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The Icon in Motion
THE THEOLOGY OF
THE ICON AND THE MEDIUM OF
CINEMA
Theology of the Icon:
HDS 2152
Professor Nicholas Constas
May 24, 1999
Curtis Chang
50 Sawyer Ave. – Tufts
University
Medford, MA 02155
617-625-2257
cchang@emerald.tufts.edu
Introduction
Cheng sat transfixed by the image of the crucifixion. On the walls
of the dimly lit room hung numerous icons, but Cheng could not tear her
eyes from the image illumined before her. The face of the suffering Christ
was especially gripping such that Cheng’s own eyes filled with tears. For
almost two years, Cheng had been exploring Christianity but had always
stopped short of conversion; she resisted identifying herself with Christ
because of her memories of her cruel grandfather, a man who had called
himself a Christian but had abused her terribly for years. Now as she
contemplated the image in the flickering light, she felt she was looking at
a scene that encompassed all her suffering and yet also at a face that
radiated forgiveness. She later would report, “In a moment, I knew I could
forgive my grandfather and I did right then and there.” And that night,
for the first time, she declared her identification with Christ publicly.
In their practice of icons, Christians in the Orthodox tradition have
long reported transformational encounters similar to this true account of a
student in my campus ministry. However, Cheng sat not in a Greek Orthodox
nave with other parishioners but in the recreational room of a camp with
other students who, like her, were “checking out” Christianity. And she
was not staring at any of the icons hanging on the wall (hung by the
Protestant camp director to “decorate” the room), but at a screen playing
the closing scenes of Franco Zeffirelli’s movie, Jesus of Nazareth.
While I certainly rejoiced at the news of Cheng’s conversion, I have
been haunted by the scene of her and the others sitting transfixed before
the flickering screen, while the faces of the icons – visages backed by
centuries of theological tradition and reflection – stare on mutely.
An Overview of the Literature
The need for theological critique and reflection of cinema is
pressing. In this past century, cinema has undeniably supplanted painting
as the dominant supplier of images in our world. It would be difficult to
come up with another historical example of a media revolution that took
place so rapidly and completely (although the Internet may one day vie for
the title). As I write this, a large section of American society
eagerly awaits the date, May 19, 1999, for the next installation of the
Star Wars series. The Wall Street Journal estimates that on that day over
2 million American workers will skip work (even more millions of students
will skip school) to line up at movie theatres across the country. The
return of the Star Wars’ images to public display after their absence of
over twenty years has become an unofficial national holiday. It seems
that we are witnessing the secular version of the Feast of the Restoration
of the Holy Icons, the ninth century celebration of the return of icons to
the Orthodox Church after the Iconoclastic Period.
Yet serious theological reflection on this obviously powerful medium
has been surprisingly lacking. No theologian has ever produced a widely
acknowledged and definitive treatment on the medium of cinema. The
majority of theological forays into cinema that do exist simply analyze the
themes and plots of various movies. Even Margaret Miles, who elsewhere
in books like Image as Insight (1985) has developed a theological
perspective on visual understanding, restricts her main treatment of
American cinema, Seeing and Believing (1996), to the values reflected in
various popular films. In all these works, film is treated not as a
medium but as any other reflection of contemporary culture. Such attempts
fail to analyze exactly what makes cinema what it is. The theological
analysis of these works could be simply transposed to other media like
painting, music or literature. Theology has yet to grapple with the unique
dimensions of the medium of cinema.
Miles’ Seeing and Believing reveals another shortcoming in Christian
theological discourse about cinema: a rather short sighted choice of the
main theological conversation partners. For example, she chooses to
correlate various movies with rather lengthy discussions of specific
liberation and feminist theologians. In sharp contrast, she makes only a
passing and generalized reference to the theology of the icon. Other
writers share this tendency to bring the cinematic medium into conversation
only with relatively contemporary theologians like Martin Heidigger, Harvey
Cox or Paul Tillich. Yet the theology of the icon deals far more
explicitly with images than Heidigger, Cox, or any liberation and feminist
theologian ever did. Furthermore, iconography enjoys a far more ancient
intellectual tradition and a far more continuous religious practice than
modern Protestant liberals like Tillich do. The Orthodox tradition and
practice of icons have stood the test of numerous challenges over the
centuries. It seems to me that when faced with a challenge like a media
revolution, the church especially needs to correspond with its oldest
thinkers.
From their end, theologians of the icon must bear a share of
responsibility for their absence from theological discourse about cinema.
During the century of cinema’s ascendancy, they have shown little to no
interest in exploring the new medium. This may be due to the historical
context of the Greek and Russian Orthodox traditions during this century.
Both have been forced into culturally defensive postures: the former in
regard to Islam and the latter in response to Communism. Whatever the
reason, even an Orthodox theologian as conversant with modernity as Paul
Evdokimov will hint that other media like architecture or Mozart’s music
can serve some of the same functions as a traditional icon, but will
nevertheless fail to deal with cinema at any length. Interestingly (and
perhaps sadly) the most extensive attempt to connect the theology of the
icon to the actual medium of cinema is found in a few pages from Jacques
Ellul’s The Humiliation of the Word (1985) where Ellul essentially
reintroduces arguments first advanced by iconoclasm.
