Through a Screen Darkly

Jeffery Overstreet

AN UNREMARKABLE storage shed stands in the middle of a twenty-acre patch of farmland near Macomb, Illinois, a four hours’ drive from Chicago. For most of the year, it houses equipment. But today, July 4, 2003, the shed catches direct sunlight in the near hundred-degree heat while several hundred people inside sweat silently in the dark, shoulder to shoulder, seated and standing.

It is only noon, but already they have spent hours straining to listen while the roaring industrial-strength fans circulate the heavy humid air. The movies they are watching began at nine thirty AM and will continue until nine PM. Outside, nearly twenty thousand campers roam through a world of tents that sprawl across the dusty slopes like the world’s largest circus. This is the twentieth anniversary of the Cornerstone Festival, a week-long alternative Christian music extravaganza run by Jesus People U.S.A. Everywhere you wander, your eardrums are pummeled by waves of throbbing bass as bands of all musical colors clamor for attention.

But there’s more than music going on now. The storage shed has become a makeshift theater. Over the doors hangs a hand-painted sign that reads Flickerings Film Festival.

This is not a screening of The Passion of the Christ. Nor is it a marathon of the Left Behind movies or the other franchise popular amongst churchgoers—The Lord of the Rings. This morning it was a series of amateur short subjects. They’ve
just finished a feature-length documentary on gun control, during which people were turned away at the door by the Sold Out sign scrawled in ink from a Sharpie. Soon, they’ll take in an obscure foreign film, followed by a documentary about Jacques Derrida.

An intellectual’s film festival drawing capacity crowds in the middle of Illinois farmland? And the attendees are Christians?

What is going on here?

The first time I saw Mike Hertenstein, I thought he looked like a youth-camp counselor. He drove up in a golf cart and invited me on a quick tour of the Cornerstone Festival. In his baseball cap, squinting behind his sunglasses, wearing a dusty red T-shirt and shorts, he doesn’t look like an arts-awareness activist. But his work mixes the responsibilities of an art critic, a youth minister, and a prophet in the wilderness. His wilderness is the church. His vision is a revival of profound artistic sensibilities within it. As he putters along in his cart, no one can see the print on the back of his T-shirt: So many subtitles, so little time.

Mike is one of many agents responsible for setting in motion a continental shift in churchgoers’ perception of popular culture and art. His approach is unique. He wants to expose moviegoers to the provocative and overlooked work
of filmmakers who explore spiritual themes. He wants to draw Christian artists out of their old enclaves to break new ground.

For Flickerings 2003, Hertenstein called for amateur filmmakers to submit short films following a list of strict limitations. It’s his version of the Dogme 95 creed, a filmmaking code established by the Danish filmmaker Lars von Trier. Von Trier encouraged filmmakers to adhere to a strict code of minimalist filmmaking, and his famous Thou Shalt Nots banned genre movies, postproduction work, cameras other than hand-held video cameras, sound added beyond what takes place within the scene, superficial action (murder, gunplay, car chases), and more.

Filmmakers who accepted the challenge introduced influential and revelatory films that proved just how much of what we see in mainstream cinema is unnecessary, and how a more efficient mode of filmmaking could captivate audiences. This series of minimalist films included innovative and critically acclaimed titles like Breaking the Waves, The Celebration, and The Son.

Hertenstein’s own dogma for religious artists included different restrictions: Refrain from the use of popular religious symbols, including the Cross. No church scenes. No conclusions that involve a conversion to Christianity. No Scripture verses. No music with lyrics. No End Times scenarios. Show, don’t tell.

By these rules, the Flickerings’ founder coaxes Christian artists away from the simplistic, didactic, sentimental, and condescending approaches prevalent in contemporary Christian art and entertainment, nudging them toward the language of metaphor. This unsettles some artists. They worry that viewers won’t get their message. But indirection is the way art works. It is a tradition with a respectable history. One influential storyteller famously avoided paraphrasing his own parables, leaving the epiphanies for those with “ears to hear.”

Even as he challenges them on their own work, Hertenstein provides attendees with a feast of overlooked international cinema. What better way to draw Christians into healthy and relevant discussions than to show them provocative works of art?

It happens again and again over the course of the week: Code Unknown, an intense French drama about breakdowns in communication between couples, families, communities, and nations. Not of This World, an amusing, emotional Italian parable about a nun and a Laundromat owner. The King Is Alive, an excruciating tale of moral, civil, marital, and intellectual disintegration. Hell House, a troubling but objective documentary on heavy-handed evangelical tactics.

