Manichean cosmologies, the tradition of evil as privatio boni maintains that evil has no “foothold in being”: it is a privation that is wholly parasitic on the Good.8 Some contemporary criticisms of the privatio boni tradition point out that viewing evil merely as a privation cannot do justice to its horror and force, not least in the experience of the Shoah. However, it should be remembered that the tradition of viewing evil as a privation of the Good is not an empirical thesis about how we experience evil, but a metaphysical thesis about evil’s ontological status in relation to a transcendent reality. It is an aspect of the doctrine of creation.

For Jewish and Christian theologians, the transcendence of God, the source of all being and life, presents a particular problem concerning representation and language. Of course, the second of the Ten Commandments, given in Exodus 20 and Deuteronomy 5, forms the basis of ...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Notes on the Contributors
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• Section 1: From Out of the Darkness, Into the Light: Evil, Violence, Depths, and Trauma
• Chapter 1: Representing Evil in Schindler’s List and Life is Beautiful
• Chapter 2: Imagining a Better Way
• Chapter 3: De Profundis . . . Out of the Shallows . . . Enter the Void
• Chapter 4: Recalling Jesus
• Section 2: From Light to Light: Grace, Forgiveness, and Community
• Chapter 5: Embracing Failure and Extending Grace in a Digital Age
• Chapter 6: There Will Be Frogs
• Chapter 7: Solitude, Search, and Forgiveness in Paris, Texas
• Chapter 8: Graphic Theology
• Chapter 9: Making Dinner
• Section 3: From the Light, Into the Darkness: Horror, Sci-Fi, Fantasy, and Apocalypse
• Chapter 10: The Parable of the Poltergeist
• Chapter 11: The Undiscovered Country
• Chapter 12: Theological Reflections and Philosophical Themes in the New DC Comic Films
• Chapter 13: C. S. Lewis Contra Cinema
• Chapter 14: Fantasy, Escapism, and Narrative in Pan’s Labyrinth
• Chapter 15: Apocalyptic Images and Prophetic Function in Zombie Films
• Bibliography