Nothing that reality throws at us is too challenging for the cinema. In man’s relationship with religion it has found a uniquely complex subject of which to treat. Especially when such relationship appears sick, having strayed towards violent practices both the causes and the effects of which are calling out to be investigated.
Last update: 2025-01-21 16:10:25
There is a fil rouge that gives human history a particular weave. It tells the story of donated lives, of existences spent serving others and encounters that open up horizons of meaning and engage people in the freedom of making definitive choices. This same history is also run through with noisy warriors whose violence is reintroduced and amplified, nowadays, by the environment depicted by the media. Violent images lay siege to our daily lives, becoming an integral part of them and making us numbly inured. Religion is not immune either: it is often transformed by men from a space for encounter and dialogue into an occasion for clashes, a ground of conflict and an instrument of violence. Perhaps it would be useful to remember that, as Pope Francis emphasises, ‘Authentic religion is a source of peace and not of violence! No one must use the name of God to commit violence! To kill in the name of God is a grave sacrilege’. (Meeting with the leaders of other religions and other Christian denominations, Tirana, 21 September 2014).
The cinema’s encounter with religion (with Christianity, first and foremost) came about in order to support that spectacular form of vocation that the cinema constitutes and to move film-goers by playing on a consolidated, widespread iconography: this from early examples such as Georges Méliès’ Le Christ marchant sur les eaux (1899) and Giulio Antamoro’s Christus (1916), to Hollywood’s biblical blockbusters, The Ten Commandments (1923 and 1956, both versions directed by Cecil B. DeMille) and The King of Kings (1961, directed by Nicholas Ray).
It is precisely this marked attention towards what is real that pushed cinema to become a mouthpiece regarding issues that are difficult to understand and forms of degeneration and drift that are connected to religion: ranging from D.W. Griffith’s Intolerance (1916) to C.Th. Dreyer’s Dies Irae (1943), from Roland Joffé’s Mission (1986) and Eran Riklis’ The Syrian Bride (2004) or Alejandro Amenábar’s Agora (2009), to the recent Cristiada (For Greater Glory: The True Story of Cristiada, 2012) directed by Dean Wright.
Catholics: Violence, Reconciliation and Hope
The violence invading the film industry’s imagination is rampant but it does not have the last word. Testimony to this is provided, in Rafal Wieczynski’s film Popieluszko (Popieluszko. Wolnosc jest w nas, 2009), by the priest who sided with ‘those who are last’ in Poland in the era of Solidarność; a Poland caught in the vice of a dictatorship that did not even respect religious freedom. Persecuted and killed for witnessing to the Gospel, Jerzy Popieluszko becomes an emblem of redemption and hope, of a faith that does not retreat but, on the contrary, presents itself as an alternative in order to change a nation’s destiny.
Once again, it is a martyrdom that is at the centre of Xavier Beauvois’ film, Of Gods and Men (Des hommes et des dieux, 2010). This tells the story of seven Trappist monks from the monastery of Tibhirine who were kidnapped and killed in 1996. The film shows the courage of consecrated men ready to sacrifice themselves in order to promote a culture of exchange and dialogue with something other (Islam, in this case), as Father Christian’s testamentary letter confirms: ‘For this life lost […] I thank God, who seems to have willed it entirely for the sake of that JOY in everything and in spite of everything. In this ‘THANK YOU’, which is said for everything in my life from now on, I certainly include you, […] And also you, my last-minute friend, who will not have known what you were doing. Yes, I want this ‘THANK YOU’ and this ‘GOODBYE’ to be a ‘GOD-BLESS’ for you, too, because in God’s face I see yours. May we meet again as happy thieves in Paradise, if it please God, the Father of us both. Amen! Inch’Allah!’
Lastly, the violence suffered ‘on the inside’ of every religion must not be forgotten. The director Stephen Frears brought the human drama of Philomena Lee to the screen. An unmarried mother in the Ireland of the 1950s, she was shut up in a home run by Catholic nuns and had her son taken away from her but never gave up looking for him. Philomena (2013) offers an intense portrait of a woman set free by faith and the ability to forgive, which release her from the burden of the injustice to which she was subjected.
Islam: Resisting Fundamentalism
Violence is not limited by skin-colour, borders or other barriers. The Islamic culture has also developed forms of drift linked to a distorted and repressive use of religion.
In a Lebanon torn apart by competing religious factions, it is a woman who has chosen to speak out about the need for dialogue and solidarity. In Where Do We Go Now? (Et maintenant on va où?, 2011), Nadine Labaki orchestrates a choir of wholly female voices that show strength, resilience and irony in fighting male arrogance and the violence of a religion that is sometimes difficult to stand up to. Her film offers the viewer a glimmer of hope on the horizon.
Violence finds its expression in animation as well. Again, it is from the gaze of a woman, Marjane Satrapi, and the autobiographical graphic novel she brought to the screen together with Vincent Paronnaud, that Persépolis (2007) has its birth. The tale of the consequences of the Iranian Islamic revolution in 1979 and the shattering of a people’s illusions in the face of fundamentalism’s intransigence is illustrated through the changing difficulties encountered by a rebellious and unconventional little girl who is ready to give up living in her own country in order to act as a witness to freedom and independence.
In Hany Abu-Assad’s Paradise Now (2005), on the other hand, it is the fears and ideals of two young, aspiring kamikaze bombers that force the viewer to face the darkest and most violent recesses of Islamic extremism. In a perspective that is unprecedented in Palestinian cinema, the two friends will come to understand, during the last night they spend at home, that they hold the keys to their own destinies and that another choice is possible for them, too.
The Drama of the Jews
During the last few decades, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict has constituted a genre theme in its own right, offering a variety of visions and perspectives from both sides. In Lemon Tree (2008), Eran Riklis tells the story of the difficult co-existence in the territories along the border. In the war-besieged West Bank, a woman has the courage to spark off a peaceful resistance regarding the Israeli Defence Minister and his absurd demand to cut down the lemon trees in her garden, on security grounds. It will be dialogue and empathy with the politician’s wife that create the conditions for a solution entrusted to mutual understanding.
In Samuel Maoz’s Lebanon (Levanon, 2008), the war fought against Lebanon in 1982 by young Israeli soldiers assumes the form of a nightmare with no way out. Squeezed inside the claustrophobic atmosphere of a tank, the soldiers personally experience the absurdity of a conflict without any real enemies to fight.
If one thinks of violence suffered and the cinema’s ability to bear witness to it, it is impossible to leave out the cinema-Shoah lode: over the years, this has become the very paradigm of remembrance. This combination has taken very many different forms, ranging from
Claude Lanzmann’s documentary, Shoah (1985), in which the horror of the camps is expressed in all its forms, and Schindler’s List (1993, directed by Steven Spielberg), to Roberto Benigni’s La vita è bella (1997) and Roman Polanski’s Il pianista (The Pianist, 2002), to name but a few.
* President of the Fondazione Ente dello Spettacolo, Rome