9 minute read
VERONICA AND THE SCREEN
CINEMA AND THE CHRISTIAN IMAGINATION
SINCE ITS INCEPTION, FILM HAS PLAYED A KEY ROLE IN THE INTERPRETATION AND REIMAGINING OF THE CHRISTIAN STORY
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BY PAUL CLOGHER
There is little doubting the role played by cinema and online streaming during the lockdown experience. The screens in our lives not only connected us with family, friends and workplaces, but also offered visions of other worlds, other ways of being human. Those same screens can equally distract, disinform, and even deform. Viewing, then, is never an automatic or passive experience but often a matter of how we see. The technological advances of recent decades have redefined the art of cinema to such an extent that it may well be more accurate to speak of a ‘cinematic culture’ that encompasses the worlds of streaming, social media, and image culture in all their forms. These dynamics made it possible for filmmaking and viewing to continue via many media while cinema theatres remained closed for long periods in many parts of the globe.
Cinema’s multimedia character means that it intersects with, and borrows from, other art forms, such as music, painting, and literature. This constant overlapping with other media and sites of meaning makes it a potent mirror of the ambient culture and, indeed, of ourselves as viewers. One of the most intriguing dimensions of this is the way in which viewing allows us to imagine ourselves as another. The popularity of the television adaptation of Sally Rooney’s Normal People, a story rooted in the vagaries of human relationships, is but one example of this trend.
All of this has profound implications for the Christian mind and heart. In the darkness of the auditorium or the privacy of the LCD screen, we can be caught up in the noise of constant content and distraction, but we can equally encounter spaces within which to compose ourselves, reflect on the world, and
encounter broader horizons of our humanity. Viewing is very much an active participation in what any one story has to say to, and for, us. The French director Jean-Luc Godard grasps this dimension with great clarity when he describes cinema as a moment of encounter, even love, that renews the legend of Veronica, that patron saint of photographers, who in the sixth Station of the Cross receives the miraculous imprint of Jesus’ face. As he explains: “The cinema is the love, the meeting, the love of ourselves and of life, the love of ourselves on earth.” The screen, he continues, is “the linen of Veronique, the shroud that keeps the trace, the love, of the lived, of the world.”
THE CHRISTIAN STORY
From its inception in the late 19th century, the art of the moving image has played a key role in the interpretation of the Christian story and this trend shows little sign of decline. Films such as Mel Gibson’s The Passion of the Christ (2004) heralded a renewed interest in biblical themes and stories. More recently, mini-series such as HBO’s The Young Pope and The New Pope (2016-2020) and films in the mould of Paul Schrader’s First Reformed (2017), an acclaimed meditation on despair, faith and the climate crisis, exemplify the continued relationship between the cinematic and the sacred.
From the beginning, propogandists of all persuasions recognised cinema’s potency as a medium of social and religious transformation. As early as 1907, for example, Pathé’s silent pageant La Vie et Passion de Jésus Christ was heavily censored in Czarist Russia on the grounds of photography’s inadequacy as a form of representation as well as, perhaps, cinema’s potential role as a rival for institutional religion. Not unlike the wind that blows through trees or the primordial presence that hovers over the deep, however, the Word often evades coercion or control, so that on the latter-day shrouds of the screen the redemptive gesture of Christ still reverberates. In what remains of this reflection, I would like to sketch some important dimensions and examples of this dynamic in three recent iterations of the Gospel story in cinema.
PASSION PLAY
The passion play traditions of European Christianity illustrate the social and dramatic contours of the Gospel. Alongside the great artistic traditions of the renaissance and baroque eras, they exerted an important influence over the early days of film, one that continues in contemporary cinema. The French-Canadian director Denys Arcand’s attention was turned toward the passion story by a chance encounter with an unshaven actor during an audition. When asked about his appearance, the actor replied, “I’m sorry, I’m Jesus.” This led Arcand to attend a passion play in which the actor was playing the lead role. Recounting the event, he recalled the sight of “actors in a mediocre production which received shouted applause from tourists” and concluded, “I had to make a film.”
Set in contemporary Montreal, Jésus de Montréal (1989) is an update of Veronica’s legendary story, where the imprint of Jesus is left on the world of 1980s Quebec. It tells the story of Daniel Coulombe, an idealistic but mysterious actor who is hired to re-write and modernise a local passion play. While the play’s sceptical tone sparks criticism from the shrine authorities, it is received rapturously by the wider public. One scene suggests that Jesus was the illegitimate son of a Roman soldier, while the play’s conclusion hints that the resurrection may have been a pious fraud. By the same token, Daniel’s performance is sincere and intensely prophetic to the point where he draws ecstatic responses from some audience members who believe him to be Jesus.
