Religious cinema: from the visible to the invisible

Nerijus Milerius

Introduction

Classifying Christian religious films, Clive Marsh puts them into three categories, namely, first, Jesus against culture, second, Jesus in dialogue with culture, third, Jesus in culture. In the first case, artistic laws are subordinated to the requirements of theology. In the third, religious symbols become just cultural signs.  

            It seems that, in religious cinema, the dialogue between Jesus and culture, in our case, religion and cinema, is the most promising and creative option. This type of religious film, however, is the most challenging as well. Seeking the dialogue, one cannot count on great number of Bible illustrations, so frequently screened in TV during Christian feasts. These illustrations can help in animating the memory of Sacred Scripture, but most of them have nothing to do with cinema as an art. From the other hand, great number of religious films plays with religious symbols without being sensible to their initial (sacred) meaning. In this case, even highly sophisticated works of art could have nothing to do with religion. To make it clear, the dialogical religious film should “speak” about religion in cinematic language. As cinema belongs to visual arts, religious films should speak in visual images.

            Reconsidering the dialogical religious cinema, therefore, the initial analysis of cinematic visual “language” is required. That is why, in this paper, first, the outlines of the theory of the visual in cinema will be briefly discussed. I argue that, in cinema, the visible could be conceived only along with the invisible, what especially becomes clear in the procedure of montage. Second, the status of the invisible in religious cinema will be sketched.

I. The Visible and Invisible in Montage

It’s almost commonly accepted that the technique by help of which cinema differs from other arts is montage. It’s quite usual to seek for the origins of montage in literature or theatre. The very principle of montage, however, could be found in the everyday life as well.

            In history of cinema, various forms of montage were invented and mastered. However, there are two film directors without whom the very notion of montage seems to be impossible. Each of them contributed not only to montage as cinematic technique, but also to montage as a concept of aesthetics functioning in the domains of arts and daily experience.

            Usually, montage is drawn as linear sequence of frames. See the scheme below:

                                                             (Scheme1) 

This scheme, however, fails to reveal the spatial-temporal structure of the film. As every film plays not with single time and space but with heterogeneous time and heterogeneous space, the linear sequence of frames should be replaced by concept of manifold net. The principle of a film as a net is evidently expressed in the film “Intolerance” by American director Griffith.

a) Griffith:

“Intolerance” is composed of four different stories. Each of them represents four different historical epochs. The first story (A) is that of America contemporary to Griffith, the second (B) returns to times of Jesus, the third (C) refers to St. Bartholomew's Day Massacre, the forth (D) tells about Babylonian times.

All the four stories of “Intolerance” could be drawn as parallel lines.   

                                    1                      2              3                     4                   n         

(Scheme2)

The vertical line (A, B, C, D) represents here four stories told by Griffith, the horizontal line (1, 2, 3, 4, n) is that of sequence of frames. In the film, Griffith constantly moves from one story to another. For example, in the first frame, the first (American) story could become visible. The second frame could depict the times of Jesus, the third frame could turn to St. Bartholomew's Day Massacre, the forth frame could tell the story of the crash of Babylon.

Certainly, the actual procedure of jumping from one story to another is more complicated as that drown in the oversimplified scheme2. Each of four stories is not represented in equal number of frames, and American story prevails over the other three. Nevertheless, the scheme2 demonstrates Griffith’s revolutionary insight into the technique of montage. As one could learn from the scheme2, not only visual parts compose a film. Along with visualized frames, there are parts which are omitted and left invisible but, nevertheless, participate in the structure of story. For example, when we are seeing the forth frame where story of Babylon is depicted, the other three stories are not represented directly on the screen but, nevertheless, they are intended and constitute the body of film as a whole.

            As it is obvious in the scheme2, the invisible part of film (A2, A3, A4, B1, B3, B4, C1, C2, C4, D1, D2, D3) is much bigger than visible (A1, B2, C3, D4). Film director’s task is not just to make montage by composing two different frames, but to chose one possible frame from the great number of invisible possibilities and to make it visible.

That is why in French cinematic tradition, the word “montage” is quite frequently transformed into “montr(a)ge”. However, one should not make mistake in thinking that, in “mon(t)rage”, the invisible plays just a minor role. Just on the contrary. Creating a plot, cinema director should keep balance between the visible and the invisible. The necessity of the equilibrium between the visible and the invisible is the most evident in such genre as detective story where to overdose the visual would mean to kill the intrigue. In order to make something visible, one should leave the open space for invisible. Quite paradoxically, thus, the invisible becomes the condition of possibility of the visible.

