Sacred Profanity: Spirituality at the Movies
By Aubrey Malone
(Praeger, $54.95 / £37.95 / €43.51 approx.)
Peter Costello
We live now in an age dominated by the image: in popular magazines, on television, in films. More and more people absorb what they know of themselves and the world through images rather than words. The images that dominate the world are also too often American images. But where, it might asked, does that leave those views of the world that depend on the word, literature, philosophy, religion, especially the views of Europe and the rest of the world.
This in a wide sense, is the problem that Aubrey Malone, familiar to readers as the film critic of this paper, explores in the stimulating book. The ''spirituality'' of his title is defined in the very broadest sense.
In the course of his seven long chapters he explores various aspects of movies touched by faith: Biblical epics, the lives of Jesus, stories of priests, ghosts and the after life, the spiritual beliefs (often odd) of movie people, science fiction and the diabolical.
As can be imagined this covers a lot of ground. But his approach is focused always on the human. There is nothing here of the aridities that all too often infect writings about movies and films by specialist writers.
He has a keen eye to for the foibles and failings of everyone from Cecil B. DeMille onwards. But what he also suggests is the extraordinary manner in which movies reflect the changing lives and beliefs of western countries, or if we are really honest with ourselves, the beliefs of the United States.
He does not quite neglect European films in the mass of Hollywood mogul movies that are inevitably his subject. For me the contrast is summed up by Cecil DeMille's movie The Ten Commandments and Pasolini's third feature film Il Vangelo secondo Matteo.
The DeMille epic, which I saw again lately, is a poor thing technically: very stagey, with ludicrously obvious back-projections and wooden acting. The slave scenes are grotesque. Perhaps only the crossing of the Red Sea works.
Pasolini's film, however, is one of the greatest films ever made on a religious theme. The author in a generally appreciative account of the film remarks that ''by creating Jesus as a socialist figure rather a primarily religious one, Pasolini divested him of his essence''. Yet the Sermon on the Mount in the film is a wonderful expression, to me at least, of the essence of Christian message, of Christ's anger at the self-righteous and unctuous piety of his times, with the priests and scribes (who alas remain with us in other forms).
There is both food for thought and rich entertainment in this book, the work of a writer seeped in the history of Hollywood and movie making.
A couple of points strike me at the conclusion. Writing of spirits on screen he does refer to the scene in Kuroshawa's RashÂmon, of a dead husband speaking through the mouth of the seer: an extraordinary scene in an extraordinary film.
Also the scene in Walkabout, where the young Aborigine boy dances his attraction to the white girl only to be rejected. (Though it must be said that Edward Bond's screenplay and Nic Roeg's direction distort the truer power of the source novel).
These films remind us that the history of film now encompasses places far, far away from the settled folk of Dubuque, Iowa, for whom most movies are made. Attention to the films of India, Japan and Africa would have provided a real contrast in the presentation of encounters with the divine and the numinous, and allowed the reader to begin a further exploration of their own spiritual ideas in the largest possible context.
But even without this greater dimension, there is more than enough in this book to stimulate the reader for whom both the images and the word are important.
