Christian Cinema As National Cinema

THE SEMIANNUAL NEWSLETTER OF THE ROBERT PENN WARREN CENTER FOR THE HUMANITIES VOL. 19, NO. 2 • SPRING 2011 • VANDERBILT UNIVERSITY Christian Cinema as National Cinema By Anne Morey he project that brings me to the Robert Penn Warren Center for the Humanities is a history of Christian filmmaking in the United States. In Torder to offer a survey of the relationship between the American film industry and the uses of the religious text, I am examining films made by Hollywood and by filmmakers adja - cent to it who have achieved national theatrical releases for their products; in the process, I con - sider what difference it makes that manifesta - tions of religious belief converge with both economic behavior and with entertainment, and what consequences this convergence has for religion, Hollywood, and our understanding of the place of each in public life. Some parts of this story of the twinning of film and Christian - ity are well known, but there is no book-length survey that looks at the history of American H.B. Warner as Jesus Christ in Cecil B. DeMille’s The King of Kings (1927), courtesy of the Academy filmmaking through the lens of its relationship of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. with Christianity as both a narrative and social force. The most fruitful examinations of Christ - son demonstrate in their examination of Vita - opposition to the American film industry was ian creativity in contemporary American public graph’s The Life of Moses (1910), the religious created by the industry’s ability to retail big-city life have hitherto focused on broadcasting, film simultaneously justified film attendance on values where they were not wanted; in other music recording, and publishing. This study the sabbath and created appreciation for the words, religion helped to naturalize the move - focuses on film because it has historically been a assimilationist desires of America’s Jews at the ment of film into small-town American life, as it unified industry with a small coterie of produc - moment that the success of the nickelodeon was ers confronting high economic barriers to entry generating a kind of urban backlash against film Inside and consequently desirous of addressing a attendance among the young. The 1915 Mutual national audience. The economics of film, in v. Ohio Supreme Court decision that determined Christian Cinema as National Cinema ............1-4 other words, mandate participation in a that film was an imitative art that deserved no The Future of the Humanities ............................5 national discourse in ways that the niche mar - protections against prior restraint is bookended External Grants and Fellowships .........................6 keting possible to publishing and broadcasting by two D. W. Griffith films that manipulate reli - does not. In short, my book argues that the his - gious rhetoric, The Birth of a Nation (whose con - What We Are Writing ..........................................7 tory of the American film industry may be told clusion invokes the figure of Christ) and Graduate Fellows Lecture Series ..........................8 in miniature through its relations with Ameri - Intolerance (which contains an extended sequence Harry C. Howard Jr. Lecture ...............................9 can Christianity. set at the time of Christ). Later, another religious Perhaps unexpectedly, Christianity also film, Roberto Rossellini’s The Miracle, incited the Sesquicentennial of the Civil War .................................10 appears to be a recurring element at moments of suit that overturned the Mutual decision in Theory, Interdisciplinarity, and the Humanities .........11 institutional crisis within the American film 1952. Cecil B. DeMille’s King of Kings (1927), as Building Community in the 21st Century .................12 industry. As William Uricchio and Roberta Pear - Richard Maltby has observed, appeared when Letters • Spring 2011 • 1 Letters • Spring 2011 • 2 had earlier in urban settings. heart, or the second Terminator film. social climate of the late 1940s and 1950s, a Perhaps above all, the narrative of the installa - A brief history of Hollywood’s relations with span of fifteen or so years that brings us the sur - tion of enforcement mechanisms by 1934 for the religious film—and, to some extent, with feit of riches constituted by the second Ten the Production Code (the film industry’s self- the religious filmmaker—makes more obvious Commandments (DeMille, 1956), the second censorship organization) can be read as one in the continuities and breaks in the film industry’s Ben-Hur, The Robe (Henry Koster, 1953), Quo which religion was the solution to an institu - own tradition of religious filmmaking. Religious Vadis? (Mervyn LeRoy, 1951), and other similar tional crisis in the film industry. The Production outsiders, as I have argued in another context, works. The fit between the film industry’s Code represented the failure of liberal Protestant have historically hoped for access to the bully changed economic structure and the usefulness attitudes toward the film industry and