Sanctuary Cinema: Origins of the Christian Film Industry

Sanctuary Cinema

Sanctuary Cinema The Church that is not equipped to show motion pictures is as incomplete as a church without an organ. Rev. Leslie Willis Sprague1 In Sullivan’s Travels, director Preston Sturges’s 1941 satire on Hollywood filmmaking, a naive director of inane comedies wants to produce a socially significant drama. He takes to the road as a hobo, but is soon incarcerated in a chain gang. The oppressed prisoners are given a Sunday reprieve from their tortuous labors in a Black rural church. As they hobble into the sanctuary with leg chains clanging, the congregation is singing “Let My People Go.” The director, John L. Sullivan, detained among the prisoners, sits in his pew as church lanterns are dimmed, a screen is lowered, and an old projector rattles. A Walt Disney Pluto cartoon is exhibited in the church, for the delight and true recreation of those whose lives are without joy or hope. The church becomes, for a brief holy moment, a sacred site of healing through comic film images. The church’s inaugural place in relation to silent moving pictures was as a site of exhibition. As the primary locus of social and spiritual community , the churches opened their basements and halls to the new medium in the late nineteenth century even as they had earlier appropriated the use of drama in morality and miracle plays and then the stereopticon and numerous lanternslide shows. Visions of moving pictures incorporated into preaching, teaching, worship, and the spiritual life of the community inspired church leaders to experiment with modes of adaptation . The use of moving pictures in churches gave rise to a debate regarding their role within these worshiping communities. The tendency of moving pictures to function solely as entertainment would have troubled 2 55 its diffusion into the church had it not been for the emphasis on their potential for teaching and uplift. The positive historical uses of the icon and the theater for spiritual and moral instruction reminded religious leaders of the potential to adapt other means of communication for the work of the Lord. Although it would be years before churches regularly produced their own motion pictures, they began using them in church basements and halls for specific purposes almost as soon as the nascent film industry began making them.2 An auspicious event occurred in 1885 that enabled the religious use of the marvelous moving image. At that time, the Reverend Hannibal Goodwin was rector of a fashionable Episcopal church in Newark, New Jersey, the House of Prayer. An amateur chemist, Goodwin tinkered with a flexible , transparent film base that allowed successive photographic images to be coiled on one long strip. He wisely filed for a patent for his invention of celluloid film stock and to establish the Goodwin Camera and Film Company. Unfortunately, the rector later lost his business to George Eastman and only a lengthy legal suit restored his fame and part of the financial fruit of his labors; nevertheless, the motion picture bug had bitten the churchman. Goodwin was ultimately praised as the supreme missionary and educator, whose original motive was a spiritual one. In 1918, the Reverend W. H. Jackson, columnist for the early film periodical, Moving Picture World, commemorated Goodwin and his invention, noting that the moving picture was born a child of the church (although now in danger of neglect), and its original conception was to bequeath both education and entertainment to the Sunday school.3 Goodwin’s early biographer T. M. Dombey went further and noted that movements in the church to supplement sermons with screen illustrations of the Bible and to produce films from Genesis to Revelations would be ephemeral if “an organized movement of the Churches to give such exhibitions accompanied by teaching in Sunday School and to equip all manner of missionary forces” did not evolve from Goodwin’s invention.4 During the first decades of film’s development, various religious factions sought to utilize the new medium for sectarian purposes.5 Having set up their own Cinematograph Department, the Salvation Army may well be the earliest on record to make use of film for religious purposes , coinciding with its own genesis as a movement at the end of the nineteenth century.6 In 1899, in Australia, the son of the founder of the Salvation Army, Herbert Booth, used film as a means to propagate the faith and minister to the poor through storytelling. Claiming to be the 56 | Sanctuary Cinema [18.116.42...