How great films help us meditate on God’s beauty

Faith in Film

I mentioned last week that while the Vatican is an unlikely source of film criticism, it does have its own list of ‘great films’. It’s a list I encourage you to check out, easily found with a quick Google search.

Their selection is broken up into three categories, religion, values and art. It’s obvious enough what we as Catholics can learn from explicitly religious films, or ones with a strong moral message. But why does the Vatican even care about art? Or, to phrase the question differently, what can we gain from great art?

To dwell on this question, I’m going to choose a film that has for decades topped the list of critics and professionals as the greatest of all time: Citizen Kane. This 1941 drama about a media tycoon corrupted by power and desperate to recover the love he never received from his parents, broke new ground cinematically and professionally.

There are many themes that could be explored profitably by a Catholic audience. The prime importance of parental love; the corrupting influence of power; the self-centredness of a man who craves love only on his terms. The way the film knits these themes together is part of its greatness, but these aren’t to be my focus.

Citizen Kane was the product of a 25-year-old tyro, Orson Welles, who directed, co-wrote and starred in the film. He was given unprecedented control over the film and made good use of it. The story is a complex one, flipping back and forth in time, and changing perspective frequently as a reporter interviews friends of Charles Foster ‘Citizen’ Kane after Kane has died.

Story

The story structure isn’t likely to be what we’re used to. It’s not a linear progression, moving from the start of his life to the end. We come in at different times and see his life in its many different aspects.

The director Welles is very subtle in how he uses the form of the film to convey the ups and downs of Kane’s life. Deep, dark shadows often hang on the corners of the frame, creating a sense of impending doom. Or we see Kane (played by Welles) standing in a cavernous room, dwarfed by the monstrous mansion he designed. We see how his relationship with his first wife progresses, a famous montage of breakfasts, which is both funny and cutting.

We are made to sympathise and understand a character who is quite unpleasant; we never love him, despite the fact that’s what he craves. Kane is a very modern man. He doesn’t trust easily, is not very receptive and prefers to have love on his terms. Kane is out to remake the world in an image he prefers and that includes those closest to him, who he treats as puppets on a string.

Each shot is beautifully crafted, each scene springs to life almost organically and the film as a whole is so natural, its complexity doesn’t overwhelm.

Impress

Though it doesn’t overwhelm, it does impress and inspire awe. In a funny way, it makes us feel small and that’s a good thing! We are told by advertisers and promoters that we go to the cinema to be empowered and there is truth in that. We go to films for enjoyment and to be uplifted emotionally, to be made feel good about ourselves.

But we also go to films, those we consider great, because we want to see things done that we can’t do, to be impressed by a skilful storyteller or a photographer with a great eye. What impresses us about their work is both the content, the story being told, and form, the way the story is told.

As is the case with Citizen Kane, there is a unity between form and content that we can marvel at and which transcends our everyday experience. We begin to see how beautiful a film it is.

You may notice that my language is taking on a ‘theological’ flavour. Unity of form and content; transcendence; it could easily be God I’m talking about, and that’s hardly a surprise. Included in the traditional properties of God are truth, goodness and beauty.

The last of these is the most often neglected, although less so in the modern age. Truth and goodness just seem more tangible and easier to access. Beauty appears more obviously to be ‘transcendent’, out of our reach or everyday experience.

And yet we yearn for it. It is part of our life. Beautiful films, like Citizen Kane, and beautiful works of art in general remind us what we yearn for. Artists, to borrow JRR Tolkien’s phrase, are ‘sub-creators’, working in the image of God. When they are at their best, they begin to reflect his glory. It is little surprise then that we experience fear and wonder before their creations.