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Visual Story and the Religious Interpretation of Film

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  09 September 2014

John R. May
John R. May*
Affiliation:
Louisiana State University
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Abstract

There are three basic theoretical approaches to the study of literature and religion that can profitably be appropriated by the religious critic of cinema—heteronomy, theonomy, and autonomy; but the greatest of these is autonomy, which explores those dimensions of the formal structure of film that represent the visual analogue of religious or sectarian questions. Inasmuch as all of our culturally typical films are stories, the autonomy of film is preserved if the religious critic approaches film as visual story. The extremes of story, myth and parable, yield substructures that correspond to differing responses to the fundamental religious questions about our relationship to the universe, to others, and to ourselves. Moreover, certain cinematic elements are more suitable than others for the visual representation in story of our basic religious concerns.

Type
Articles
Information
Horizons , Volume 7 , Issue 2 , Fall 1980 , pp. 249 - 264
Copyright
Copyright © The College Theology Society 1980

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References

1 Essays Ancient and Modern (New York: Harcourt, Brace and World, 1936)Google Scholar; reprinted in The New Orpheus, ed. Scott, Nathan A. Jr., (New York: Sheed and Ward, 1964), pp. 223–35.Google Scholar See also Brooks, Cleanth, The Hidden God: Studies in Hemingway, Faulkner, Yeats, Eliot, and Warren (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1963)Google Scholar; Gardner, John, On Moral Fiction (New York: Basic Books, 1978)Google Scholar—Gardner does not write, of course, from any acknowledged religious perspective, but rather from a viewpoint of “ethical” heteronomy; Killinger, John, The Failure of Theology in Modern Literature (New York: Abingdon Press, 1963)Google Scholar; Jarrett-Kerr, Martin, Studies in Literature and Belief (London: Rockliff, 1954)Google Scholar; Stewart, Randall, American Literature and Christian Doctrine (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1958)Google Scholar; and TeSelle, Sallie McFague, Literature and the Christian Life (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1966).Google Scholar

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3 Trails of the Word: Essays in American Literature and the Humanistic Tradition (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1956), pp. 97–111.Google Scholar See also Detweiler, Robert, Story, Sign, and Self: Phenomenology and Structuralism as Literary-Critical Methods (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1978)Google Scholar; Lewis, R. W. B., The American Adam: Innocence, Tragedy, and Tradition in the Nineteenth Century (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1955)Google Scholar; The Picaresque Saint: Representative Figures in Contemporary Fiction (Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott, 1959)Google Scholar; and Lynch, William F., Christ and Apollo (New York: Sheed and Ward, 1960)Google Scholar; Christ and Prometheus: A New Image of the Secular (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1970).Google Scholar

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5 The biographical assumption, a fallacy of heteronomous interpretation, tends toward a facile equation of the artist's background—training, religious affiliation, theoretical persuasion—and artistic achievement. In this instance, one would assume that Schrader's celebration of transcendental cinema would shape his artistic creation. Taxi Driver and the more recent films that Schrader has written and directed (Blue Collar and Hardcore) are anything but transcendental.

6 In Mansions of the Spirit: Essays in Literature and ReJigion, ed. Panichas, George A. (New York: Hawthorn Books, Inc., 1967), 59–73.Google Scholar

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10 Ibid., p. 57.

11 Fiction and the Shape of Belief (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1966), pp. 7, 24–26.Google Scholar

12 For fuller treatment cf. my The Pruning Word: The Parables of Flannery O'Connor (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1976), Ch. 1Google Scholar, “The New Hermeneutic and Parables of Jesus.”

13 “Three Myths of Transcendence” in Transcendence, eds. Richardson, Herbert W. and Cutler, Donald R. (Boston: Beacon press, 1969), 98–113.Google Scholar

14 Lawrence, D. H., Studies in Classical American Literature (New York: Thomas Seltzer, 1923), p. 92.Google Scholar