An Orthodox theologian may object that his absence from discussions
of cinema is no failure but a moral necessity. Contemporary cinema, he
might argue, is filled with decadent images of sex and violence. What does
the holy icon have to do with the pagan movie? What does Byzantium have to
do with Hollywood? While such a response is understandable, it begs a
question that must be asked: is cinema fated to such decadent paganism by
its very nature as a medium and if so, why? Furthermore, to reject cinema
because of how nonbelievers use the medium seems to contradict the
iconographic tradition itself. In the iconoclastic debates of the eighth
century, defenders of the icon like Patriarch Nikephoros I repeatedly
argued that the use of images was validated by the practices of the early
church. Scholars like Paul Corby Finney and Sister Charles Murray have
persuasively demonstrated that the early church never invented a “pure”
Christian art form, but rather freely appropriated the artistic practices
of pagan Rome. Other scholars are exploring the likelihood that the
Byzantine icon itself partially descended from Roman Fayum funerary
portraits, an art form rooted in the Isis cult and various practices with
corpses that Christians undoubtedly would have found repellent. There
seems every reason at least to hope that the church today can similarly
redeem the cult and practices of Hollywood.
The realization of this hope, in my opinion, lies in awakening a
conversation between the painted icon and the flickering screen. Since to
the best of my knowledge there does not exist any major work that attempts
this conversation, this paper can only put forth some tentative first
exchanges. I seek to do so by focusing on the feature that most
distinguishes cinema from other visual media: motion.
Motion has named the medium from its conception. Thomas Edison
christened his first movie camera “the Kinetograph,” drawing on kinein,
Greek for “to move.” The French influence over the early commercial
ventures of this new medium replaced the Greek “k” with the French “c,”
producing the English term “cinema.” If “iconography” refers to “the
inscribing of an image,” then “cinematography” refers to the “inscribing of
movement.” The more popular term “movie,” of course, stands for “motion
picture;” the immediate and wide adoption of this term demonstrates how
people quickly grasped the defining feature of this new medium.
This paper will explore the potential conversation between the
theology of the icon and the medium of cinema by examining three particular
types of motion: time, the viewer, and the subject. I hope to foster a two
way-dialogue that seeks mutual correspondences, insights, and critiques. I
especially hope to show that the theology of the icon suggests how cinema
can serve as a modern icon.
Time
In the history of cinema, the medium almost immediately had to ask
itself how it would present chronological motion. The two main choices
were presented by the French pioneers of cinema at the turn of the century,
the Lumière brothers and Georges Méliès. Auguste and Louis Lumière (the
first to charge admission to audiences for their movies) were photographers
before discovering this new medium. Consequently their films simply
reproduced everyday events such as workers walking out of a factory or a
train leaving a station. For the audience, the progression of time
depicted in the theater matched the flow of time outside the theater. In
contrast, Méliès came to cinema from his previous career as a stage
magician. And Méliès immediately seized the new medium’s ability to change
the audience’s perceptions of reality, especially of time. His films, the
most famous being Voyage to the Moon (1902) and The Kingdom of the Fairies
(1903), took the audience backwards and forwards into all sorts of
different times.
While the approach to time utilized by the Lumières continues to
influence cinema (especially in the cinema verite genre), Méliès’ approach
has come to dominate the medium. This was inevitable given that the power
of film so much stems from how it can lift audiences temporarily out of
their normal experience of time. Not surprisingly, the titles of many of
Méliès’ original films featured the words, “dream” or “nightmare.”
This evokation of dream is also featured in the writings of the
Russian theologian of the icon, Pavel Florensky. Florensky describes the
encounter with the icon as a visual encounter with the dream realm:
And as we begin to awaken, we begin to transpose these dream
images into daylight consciousness where they can unfold in
the temporal sequence of our visible world. But, taken in
themselves, these dream images have a unique, incomparable
time, a time that cannot be measured in the terms of the
visible world, a “transcendental” time.
A preeminent physicist in the Soviet Union before taking on the priestly
vows, Florensky refers to “the principle of relativity, that in different
dimensions there is different time and it moves in different speeds and
different measures.” He especially emphasizes the instantaneous reversal
of time in the dream image: “Few have sufficiently considered, however, the
infinite speed of the dream-time, the time that turns inside out, the time
that flows backward.”
This dreamlike “backward flow” of time plays a prominent role in the
theological tradition of the icon. In the Iconoclastic controversy, John
of Damascus defended the icon as a necessary link to Christ back across the
divide of time: “Nor can man have immediate knowledge of things which are
distant from each other or separated by place, because he himself is
circumscribed by place and time. Therefore the image was devised that he
might advance in knowledge… .” This “advance in knowledge” connects
an individual to the historic Christ since we “record with images the
saving passion and miracles of Christ our God” and pass the knowledge of
the incarnation to subsequent generations.
Cinema of course can also bring the past to life by simply visually
staging a scene from a different time period, like the way Zeffirelli
depicted the historical crucifixion with realistic costuming and props.