the tri - pulpit of Hollywood. The history of denomina - of the biblical narrative structure has been well umph of Catholic approaches to textual regula - tional filmmaking is more complex than can be explored by film scholars, who see a host of rea - tion, as both Maltby and Francis Couvares have explored here, but it embraced mainline Protes - sons for the vigorous return to religious film - noted. Religion’s utility to Hollywood continued tant denominations such as the Methodists, for making (see Pauly and Sobchack). Causes range into the 1960s, with the biblical spectacular example, who noticed declining membership in from the desire to find pre-sold narratives that forming a reliable product at a moment when the 1910s and 1920s particularly among young will take advantage of the differences between audiences had declined by half, as they did people. Methodists consequently parlayed a his - film and television (such as the widescreen between 1948 and 1958, making the economic tory of the illustrated, improving lecture into a process introduced in The Robe ), to a desire to penalties for misjudging public sentiment con - brief flirtation with feature filmmaking. Such continue to make films that will travel well to siderable. Religious filmmaking even combines attempts at religious filmmaking by religious the hinterlands even as the Production Code’s with technological innovation; for example, Cin - groups remained by and large outside the main - authority was clearly in decline (a return to the emaScope, the widescreen format that was stream and never spoke to Americans in large 1920s formula of sexual explicitness contained designed to lure adult audiences back into the - numbers. Despite the apparent weakness of within the Trojan horse of suitably pious subject aters in 1953 debuted in the religious block - such filmmaking, however, religious pressure matter), to a desire to use the Holy Land as the buster The Robe. groups were at intervals able to call Hollywood’s backdrop to Cold War allegories or to an explo - Religious filmmaking in America thus pos - attention to the usefulness of the mainstream ration of the new post-1948 political realities in sesses a lengthy tradition, one substantial religious narrative with films such as DeMille’s the Middle East. So dominant was the formula, enough to permit the development of a number The King of Kings, which was something of a in fact, that an unsigned editorial in The Christ - of different subgenres: the action/adventure reli - milestone in church/film industry cooperation. ian Century eventually observed that these films, gious picture such as Matthew Crouch’s Revela - It appears, somewhat unexpectedly, that with while often recommended from the pulpit, were tion-based The Omega Code (1999) and the installation of the Catholic-influenced Pro - serving the interests of the industry rather more Megiddo (2001); the Christian musical such as duction Code, big-budget religious spectaculars than they served the interests of believers, com - Godspell (David Greene, 1973) and Jesus Christ, such as Ben-Hur and The Ten Commandments menting that “father has not seen as much to Superstar (Norman Jewison, 1973); the Jesus (DeMille, 1923), which had been a recurrent excite him elsewhere as he has at movies which biopic such as From the Manger to the Cross (Sid - feature of super-A picture production in Holly - the churches tell him to see” (“Bible” 1235). ney Olcott, 1912), King of Kings (Nicholas Ray, wood in the 1920s, disappeared. It is something The later 1950s and 1960s didn’t see an aban - 1961), The Greatest Story Ever Told (George of a cliché in histories of American religion to donment of religious filmmaking, but the fit Stevens, 1965), and Joshua (Jon Purdy, 2002); say that the Scopes trial (1925) caused evangeli - between the religious narrative and the film the Christian art film such as The Last Tempta - cal Protestants to withdraw from the public industry became less cozy as Hollywood tion of Christ (Martin Scorsese, 1988), which sphere for twenty years or more. Whether or adjusted to significant new institutional realities. might be classed with European art films that not that was the case, at more or less the same Indeed, the Paramount Decree of 1948 set up explore religious life and belief in unconven - moment the leadership of a variety of mainline the legal and economic structures that reduced tional ways, along the lines of Pier Paolo Protestant denominations was discredited barriers to entry into the film exhibition and Pasolini’s The Gospel According to St. Matthew because of its too close dealings with the Hays distributions markets, which in turn began to (1964), and Jean-Luc Godard’s Hail Mary Office, which oversaw film industry self-regula - undo the framework of the Production Code, (1985); and the religious horror film such as tion. Into the gap created by the absence of a permitting more foreign and more risqué films Rosemary’s Baby (Roman Polanski, 1968) and Protestant presence capable of shaping film nar - access to America’s screens.

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