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Lessons from Holy Hip Hop

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The Purpose of Film Art

artistic literature aids one’s memory to make the comprehension of a doctrine* a permanent acquisition

*a truth of Scripture

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David Puttnam: Hollywood’s Role in Shaping Values

In this two part interview with Bill Moyers, titled “Hollywood’s Role in Shaping Values”, Producer David Puttnam (Chariots of Fire, The Killing Fields) says:

Filmmakers are selling themselves short by making trivial films.

Puttnam’s contention is that films have an incredible power to influence how we live our lives.

My diet of American cinema formed what might be called my ethical understanding of the world (The Search, The Best Years of Our Lives, Inherit the Wind, On the Waterfront)… It was from films like this that just about every tenet by which I’ve tried to live my life somehow evolved.

Conversations at the American Film Institute with the Great Moviemakers: The Next Generation

He says filmmakers need to acknowledge and embrace that reality and make films that positively affect society.

There’s an underlying poverty of ambition. I’ve never accepted that there’s any dichotomy at all between entertaining you and also dealing with an issue. And I think it’s the job of the responsible filmmaker, or the good filmmaker (forget responsible) to deal in both. When I’m teaching I have this expression I use all the time. There are AND movies and there are OR movies. A filmmaker’s responsibility is to make an AND movie. That’s to say a film that is entertaining and informing, and has intrinsic values, values which are ongoing in society which people can gather around and defend. An OR movie is a movie that, on day one, decides it wishes to exploit whatever is fashionable about the audience at that moment and doesn’t wish to bother itself with injecting any other values whatsoever.

Puttnam argues this balance is found by telling stories that resonate with the hearts of audiences. A Chinese audience could understand what was happening in Chariots of Fire even without subtitles, and thereby it entertained and informed them.

What’s wonderful about cinema is that it’s a truly international medium and if you can make that case in a movie – my experience as I’ve traveled the world with the films I’ve produced is – you get the same echoes. People respond in the same way to the same fine echoes of themselves they see on screen.

But Moyers points out the fundamental problem with Puttnam’s argument: that doesn’t tell us which values to promote.

Rambo appeals to a lot of people, millions of people, for many of the same reasons. Here’s a man, an individual on a mission of patriotism for his country, driven by deep, abiding affection for his brothers in arms, for his country, his cause, risking his life, going into the dark forrest, as the mythologists would say. Wrestling with demons, adversaries. Coming back having accomplished the will of the individual against the hordes out there. Now what’s the difference between the Rambo of that image and the Jesuit priest in The Mission?

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What has to be acknowledged is that virtue is universal because we are created in the image of God, but so is sin, because we are fallen, marred image bearers. Author Grant Horner explains:

God made us in His image; we make movies in ours… Film is the most powerful image of itself that humanity has ever produced. No one could deny that books, art, music, politics, social consciousness, and so forth are significant, but film is the one “cultural location” where all of these other categories may meet and have a discussion… Film has become a significant theater displaying man’s nature – in both its glory and its shame.

Meaning at the Movies

Puttnam’s desire is to see films propagate what ought to be. But you can’t do that by appealing to what is. You can’t get an ought from an is. The only way films can have the kind of impact Puttnam wants them to have is if they are rooted in the Word of God – our only source for what ought to be. And a proper understanding of the Word of God prevents us from looking to ourselves for hope. Puttnam argues:

The effect of that drip, drip, drip daily diet of views and ideas that adhere to what’s best in society. That has an effect. Not one movie. Not one [newspaper] article. But just the fact that all of us buckle down and try and do better and be better.

This will never accomplish what Puttnam wants it to because society is fallen and in need of a Redeemer, not better bootstraps. “Something more is wanted than merely to din into men’s ears what they ought to be, and what they ought to do. Something is wanted more effectually to renovate the heart and move the springs of action. The water is nought, and if you make it flow it is bitter. You want an ingredient to be cast into it that will heal its poison springs, and make them sweet and clear.”

With this in mind, consider these three closing points from Puttnam:

1. “Every single movie has within it an element of propaganda. And they walk away with either benign or malign propaganda.”
2. “I don’t think it is the role of the businessman to capitulate to the artist any more than it is the role of the artist or the creator to capitulate to the businessman.”
3. “You make a passionate and committed film, and you do it well, and the audience will always turn up. I’ve never had the audience let me down. I’ve never made a fine film, as a producer, and had the audience not turn up.”