Such staging falls under the rubric of mise en scene, one of the two main
tools of the cinematic medium. Mise en scene, or “putting in the scene,”
simply refers to the choices about what to place on the set: how actors,
costumes, background, camera perspective, etc. are arranged. It neatly
parallels how any painter would choose to compose her painting. But the
other main tool of the cinematic medium defies an immediately apparent
comparison to the static visual arts. It is termed montage and it refers
to the post-production editing process whereby all the variously staged
scenes are rearranged into a single movie. In a movie, a very simple
montage like a “jump cut flashback” can depict – at least at the aesthetic
level – what Florensky termed the “wholly instantaneous” reversal of time.
In the past hundred years of cinema, far more complex, varied and powerful
montage moves have evolved. It is in the wealth of choices available in
montage that gives cinema its powerful ability to rearrange time and imbue
the experience with meaning.
While montage initially seems to be utterly unique to cinema, it
actually shares parallels with icons, at least more so than with most other
visual arts. As a liturgical object and not just as an individual work of
art, an icon is almost always meant to be viewed in relation to other
icons. A church arrages each freshly painted icon into a larger viewing
experience, much the way a film in post production edits recently filmed
scenes. The most obvious examples of “edited” icons are found in
“bilateral” icons where different scenes from different time periods are
physically hinged together. But other dual arrangements within a church – like the placement of a scene of Mary holding the baby Jesus near another
of her holding the limp corpse of Christ – imbue both icons with an added
power.
In fact, principles of montage may even help to explain some of the
ways icons are arranged. In the 1920s, the Russian film theorist V.I.
Pudovkin developed a theory of montage called “relational editing,” built
around five basic types of montage: contrast, parallelism, symbolism,
simultaneity, and leit-motif. A fascinating topic for future inquiry
would be to examine how various icon placements fit into his theory.
Perhaps an even more interesting question would be whether Pudovkin’s
understanding was influenced by the Russian Orthodox icon tradition. It is
likely that this visual tradition which so pervaded Russian society would
have shaped the earliest Russian practitioners of cinema.
Indeed, it is striking how many of the earliest and most influential
theorists of film montage were Russian. Perhaps the most classic theory is
the one also proposed in the 1920’s by another Russian, Sergei Eisenstein.
In its simplest form, Eisenstein’s theory states that scene A should be
placed next to scene B only in order to create a transcendent new meaning
C. An extended and brilliant practice of this theory is found in
Francis Ford Coppola’s The Godfather, Part II (1974) where the entire movie
repeatedly jumps scenes across a 40 year divide, the end product being a
depth of meaning that transcends a simple recounting of each time period in
strict chronological fashion.
Eisenstein’s theory suggestively points to that creative tension
about time that theologians of the icon struggle to communicate. The time
of the icon is clearly not just the present. As mentioned, one of the
icon’s crucial movements of time is to connect the viewer to the past. Yet
the time of the icon is also not just the past. As Archimandrite Vasileos
emphasizes, the icon’s relationship to the past is far more than one of
“recollection.” To put it in cinematic terms, Vasileos’ argues that
the a truly iconic medium must have more than just mise en scène. The
aspiring iconographer must master montage, for he will inevitably fail if
he thinks “that you will come nearer to the truth about Him the more
faithfully you manage to copy the landscape of Palestine or present the
area as it was at that period.” “History is interpreted differently,”
Vasileos stresses, “the events of divine Economy are not past and closed,
but present and active.” It is as if past and present are spliced
together, creating a new divine timelessness.
This sort of spliced timelessness is what led Florensky to describe
the encounter with the icon as occurring at the boundary of two temporal
realms, the waking world and the dream world. The actual art of the icon
seeks to capture this new time that is not just present nor just past, not
just A or B, but a timeless C. In the way some iconic figures seem to
float suspended or in the way indoor events are lifted outdoors or in the
way day and night are never depicted “realistically,” the icon seeks to
elevate beyond the normal strictures of any one time.
For most Orthodox practitioners, this timeless dimension is accessed
in a prolonged contemplation of the icon, where the viewer’s own march
through time is somewhat suspended as well. And thus for most Orthodox
theologians, the editing of the modern Hollywood movie – with its rapid
cuts and flashing scenes – must seem far removed from the icon. But while
this accelerated depiction of time – montage hooked on speed – may be a
current addiction of Hollywood, it is not intrinsic to the medium itself.
Historically, the medium contains numerous methods and examples where time
is slowed dramatically or even suspended, an effect achieved precisely with
numerous editing moves. The most famous examples were created by Sergei
Eisenstein himself. In the classic “Odessa Steps” scene from The
Battleship Potemkin (1925), Eisenstein brilliantly arranged some 200 shots
(including the famous shots of the baby carriage rolling down the steps) to
create a montage that stretches out time to almost a standstill, producing
a powerful visual effect that has truly stood the test of time.
Although timelessness is important to the visual experience of the
icon, the theology of the icon also emphasizes movement towards the future.
Panayiotis Nellas describes the Orthodox understanding of time as “a
journey… from the iconic to that which truly exists.” According to
Nellas, history can be understood as the realization of this journey… it
is not only the present and the past which move and determine history but
also the future.” This “iconic journey” toward the end of history is
especially emphasized in Paul Evdokimov’s theology of the icon. For
Evdokimov, the icon is like a window to creation’s true future in Christ:
“The icon reveals to all this eschatological light of the saints, it is
therefore a ray of the Eighth Day, a witness of inaugurated
eschatology.”