As the passion on the mountain increases in popularity, its story begins to play out in the lives of the actors with tragic, yet hopeful, consequences. The story outside the play takes the form of an allegory of the Gospel of Mark and a meditation on artistic integrity as a medium of meaning. Like Mark, Arcand
plays with the boundaries of what we perceive to be the Christian story. Rejecting those who expect to be ‘inside’, Daniel/Jesus forms his own troop of ‘outsiders’ for a passion play which contradicts traditional perceptions of both the Christian story and theatre itself. Amid the tumult, Jesus remains hidden but also present, hinted at, and even unavoidable. “Consumerism may be the legacy of the eighties,” Arcand once explained, “but there has got to be more to life than that. Jesus of Montréal is about a yearning for something else, a search for a sort of meaning.” Against this backdrop, the figure of Daniel embodies an ambiguous, even hidden, trace of redemption.
CONTEMPORARY SETTING
For much of cinematic history, Jesus has invariably been played by white European or American actors. Mark Dornford-May’s Son of Man (2006) represents a decisive and welcome shift from this approach by transposing that story onto a contemporary African setting. Starring Andile Kosi in the title role, the film offers viewers a prophetic messiah who moves among the poor and exposes the injustices and tragedies of the African experience. Set in a fictional southern African state named Judea, Son of Man contemplates what the story of Jesus might look like in contemporary Africa. The massacre of the innocents, for example, takes place during a violent raid on a school where Mary the mother of Jesus works as a teacher. Amid the bodies of dead villagers, an angel in the form of a child announces an impending birth.
The film is also prefaced by a more cosmic but nonetheless grounded encounter
between Jesus and a Satan-like figure in the desert. In a variation on the temptation scenes of the synoptic gospels, the two men argue until Jesus pushes the Satan figure down a sand dune with the words, “this is my world.” A profoundly incarnational statement, the scene illustrates the film’s urge to incarnate the Jesus story in the contemporary African reality and let it take shape in the faces and lives of those who inhabit its world.
GENDER AND FAITH
Both Jésus de Montréal and Son of Man contemplate the humanity of Jesus and the meaning of the Christian story as it encounters new social, cultural, and political realities. In the Christian imagination, the humanity of Jesus is intimately bound up with the humanity of his mother Mary. We can equally think of this humanity in a more expansive way as emerging through the lives of the women who form the Christian body. In Garth Davis’ Mary Magdalene (2018), we encounter another trace of the Christian story that restores its title character’s role as the ‘apostle to the apostles’ and explores the relationship between Christianity and gender.
In a striking departure from both cinematic history and several popular traditions, Mary, played by Rooney Mara, leads a relatively sedate life on the shores of Magdala. After she spurns an arranged marriage, her family fear that her introverted demeanour and desire for solitude may be the product of demonic forces. Following an aborted water exorcism, she remains in an almost catatonic state until a wandering preacher enters the story. Played by Joaquin Phoenix and bearing all the physical hallmarks of a wilderness lifestyle, this Jesus asks a reverberating question: “In the silence, is there something calling?” Their encounter leads to another river. In a detail drawn from the Gospel of John, which depicts Jesus and his disciples practising baptism, Mary’s immersion brings new life but equally draws her into conflict with both her family and a suspecting group of disciples.
Davis’ exploration of the relationship between gender and faith offers a timely reflection on Christianity’s dialogue with contemporary culture. In one of the film’s most evocative scenes, a group of women question Jesus on how one forgives sexual violence and patriarchal honour killing. Their exchange hints that the death of a patriarchal world lies in the realisation of the Gospel, a liberation which, for many, still awaits.
UNFINISHED STORY
Two millennia of interpretation and representation offer viewers an expansive and diverse landscape through which the Christian story is imagined and reimagined. Cinema is one site where the dynamism and tensions of that story are revealed. Such
tensions are a mirror of the incarnation itself. To think of a Christianity that exists in pure seclusion or apart from culture is to ignore the incarnational dimensions of the Gospel. The incarnation reveals how there is no such thing as ‘worldless’, wordless, or imageless Christianity. The films mentioned here have their limitations in either style or taste, but each equally makes a profound contribution to the unfolding of the Gospel within contemporary culture.
The last two years have been tinged with a certain uncertainty and the LCD screens of the phone, television and laptop are, by now, probably in need of the stand-by button’s respite. On the latter-day shrouds of the screen, the humanity of God still speaks in dynamic and sometimes unexpected ways. These films reimagine the Christian story as a series of tensions, but tension is always the birthing ground of creativity. That creativity points the mind and heart toward the unfinished story of Christian hope, and mirrors, perhaps, a more sacred uncertainty as humanity moves toward the unknown horizon of redemption which that story proclaims.
Paul Clogher is a lecturer in religious studies and theology in Waterford Institute of Technology.