The Story Behind Epic Failures

Last September, David Denby penned a great essay titled Has Hollywood Murdered the Movies? Denby’s observations centered around the success of mindless movies like The Avengers:

EARLIER THIS YEAR, The Avengers, which pulled together into one movie all the familiar Marvel Comics characters from earlier pictures—Captain America, Thor, Iron Man, and so on—achieved a worldwide box-office gross within a couple of months of about $1.5 billion. That extraordinary figure represented a triumph of craft and cynical marketing: the movie, which cost $220 million to make, was mildly entertaining for a while (self-mockery was built into it), but then it degenerated into a digital slam, an endless battle of exacerbated pixels, most of the fighting set in the airless digital spaces of a digital city. Only a few critics saw anything bizarre or inane about so vast a display of technology devoted to so little. American commercial movies are now dominated by the instantaneous monumental, the senseless repetition of movies washing in on a mighty roar of publicity and washing out in a waste of semi-indifference a few weeks later. The Green Hornet? The Green Lantern? Did I actually see both of them? The Avengers will quickly be effaced by an even bigger movie of the same type.

His concern is that this trend changes the nature of cinema: from drama to mere spectacle.

The oversized weightlessness leaves one numbed, defeated. Surely rage would seem an excessive response to movies so enormously trivial. Yet the overall trend is enraging. Fantasy is moving into all kinds of adventure and romantic movies; time travel has become a commonplace. At this point the fantastic is chasing human temperament and destiny—what we used to call drama—from the movies. The merely human has been transcended. And if the illusion of physical reality is unstable, the emotional framework of movies has changed, too, and for the worse. In time—a very short time—the fantastic, not the illusion of reality, may become the default mode of cinema.

And this trend is amplified by the influence of commercials and music videos, neither of which rely upon drama:

Film, a photographic and digital medium, is perhaps more vulnerable than any of the other arts to the post-modernist habits of recycling and quotation. Imitation, pastiche, and collage have become dominant strategies, and there is an excruciating paradox in this development: two of the sprightly media forms derived from movies—commercials and music videos—began to dominate movies. The art experienced a case of blowback.

As everyone knows, we can read an image much more quickly than anyone thought possible forty years ago, and in recent years many commercials have been cut faster and faster. The film-makers know that we are not so much receiving information as getting a visual impression, a mood, a desire. A truly hip commercial has no obvious connection to the product being sold, though selling is still its job. What, then, is being sold at a big movie that is cut the same way? The experience of going to the movie itself, the sensation of being rushed, dizzied, overwhelmed by the images. Michael Bay wasn’t interested in what happened at Pearl Harbor. He was interested in his whizzing fantasia of the event. Nothing important happens in The Avengers. As in half of these big movies, the world is about to end because of some invading force; but the world is always about to end in digital spectacles, and when everything is at stake, nothing is at stake. The larger the movie, the more “content” becomes incidental, even disposable.

…The results are there to see. At the risk of obviousness: techniques that hold your eye in a commercial or video are not suited to telling stories or building dramatic tension. In a full-length movie, images conceived that way begin to cancel each other out or just slip off the screen;

Denby notes the progression of the film medium and how it came to rely upon story:

A long time ago, at a university far away, I taught film, and I did what many teachers have no doubt done before and since: I tried to develop film aesthetics for the students as a historical progression toward narrative. After all, many of the first movies in the 1890s were not stories at all, but just views of things—a train coming into a station, a wave breaking toward the camera. These visual astonishments caused the audience to stare open-mouthed or duck under the seats for cover (or so the legend says, preserved recently in Scorsese’s Hugo). I wanted my students to be astonished, too—to enjoy the development of film technique as a triumph of artistic and technical consciousness. I worked in straight chronological order, moving from those early “views” through Edwin S. Porter’s 1903 experiments in linear sequencing in films such as Life of an American Fireman and The Great Train Robbery and then on through D.W. Griffith’s consolidation a few years later of an actual syntax—long and medium shots, close-ups, flashbacks, parallel editing, and the like…

At the beginning, after the views of trains and oceans, movies offered burlesque skits or excerpts from theatrical events, but still no stories. A completed movie was often just a single, fixed, long-lasting shot. It is likely, as David Bordwell, Janet Staiger, and Kristin Thompson explained in The Classical Hollywood Cinema, that narrative emerged less from the inherent nature of film than from the influence of older forms—novels and short stories and plays. And also from pressure to create work of greater power to attract more and more customers.

If creating fictions is not encoded in the DNA of film, then what is happening now has a kind of grisly logic to it. As the narrative and dramatic powers of movies fall into abeyance, and many big movies turn into sheer spectacle, with only a notional pass at plot or characterization, we are returning with much greater power to capers and larks that were originally performed in innocence.