Cinema seems to be ideally suited for this “iconic journey.” It
excels at presenting what is not yet visible in ordinary reality and can
only be imagined. This is why the most imaginative and visually oriented
people tend to gravitate to film as a creative outlet. But in this regard,
theologians of the icon issue a stern warning. Florensky notes that the
boundary between this world and our future is indeed a place of great
imagination – and great temptation. He cautions that at this boundary, the
artist can easily end up losing sight of the true future in God and end up
in an idolatrous condition called prelest. Prelest occurs when the artist
mistakenly projects images of the visible world on to the divine world.
His art derives from the wrong time: he seeks to raise up images of the
past or present rather than making present the true future.
This warning is particularly apt for cinema. Because the medium
offers so much power to summon images into being, one must ask: “What is
the spiritual time frame of these cinematic frames?” For instance, the
cinema of post modern France, a society which has essentially abandoned its
one time Christian horizon of hope, reflects a certain wandering and
vagueness. Without the true eschaton in sight, cinema will end up enslaved
in prelest, projecting the “spirit of the age.” When that spirit is
hopelessness or just absence of a future, as seems to be the case in
postmodernism, the screen will increasingly take on bleaker and bleaker
hues.
Thus Florensky rightly insists that the spiritual condition and
training of a visual artist – what he calls “spiritual sobriety” – is a
legitimate concern for the church. Phan summarizes how eschatology drives
a similar concern in Evdokimov’s theology:
But the icon is not simply a witness of inaugurated
eschatology, it is itself already a case of eschatological
fulfillment. This is shown, Evdokimov believes, in the very
requirements of an iconographer. To paint an icon, it is not
enough to have doctrinal orthodoxy and artistic talent, a
third condition is indispensable: ‘holiness of life, an
artistic soul purified by ascesis and prayer and coupled with
a contemplative faculty. Further, in iconography the
imagination is not given free rein, rather it is guided by
Tradition to read and contemplate the archetypes.
It seems to me, then, that if the church seriously wants to redeem the
medium of cinema, it will not ultimately resort to boycotts, influencing
censorship boards, or even long academic treatises on the themes of
Hollywood movies. While all that may have some value, the church will only
redeem cinema when it does what it has done best through the ages:
minister, teach, and disciple real people. For it will only be through the
hearts and souls of real directors, actors, and cinematographers that
cinema has a chance at becoming icon, a celluloid window to our true and
hopeful future in Christ.
Finally, I should like to point out that the visual experience of the
still icon and the motion picture are more closely related than one might
think. As one walks through an Orthodox church, the eyes pass over a
multitude of icons in which the “episodes are associated with each other
according to their meaning and inner necessity.” One looks at the
Annunciation. Then moving on, with the image of the Virgin still in the
back of one’s mind, the viewer sees the image of the Birth of Christ.
While the image of the baby lingers in memory, the eyes then turn to the
Transfiguration. And so on and so on until one’s eyes are lifted skyward
to the dome to the Pantocrator Christ sitting in the Final Judgment. For
the present viewer, the images of the past flow in to the future
seamlessly. As Christoph Schönborn put it, “The icon is a connecting link
between the Incarnation and the return.”
When we walk into a theater and stare at the images on the screen, we
are strictly speaking not looking at motion. Each cinematic image itself
does not actually move; each by itself is as still as any icon. The
experience of motion is produced by running a multitude of images through
the projector, with each image depicted a little further along in his
destined movement. In between each image, the screen is actually totally
dark; indeed, for about half the time we are “watching a movie,” we are
actually sitting there waiting for the next image. The occasionally
visible flicker testifies to this lull. But we usually perceive a seamless
motion because of an optic effect called “persistence of vision.” While
the screen is dark, the retina continues to “see” the last image.
Moreover, our eyes also anticipate the next image, further filling in the
blanks. In a movie then, we are literally caught up in a vision which
contains the past and anticipates the future. Might not this interplay of
time and optics suggest the iconic potential in cinema? Might not its
flicker emanate from waiting in this interval, in the afterglow of the
candles of the Birth of Christ – what Basil the Great called the “birthday
of humanity” – and still waiting for the completed light of that Eighth
Day?
The Viewer
Theologians of the icon repeatedly emphasize that the icon draws the
viewer to move into the depicted scene. The viewer is to enter an
imaginative and sympathetic relationship with the images of Christ and
saints. John of Damascus especially praised the affective bonding possible
for the viewer of an icon. Quoting St. Basil’s encounter with a
martyr’s icon, John exclaimed, “Would that I may be included in this
image!” Through “visible things,” John argued, the “desire to see and be
present with the saints physically” is actualized. When the viewer has
made this aesthetic move, then he will be “moved” in the emotional sense.
Gregory of Nyssa so thoroughly experienced both the aesthetic and emotional
movements involved that he declared he broke into tears every time he
contemplated an image of Abraham’s sacrifice of Isaac.
