As I sat in a cinema on Saturday mornings in the 1950s and watched the weekly episode of Jessie James, I confess there was very little theological reflection as Frank and Jesse James robbed banks and performed railroad hold-ups.

Deeper thinking was stirring when I saw Bridge over the River Kwai (1957), Ben Hur (1959) and Lawrence of Arabia (1962). But a true dialogue between film and theology probably began with Becket (1964) and a Man for all Seasons (1966), and the rest is a personal history of flickering images.

I was reared in a Christian climate which saw Hollywood and Ealing Studios as a threat to discipleship and some of my respected Christian mentors, to whom I owe so much, would have agreed with the theological perceptions of Herbert Miles who declared movies were ‘the organ of the devil and the moral cancer of civilisation’.1 With hindsight, in my early years as a Christian there was an absence of any dialogue between cinema-going and Christian discipleship. You went for light entertainment to see Doris Day in The Glass Bottom Boat (1966) – and I can still hum the theme tune – and for escapism to The Ipcress File (1965) – and I preferred Len Deighton’s book. But it was never with an expectation that a visit to the cinema might be a divine encounter or that a movie scene could be a sign of God’s active presence in his creation. Paintings and art galleries – yes; films and cinemas – no. I was awaiting that C. S. Lewis experience of the ‘baptism of the imagination’ that enables a way of seeing and is fostered by a discipline of looking and listening, reflecting and evaluating.

This evaluation of film is best done in community and I am grateful for being a member of a film group for the past fourteen years and for the companionship of a group of friends with whom I can enjoy, reflect and think. As a group we have come to appreciate the distinction that Robert K. Johnston makes between the analytical and the revelatory in films.2 A true dialogue between film and theology will analyse critically the metaphors and messages of the film maker. Is Oliver Stone’s JFK (1991) a spectacular re-enactment of the greatest controversy of the 20th century or an irresponsible piece of revisionism? Is Mel Gibson portraying in Braveheart (1995) the Christian virtues of courage and self-sacrifice or is the film a revenge fantasy? Have the brothers Larry and Andy Wachowski provided in The Matrix (1999) a new contextualisation of the gospel in the main story line or are the points of connection too tenuous to be taken seriously? Is Johnny English (2003) a hilarious spoof spy thriller or a sign of the coarsening and vulgarization of our culture?

The revelatory experience will be more personal. There is ample evidence of film-goers experiencing transcendent moments and glimpses of divine insights through a film. It is reported that following the release of Spielberg’s Saving Private Ryan (1998), young people in their twenties were challenged freshly about the morality of war and sought out veteran soldiers in their seventies to thank them for the heroic sacrifices they had made in the Second World War.

I can remember sitting in a Melbourne cinema and experiencing an overwhelming stillness of spirit as I watched the endless litany of names scrolling through at the end of Cry Freedom (1987). I cried as I allowed the injustice of the Steve Biko story to wash over my mind and heart and this film came back to me when many years later I stood outside the prison cell on Robben Island which had been occupied by Nelson Mandela. I was numbed by the capital punishment scenes in The Green Mile (1999) and was made to review my thinking on restorative justice. I thought the scene in The Man Who Sued God (2001), where Steve Myers (played by Billy Connolly) sits in an empty church and gazes at the figure of Christ on the cross, was a deeply compelling image without words and, for me, the heart of the film.

I am glad that such a book as this has been written and I look forward to using it as a creative companion for my occasional visits to the cinema. As one of the characters says in the film Grand Canyon (1991), ‘everything you need to know about life is in the movies’. Not totally true - but it is a great starting point.

On 28th December 1895 August and Louis Lumière showed their film Arrival of Train at Station. The audience recoiled with fright at the train steaming towards them. The cinema was born. After a century of technological innovation and mass marketing techniques, the cinema is now a huge global business, whether the products are watched in the new shimmering multi-plexes or via DVD on a flat plasma screen television. Even with the increasing rise of television, the cinema has managed to hold its own, and now experiences something of a revival. Part of the explosion in the UK of television options is the growing number of ‘film’ channels.

The growth of cinema itself has also spawned a growing academic interest in film as a particular and unique medium, and from the second decade of the twentieth century serious reflection on film began. With the rise of alternative theories of film and the burgeoning of university courses on various aspects of media studies, the impression is certainly that the study of film is on the rise. Much more recently there has been an emerging interest in the relationship between theology and film, or perhaps it may be more accurate to suggest that there has been a growing interest in film among theologians. Films have always drawn both on biblical stories and biblical images, although directors and produces have interpreted them in their own way. The commercial success of The Passion of the Christ shows that the biblical story still sells, and the ‘secular’ appropriation of parts of Genesis chapter 3 in Pleasantville, as explored later in the book, suggests that both the knowledge and power of biblical images lives on.

