I’m teaching a course called “Theology and Film” this semester. One of the tasks of this week’s class was to demonstrate that, while movies can and do feature theological ideas and figures, they’re also capable of manifesting the sacred. I used Paul Schrader’s 1972 book Transcendental Style in Film: Ozu, Bresson, Dreyer to illustrate this point. For Schrader, there is a particular cinematic style—ascetic, exigent, pathos-filled—that manages to evoke a heightened spiritual awareness, indeed, an intimation of the divine. When the class seemed confused about Schrader’s theory, I turned to Terrence Malick’s The New World (2005). Of course, films associated with Schrader would have made sense too—perhaps above all, Martin Scorsese’s Taxi Driver (1976), which was written by Schrader—but I wanted to exhibit a unique and altogether different auteur. We watched the first and the last scene from The New World, and the students were simply captivated. Malick is not to everyone’s taste, but his peaks are so, so high. Take a look:
No one I’ve studied since the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic has stimulated my thinking like French theorist Jacques Ellul (1912-94). This passage is from his 1967 book The Political Illusion (L'illusion politique): “Under the rushing surface of daily events there are currents, and on a deeper level still, those depths which do not change except with the slowness of madrepores. But only the news interests and impassions us; and our attention span and political acumen are riveted on the latest bomb exploded somewhere. If a man speaks at such a moment of a deeper level, he appears out of tune with his time, uncommitted; although only by digging more deeply can political thought be formed and the present eventually explained.”
Emotional. Powerful.
Jacques Ellul - thanks for the quotation/introduction. Hard not to be reminded of SK "The Present Age," that political impassioning may be a way of becoming absorbed or engaged but then returning to a status quo without understanding.