Such movement occurs in several ways. First of all, the viewer must
be trained to approach the image in the proper fashion. The spiritual and
aesthetic steps involved in true veneration must be “learned,” Vasileios
writes, before one can walk “the path which brings you to the spring of
life without end.” The Catholic medieval tradition of icons shared
this emphasis on visual training. Margaret Miles documents the “‘private
exercises in imaginative intensity and sharpness’ [that] prepared people to
engage fully the visual images that were an inseparable part of public
worship.” As with the Byzantine tradition, the goal was that “the
viewer is placed within the depicted event through the intensity of feeling
he or she shares with the human beings of the painting.”
This sort of rigorous training and participation seems to implicitly
critique video mediums. Many critics of television and film have condemned
the way viewers are lulled into a blank passivity, as wave after wave of
electronic images wash over them unthinkingly. While this critique
undoubtedly captures some truth about our current culture of “consumer
viewership,” one must be careful not to automatically extrapolate this
cultural critique to the medium itself. In his book, How to Read A Film,
film scholar James Monaco argues that the medium actually calls forth a
variety of moves on the part of the viewer. At a basic optical level, film
depends on constant eye movement. Because the receptor organs of vision
are concentrated only in a small portion of the retina (called the “fovea”)
a viewer must stare at only a very limited space in order to “see.” In
order to comprehend an image the size of a movie screen, the viewer must
move his move his focused eyes rapidly across the space. Each of these
movements, termed a “sacccade,” lasts roughly 1/20 second; interestingly
enough, this interval is almost exactly the same as the length of
“persistence of vision.” The combination of these two optical effects is
what makes the cinematic screen an inviting scene and not just an
incoherent, flashing jumble of images.
The important point Monaco makes is that the proper “saccade
patterns” (and numerous other optical moves) necessary to comprehend a film
must also be learned by the viewer. That this is mostly an unconscious
education for the majority of viewers does not make it any less of a
training. Furthermore, this training is not thoughtlessly universal as
studies show that “even the simplest visual images are interpreted
differently in different cultures.” Indeed, I suspect that the visual
training of the average Byzantine layman was also fairly unconscious and
culturally determined. And just as the Orthodox elite developed more self-
conscious teaching about icon viewing, so have modern scholars about
cinematic viewing. Finally, scholars have increasingly applied the
insights of semiotics to cinema, revealing that the best made movies
contain sophisticated “codes and syntagms” that require great attention to
properly decipher. Monaco summarizes his argument for the potential of an
active viewer of cinema:
The irony here is that we know very well that we must learn
to read before we can attempt to enjoy or understand
literature, but we tend to believe, mistakenly, that anyone
can read a film. Anyone can see a film, it’s true, even
cats. But some people have learned to comprehend visual
images – physiologically, ethnographically, and
psychologically – with far more sophistication than have
others. This evidence confirms the validity of the triangle
of perception… uniting author, work, and observer. The
observer is not simply a consumer, but an active – or
potentially active – participant in the process.
In short, viewers can be trained to engage with a movie more properly.
There at least exists the potential for the current church to disciple its
viewers of cinema much the way it has had to do with icons.
This potential demands to be at least explored because cinema
contains unprecedented power to move viewers. And much of this power does
seem to reside in the medium, able to significantly cross cultural
boundaries. Neil Anderson, a western Bible translator working among the
Folopa people of Paupua New Guinea for over twenty years, documented one
vivid example of this power. While translating the gospel of Luke,
Anderson showed the aboriginal tribe a cinematic depiction of the gospel,
using his church as the theater. He reports how the Folopa viewers
responded when the Crucifixion scene came on the screen:
A silence came over the church floor as the soldiers laid
Jesus down on the cross. He was still alive; everyone could
see that. But that silence was only the calm before the
storm. At the first hammer blow on the nail into Jesus’ hand
all the women in the church erupted into an excruciating
wail. It made the scene on the film all the more terrible.
The men, sitting on their side, tried to keep the women
quiet, but they would not stop.
‘It’s not real’ they shouted. ‘That’s not really Jesus!’ But
they were apparently not convinced. It was like Jesus was
actually dying right there before them.
Substitute an icon for the screen and a Byzantine theologian of the icon
would have applauded the women’s response as true veneration. [As a side
note, the gender differences in the response of the Folopa people
strikingly parallels Judith Herrin’s account of how Byzantine women viewed
icons with greater emotional intensity than their male counterparts. The
Folopa men’s attempts to scold the deeply moved women also eerily echo
throughout the history of the icon.]
The icon and the movie share further similarities in how both mix
display and sound to invite the viewer to participate in the image. For
instance, a large icon of the baptism of Jesus is frequently placed right
over the church’s baptismal fount; participants in the baptismal event
would look up and feel almost taken up into the One True Baptism of
humanity. Or the Annunciation may be depicted with the angel displayed on
one corner of the sanctuary and the Virgin on the opposite corner. As the
viewer steps into the intervening space with hymns of the angelic call and
Mary’s response resounding back and forth, the viewer experiences the
ancient version of a Dolby Surround Sound theater system! Some smaller
icons even come with a precise “script,” directing a specific display
location, lighting, and hymnal soundtrack. Art historian Otto Demus
reminds us of the theatrical nature of the icon experience: “The Byzantine
church itself is the ‘picture space’ of the icons… [the viewer] is bodily
enclosed in the grand icon of the church; he is surrounded by the
congregation of the saints and takes part in the events he sees.”
