The Christian Critic and The Cinema

Extract

Discussion of the impact of Christian criticism on the cinema would be premature. Both are too new. ‘The art of the film is not yet formed’, Herbert Read wrote in his essay Towards a Film Aesthetic (helpfully reprinted in The Cinema 1951: Penguin Books; 2s. 6d.); ‘and to theorise about something which is not yet fully in being may seem the height of pedantic indiscretion.’ Without fixed principles, tradition or terms of reference, critics, like other members of the film body, are still making up the rules of their job as they go along doing it; and among them the Christian critic is a late starter. Conscientious Catholics for too many years have passed the cinema by, neglecting, either from fear of its evil or scorn of its stupidity, to learn the alphabet of the language of moving pictures.

Pope Pius XI saw the folly and danger of this attitude already in 1936. But the Catholic community responded slowly to the challenge of his encyclical on films, Vigilanti Cura. Only now is it possible to discern even the rough outlines of a body of Catholic film criticism. Last April, Christian film critics from all parts of the world gathered in Lucerne for a study conference arranged by the O.C.I.C. (Office Catholique Internationale du Cinéma). I keenly regret having been prevented at the last moment by illness from being present; for this was a first concerted attempt to define the principles and functions of Christian film criticism.