A Few Remarks on Cinema and Christianity

Olivier Clément

Abstract

Clément reflects on the image and function of the cinema in a modern world, and on the presence of the spirit of Christianity in the cinema. He suggests a new perspective and wants movies to be treated in a new evangelizing way. Clément argues that the cinema is a liturgy of planetary civilization; it is metaplanetary language which can form a community beyond a language. Above all, it affects man’s emotionality with the art of imagination, which passively plunges us in an ocean of psyche with no points of reference. It may render the world unreal by replacing reality with a vision. It can also challenge the basic moral precepts, trivialize sex and death, and not so much reduce as unite them in a nihilistic way. Clément suggests doing away with somnambulism by strengthening fear and astonishment, and stimulating a longing for the beauty of a community. He says that trashy academism, typical for the subject of Christianity, has to be replaced with courage and the freedom to create. Clément believes that Christian imagination can be evangelized and revived only by the taking of what he calls a “dostoevskian” road: one has to transform “the sadness of death” into the “sadness of God.”

• The text is a translation of the article Notes sur le cinéma et le christianisme by Olivier Clément. Originally published in: Contacts. Revue Française de l’Orthodoxie 2001, no. 194, pp. 166-172. © 2001 by Contacts. Revue Française de l’Orthodoxie.