Historically, cinema has increasingly defined itself by this same
aesthetic. Especially in its attempt to differentiate itself from
television in the postwar era, the industry moved to wider screen formats
and more powerful sound systems to surround the viewer. The CinemaScope
format especially established itself as the standard in the 1950s;
interestingly, it was first introduced in The Robe (1953), a movie
depicting Jesus’ crucifixion.
The icon and the movie also both move the viewer by complex uses of
perspective. For instance, portraiture icons are almost always presented
in full frontality “to impress themselves upon the viewer.” But the
more interesting feature of icons is the way so many of them invert
perspective. At first glance, the icon appears to have the main features
of a “classical” perspective. The viewer is able to stand apart with
enough of the “objective” perspective to gather all the necessary
information contained in the scene. But upon further contemplation, the
viewer realizes that the scene contains numerous perspective lines, many of
them inverted such that the view only makes sense from various vantage
points within the icon. Vasileios summarizes the theological rationale
behind this aesthetic: “worldly space is transfigured; [classical]
perspective, which puts man in the position of an outside observer, no
longer exists. The believer, the pilgrim, is a guest at the Wedding. He
is inside, and sees the whole world from the inside.” The viewer is
thus enticed to enter and explore all the different spaces within the icon,
trying out different perspectives.
Cinema also moves the viewer by constantly shifting perspective.
Cinematic perspective – commonly termed “pov” for point-of-view – is
constructed by the placement of the camera, which acts as the viewer. The
ability of the camera to move physically into pictorial space is one of the
most unique dimensions of the medium. Nevertheless, it has become almost a
convention within the medium that scenes must begin with “an establishing
shot.” This pov is akin to the classical perspective: it feeds the
necessary information of the whole scene to the viewer, enabling him to
observe from outside. Only then does the camera/viewer begin shifting into
perspectives like the “over-the-shoulder shots” in a dialogue scene, where
the viewer first takes the pov of one character and then shifts to the
other in a “reverse-angle shot.”
That this cinematic convention developed the way it did may shed
light on why icon art, for all its disorienting array of perspectives,
never fully abandoned the classical perspective the way some modern art has
radically left it. The viewer needs enough information and distance before
being ready to jump into the scene. In a sense, the establishing shot and
the icon’s initial classical appearance give the viewer enough space to
stand apart, watch a bit, and then freely decide where and how to enter and
with whom to identify. This is why in the history of cinema, no major film
has yet executed what I would call “a totalizing pov” for a film’s entire
duration. A “totalizing pov” is one where the camera so completely enters
the space of the movie such that the audience is compelled to only see what
one character in the movie saw. Robert Montgomery’s Lady in the Lake
(1946) is the closest attempt and it was a popular and critical disaster.
Audiences complained that watching the movie was a “cramped, claustrophobic
experience.” Interestingly, even in that attempt, Montgomery could not
fully abandon the classical perspective and resorted to a host of mirror
tricks to convey the establishing shot.
Technological innovations are giving movie makers ever more
sophisticated control over perspective. The invention of the Steadicam
system in the 1970s has enabled the camera to enter the physical space of
the set even more intimately. The system was used frequently in the Oscar
winning Das Boot (1981) to give the viewer the perspective of a sailor
moving (often in a moment of great panic) within a German U-boat in World
War II. Director Wolfgang Petersen veered in the direction of a totalizing
pov to deliberately recreate that “cramped, claustrophobic experience.”
Future technologies like virtual reality also will give the medium even
greater ability to manipulate perspective. The fact that the icon
tradition has disciplined itself to retain some semblance of the classical
perspective serves as a cautionary question for these future technologies.
Will such technologies be used to offer viewer space and freedom to choose
how she will participate in images? Or will they be used to manipulate the
viewer in a hidden fashion, subtly manipulating her into a totalizing
experience? When movie makers give in to the latter temptation, the image
loses all potential as a holy icon of divine grace and instead becomes a
human instrument of the will to power.
A similar danger lies in the tendency towards “realism” in cinema.
Hollywood seems to be possessed by a drive to fill up every empty space in
a scene with images. Whether this is intrinsic to the medium or not is
unclear; but as a cousin to the photographic arts, cinema certainly does
have an internal logic towards filling up a space with “realistic” images.
Take a basic scene of someone someone standing by a desk. Cinema seems to
want to immediately make the scene feel “real” by giving the desk a
specific grain of wood, a precisely arranged stack of paper, a telephone
with a specified color; the medium wants to fill the background with office
props and architectural details of a distinct time period. In contrast, an
icon consciously resists such “realism.” Look at an image of a saint
standing by a desk and all its architecture and props are remarkably sparse
and abstract. And on average the icon contains much more empty space
within its frames.