His observations are nothing new. Though they may have greater urgency today, the same concern was voiced by Producer David Puttnam (Chariots of Fire, The Killing Fields) for years:
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Sadly, however, over the past few years filmmakers have failed to tap the real power and influence of cinema. Many have failed even to acknowledge the awesome responsibilities their job entails. There is an underlying pervasive poverty of ambition amongst too many people in this industry. Simply claiming to be a purveyor of entertainment just seems profoundly dishonest to me. Filmmakers have to decide for themselves what kind of society they want to be a part of, and then promote that society through their work rather than take advantage of society’s weaknesses. But film is actually regressing back to the era of the fairground spectacle, when all audiences demanded was the thrill of standing in front of the Lumiere brothers’ screen as a train was rushing towards it.

Conversations at the American Film Institute with the Great Moviemakers: The Next Generation

Denby continues:

THESE OBSERVATIONS annoy many people, including some of the smartest people I know, particularly men in their late forties and younger, who have grown up with pop culture dominated by the conglomerates and don’t know anything else…  If I say that the huge budgets and profits are mucking up movie aesthetics, changing the audience, burning away other movies, they look at me with a slight smile and say something like this: “There’s a market for this stuff. People are going. Their needs are being satisfied. If they didn’t like these movies, they wouldn’t go.” But who knows if needs are being satisfied? The audience goes because the movies are there, not because anyone necessarily loves them…

But the trouble is real, and it has been growing for more than twenty-five years. By now there is a wearying, numbing, infuriating sameness to the cycle of American releases year after year. Much of the time, adults cannot find anything to see. And that reason alone is enough to make us realize that American movies are in a terrible crisis, which is not going to end soon.

Enter John C. Kwasny’s recent piece at Reel Thinking called The Story Behind the Epic Summer Blockbuster Failures. Summer 2013 has has disrupted the escalation of epic blockbusters Denby verbosely lamented. In contrast to The Avengers, this summer’s movies have largely been failures. Some has suggested market saturation and CGI burnout as possible reasons why, but Kwasny says these are not the real reasons:

Now these are very good explanations to the epic failure of summer 2013.  But I would like to suggest that much bigger than these reasons is the fact that so many of these films tell incredibly lousy STORIES!”

…Hollywood, as with most of our American institutions, seems to want us just to disengage our brains and sit back and be entertained by cosmic destruction, overpaid actors, and a joke or two thrown in for good measure.

So I take it as good news that these movies are failing.  Maybe we are actually longing to be told a good story.

Human beings, created in the image of God, though drawn to distraction, will ultimately desire meaning over spectacle. And therefore Christians have an important role to play in the production of culture (“the attempt to create a system that allows us to live in peace, in pleasure, and with a sense of meaning, a feeling of fulfillment; the web of ways we have of both looking at the world and living in the world” –Horner):

Christians, with our minds being renewed each day, should want stories that will make us truly think and feel in God-honoring ways.  Even non-believers, made in the image of God, really desire to be told a story that will enliven the heart and mind rather than continue to deaden them.  Ultimately, our true longing is for the greatest story ever told–the grand story of redemption in Jesus Christ!

And Kwasny’s final conclusion hits the nail on the head:

As much as we’re all probably getting tired of looking forward to big blockbuster movies only to be disappointed, there is really a much bigger problem out there.  It’s one thing for Hollywood to lose its ability to tell a good story; but the real worry is that Christians aren’t much better.  No, I’m not referring to the so-called Christian movie industry, but rather the main venues of our “storytelling”– the pulpit and the Christian Education classroom.  We too can engage in a whole lot of fluff, joke telling, and entertaining production that moves us away from the amazing stories of Scripture.  Instead of being passionate about the Word and becoming more skilled in the art of communicating it to the world, we can settle for lightweight sermons and Bible lessons that leave people empty.  Our prayer should be that a renewal of quality storytelling take place in our churches first, where hungry hearts and minds can engage with life-giving truth.  Then, maybe some gifted writers will once again give us stories in film that will encourage and engage us!

Self-Importance

“Lights, Camera, Action” by Catherine Hunt

We live in the age of media. People don’t read books anymore, they watch TV and movies. Preachers are stuck in the past. What the church needs is a new generation of Christians willing to engage the culture in a new way. What the church needs is film.

This is what you will hear repeated frequently by Christians involved in filmmaking. Many see themselves as playing a very important, in fact crucial role in the church. But the truth is that we need to be on guard against the ever present enemy: pride. Walt Chantry explains:

Self-importance has a way of creeping into our hearts. Once there, it secretly influences every thought, even our spiritual desires and prayers.

