Preface

Walter Benjamin in his 1936 essay, "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction," argued that modern forms of production inevitably transform the function of art, destroying its religious function and liberating art to serve new social and political purposes: "for the first time in world history, mechanical reproduction emancipates the work of art from its parasitical dependence on ritual. . . . Instead of being based on ritual, it begins to be based on another practice—politics."¹ Benjamin at times seems almost to feel the loss of the religious function that once was central to art but then asserts the necessity of such destruction, describing the process as "a tremendous shattering of tradition which is the obverse of the contemporary crisis and renewal of mankind," a process that is "intimately connected with the contemporary mass movements."² The shattering of tradition is an inevitable component of the dialectical progress through which history is moving, in Benjamin's account, and a sense of crisis is a necessary prelude to the change of consciousness and society that will be needed in the emerging age.

In Benjamin's view, cinema, as the new art form that depends entirely on new technological means of production for its existence, will play a prominent role in the emergence of a new stage of art that will sever the outmoded connection between art and religion, a connection that belongs to an earlier and now superseded stage in the development of culture. Benjamin offers a number of illuminating observations concerning cinema and what we now call the mass media, and he is prescient about the implications of the mass media for the ways in which political leaders will interact with the public in this new age, but his one-sided understanding of the dialectic of faith and culture made him blind to the ways in which artists could find new ways to explore a theologically rich vision of the world through the new art of cinema.

Perhaps no filmmaker more fully displays the potential of cinematic art to set aside psychological and naturalist views of human life and portray instead the subtle presence and action of grace in a world distorted by the constant pressure of sin than French director Robert Bresson (1901–99). Bresson's films are not widely known in the United States—he could fairly be called a filmmaker's filmmaker and is deeply admired in the world of cinema. Speaking of Bresson's 1996 film, au hasard Balthazar, Jean-Luc Godard expressed deep admiration: "I'd compare Pascal's Discourse on the Passion of Love to this film. The film affected me the same way as Pascal's writings on passion." Louis Malle has spoken of the same film in superlative terms: "It seems to me that cinema has finally entered a certain zone that it had previously barely touched." Novelist Marguerite Duras also speaks of Bresson's work in the highest terms: "I think Bresson has brought something extremely new to cinema today, which is thought."¹

Bresson developed his artistic craft to bring to fulfillment what can well be described as a Catholic vision of life presented through cinema. His best known film is perhaps Diary of a Country Priest (1951), a beautiful film that is deeply faithful to the great novel by Georges Bernanos, a novel that might at first strike one as unsuited to film adaptation. Bresson based two of his thirteen films on novels by Bernanos (the other is Mouchette), and it would be plausible to argue a kind of artistic parallel between Bernanos in the world of literature and Bresson in the world of cinema: each develops the contemporary potential of an art form to reveal new artistic possibilities for exploring a Catholic vision of life in the modern world. Each engages in a dialog between faith and culture in the world of art and demonstrates that faith has a still vital part to play in such a dialog, contrary to the views of theorists such as Benjamin.

Bresson's film achieves its fidelity to the spirit of the novel by Bernanos in spite of omitting a...