The cramped nature of “realism” hangs as a question mark over
cinema’s potential as icon. To put the question in theological terms, does
cinematic “realism” crowd out the Holy Spirit? With the icon, there is
space for the Spirit to prompt the viewer to view an aspect of an image and
receive a particular meaning – all according to how the viewer needs to
encounter Christ at that juncture. At different points in the viewer’s
life, the Holy Spirit has the room to imbue the same aspect with different
meanings. The image is sparse enough so as to avoid being completely
predetermined in its meaning. Moreover, the viewer always retains the
freedom to respond. But with cinema, will that freedom enjoyed by both the
Spirit and the viewer always be present? Will cinematic images lock us in
a realism that will only permit one meaning for all viewings? This was the
concern that most animated Jacques Ellul’s iconoclasm. Ellul warned that
visual media replaced the spiritual realm of “Truth” with the oppressive
realm of “Reality,” the latter defined as an order that limits our
attention solely to what can be precisely measured, documented and
controlled. Without agreeing to his extreme iconoclasm as the only
answer, I believe Ellul asked the right question. To put it another way,
who ultimately will move the viewer? Will the “realistic” image itself and
the human controllers of such images direct a totalizing course? Or will
the Spirit of Jesus who always moves in freedom and grace set us on our
true motion?
The Subject
Centuries before the advent of cinema, Plato seemingly envisioned the
medium in eerie fashion. In his classic parable of the dark cave, Plato
has Socrates describing men chained to their seats while watching a screen.
Behind them on an elevated platform burns a fire. Other men walk along
that platform performing various movements The fire projects their
flickering shadows on the screen, the only sight the chained men see.
Socrates’ listener comments on this depiction, “You have shown me a strange
image, and they are strange prisoners.” To which Socrates responds: “Like
ourselves they see only their own shadows, or the shadows of one
another.” For the theologian regarding cinema, then, the obvious
question presents itself: does cinema give humanity true access to the
transcendent God or does the medium only enable humanity to self-project
its own shadows? That cinema may only do the latter is suggested by the
Chinese term for movies, dianying , which literally means “electronic
shadows.”
Wrestling with the medium of painting, theologians of the icon
grappled with this basic theological question for centuries, and most
intensely during the Iconoclastic Controversies. Their answer centered on
the unique subject of the icon: the Person of Christ. As John of Damascus
put it, because Christ in the Incarnation lowered himself “in a body of
flesh, then you may draw His image and show it to anyone willing to gaze
upon it.” Because Christ is no mere shadow of God but a true person,
when viewers gaze on his image they are given real access to the
divine. The second Iconoclastic Controversy (815-843) especially
caused the defenders of the icon to emphasize the specifically individual
and personal nature of God – what the Early Fathers termed hypostasis – depicted in the Christ image. Theodore the Studite thus responded to the
iconoclasts, “Therefore, although He assumed human nature in general yet He
assumed it as contemplated in an individual manner… this separates Him by
His hypostatic properties from the rest of men, and because of this He is
circumscribable.” This hypostatic property of the image continues to
give contemporary theologians of the icon confidence that they are facing
God Himself. This personal dimension of the icon means “it is knowledge
not about God but of God, the knowledge which is communion with God and
which grounds our being.” Panayiotis Nellas put it succinctly, “The
truth of an icon lies in the person it represents.”
Given the need to stress the personal aspect of the image, it is not
surprising that ancient and modern theologians alike focus on the face.
Theodore the Studite clearly equated personal identity with facial
features: “When anyone is portrayed, it is not the nature but the
hypostasis which is portrayed… insofar as he adds along with the common
definition certain properties, such as a long or short nose, curly hair, a
good complexion, bright eyes, or whatever else characterizes his particular
appearance, he is distinguished from the other individuals of the same
species.” In fact, ancient iconophiles called upon a variety of
legends to argue that the actual facial features of Christ were physically
preserved and handed down in a faithful line of transmission. In this
century, both Emmanuel Levinas and Jean-Luc Marion attributed to “the face”
power to resist the human tendency to self-project and control images.
Florensky developed a complex theology of the icon based on the notion of a
true countenance (lik). To put it in classic iconographic terminology, it
is the face that determines how much the image participates in the
prototype. Florensky summarizes his theology, “When we contemplate this
holy countenance, we thus behold the divine prototype.”
This theological emphasis is reflected in the artistic practice of
the icon. As already mentioned, icons almost always present figures in
full frontality, directly confronting the viewer with the face. In terms
of painting technique, iconographers gravitated to the encaustic technique
as early as the sixth century. This ancient technique, which combines
heated wax and color on wood, specialized in giving portrait icons “highly
naturalistic and convincing representations of the Holy family and saints,
who appeared more familiar and closer to the viewer through their evidently
personal quality.” Similarly in narrative icons, special attention is
paid to the emotional features on the characters’ faces. In fact, in
Orthodox monasteries today, iconographers in training may work on a variety
of features of the painting but the face is generally left for the master
to complete. And this is also why when the paint of the image has so
peeled that the face is no longer recognizable, the object loses its status
as a holy icon.
