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By Clair McPherson The first truly commercial motion picture was The Great Train Robbery (E. Porter, 1903), which depicted in about ten minutes exactly what its title promised, and ended with a famous “special effect” — a mustachioed villain turns to the camera in close-up and fires his pistol straight at us, the audience. Some early members of the latter, not yet used to the cinema, actually shouted in terror.

It was a fitting beginning for the commercial movie. It introduced a genre, the Western, that would last; it offered a visual stunt, precursor of 21st-century computer-generated mayhem; and its subject was violent. Imagine the history of film without violence, and you remove perhaps nine-tenths of that history. Movies and violence are closely allied.

Now imagine the Bible with all its violence removed. Same effect: violence looms large in Scripture, from start (Abraham’s tribal warfare) to finish (Armageddon). The Judeo- Christian Scriptures are a violent collection, by anyone’s standards and regardless how anyone feels about the subject.

It is therefore hardly surprising that, often, enterprising filmmakers have made Biblical “epics” that exploit Scriptural violence. Common sense tells us that Samson and the Philistines or the Crucifixion have more cinematic potential than, say, Jesus offering the Parable of the Sower.

VIOLENCE AND RELIGION SELL

More interesting are films that actually explore the relationship between religion and violence. After all, that relationship is paradoxical: all of the global faiths honor, at least on some level, nonviolence. All religions in some way condemn warfare and extol peace. Yet all of them have also been used as pretexts for war; the Abrahamic faiths — Judaism, Christianity, and Islam — have been especially inclined in this direction. The paradox is vivid given the prophets and much of the substance of the Koran. But it is perhaps most acute in the case of Christianity, which holds the Sermon on the Mount — eminently pacifist — close to its ethical core.

In the Middle Ages, Pope Urban II and Bernard of Clairvaux challenged the Christians of Europe to free the Holy Land from the Islamic Seljuk Turks. Thus began a century of adventurism, racism, prejudice, exploitation, deceit, and prevailing chaos — all under the Sign of the Cross. In the history of religion and violence, there has probably been no period when the one was so directly responsible for the other. And in no other period of its history has Christianity produced such colorful, fascinating, bloody source material for films.

In 1935, the original huckster of sex and violence in the name of God, Cecil B. DeMille, producedThe Crusades. This is the story of King Richard the Lionhearted, one of the three great monarchs who recklessly undertook the Third Crusade. The film features some fine acting, some famous historical weirdness (the beautiful Loretta Young as the Princess of Navarre urges Richard on with “Richard, you gotta save Christianity! You just gotta!!”), and the usual DeMille sexual subplots. But the interesting thing is the film’s attitude that the Crusades were a Good Thing. The great Saracen general, Saladin, who was arguably the most chivalrous leader on either side by far, is portrayed as a sleazy, scheming devil whom the noble Richard — actually a notoriously selfish and unjust king — must outwit and defeat. The Crusaders are heroes, their problems those of good Christians in a fallen world.

Fifty years later, Ridley Scott directed Kingdom of Heaven (2005). At last, the Crusades are, if not quite Bad, at least Ambiguous. But interestingly, Christianity, for some reason, is played down this time. The Crusades are about honor, adventure, baser political motives — but not really about religion. The costumes, weapons, sets, personal names, and some historical details are more accurate than earlier films; the ambiguities of the Westerners are clear and Saladin is depicted as the noble man he really was. But there is something enormous missing at the center: the Christian faith at its most twisted.

So when, at the climax of the movie, the hero, a Crusading young blacksmith played by Orlando Bloom, shouts out an inspiring speech about the occupation of Jerusalem, the result is the most anachronistic thing in the movie: a modern-sounding tirade about rights and freedom and the individual. What he should have shouted about was God’s vengeful will, serving Christ by killing the Infidel. The sort of thing St. Bernard really did shout about.

The kind of thing Bloom’s character says in fact has been the motivation for most modern warfare, justifiable and not so justifiable. Religion has receded as the major cause; soldiers are often sustained by faith, but it is the national, not the religious, imperative that sends people off to war. For the truly ambiguous relationship between faith and violence, we must look at another historical moment in Christianity.

Joan of Arc was a 15th-century French peasant girl who shook off the domination of the English in the Hundred Years’ War, restored the French monarchy, and then, in a swift reversal of fortune, died a martyr’s death. She has been the subject of poetry, art, and drama ever since; several films have inevitably been devoted to her story, including Victor Fleming’s 1948 film starring Ingrid Bergman and Luc Besson’s more recent The Messenger (1999). The contours of her life are so fascinating and heartrending, it is not surprising that virtually all of these movies have been quite good.

But the best by far, is Carl Theodore Dreyer’s The Passion of Joan of Arc (1928). This movie shows, from within the characters’ consciousness, the very real relationship between religion and violence. Dreyer does this with some of the most subtle and expressive camera work in the history of motion pictures. Joan is shown helpless and suffering yet ecstatic by filming her from high above; her judges loom like demons by filming from below; odd camera angles suggest the imbalance of reality everyone experiences; only Joan’s sole ally, a troubled young monk, is given a normal shot.

What it adds up to is an exploration of the demonic in religion. Joan’s persecutors truly believe she is the devil’s child; and the result is a murder more shocking than that of Christ, himself. Joan believes she has heard the call of God; she experiences the same kind of spiritual ecstasy the great mystics — Julian of Norwich, Hildegarde of Bingen, Meister Eckhardt — recorded. Yet the film is ambiguous: we see the face of the saint but we do not hear the voice of God. We are reminded throughout of the fact that Joan was a prayerful maiden — but she was also responsible for the deaths of hundreds. She wore the same sort of armor as King Richard the Lionhearted.

But perhaps we do hear God’s voice in Dreyer’s film. He used the art of film to deal honestly with the subject of religion and violence — a subject often exploited but almost never done justice. Dreyer accomplished that. I wish that every human being who has authoritative access to violence would watch Dreyer’s Joan of Arc. I think that might take us one small step in the direction of the real kingdom.

The Rev. Dr. Clair McPherson is a regular Trinity News contributor. He has taught spirituality, history and theology at colleges and universities for 30 years.

This article appears in the Religion and Violence issue of Trinity News.