Religion and Film

RELIGION AND FILM ‘The developing field of religion and film is very new and encourages a wide range of different interests and approaches, as Melanie Wright rightly acknowledges in this substantial contribution to film and religion studies. The whole area has not yet developed very far, is something of a hodge-podge, and to a certain degree we do not yet know what we are doing. By selecting a particular systematic approach to religion and film – which incorporates an analysis of narrative, style, content and reception – Wright makes a great step forward for the whole field. Her cultural studies approach to the topic proposes a clearly defined solution to the subject’s fragmentariness: a challenge that is long overdue. Moreover, the account she gives of each film that she considers is thorough, fascinating and enlightening.’ William L Blizek Professor of Philosophy and Religion, University of Nebraska at Omaha, and Founding Editor of The Journal of Religion and Film. ‘Many in religion and film studies do little more than use filmed stories to illustrate religious pieties. Melanie Wright is different. In this admirably informed and wonderfully fluent book, she argues for a cultural studies approach to religion and film which attends as much to the production, visual grammar and reception of a film as to its story. For it is only when we understand a film in its structure and cultural contexts that we can begin to understand its many meanings, including the religious. This book is both an excellent introduction to religion and film – to religion in film and as film – and a much needed challenge to a facile use of film by theologians unversed in film studies and cinematic cultures.’ Gerard Loughlin Professor of Theology, Durham University, and author ofAlien Sex: The Body and Desire in Cinema and Theology. ‘Melanie Wright’s scholarship, ease of language, and depth of knowledge make this an insightful, useful, and thought provoking read that examines both religion and film without privileging one for the other. It is an award winner for people who are tired of the low-budget B-movies that litter the field.’ Eric Michael Mazur Book Review Editor, Journal of Religion & Popular Culture and Associate Professor of Religion, Bucknell University. ‘Melanie Wright not only provides fascinating discussion of a range of important movies, but also moves the fledgling field of ‘religion and film’ to the next stage by drawing attention to concepts, questions and themes that undergird this exciting interdisciplinary endeavour. Religion and Film: An Introduction is a must-read for anyone interested in the integral relationship between religion and film in Hollywood and beyond. It will also prove an indispensable text for undergraduates and their teachers.’ Adele Reinhartz Associate Vice-President of Research, and Professor of Religion and Classics, University of Ottawa RELIGION AND FILM AN INTRODUCTION Melanie J. Wright Published in 2007 by I.B.Tauris & Co Ltd 6 Salem Road, London W2 4BU 175 Fifth Avenue, New York NY 10010 www.ibtauris.com In the United States of America and Canada distributed by Palgrave Macmillan, a division of St. Martin’s Press 175 Fifth Avenue, New York NY 10010 Copyright © Melanie J. Wright, 2007 The right of Melanie J. Wright to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by the author in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations in a review, this book, or any part thereof, may not be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the publisher. ISBN: 978 1 85043 759 8 (Hb) ISBN: 978 1 85043 886 1 (Pb) A full CIP record for this book is available from the British Library A full CIP record is available from the Library of Congress Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: available Typeset in Warnock Pro by Sara Millington, Editorial and Design Services Printed and bound in Great Britain by T.J. International Ltd, Padstow, Cornwall Contents I Preface 1 II Some Trends in Religious Film Analysis 11 Opening Shots 11 Motivations to Religious Film Analysis 12 On Dialogue 15 Film Selection 16 Methods of Study 20 A Proposal 22 Conclusion 30 III La Passion de Jeanne d’Arc 33 (Carl Theodor Dreyer, 1928) The Remarkable Story of La Passion de Jeanne d’Arc 33 Film Narrative 35 Film Style 40 Cultural and Religious Context 46 Reception 49 IV The Ten Commandments 55 (Cecil B. DeMille, 1956) Moses at the ‘Movies’ 55 Screening the Scriptures 60 Why the Slaves Don’t Cross the Red Sea 64 Trailing The Ten Commandments 67 Reception 71 v Religion and Film V The Wicker Man 79 (Robin Hardy, 1973) To See or Not to See? The Importance of Distribution 79 Christianity as Tomorrow’s Paganism? 