c. 2006 Religion & Ethics Newsweekly

(UNDATED) With the Academy Awards airing Sunday (March 5), it’s a time to take stock: how well were religious, spiritual or moral experiences and themes presented in a year of films?

If anything is notable about a year in which there was not a religious blockbuster to command public debate, it is that so many general interest films represented well-traversed, even well-worn genres, says Brent Plate, who teaches religion and the visual arts at Texas Christian University and who is writing a book on religion and film.

“Kingdom of Heaven” gave audiences their dose of grand historical narrative and clash of religions, while “The Chronicles of Narnia” and the latest “Harry Potter” and “Star Wars” films put a fresh spin _ not to mention elaborate and sophisticated special effects _ on retelling old myths. “War of the Worlds” and “Constantine” explored apocalyptic visions and reflected contemporary concerns about viruses and their potential to cause dread, fear, panic and possibly the end of the world.

Yet for Plate, none of these films came close to being his favorite of the year. That honor goes to a movie largely overlooked by the Academy Awards: David Cronenberg’s “A History of Violence,” the chronicle of an upright family man’s confrontation with evil and his past that explores familiar ethical and moral terrain, even if the film itself is not overtly religious.

“It asks questions about our identities, our ability to love, whether we are the same person or can change _ in effect, be born-again, and it gives us ambiguous answers,” Plate says, “as a good film so often does.”

Similarly, Paul Haggis’s “Crash,” an examination of Los Angeles race relations and fragmented communities, is not overtly religious, but it is “easily transferable” to questions of interreligious conflicts between Christians, Jews and Muslims, Plate says. It was also among the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops top 10 films of 2005.

In the past, some religion and film experts have expressed concern about the effects of the cinema on the life of faith. Marilyn Chandler McEntyre, who teaches at Wesmont College in California, worries about the ways “the screen can flatten imaginative space” and how that affects religious communities. The cascade of images can limit moral imagination, she says, a particular harm for religious traditions where “hearing the word” is so central.

Film and religion scholar Eric Mazur, who teaches at Bucknell University, says that the overall trend in movies and religion now seems to be heading in two directions: films fashioned to appeal either to religious communities (“The Chronicles of Narnia”) or religious skeptics (“Dogma”), or films that appeal to a generalized interest in religion or spirituality, without staking out a specific religious position.

Of course some films can have wide attraction and cross between these groupings. This year, “The Da Vinci Code” may appeal more to religious skeptics, but its huge success as a best-seller, not to mention its expected mega-marketing and the fact that it commands two venerable Hollywood figures at its helm _ director Ron Howard and actor Tom Hanks _ make it a film that defies easy audience categorization.

“The market is fragmented,” according to Mazur, who says a film is likely to do well if it can appeal to a segment of viewers more attracted to its general religious interest than any specific religious position it may take. “A blockbuster can appeal to either side,” he adds.

A substantial share of American audiences may be drawn to religious themes and spirituality, but they do not identify with a specific faith tradition. This audience, particularly in urban areas, is likely to be captivated by the increasingly numerous independent films that explore religion and spiritual issues from new vantage points.

Two films that excited audiences at the recent Sundance Film Festival and that are likely to draw committed audiences once they are distributed in the United States are the German-Swiss documentary “Into Great Silence,” a widely praised three-hour film on monastic contemplation (Variety called the film a “poetic essay” with a “painterly eye” that, given its subject and length, was “surprisingly exhilarating”), and “Son of Man,” a South African film that depicts Jesus as a black African and champions the plight of the poor in black townships.

Writing from South Africa after the film’s Sundance premiere, director Mark Dornford-May said the film stirred interest at Sundance not only because it eschewed the popular Hollywood depiction of Jesus as a blue-eyed Anglo _ “the important part of Christ is not his complexion but his spiritual and political legacy” _ but also because film audiences “are looking for a `spirituality’ in their lives.”

They are also showing a deepened interest in and sophistication about films that survey the human condition in what is a generally difficult and even grim time, says Kathy Brew, co-director of the annual Margaret Mead Film and Video Festival at the American Museum of Natural History in New York City.

In 2004, Brew said the documentary festival witnessed an explosion of media by people telling their own stories _ testimony, she said, of “the power of the authenticity of the real.”

“We called this the heavy year,” Brew says of the 2005 festival, as films examined a host of social issues _ drug lords in Latin America, housing and economic discrimination in the United States, and terrorism in Russia, as well as the dilemmas posed by economic globalization so graphically chronicled in the Oscar-nominated documentary “Darwin’s Nightmare.”

“These are heavy times,” she observes, “and they are times of transition, and the filmmakers seem to be issuing wake-up calls for change before it’s too late.”

MO/JL END RNS

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