The Lord does not look at the things people look at. People look at the outward appearance, but the Lord looks at the heart. (1 Samuel 16: 7
I have always been fascinated by film. Certainly the spectacle of celluloid is exhilarating, and there would be few of us in the Western world who could claim to be ambivalent about the wonder of cinema. But my interest went beyond spectatorship. I discovered cameras at an early age, and spent countless hours in darkrooms and editing suites: writing, filming, editing and making films. As a writer, film seemed to take the written word to another level, and despite the limitations and cost of early production processes, I always found a way to borrow cameras, buy prohibitively expensive reels of film, or coerce friends to play a role in one of my amateur movies.
While I loved the process of creating a world and then capturing it on film, I preferred the post-production process. First there was the exquisite wait as a reel of film was sent out for developing, a process that could take as long as a month depending on the volume of work at the local camera shop. Then there was the screening of the raw footage, often shot out of sequence. My favourite part was assembling the strips of film into an order that told the tale. In my early university days, this could mean hanging thousands of numbered strips of 8- or 16-millimeter film around my room, and then agonizingly reassembling them, hand splicing them with tape until the movie was complete. Once, after meticulously assembling a movie over a two-week period, I watched in horror as the rickety university projector devoured my only copy in less time than it took me to cross the room and switch it off. Such were the joys, and pains, of film in the pre-digital age.
Later, as an academic, I began to work with the metaphor of film. One of my early books played with the concept of persistence of vision, a now debunked theory of how light was said to ‘burn’ an image onto the retina long enough for the next image to replace it, thereby ensuring the effect of motion in the mind’s eye. I worked with Aboriginal communities in Australia for whom film had once been an invasive machine said to steal the soul; and with modern Indigenous filmmakers who re-appropriated film technologies to counter the harmful clichés that cinema had created around First Nations cultures. Film could be pabulum, or it could be life changing.
Recently, I have been thinking of film in the context of faith. On the one hand, it is true that the Bible has been the direct source of seemingly countless movies. Faith-inspired works add up to an even greater number. But film, too, as a technology, can be understood as a metaphor for faith itself. In film, like faith, we can understand the process of perception, of capturing an image and rendering it into meaning. An image, like faith, might emerge from a dark room, and develop before our eyes, from nothing into something. Or it might emerge full of spectacle and light, then be edited through our faith life, made sense of, so that the enormity of a divine truth is somehow made comprehensible. But a great film, like faith itself, is always greatest when it shines a light on an inner truth. A film, like faith, can be all spectacle and no substance, or it can be deep and layered, open to continuous understanding. In that sense, true faith is always more than meets the eye.