This growing interest in film and theology can be seen at a number of levels. At an academic level a number of books explore a variety of different approaches for entering into this dialogue, and offer a range of models and examples. These include such collections as John May’s New Image of Religious Film,1 which arose from an international symposium on religious film, theology and religious culture, Joel Martin’s and Conrad Ostwalt’s Screening the Sacred,2 Clive March’s and Gaye Oritz’s Explorations in Theology and Film: Movies and Meaning,3 and the book by Robert Johnston, Reel Spirituality: Theology and Film in Dialogue.4 At a much more popular level, the widespread availability of data projectors in churches allows films or clips of films to be shown in a whole variety of church events, including public worship.

This book thus sets out to make a contribution to this flourishing subject, in the hope that it will both encourage and enable continued reflection on this particular aspect of popular culture. It is written with a particular focus on the needs of those working in pastoral situations. With this in mind it does not assume any particular knowledge of film theory or of the debate about the nature of dialogue between theology and film. The book also does not attempt to offer and or even work towards some overarching theory of film criticism, but starts with an open agenda, allowing different voices to be heard. Its aim throughout is to offer resources to those who wish to use a dialogue with film to explore and deepen their faith, and who might help others to do the same.

The first part of the book engages with some of the material on film theory, and offers a number of pieces which explore the more general relationship between theology and film. Robert Ellis’ chapter, for example, on ‘Movies and Meaning’ provides an opening overview of the subject and suggests, among other things, that films can be interpreted or ‘read’ in theological, mythological and ideological ways. He himself concentrates on the first two kinds of reading. Steve Nolan’s chapter, one of the more demanding parts of the book, argues strongly in favour of an ideological approach to understanding film, and also provides the most technical engagement with the realm of film criticism. In some ways his approach differs from others in the book, in that his concern to develop one particular way of reading films – as ‘signifying practices’ – necessarily offers a critique of other forms of interpretation. He does share common ground with other writers in stressing the importance of story, but emphasizes the need to be alert to the way that a film attempts to draw the viewer into a story which has certain ideological presuppositions. It is only after we have discerned this, he suggests, that we can reflect theologically on what is happening in the film and in the viewers.

We think it to be a healthy feature to offer such a debate within the covers of the book itself. Our hope, in fact, is that this first section may open a small window into a much bigger field, offering a taste of various approaches that readers can follow up for themselves, through references in the notes and through the books mentioned above. The first part continues with a piece by Leonie Caldecott that explores the way one particular genre of film, in this case fantasy, develops ideas and provides resources for spiritual and theological reflection. Other genres could also be explored in the same way, and some of the chapters in the second part offer ideas about the function of other genres within the dialogue between film and theology. The final chapter in this section, by Anthony Clarke, suggests some ways in which the dialogue can be enabled to happen in the setting of a church service or study group.

The second part of the book works out some of the principles surveyed in the first part, in relation to a number of specific films. The eleven different authors have chosen a particular film and sought to engage in dialogue between it and Christian theology. This dialogue is clearly two-directional, allowing a reading of the film to shape theological interests, and then giving space for theology to speak back to the issues raised by the film. We hope that these chapters will model a variety of ways of proceeding with this dialogue, suggesting ways that films can stimulate theological reflection and encouraging readers to make similar journeys with other films which they have watched. The pieces tend to exemplify readings that have been identified in the first section as ‘theological’ or ‘mythological’ – understood, mainly, as ‘existential’ (concerned with typical aspects of the human situation) – often moving from the existential to the theological. However, some of them also show awareness of ideological issues, identifying either a predominant ideology reflected in the making of the film or, more often, an attempt by the film-maker to undermine a popular ideology. In all, the readings accept and reflect the complexity of meanings in a film and also the diversity of intentions. The individual chapters are self-contained and can be read in any order.

The third part of the book is based on a further eleven films but in a form which we hope will be particularly useful for those wishing to use a film as a basis for bible study and reflection in a church context. Each chapter provides the details for the film, a synopsis of the plot that could be used as a foundation to help those involved to explore the film and then a series of questions gathered round a number of themes that aid further reflection. The synopsis is detailed, but also tends to highlight issues that are going to be raised again in the questions. It may be particularly helpful when only clips of a film can be used in a study-group or church service. Again the accounts of individual films within this section are self-contained, but it is recommended that the opening chapters in the first section are read as resources for exploring this dialogue.

The films in the second and third parts have not been chosen because they form a collection which explores common themes, or because they are deliberate representatives of varying genres of film, although some similar themes will emerge and the films are very varied in type. Rather, the diversity of the films emphasizes the point that this book is attempting to bring together in dialogue theology and film in its widest sense. It is our conviction that the theological dialogue is not to be restricted to those films with a biblical basis or a clear religious setting. With the exception, to some degree, of The Passion of the Christ, the films discussed in the book are not Christian, but rather secular products from mainstream cinema. Whereas some do have religious characters, use religious images or explore some religious themes, many have no such connection with faith or theology. But they do explore life. And the motivation for this book is that theology should engage with all the various expressions of culture, high and popular, that we come across.

This book, then, encourages a dialogue with that which is ‘other’ to theology and different from it, in the belief that thereby insight and meaning can be gained. We hope that readers will journey both with us in the book, and without us in their own reflections on film, so that the dialogue may continue.

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