You should see the audacious program he has planned for Flickerings 2004.

This is not just about the church. The future of filmmaking, for both the mainstream and art house audiences, is a place of intense spiritual dialogue and debate.

In the wake of 9/11, many began a frantic search for spiritual resources. The weaknesses in their worldviews and sources of security became painfully apparent. The box office did well during this time, as many sought relief at the movies. A year and a half earlier, The Matrix had dumped a whole box of religious and philosophical vocabulary over our heads, and the pieces lay scattered all over the floor. Two sequels would make very little sense of it all. That fall, when Peter Jackson brought J.R.R. Tolkien’s meaningful mythology of longsuffering, sacrifice, and hope to the screen, no wonder people were so moved. And what a time for Mel Gibson to create a compelling and convincing passion play. These films set us thinking, wrestling, and growing. Critical applause, interpretation, outrage, and scorn threw fuel on the fire of a cultural conversation about art and faith.

By all indications, this is not just a fad. The time is ripe for artists to contribute incarnations that will carry the discussion further and deeper, speaking to cultural questions in ways that words cannot.

Photographer Alfred Stieglitz called a series of his photographs “equivalents.” In them, he sought to recreate for the viewer an encounter with something that he himself could not fully understand or describe, an experience that would transcend language.

For most filmmakers, movies are just illustrated narratives. But some aim higher. In treating film as art, no less profitable for study than great literature and painting, they organize what we see in such as way as to encourage the viewer to explore relationships between character, image, color, music, and camera angle. If they do their job well, the viewer comes away wanting to see the film again, to take a closer look. In this way, film is uniquely qualified to explore spirituality. More than any other art, it mirrors our experience in time and space. Reflecting our world back to us, it gives us the opportunity to reflect and revisit moments, slowly drawing back the veil.

The countercultural filmmakers of the seventies declared that sexuality was no longer a taboo subject. Today, groundbreaking talents are doing the same for spirituality.

One of the young artists most vigorously exploring spiritual hunger in America is Paul Thomas Anderson.

When Anderson’s Punch-Drunk Love arrived, many viewers expected another sophomoric Adam Sandler comedy. Instead, the film offered a complex psychological study of Barry Egan, a salesman trying to satisfy his longing for trust, intimacy, and connection in all the wrong ways. When family, friends, and a phone sex line fail him, he’s a model of modern alienation. Then, two events jolt him out of his repression and insecurity. Suddenly he has an enemy; and just as suddenly, he has a gift of grace, a woman who cares about him. This comedy echoes the theme of Anderson’s other masterpiece, the brilliantly complex drama Magnolia: we are lost, broken, needy, plunging toward disaster, and dependent upon grace.

Each of Magnolia’s interwoven plot threads follows a lost soul attempting to cope with hardship in a self-destructive and indulgent way. One by one, these characters run from the truth like prodigal sons. One by one, they stumble into the consequences. Their disparate stories converge twice in the film. First, they all happen upon the same song on the radio about brokenness and need. And later, something along the lines of a warning from heaven interrupts each character’s descent into despair. The film closes as characters are offered grace and second chances.

Anderson’s films manage to be both popular and sophisticated, employing complicated networks of pattern and metaphor. In Punch-Drunk Love, telephones, a harmonium, a red truck, cups of pudding, and toilet plungers accumulate meaning until they have become an intricate web of symbols. They give us a visual vocabulary for communication, creative expression, divine intervention, and hearts clogged with rage and despair. In Magnolia, the gathering significance of angel wings, frogs, and children is worthy of a booklength interpretation.

Alongside Anderson stands a host of contemporary artists who contribute to the cinematic lexicon of spirituality, whether they know it or not. To name a few: Mike Leigh (Secrets and Lies), Vadim Perelman (House of Sand and Fog), Jim Sheridan (In America), Michael Haneke (Time of the Wolf ), Sofia Coppola (Lost in Translation), Peter Weir (Fearless), Won Kar-Wai (In the Mood for Love), Jim Jarmusch (Dead Man), Aki Kaurismäki (The Man without a Past), Thomas Vinterberg (The Celebration), Tom Tykwer (Heaven), Wim Wenders (Wings of Desire), Richard Linklater (Waking Life), Denys Arcand (The Barbarian Invasions).

Iranian filmmakers Abbas Kiarostami (The Wind Will Carry Us), Jafar Panahi (The Circle), and Majid Majidi (The Color of Paradise), and British filmmaker Michael Winterbottom (In this World) have recently offered penetrating journeys into spiritual conflicts tormenting the present-day Middle East. Mira Nair’s Monsoon Wedding is an ebulliently colorful, deeply moving comedy set in India that explores issues of marital fidelity, abuse, and healing.

