Talking faith, talking film

When I first started reading the work of Susanne Langer, the art philosopher, I realized that she provided me with just the right methodology for understanding how religion and film can interact without doing a disservice to either. Langer suggests an important distinction in the experience of receiving works of art, a distinction she calls receiving art at two levels, the discursive and the presentational. The discursive level is what a work of art is ‘about’; the presentational level is what a film ‘is’. The viewer who approaches film from a religious perspective will be much more sensitive to the ‘isness’ of a picture because faith demands that the believer look beneath the surface in assessing life’s experiences.

Applying Langer’s distinction of discursive and presentational to the art of film has helped me in teaching and writing in this field. The methodology appears simple enough, but most viewers fail to make the distinction, remaining largely fixed on the film’s ‘aboutness’, rather than remaining open to its ‘isness’. Sadly, this is also how many religious people also view faith and doctrine, fixing on the surface data rather than its deeper significance.

This methodology enables the viewer to see beyond plot and performance of a film. When this becomes clearer, works of film art come into sharper focus for the viewer. This has certainly been the case at seminars we have conducted in connection with the Montreal World Film Festival. These seminars have brought together a select group of participants drawn from a wide variety of North American religiously oriented film goers who come to the festival to delve into the ‘isness’ of films.

These seminars, which we call Talk Faith, Talk Film, were begun by, and have continued under the direction of Interfilm, North America, an organization that seeks to deepen the understanding of film among church audience. From the beginning the seminars have involved support, as well, from the World Association for Christian Communication (WACC). Under the leadership of the Rev. Andrew Johnston, now the pastor of St. Andrew's Presbyterian Church in Ottawa, and formerly pastor of the Briarwood Presbyterian Church, in Montreal, Talk Faith, Talk Film, has energized and informed film viewers since its first sessions in 1997. The seminar is held at St. James Church, an historic Protestant church located in downtown Montreal within walking distance of the main venues showing festival films.

Discussing world cinema

That proximity to the theatres, as well as to modest-priced hotels and even more modest priced religious housing facilities, makes it possible for Talk Faith, Talk Film, to offer a tightly scheduled four-day weekend event on the first weekend of the festival for pastors and lay people who want to experience and discuss current world cinema from the perspective of the Christian faith.

The festival itself runs for ten days, beginning with the last weekend of August and ending on the first Monday of September. It is a festival that focuses less on commercial products and more on lesser known works from a wide variety of countries. It is a competitive festival, with several juries that select the best of the festival, including an ecumenical jury of three Protestant and three Catholic film scholars and film buffs.

Talk Faith, Talk Film opens on the first Friday of the festival with an afternoon lecture and reception, and a commissioning service for the ecumenical jury, held in the sanctuary of St. James Church. For the next three mornings, Saturday through Monday, seminar participants see two films each morning that are in competition for the various prizes awarded by festival juries. The seminar fee covers these tickets, which are for the six films scheduled for those three mornings. Since the festival schedule is not finalized until a few days before opening night, seminar participants do not until they arrive which films they will see; they only know they will be exposed to a wide variety of works of film art from different countries.

After the morning screenings, seminar members meet over lunch at St. James for a guided discussion of the morning’s pictures. These discussions are led by a designated leader. That leader in 2002 was Dr. Patsy Kendall, a psychologist from South Carolina. Dr. Kendall is a graduate of the Talk Faith, Talk Film seminar, who had attended two previous seminars, and later served as a member of the 2001 ecumenical jury. (One of the benefits of the seminar is that it enables Interfilm North America to identify future jury appointees for the Montreal and other world film festivals.)

Developing deeper awareness

As president of Interfilm North America, I have led several of these seminar discussions and I still find that the discussion of a work of film art with an informed church audience is a deeply rewarding experience. I believe that film viewing is essentially a meeting of two biographies, the life experience of the film maker, made manifest through the work at hand, and the life experience of the individual viewer. Through the discussion after each morning’s pair of films, participants develop a deeper film awareness, an experience which both enhances their own film sensibility and helps them develop their own leadership skills to train others in film awareness.

Our own personal life experiences -- our biographies -- are enriched when we hear how others react to a film, or when we obtain new information that we missed in our own viewing. We will all have seen the same film; but often discussions reveal that we didn’t really ‘see’ every part of the film, nor did we grasp the same theological insight that others saw. When the viewers are from different parts of North America, differing religious traditions, and from widely different age groups, the theological conversation becomes intense and often contentious. But that is what art does: bring us into a deeper awareness of ourselves and into a deeper understanding of the vision of the artist.

This Montreal seminar has become so successful -- some applicants had to be turned away in 2002 to keep the group from getting too large -- that it can now serve as a model for other festivals. Montreal, of course, is not easy to duplicate. It has many advantages that will not always be found in other places. For example, there is the location, within easy walking distance, of the church to the theatres where morning screenings are held. Montreal also has the advantage of many years of evolving good relations between Protestant and Catholic church leaders and festival officials.

Over the years, Montreal festival officials have become very receptive to the ecumenical community’s involvement in the festival. The festival provides passes to all festival films for ecumenical jury members, meeting rooms for jury deliberations, and includes a page in the annual festival programme book identifying members of the ecumenical jury. In addition, festival officials help the seminar to secure tickets for the six morning films for discussion, and schedule a final press conference where the ecumenical awards are announced, often with the winning director in attendance.

But even without this initial strong bond between the festival and local churches, Talk Faith and Talk Film can still be duplicated at other festivals. One example is at the St. Louis, Missouri, festival where a seminar and jury programme was begun by a pastor who had attended an earlier Montreal seminar. At the Denver Film Festival, Interfilm North America participates in the annual selection of the Krystof Kieslowski award to the outstanding European film at the festival. Kieslowski, the late and most certainly, great, Polish film director, who is considered to be a film maker with a strong religious sensibility, is honoured through this award, which is presented by the festival in cooperation with American representatives of the Polish government.

In addition to Kieslowski, whose Decalogue series is a prime example of how a film maker is able to resonate with theological material, the Montreal festival has been instrumental in introducing to North American audiences the films of Majid Majidi, the iranian director. Majidi is the director of such sensitive works involving children as Baran, Children of Heaven, and The Color of Paradise.

Talk Faith, Talk Film is a seminar model which can be duplicated wherever church members gather to view and discuss films. It helps if there is a local film festival around which the seminar could be organized. But even if there is no festival nearby, a church could create its own mini-festival over a weekend or periodically over a longer time span. In my church, for example, we screened each of the ten films in Kieslowski's Decalogue once a month for ten months. The participants in the monthly discussions were so involved in the religious sensibility clearly evident in Kieslowski’s work that they set up additional screenings for Kieslowski’s trilogy, Three Colors: Blue, White and Red.

The key to developing church audiences that are sensitive to the deeper religious significance of film lies in directed film discussions of films of artistic merit. The ‘isness’ of a film will reveal the level of theological insight -- or the lack of such insight- - as viewers reflect not only on the work at hand, but do so from within the context of a body of work, both of the film maker whose work is being examined, and also of the larger body of work of film makers whose work has proven to be so rich in religious insights.

Talking faith and talking film, when the two are done in tandem, can be an enriching and enlightening experience for any church group, whether in connection with an established festival like the Montreal World Film Festival, or in a series established by a local congregation. n

James M. Wall is senior contributing editor of Christian Century magazine, located in Chicago, Illinois, USA.