Moviemaking through a Christian lens

Christian resentment toward the arts goes back a long way. As far back as Tertullian, Augustine of Hippo, and even Greek philosophers like Plato, our intellectual ancestors have lambasted the arts as purveyors of sin, disorder, and excess. And from the outset of cinema in 1897, movies have endured the scrutiny of both Protestants and Catholics who believe the medium is escapist pablum that spews sex and violence onto impressionable minds. One doesn’t need to seek hard in the Christian world to find those who disdain film and view Hollywood as a hive of scum and villainy.

For cinephiles, on the other hand, cinema can be a magical experience, offering a chance to escape into the dreams and ideas of others. Great cinema accomplishes the depths of what great theater and literature do, but in a unique way. It creates meaning through visuals. Editing, cinematography, and mise en scène could become the visual “stigmata” by which the form would communicate and create something incarnate and truthful.

This “stigmata” is the subject of The Wages of Cinema (IVP Academic, 256 pp.), a recent textbook on film theory by retired Wheaton College professor Crystal L. Downing. A devotee and leading scholar of the renowned English theologian Dorothy L. Sayers, Downing approaches her newest work with the same reverence to her Dantean “Virgil” by using Sayers’ unique theology of art as the guide to understand the nature of film aesthetics amid the infernal depths of film theory and history.

Having passed away in 1957, Sayers lived through the Golden Age of cinema, dipping her toe several times into screenwriting for silent films and talkies in the 1920s and 1930s. Her 1941 book The Mind of the Maker remains one of the most renowned modern works to explore the relationship between artistry and divinity. As she believed, “Despite original sin, humans could generate beauty, whether in action, word, or artistic deed, thanks to God’s gift of creativity.”

Though a member of the Church of England, Sayers tended to believe that openly faith-oriented artists were guilty of poor craftsmanship, producing works of piety that were “grotesquely irreverent” and brought “Christianity into contempt” through their shoddy work. She despised poor artistry and believed that bad art was emotionally manipulative. Good art could not be manipulative propaganda.

Downing’s scholarly work wades deeply into the nature of the medium itself, arguing that cinema contains within it the essence of the imago dei. It crafts a communal and liturgical experience. Its form is therefore like worship, and brings something incarnational into the world.

As Sayers asserts, “human creativity fulfills the imago dei,” because it allows man to become “a maker and craftsman like Himself.” Tracking this argument, Downing asserts that film offers a form of union between the creator and creation.

However, a proper Christian engagement with cinema requires “inculcating healthy, generous eyes” rather than “merely searching for Christian messages.” As she argues, Christian detractors dismiss the medium as “a content delivery system” that functions as a “mere [conveyor] of spiritual insight.” They seek out simplistic films that inculcate their values, but lack the craft and discipline of great works of cinema.

The Wages of Cinema equally condemns low-effort consumption and low-effort craftsmanship. It calls viewers to task for demanding shallow, propagandistic entertainment as well as the filmmakers and financers who produce it, arguing it amounts to a serious spiritual heresy wherein the creation of art is severed from the divine source of all creation.

The Christian truth that Downing sees in cinema is not merely limited to Bible epics but is itself rooted in the form. The examples of films she uses to explore the medium include secular films like Bridge on the River Kwai, Ex Machina, Birdman, Lost in Translation, Kong: Skull Island, and Barbie, showing that the incarnational depths of cinema rely on its ability to capture truth in the image, meaning that even secular and atheist filmmakers are engaging in a divine act without knowing it through their “craftsmanship, artistic beauty, and structural truth.”

Downing’s work succeeds as a challenging reflection on the nature of medium and craftsmanship. While it juggles subject matter that she openly admits is impenetrable, her reliance on Sayer’s theology gives the text a solid foundation that is always calling upon the reader to reflect “on the medium itself rather than merely on their own uplifting experiences as viewers.”