Sanctuary Cinema: Origins of the Christian Film Industry

Divine Shows

Divine Shows Satan has a new enemy. K. S. Hover1 In its first several decades, Hollywood attracted religious audiences by producing significant appropriate product such as the moral melodramas of director D. W. Griffith and the conversion westerns like Essanay’s “Broncho” Billy. Films like the secular Kalem Studio’s From the Manger to the Cross and David and Goliath were exhibited in numerous religious settings.2 The Savior Himself appeared in the productions of Griffith (The Avenging Conscience and Intolerance) and Thomas Ince (Civilization). Three hundred clergymen attended a showing of Ince’s spectacle at the Tremont Theatre in Boston and advertised its religious power, some seriously suggesting that the antiwar film could convert the world to “Christian-sanity.”3 Western star William S. Hart, primed to enact justice on his adulterous wife in The Disciple, was averted from personal vengeance by a vision of the three crosses on Golgotha. Like the unmistakably luminous image of the cross in Jasper Cropsey’s The Millennial Age (1854), the emblazoned image of the old rugged cross on Calvary stood as the apotheosis of grace in Hart’s religious western film. Mary Pickford in Sparrows would see the Good Shepherd dissolving out of the side of a barn and taking a dead child into a pastoral heaven. In Shadows, Lon Chaney’s Chinaman converted to Christianity after he witnessed the forgiving spirit of a maligned minister. King Vidor’s Sky Pilot would bring salvation and masculine friendship to the Canadian town of Swan’s Creek. Such religious presentations from Hollywood fueled Christian visionaries’ belief in the religious possibilities of the motion picture. Clergy believed it was not 3 117 enough to exhibit these films; they felt called to produce their own cultural and spiritual art. With an optimistic and poetic spokesperson like Vachel Lindsay, many waxed eloquent on a vision of film as a new language of “American hieroglyphics ,” a universal Esperanto connecting viewers around the world to the aesthetic tradition of the Hudson River artists as well as with the transcendental legacy of Emerson and Whitman. In fact, in his Gospel of Beauty, poet-evangelist Lindsay showcased the inspiring and intimate links between magnificent forests and “groves of giant redwoods” and a category he labeled “Photoplays of Religious Splendors.” Praising the glories of the spectacular cinema, he entreated the “most sceptical reader of [his] book to assume that miracles in a Biblical sense have occurred,” as nature was its witness.4 For Lindsay, and for a host of clergy, the same religious truths promulgated by the Hudson River painters, namely, the notion of God’s presence in His creation, were to be located in moving picture scenes of the American mountains and valleys. The moving picture camera was an honest and unsullied eyewitness to the glories of God in the handiwork of His creation; its record revealed the possible redemption of the world. The Reverend James Ecob, echoing Calvin, reminded preachers that the natural world was the scene, or theater, of divine action, and the story of creation was a living series of moving pictures “or cartoons, vast in outline, deep in color and suggestion, moving in panoramic majesty.”5 One precedent for interpreting signs of God’s activity in natural phenomena came through the typological imagination of Puritan preacher Jonathan Edwards, for whom even craggy mountains and thunder clouds offered shadows of God’s majesty and evoked such “mild attributes” as His goodness, grace, and love.6 Ecob suggested that intimations of a Protestant faith could be seen not only in the thunderclouds and flowers, but also through the arts of painting and moving images . The images of Creation were replete with God’s fingerprints. Photo-Drama of Creation Religious cinematic innovation burst upon the theatrical milieu in 1913, when the International Bible Students Association (IBSA) produced an eight-hour Photo-Drama of Creation, released as three separate features.7 The “nonsectarian and interdenominational” biblical extravaganza was presented free to local community theaters (often cosponsored by anony118 | Divine Shows mous donors), promoted as pure philanthropy, and shown free in all principal cities.8 Amazed that this independent film was enjoying such a wide release, Moving Picture World decided it was worthy of review; their movie critics found it especially commendable that no charge was made for admission in such a mercenary business as film production.9 Even Billboard and The New York Times were...