If atheist and agnostic filmmakers have been responsible for many of the most movingly positive cinematic treatments of religious themes and characters, what about filmmakers of faith?
Golden Age Hollywood, of course, is rife with popular pious films, many from filmmakers with some sort of religious identity. A number of the period’s greatest filmmakers, including Frank Capra, John Ford, and Alfred Hitchcock, were Catholics, and much has been written about how their religious milieu informed their sensibilities and use of imagery and theme. (For instance, see “AfterImage: The Indelible Catholic Imagination of Six American Filmmakers” by Richard A. Blake, S.J.)
When it came to overtly religious themes, though, the general tidiness of Hollywood during the era of the Production Code — a set of movie industry moral censorship guidelines — tended to discourage the ambiguity that often comes with the most spiritually searching art. Many religious films of the period, such as Leo McCarey’s “Going My Way,” are dated today; some, such as Henry King’s “The Song of Bernadette,” still retain considerable power. (Part of the enduring power of “The Song of Bernadette” surely reflects the source novel by Franz Werfel, a Jewish atheist.)
Even John Ford, perhaps the Golden Age’s most poetic director, adapting one of the 20th century’s greatest Catholic novels, Graham Greene’s “The Power and the Glory,” couldn’t begin to do justice to his source — though the film, “The Fugitive” (1947) starring Henry Fonda, is among Ford’s most poetic films, and one of the better religious films of the period. (Greene’s protagonist, a frail, fallible whisky priest who has fathered an illegitimate child, was an unthinkable character under the Production Code.)
No filmmaker is more associated with Hollywood religion than Cecil B. DeMille (a not very devout Episcopalian). Best known for his last religious production, “The Ten Commandments” (1956) starring Charlton Heston, DeMille’s most artistically and spiritually inspired work, perhaps his masterpiece, was made nearly 30 years earlier, at the climax of the silent era: “The King of Kings” (1927) starring H.B. Warner as Jesus Christ.
Another silent film released the following year in Europe ranks among the greatest films ever made: “The Passion of Joan of Arc” by the Danish master Carl Dreyer. Dreyer is one of a handful of cinematic giants, including the French Catholic Robert Bresson and the Russian Orthodox Christian Andrei Tarkovsky, who address transcendent themes as believers. (See “Faith and Spirituality in Masters of World Cinema,” edited by Kenneth R. Morefield, for more.)
Dreyer’s films after “Joan” include “Day of Wrath” (1943), a haunting tale about 17th-century witch-hunting that takes seriously the possibility of witchcraft, and “Ordet” (1955), a ponderous religious drama that takes seriously the possibility of a divine miracle. (Dreyer identified as a Christian at least by the time he made “Ordet,” a film perhaps intended as a prelude to a long-planned film about Jesus that, alas, was never realized.)
Spiritual themes in the films of Bresson and Tarkovsky are often subtext rather than text, but each has at least one sublime film centrally concerned with religious themes, featuring a clerical protagonist who struggles with his vocation in the face of great difficulty: Bresson’s “Diary of a Country Priest” (1951), based on the novel by Catholic writer Georges Bernanos, and Tarkovsky’s “Andrei Rublev” (1966), nominally focused on the celebrated 14th-century Russian iconographer.
Strikingly, where the religious films of nonbelievers often feature idealized religious characters more or less certain in their faith, films by believers often put their characters’ faith to a more existential test.
Brother Christian in “Of Gods and Men,” the titular heroine of “Sophie Scholl: The Final Days” and Thomas More in “A Man for All Seasons” never waver in their basic confidence of the right path (even when that path, for Brother Christian, turns out to be “Spend some time as a community discerning God’s will”).
Tarkovsky’s Andrei, by contrast, faces a debilitating crisis of vocation if not of faith, leaving his religious community and becoming unable to paint or even speak. Then there’s his deeply unsettling encounter with pagan revelers which ends with him bound while a nude pagan woman named Marfa kisses him sensuously before setting him free. The next day Andrei is forced to watch in mute shame as she swims for her life to escape pursuing soldiers.
Andrei has no response to Marfa — something that could never be said of Sophie Scholl or Thomas More. Bresson’s young country priest is even more easily reduced to demoralized silence by a schoolgirl’s impudent flirting. Even Dreyer’s Joan stumbles, briefly acquiescing to a false confession.
Obviously, this brief survey is necessarily impressionistic, not even approximately complete. There are any number of notable filmmakers, from Rohmer to Malick, I haven’t touched on.
What the examples above suggest, I think, is that the most honest and moving art is often that in which artists of all persuasions challenge their own dispositions rather than indulging them. Good art is a struggle in which the artist seeks to transcend himself. When an atheist filmmaker celebrates a protagonist’s faith, or when a believing filmmaker cross-examines faith, then something may emerge with the power to speak to viewers of varying persuasions.
