4. Theology and Film (Religion and Film‪)‬

French film theorist Andre Bazin focuses much of his attention on the ontology of the cinematographic image (1971, 1996). This Roman Catholic critic compares film to the art of embalming the dead, to the Egyptian religious practice of trying to preserve life by representing it. Philosophical explanations of an epistemology of film develop from the Reformed tradition of scholars like Plantinga (Plantinga & Smith, 1999; Carroll, 1990) who brings the cognitive-affective theory of film spectatorship into the forefront of an inquisition on the nature of film. How do a spectator's rational mental activities underlie his or her affective responses to film? Even as philosophers like Litch (2002) deem it worthy to reflect on film, religious scholars and theologians move beyond viewing film as "harmless entertainment" to analyzing films as visual discourse with theological significance (Maltby, 1983). The emotional relationships of spectators and films are based on basic cognitive competencies, that one understands the images even in one's responses to them. For example, films like The Night of the Living Dead elicit fear and disgust; comedies evoke laughter; tear-jerking melodramas, tears; thrillers, anxiety. How films manipulate such responses and how spectators identify with film characters (as in Groundhog Day) is the interest of the cognitivists as much as of the psychoanalytic critics. The empathy induced by close-ups (in Bergman's works or in Blade Runner) raises issues of the ontology of the film image itself, leading as well to questions of epistemology, of how we recognize, know, read, and interpret such images. Philosophy does not reside far from its sister theology. Mortimer Adler (1937) builds a religious perspective of film upon a Greek philosophical foundation of cinematic aesthetics. Plato's Allegory of the Cave opens up an analogy for looking at illusionary (and poetic) images in the dark that suggests general principles for looking at films. Herein, Adler offers an image of the artist as a seducer, an inspired but potentially corrupting agent who is dialectically challenged by the politician, ergo censor. From Plato and Aristotle (wherein Adler finds a prototype of entertainment education where art objects are educative and able to either corrupt or cultivate moral virtues), Adler establishes a transition to the revealed wisdom of Christianity on the nature and place of the art of the movies. As the poet was a rival to the philosopher in Greek thought, now the filmmaker becomes the rival to the priest.