The Conscience of the Contemporary Cinema

Extract

The major moral problems to be tackled on film - seriously tackled, not exploited for commercial or publicity expedience - are, as might be expected, problems that affront the social conscience rather than the religious. And to those who frivolously take this to be a reflection on the immorality of the cinema, it might be useful to consider whether it is not rather a reflection on the lack of real charity among the conventionally religious. These major moral problems can be, I think, most easily explored under a few broad headings, though these are necessarily fluid and some films could as easily fit under any of three and some, perhaps, fit uneasily under any. I would suggest then, that it is convenient to survey them under the headings of war, justice, society and the individual, and what one might almost call ‘conscience and religion’ or perhaps more accurately ‘conscience and God’. There is even, I think, a faint embryonic shaping of a category which might almost be called ‘conscience and sex’, though most of the films I myself would put here could probably be just as well placed under the category of the ‘individual’, because the situation explored is nearly always conveyed in terms of limited personal relationships rather than in wider implications of the moral law as it is understood by classical theologians.

War. The theme of war in the cinema is, roughly speaking, treated in two quite different ways and it is important to realize this because it is, after all, one of the most constantly recurrent themes in the film output of nearly every nation that played an active part in the last war.