ANYONE WHO READS this column with any regularity knows that I am very interested in film. I have been since my days in graduate school studying philosophy. During the three years that I spent in graduate school, some of the great films from Europe were beginning to appear in this country. By viewing films by great directors such as Ingmar Bergman, Federico Fellini, Robert Bresson and Vittorio De Sica, I came to believe that a diet of serious films could have a powerful impact on a person’s consciousness and conscience.
At one of the graduate schools I attended, some marvelous films were shown and that moved me to think about conducting film festivals when I returned to the diocese and began to teach. After graduate school I rediscovered some great works by directors of American films, including Orson Welles, Frank Capra, William Wyler, Billy Wilder, Alfred Hitchcock, Howard Hawks and John Huston.
The Friday Film Festivals that I present each fall and spring with the help of the Brooklyn Diocese’s Office of Faith Formation, School of Evangelization have several goals.
My first goal is to provide myself and others with the opportunity to experience great art on a large screen at the Immaculate Conception Center in Douglaston.
Though not all of the 250 films that have been shown qualify as classics, the vast majority are at least “near classics” – films that are interesting, entertaining and thought-provoking. It is not easy, or at least I do not find it easy, to state simply and clearly what art can do for us as human beings. Educate us? Open us to mystery? Help us to be more reflective? Challenge our conscience? Offer us an experience of the Divine? Provoke us to ask and think about topics and questions that are usually reserved for philosophy? Strengthen our faith?
Critical and Appreciative
I have devoted many hours to studying and writing about films because I think films can do all of the above. Viewing and reviewing the films shown in the festivals has been an education for me and has helped me to be more critical and appreciative when I watch a film. Some films that I may have seen in my youth, when viewed again now, take on an entirely new meaning.
Because of DVDs and online movie rentals, many of my friends rarely go to theaters anymore. They prefer to view films in their own living rooms. I understand that. I don’t view many films in theatres anymore either.
About a month ago, Mike Geoghan, a producer at NET invited me to screen the eight Academy Award nominees for best film and to discuss them on a special segment of the show Reel Faith. Without that invitation, I probably wouldn’t have made time to see several of the films.
The late John R. May edited a wonderful book entitled “Image & Likeness: Religious Visions in American Film Classics” (New York: Paulist Press, 1991, pp. 200). In his Introduction, May quotes an essay by T.S. Eliot on literature and the quotation can be applied to creators and viewers of films:
“The common ground between religion and fiction is behaviour. … If we, as readers, keep our religious and moral convictions in one compartment, and take our reading merely for entertainment, or on a higher plane, for aesthetic pleasure, I would point out that the author, whatever his conscious intentions in writing, in practice recognizes no such distinctions. The author of a work of imagination is trying to affect us wholly, as human beings, whether he knows it or not; we are affected by it, as human beings, whether we intend to be or not.” (p. 2)
I am always upset when friends tell me that they have been reading junk. If we are going to read, why not read something that might affect us and enrich our experience? I feel the same way about films. I think that everything that Eliot said about writers and readers applies to filmmakers and viewers of films. Film as art affects us on many levels, sometimes, perhaps even often, without our realizing that we have been affected. All significant art deals with mystery.
At the first festival I conducted, about 700 people attended. Now about 50 to 80 people attend. I wish more were interested but I plan to continue as long as anyone is interested or until someone convinces me that film is not as important as I think.
For details about Father Lauder’s 49th Friday Film Festival, click here.
Father Robert Lauder, philosophy professor at St. John’s University, Jamaica, is the author of “Pope Francis’ Spirituality and Our Story” (Resurrection Press).
