Sanctuary Cinema: Origins of the Christian Film Industry

Introduction

Introduction Underground films, political films, avant-garde, experimental, educational, and documentary films—these renegade films bubble up and flow against the tide of dominant Hollywood products. Made in spite of a paucity of funding, resources, and support, and despite dim prospects of finding channels for distribution and exhibition,1 they try to represent alternative ways of looking at life, to offer ideological or pedagogical perspectives that have been overlooked by the dominant media corporations, and to provide a viable alternative to Hollywood’s commercialized offerings .2 One neglected case among these frequently marginalized modes of independent nontheatrical filmmaking, of films not produced for general theatrical release, has been a fragmented, “lowbrow” network that confesses and professes to a distinctly sectarian vision. Its function is predominantly didactic. Its ideology is unapologetically theological. Its audience is a vast congregation. I call this network the Christian Film Industry . Christian films are films of, by, and for the people of the church, not aspiring to high aesthetic values nor aiming for economic profit, but seeking to renew, uplift, and propagate. They are tribal films, told and retold within their own community to carry on its traditions and values. The makers of these films go against the grain of mere entertainment to produce a genre of religious cinema that is remarkably political: political because it subverts the secular city by envisioning, however inartistically or superficially, the City of God. One enduring characteristic of this tribal people’s art may well be that it strikes a popular art industry as artless: rough, unpolished, unsophisticated , even kitschy, suggesting a stubbornly peculiar mind set: “It may be bad art, but it is ours.” However, just as icons were fashioned not to draw attention to their craftsmanship but to draw spectators into worship, so 1 Christian films have been crafted primarily to preach rather than to entertain , to emphasize moral and religious concerns rather than aesthetic delights. Christian filmmakers frequently saw themselves as struggling to be in the world but not of it, wrestling with the classic dilemma articulated by church father Tertullian, namely, “What has Athens to do with Jerusalem? What concord is there between the Academy and the Church?” Jerome echoed this sentiment in the fifth century, asking: “What has Horace to do with the Psalms, Virgil with the Gospels, Cicero with the Apostles?” Trained as a classical rhetorician, Jerome suffered a vision in which he was called before divine judgment and condemned as more of a Ciceronian than a Christian. In a strangely parallel experience, filmmaker George Lucas dreamed that he stood before the Almighty, who looked down on him and said: “Get out. You blew it.” Here the question arises: “What has Hollywood to do with Jerusalem?”3 Or even, what has film history to do with religion? In contrast to studies of class, ethnicity, gender, and other cultural variables in film, religious affiliation is significantly ignored. If film history is to traverse other histories, as critic Lee Grieveson put it, or to become part of a larger, integrated collaboration , as historian Donald Crafton has encouraged, it must intersect with a social history of religion.4 In what might serve as a classic paradigm for the religious filmmaker, liberation theologian Gustavo Gutierrez laid the biblical groundwork for a culture of resistance, for those people who wished to sing their own songs, write their own poetry, dance and joke according to their own rhythms and humors, design their own artistic works, and speak boldly for what they saw as good, true, and right. In his aptly titled We Drink from Our Own Wells, Gutierrez warned people not to imbibe the poisonous and noxious values of the multinational corporations that concocted a shiny, commodified culture for consumption by an unsuspecting and undiscerning people.5 His liberating discourse was marked by a concern for marginalized and exploited people, for their need for dignity and justice, and for locating a true and passionate prophetic voice to organize a spiritual resistance to a deeply insidious consumerist culture. Some corners of Christian filmmaking, particularly those associated with various orders of the Roman Catholic Church, sought to be voices crying in the wilderness, or at least in church basements and school auditoria , in distinct educational and prophetic ways. They saw themselves as 2 | Introduction standing on their own “sacred” and separate values, identifying themselves through what they define as signs of difference. The Christian...