Setting the Stage for Conversation About Theology and Cinema
Why is the theology and cinema conversation important?
This is a question I am frequently asked. As is the case with many hybrid disciplines, the merit of this conversation is not self-evident. It is considered an adornment to more basic or routine paths of inquiry we find in theology, biblical studies, or the liberal arts. It often lacks precision, accuracy, historical depth, or continuity with current theological discourse. It often feels like a bit of a stretch.
The following is an attempt to outline an answer to this question despite such criticisms. In its best examples, speaking of theology and cinema at the same time has led to wild and perhaps even liberating glimpses of the raw material of theology. Here the theological and the aesthetic converge, fully entangled. The personal and the propositional encroach upon each other. The formal becomes a stage for the devotional. All this makes it a conversation worth having.
A few more specific reasons why:
1. Listen to a good conversation between film writers, academics, or historians. The discourse is rich because cinema is one of the primary spaces in which our artists test emerging concepts of personhood, identity, history, and the body. Grasping the nuances of typical cinema conversation often requires a little digging in the history of cinema, but exposure to such provocative gestures and imaginaries makes the journey worth it. It is not a distant leap from here to theology.
2. The development of cinema mirrors, or sometimes even signals, the development of our intellectual history. To know one is to learn how to track with the other.
3. Cinema has a disruptive quality. For those of us who live within specific theological frames, cinema can be a bit of a test chamber for our core theological assumptions. It can disrupt the ease with which we pronounce theological concepts by repositioning them in unexpected forms or unanticipated narratives. As Hans Werner Dannowski once claimed, cinema “may also save the church from the deep sleep of the habitual and the always known.”
4. Cinema is theology with dimension. We speak freely of the narrative quality of our existence and the descriptive power of theology in its provision of a script for our ongoing drama. We should be exposing ourselves to the stories that will shape us well, that will shape us toward reconciliation, recovery, and the images of righteousness woven into the biblical narrative. (One of the quickest ways to get at even the most opaque cinema is the experience of desire — and acceptance of the basic theological idea that not only are we shaped principally by desire, but this is also how we project ourselves in the world. We are unavoidably present through the script of our own desires. This is what connects us so organically with the self-descriptive, yet uncontrollable art of cinema.)
5. Cinema has an apocalyptic quality. There is a thick seam of conversation about theology and the ontology of cinema. Whether through lenses of immanence and sacrament, transcendence, or apophasis, it is clear that the questions of materiality and representation in cinema are for some reason directly reflective of our most basic questions about the nature of God’s existence and relationship to the world. Such questions should be creatively mined for their revelatory properties.
6. Cinema is about embodiment in the same way theology is about embodiment. We have much to learn about church practice as a sensory space in which we experience and embody the abstractions of dogma. We can discern a similar engagement between concept or metaphor, physical presence, and sensory experience in the cinema. Perhaps we can find ways to merge these different, yet complimentary, conversations about the body and belief-formation.
7. We are religious people. The best cinema about religion helps us to perceive the symbolic, world-building, generative, time-bending, myth-making quality of religious experience. In an age that holds religion and its labels at arm’s length, global cinema maintains a minority report that it is okay to be religious, to believe in things, to connect yourself to mysteries.
What Next?
Some of this a bit vague and untested, but it gets us close to a rationale. If the conversation between theology and film will become anything more than a boutique, optional plug-in for the humanities, a few things will need to happen. The conversation will need to trace its own historical origins, to develop some kind of historical consciousness. There are specific positions or perspectives present in the conversation. It would be helpful to identify and describe these, so that they can better speak to each other. We should continue to contribute to the heap of connections between theology and cinema already present in volumes and journals. But we should learn how to be clearer about why we are making these connections, and how they are part of theological movement toward whatever is next for Christianity.