            From Griffith’s times on, cinema theorists and critics have been given the powerful tool to draw a map of visible and invisible fields of a film. It should be taken into account that one could map not only parallel story lines as Griffith has done but all the heroes and heroines of a film or, in more complicated version, not only the content of  a film but also its structural levels. For example, in surrealist cinema, the vertical line (A,B,C,D) could represent reality (A), dreams (B), hallucinations (C) and visions (D). In this case, the interplay of the visible and the invisible would take the form of the interplay of the real and the surreal.

            The discovery of the invisible in the cinematic story was only the first step. The second step was made by Sergey Eisenstein who has discovered the dimension of the invisible in the single image.  Even though Eisenstein does not belong to the sphere of religious cinema, his cinematic principles have been used to create it.

a) Eisenstein

Being not only practicing filmmaker, but also theoretician of the cinema, Eisenstein himself used to write on the nature of the visual in cinema. Having accepted the notion of montage as editing of heterogeneous times and spaces, Eisenstein rethought the type of relationship of one story line to another. Whereas Griffith assumed that story lines (A,B,C,D) could be conceived as parallels, Eisenstein insisted on their dialectical relations of negation and synthesis.      However, what makes Eisenstein exceptional is not only this reconsideration of the notion of cinematic montage, but also the endeavor to reconsider montage as aesthetical and, at the same time, psychic category.

Looking from the point of view of Eisenstein, the graphical scheme of montage (scheme2) would have one essential shortcoming, namely, it takes the visible image as a single unit and conceals the fact that this image itself is a product of montage. For every visual image in scheme2 (A1, B2, C3, D4), the analogous scheme could be drawn:

                                1                      2                   3                    4                   n         

One could wonder what the vertical line (A,B,C,D) would represent here. How the invisible (A2, A3, A4, B1, B3, B4, C1, C2, C4, D1, D2, D3) can exist in experience of a single object? Answering these questions, Eisenstein introduces the distinction between a picture and an image. Whereas a picture is, let’s say, “pure” sensation, an image is a result, montage of sensations.

            Eisenstein believed that the distinction between a picture and an image could be proved by the experience of the following figure:

Looking at this figure, we usually do not hesitate that we are seeing “three, let’s say, a.m.”. Eisenstein argues, however, that what we are seeing is not a “three a.m.” but the picture of geometrical figure – a circle and two intersecting lines. An image of “three a.m.” is montage of different experiences and events that happened or did not happen to me at that time.

It becomes clear now how the general scheme of a film (scheme2) can represent not only a film but also a single image. Using the same example of “three a.m.”, one can imagine that, in the vertical row, A is the line for anonymous universal time, B represents all the tales, anecdotes or truth stories concerning this time (to B, for example, can belong various expressions to horrify naughty kids, as “vampires are awaken to chase”), C refers to long hours of sleepless nights, D reminds of unexpected news one has just received at that time, etc. Needless to mention, there are uncountable variations of the montage of the figure drawn above.

Every single physical thing or mental concept is such image by help of montage composed from different pictures. A table, a screen, a window and all the other things are nothing else but products of montage. But if everything in everyday experience is montage, how can we distinguish montage in everyday life and montage in film? Are they identical procedures? No, they are not. What differ them is the relationship of a picture to an image. Eisenstein argues that, in everyday life, we move automatically from picture to image without even noticing it (that is why we usually “see” a clock there where there is nothing but geometrical figure). The task of the cinema is, on the contrary, to decompose automatically and unconsciously constructed images, disclose how they are constituted, and creatively recompose them in film.

In routine everyday experience, we are grasping the visual image without leaving a free space to that what is not seen. As we could deduce from Eisenstein, incapability to leave the open space for unknown does not let us to renew our experience, what transforms the viewed images to stereotypes. “Stereotypical eye” constantly sees things as the same neglecting that every experience each time recomposes them in a different way. Being incapable to see a thing for a new, an eye remains “blind”. That is how the invisible dimension in experience becomes the necessary condition for being able “to see”. 

II. Religious Cinema

Cinematic techniques and practices we have just discussed are but ABC of cinema. This ABC is essential for all the films. However, as the same ABC can be used to construct different words and texts, the cinematic genres also treat the dimension of the invisible in their own peculiar way.

            As a matter of fact, for example, the film of catastrophe and disaster reduces the role of invisible to a minimum. What counts in such kind of film, is the terrifying images and their influence on spectator. As I have already mentioned, the criminal stories do not minimize the dimension of invisible, but opens and integrates it into the very midst of events. Religious cinema is extremely sensitive to the dimension of the invisible as well. Not without reason Christian thinker and novelist G. K. Chesterton treated religion as sort of detective and detective, respectively, as having the religious dimension. However, contrary to criminal stories that usually keep open the invisible only till the final scene where everything becomes more or less visible, religious cinema never ceases to treat it as irreducible and valuable in itself.

            Analyzing the role of the invisible in cinema, nevertheless, on should not forget that there is no coherent religious cinema. In its different types, the status of the invisible also varies. More than that, even in the domain of the dialogical religious cinema we are mostly dealing with, the dimension of the invisible changes along with history of film.