82 Scotland the Movie 90 English Horror(s) 94 Reception and the Cult of Fandom 100 VI My Son the Fanatic 107 (Udayan Prasad, 1997) Cinema and Diaspora 107 Filming Fundamentalism 110 It’s Different for Girls 117 Hit the North 119 The Burden of Representation 123 VII Keeping the Faith 129 (Edward Norton, 2000) Reception: Once More, With Feeling 129 A Priest Walks Into a Bar… 130 Jewish/Christian Romance at the Cinema 135 A ‘Women’s Picture’? 138 VIII Lagaan 143 (Ashutosh Gowariker, 2001) Hooray for Bollywood 143 Seeing and Believing 148 Unity and Diversity 153 It’s Not the Taking Part, It’s the Winning That Counts 157 Reception 161 IX Conclusions 167 Notes 175 Bibliography 205 Film Index 235 Name and Subject Index 239 vi I Preface he cinema – meaning not just films, but also the institutions that produce and distribute them, and the audiences who Tare their consumers – has been in existence for just over a century. From early beginnings as a travelling fairground attraction it quickly developed, as both art form and industry. Within a couple of decades, the making and exhibiting of moving images was a worldwide business. In the mid-twentieth century, going to ‘the pictures’ was the social pastime in the West, a status it would soon enjoy globally until challenged, but not eclipsed, by other forms of mass entertainment and communication like television and the Internet. Whilst cinema attendance in the West has declined since the 1950s, India (the world’s largest manufacturer of feature films) still has a weekly film- going population of 65 million people. In the UK, there has been an upward trend in cinema admissions in recent years: 2002 saw a high point of 176 million admissions (2.6 per person, compared with 5.4 per person in the USA).1 The rise of home video, and latterly DVD, has bolstered the status of film viewing as one of the most ubiquitous of leisure activities. In short, film is an enormously popular medium. It shapes and reflects a range of cultural, economic, religious and social practices and positions in modern society. As old as the cinema itself is its relationship – or more accurately, relationships – with religion. Book titles like The Seductive Image: A Christian Critique of the World of Film,2 or even Religion and Religion and Film Film: An Introduction, perhaps imply that ‘religion’ and ‘film’ occupy realms that are distinct from, or even at odds with, one another. Just as Jürgen Habermas associates the growth of print culture in early- modern Europe with a rise in discursiveness and reason and a shift in the Church’s status from that of feudal power to ‘one corporate body among others under public law’, so for some the expansion of film as a medium is linked to a crisis or decline in religious authority and commitment.3 This view has weighty antecedents. For Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer, writing during the Second World War, film typified the ‘culture industry’. Its reliance on rationalistic, technocratic forms of organisation meant that it embodied the modern drive to system and unity – responsible for the death of ‘local mythologies’, and implicated in the advancement of totalitarian ideologies.4 Accounts of cinema as an agent of secularisation are, however, misplaced. Religion has not been displaced by a new medium: it has colonised it, and has found itself challenged and altered in the course of the encounter. Religious ideas, rituals and communities are represented or alluded to in a dizzying number of films. In early twentieth-century North America and Europe significant resources were channelled into films that re-presented biblical or moral stories and drew on existing practices of religious dramatisation, including passion plays and (in the case of Yiddish cinema) Purimspiels. Raja Harishchandra (Dhundiraj Govind Phalke, 1913), based on a Hindu epic (the Mahabharata), is widely credited as the first feature film made in India, where entertainment had for centuries been associated with the temple and religious activity. (Interestingly, plans for the new Swaminarayan Mandir to be built near Delhi – intended to be the largest temple complex in the world – include an Imax cinema.) Worldwide, a significant number of films continue to rely explicitly on religion for the development of narrative and character. A glance at the list of features released in any given year yields many examples. Thus,The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe (Andrew Adamson, 2005), released during the final stages of this book’s preparation, was based on the similarly named novel by Christian apologist C.S. Lewis and was marketed heavily amongst 2 Preface faith-based audiences in the USA;5 and the top-grossing film of 2006 is widely expected to be The DaVinci Code (Ron Howard, 2006) in which two academics pit themselves against clandestine Catholic groups and unravel clues to discover the ‘holy grail’.

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