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Self-Importance: An Unbiblical Worldview

My desire to make films is not born out of a belief that the church has failed its mission. Quite the contrary. I was saved through the faithful preaching of God’s Word. Rather, my motivation stems from 1 Corinthians 10:31 “So, whether you eat or drink, or whatever you do, do all to the glory of God.” If I am going to eat and drink, I am going to do so to the glory of God. If I am going to make films, I am going to do so to the glory of God (Lord willing).

Tetelestai

“It is finished” But unlike the finished work of Christ, I’m only done with the first draft of Useless… And there’s a lot more work to do. But this lifts a big weight off my shoulders.

Thank you for your prayers over the last month. They were truly answered. I’ve been praying for The Lord to be glorified throughout this process. One of the ways he answers that is to remind me that I can’t do this work of myself, but only through Him.

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Tags | prayer, redemption, Screenwriting, Useless

Tragic Worship

The problem with much Christian worship in the contemporary world, Catholic and Protestant alike, is not that it is too entertaining but that it is not entertaining enough. Worship characterized by upbeat rock music, stand-up comedy, beautiful people taking center stage, and a certain amount of Hallmark Channel sentimentality neglects one classic form of entertainment, the one that tells us, to quote the Book of Common Prayer, that “in the midst of life we are in death.”

…Christian worship should immerse people in the reality of the tragedy of the human fall and of all subsequent human life. It should provide us with a language that allows us to praise the God of resurrection while lamenting the suffering and agony that is our lot in a world alienated from its creator, and it should thereby sharpen our longing for the only answer to the one great challenge we must all face sooner or later.

…Yet tragedy is a vital part of entertainment. Aristotle in his Poetics famously argued for the personal and social benefits of tragic drama. The audience, swept up into the vertiginous moral crises, the magnificent flaws, and the catastrophic falls of the heroes, enjoyed the experience of catharsis—running the gamut of relevant emotions—without being agents in the events depicted on the stage. They left the theater cleansed by the experience and knowing more deeply what it means to be human. They were wiser, more thoughtful, and better prepared to face the reality of their own lives.

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It is therefore an irony of the most perverse kind that churches have become places where Pascalian distraction and a notion of entertainment that eschews the tragic seem to dominate just as comprehensively as they do in the wider world. I am sure that the separation of church buildings from graveyards was not the intentional start of this process, but it certainly helped to lessen the presence of death. The present generation does not have the inconvenience of passing by the graves of loved ones as it gathers for worship. Nowadays, death has all but vanished from the inside of churches as well.

–Carl Trueman

Good Christian. Good Artist

The phrase “good Christian art” is redundant. Good Christian art is simply good art – art that explores and expresses our deepest and truest humanity, art that speaks to us, prods us, inspires us. This does not demean art that is created with deliberate theological themes or purposes. It cialis india online midwayfire.com is also used for fun purpose. Features and Benefits One other advantage that pills made from potent herbal extracts like horny goat weed, Ginkgo Biloba, Avena Sativa, Myrtus viagra tadalafil Caryophyllus, Siberian Ginseng, Saw Palmetto and muirapauma bark extract. This gets dry and fosters inflammations with the protective mucus membranes within tadalafil buy in usa your intestines… Almost every man takes this problem as the subject of humiliation and embarrassment so they keep this problem undiagnosed by the browse that link levitra 40 mg healthcare provider. On the contrary, theological reflection is part of what it means to be human… If you want to glorify God with your work, I don’t recommend trying to be a “Christian artist.” Instead, be a good Christian. And be a good artist.

–Michael Gungor

A Source Critic Looks at Downton Abbey

Here is a fun satire of source criticism. Biblical source criticism is the theory that the Bible is a collection of multiple different stories from different time periods that have been edited into a single collection and changed to fit (for example, the multiple times that Abraham lies to foreigners about his wife must mean the stories came from different sources and have been heavily edited). Anyways, enjoy:

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(For a good summary and critique of source theory, take a look at A Biblical History of Israel)

Why Are Christian Movies So Awful?

Just read an article at Salon.com called Why Are Christian Movies So Awful? It’s a review of the new movie Soul Surfer, which is based on the true story of a young Christian surfer who lost her arm, but was gutted of any theology by the producers.

One line from the review stuck out to me:

At the risk of offending many people in many different directions, Christian cinema reminds me of gay cinema. If, that is, gay cinema were permanently stuck in 1986, with a self-ghettoizing mandate to present positive role models for youth and tell an anodyne but uplifting story that sends a message of hope. Read more…