            To grasp these changes, let’s take an episode from religious text, the Gospel:

Then Jesus went with them to a place called Gethsemane; and he said to his disciples, “Sit here while I go over there and pray”. He took with him Peter and the two sons of Zabedee and began to be grieved and agitated. Then he said to them, “I am deeply grieved, even to death; remain here, and stay awake with me”. And going a little further, he threw himself on the ground and prayed, “My Father, if it is possible, let this cup pass from me; yet not what I want but what you want”. Then he came to the disciples and found them sleeping; and he said to Peter, “So, could you not stay awake with me one hour? Stay awake and pray that you may not come into the time of trial; the spirit indeed is willing, but the flesh is weak”. Again he went away for the second time and prayed, “My Father, if this cannot pass unless I drink it, your will be done”. Again he came and found them sleeping, for their eyes were heavy. So leaving them again, he went away and prayed for the third time, saying the same words. Then he came to the disciples and said to them, “Are you still sleeping and taking your rest? See, the hour is at hand, and the Son of Man is betrayed into the hands of sinners. Get up, let us be going. See, my betrayer is at hand” (Mt 26.36 – 26.46).

                The Gospel is manifestation of faith expressed in the certain chronicle of events. Looking through the prism of film, however, the Gospel is too “ascetic” in psychological characters and in visual descriptions to be directly translated into cinematic images.

            The lessons of Griffith and Eisenstein could easily help us to imagine the visual net (scheme2) of that what could be seen in the episode and what can not. The different story lines of Jesus and his disciples could be drawn. In the episode, we can even find some references to Jesus’ inner states, what is quite exceptional and rare case. The inner states of disciples are left in silence.

            The relationship of the visible to the invisible can be put in the following scheme:

As in all similar cases, the unexpressed and, therefore, invisible (I) part of the episode is incomparably bigger than that which is easily convertible into the visible (V). What is more striking, however, is the lack of hints how to visualize Jesus himself and his disciples. It is obvious that, depicting Jesus, the early cinema relied upon the other arts.

Religious visual art has always seen image as something that exceeds the sphere of the visible, in other words, as something that is more than “just” an image. In different cultures, different canons to express this surplus symbolic meaning of the image were created. The canons taught how to see what could not be seen by an ordinary untrained eye.

Early silent religious cinema owes a lot to this enormously rich tradition of the sacred art. It’s this art which helped to extend the field of the visible and make the different visualizations of the Gospel possible. However, transferred from the field of painting to that of cinema, artistic canons have gradually got the form of stereotypical images.

As Roy Kinnard and Tim Davis put it, the painting image of Jesus has dominated in cinema until 60^th. Griffith’s “Intolerance”, certainly, are still deeply enrooted in this tradition. Nevertheless, having related four different epochs in one cinematographic net, Griffith has found the way how to make the story of Jesus as modern as it would have taken place in contemporary world. In this fourfold net, the stories were not closed on themselves; each of them was viewed form the prism of another. It could be said that Griffith filled the cinematic space with images inherited from the history of art but, at the same time, he opened the field for expressing the cinematic story of Jesus in present. To say it in another words, Griffith taught his contemporaries how to see the story of Jesus with their own eyes and within their own lives.

            Therefore, Griffith could be understood as someone who foresaw the Eisensteinian program of renewing experience through cinematic creativity. From this time on, religious cinema started to invent its own strategies to depict and at the same time to renew various religious themes. Returning once again to the episode of the Gospel, new possibilities emerge. Along with literal attempt to translate verbal into visual, the new imaginative cinematic worlds could be, and indeed have been, constructed. In contemporary history of religious cinema, there is great number of films where Jesus story is told from the side of the others, disciples, betrayer, even Barabas, etc. Such strategy not only constitutes new lines that have never been expressed before but also invites to reconsider the story of Jesus itself.

Needless to say that some of those films, created in the space that was earlier invisible, constantly provokes a scandal. As Saint Paul said, the crucifixion itself is a scandal because it contradicts to logical rules and habitual stereotypes.

Literature (under construction):

1. Ayffre “Cinema et foi chretienne”. Paris, 1960.

2. Bedouelle G. “Du spirituel dans le cinema”. Paris: Les editions du cerf, 1985.

3. “Cristianisme et cinema”. Cinema Action, N.80, Conde-sur-Noireau: Editions Corlet, 1996.

4. Esteve M (editeur). “La passion du Christ comme theme cinematographique”. Etudes cinematographiques, 10-11, 1961.

5. Kinnard R., Davis T. “Divine images. A history of Jesus on the screen”. New York: Citadel Press Book, 1992.

6. Marsh C., Ortiz G., (Ed.) “Exporations in theology and film”. Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 1997.