Documentarians Errol Morris (The Fog of War) and Steve James (Hoop Dreams) are elevating their genre to the level of high art. Stevie, James’s personal testimony about serving as a Big Brother to a troubled boy is the most soul-searching, transforming work of nonfiction film I’ve encountered.

In interviews, many of today’s most provocative directors confess their admiration for the same list of predecessors: Robert Bresson (Au Hasard Balthazar), Akira Kurosawa (Ikiru), Carl Theodor Dreyer (Ordet). The works of two more recent directors—Andrei Tarkovsky (Andrei Rublev, Mirror) and Krzysztof Kieslowski (The Decalogue, Three Colors: Blue, White, Red)—are also mentioned with reverence. It is worth noting that these past masters are all known for works of an intensely spiritual, religious, and in some cases Christian nature.

For the big studios, the future of film is in digital effects, franchises, comicbook adaptations, and big-budget remakes with expensive celebrities. It’s in pornography masquerading as art—indulgent in sex, but also in violence, political agendas, and religious sermonizing—appeasing whatever appetite consumers bring. Audiences will continue to make successful works of art a rare exception, because they tend to chase after what they want rather than what they need.

But for those who desire healthy challenges and nourishment, the future of film lies in the hands of a sleeping giant. A generation of creative artists has discovered that it can afford what it takes to make a good movie without the big budgets, celebrities, and special effects. These amateurs have different priorities than earning big studio paychecks, achieving magazine-cover fame and winning popularity contests like the Oscars. Some will focus on realizing their unique artistic visions. Once they develop a method of distribution—via the Internet or otherwise—these new visionaries will show us how the studio system has stifled rich and diverse expressions from around the world. Many of the great films of the next era will be discovered at independent film festivals and in the web-logs of vigilant cinephiles rather than at major studio press junkets.

Of those, the works that stand the test of time will be those that capture our imaginations and speak to our deepest spiritual longings. They will reveal the truths that cannot be told. This will occur not through argument, but through visual poetry, images worth a hundred thousand words, or better, worth a long and reverent silence.

In the heat of the Flickerings festival, people are going to extremes to discover a new language for spiritual matters. Tired of the pat answers, preachiness, and oversimplifications of most contemporary Christian entertainment, more and more believers are venturing to experience truths that cannot be spoken. Like the Israelites in the desert, moviegoers are likely to ignore a list of instructions, but they’ll follow pillars of cloud and fire, eyes wide open.

This is not the environment in which I started work as a Christian press film critic. For more than three years I have written a weekly column for Christianity Today that requires me to read, excerpt, compare, and contrast the perspectives of other Christian film critics. When I began, only a few publications published such reviews. Most of those critics spent their reviews cataloguing instances of nudity, profanity, and violence, to make sure Christians stayed safely insulated against such corruption—an approach that has stunted the intellectual growth of many Christians, steering them away from what might have been transforming spiritual experiences.

Recently, a new wave of Christian film writers has become busy interpreting films. They see how essential it is for moviegoers to develop the ability to explore the stories of popular culture, highlighting what is excellent and identifying what is flawed or indulgent, in order to participate in the cultural dialogue about art and the reality it reflects. These voices have come to outnumber those few but outspoken evangelical extremists. I cannot keep up with them all.

Some complain that this discipline of art interpretation is merely a way in which the culture distracts the church from its practical evangelical work. But art interpretation is a practical pursuit. It’s as essential as going into the desert, climbing a mountain, approaching a burning bush. Saint Paul took the time to stroll among the heathen idols, and he stumbled upon one that inadvertently pointed to the Unknown God. This gave him an opportunity to affirm the truth in the midst of those who had not yet recognized it instead of just in the familiar company of those who had. “The cross,” sings Paul Simon, “is in the ballpark.”

God promises us that we will be changed when we see him. This pursuit of what film critic André Bazin calls “holy moments” becomes an exercise of transformative recognition of God in the everyday.

Wise men studied the skies and then set out after a star, which led them to the Christ child. Similarly, those with eyes to see will be drawn to glimmers of God’s truth in creation and in art, our work of sub-creation. These revelations will happen more and more in art house theatres. In the multiplex. On DVD. In post-viewing discussions on-line, at home, and increasingly at the local church. This summer they will take place again in a hot storage shed on a patch of farmland near Macomb.

Visit Jeffrey Overstreet as Image Artist of the Month for May '06

Issue#42 • Summer 2004