The medium of cinema similarly focuses on the face. The “close-up”
is an indispensable technique in film and the phrase “the camera loves her
face” is a prized plaudit in Hollywood. The best actors and actresses have
always crafted emotionally complex facial movements. And the most
artistically inclined directors rely on the power of the face to
communicate. As Federico Fellini said, “Faces are my words.” Entire
theories of film have even been constructed around the face. The most
notable theory was developed from the 1920’s to the 1940’s by Béla Balázas,
a Hungarian by birth who also spent considerable time in Russia and other
Eastern European countries (again, one notes the disproportionate numbers
of influential film theorists from countries where the Orthodox church
shaped the visual culture). Balázas wrote of “micro-dramatics:” how the
subject’s face moves in subtle ways to convey shifts in the entire film’s
emotion and meaning.
This focus on the face indeed highlights cinema’s similarity with the
icon – and a potentially devastating difference. For except in the case of
documentaries, the cinematic face is the face of an actor. In terms of
facial features, the personal link between image and prototype is
stretched. In my student’s encounter with Zeffirelli’s film, exactly which
face moved Cheng to tears: Jesus’ or Robert Powell’s? Any theological
analysis of cinema must wrestle with the disturbing reality that the film
actor’s work intrinsically is the work of illusion, projecting only a
pretended likeness to the prototype. The potential loss of the personal
link in theater was precisely what led the early Fathers to choose the
rather obscure term hypostasis to denote the personal nature of Christ.
They deliberately eschewed the more common term prosopon because it was
used to denote the mask actors wore in classical Greek theater. And with
cinema’s historical tendency to foster a cult of celebrity, people now go
to movies more to see the actor’s face than to meet any prototype. The
star actor projects his own personality. Who even remembers all the names
of the characters that Harrison Ford portrayed in his last several movies?
If the facial image has so drifted from the prototype, then it seems we are
thrust back into Plato’s cave, the shadowy realm of illusion and human self-
projection. Must we then give up hope for cinema as icon?
I believe there is still hope. And the seeds of that hope can be
found in the icon itself. Iconographic practice suggests that despite the
theological emphasis on face, there are other ways of establishing a
personal link between image and prototype. For instance, in her exhaustive
study of Byzantine art, Liz James documented how “color is perceived as a
means of representing and identifying a figure.” Indeed, she goes so far
as to argue that “for the Byzantines, color was the primary definition of
form.” Similarly, Henry Maguire has shown that the “corporality” (the
weight, shape, and dimensions of the body) of the image served “to
distinguish between classes of saints according to their natures.”
That more than just the face is needed to establish identity seems
obvious upon reflection. Imagine the following experiment: copies are made
of numerous icons of Byzantine saints, only everything is blackened out
except the face. If a representative sampling of Orthodox lay persons were
then asked to match the faces with names, my suspicion is that the scores
would be fairly low. Even in the case of the widely recognizable face of
Jesus, that familiarity is not intrinsic to the face but rather taught by
association. From a young age, people have learned to identify the face of
Jesus because they associate that image with identifying contexts, like the
cross, the last supper, etc..
This critical need for context was illustrated in one of the classic
early experiments in cinema, the so called Mozhukhin Experiment conducted
by the Russian director Lev Kuleshov sometime in the early 1920s. Bruce
Kawin’s account of what Kuleshov did is worth quoting at length:
He found some old footage of a pre-Revolutionary actor named
Ivan Mozhukhin, a single long take (probably a makeup test)
in which the face showed an unvarying, neutral expression.
Kuleshov then cut three different shots into this take: one
of a child playing with a toy, one of a bowl of soup, and one
of an old woman in a coffin. The sequence went as follows:
face, child, face, soup, face, woman, face. When he showed
this short film to an audience… they remarked what a great
actor Mozhukhin was. They enjoyed the subtle way he
expressed affectionate delight at the child’s playing, hunger
for the soup, and grief at the death of the woman, whom they
assumed was his mother.
We naturally construct the meaning of a face out of surrounding context,
and in particular out of the narrative context. In fact, the need for a
coherent narrative to understand a face is so great that viewers will even
construct a simple narrative (i.e. a son weeps at his mother’s funeral) if
one doesn’t already exist.
More expressive faces even (and perhaps especially) need narrative.
Commentators on Byzantine art often point to the Mount Sinai Christ icon as
the epitome of a complex and meaningful visage. Christ’s face seems split,
with his right conveying an expression of acceptance and his left one of
judgment. Yet without specific narratives like Jesus’ story of the sheep
and the goats (Matthew 25: 32-46) and the broader sweep of the Biblical
meta-narrative that depicts a God who both accepts and judges, the Mount
Sinai face would simply seem inscrutable.
The should not surprise us. Philosophers like Alasdair MacIntyre and
Charles Taylor have increasingly realized that understanding another
character – or even any truth statement – requires knowing the narrative
that surrounds the character or statement. What philosophers are
coming to realize, movie makers have practiced almost from the beginning.
This is why D.W. Griffith, who made the first truly popular movies in the
early part of the century, named as one of his key precursors Charles
Dickens, an author who so perfected the character revealing saga.
Robert McKee, who has taught thousands of modern screenwriters through his
famous Story Structure seminars, bases his teaching on a key insight about
character:
TRUE CHARACTER is revealed in the choices a human being makes
under pressure – the greater the pressure, the deeper the
revelation, the truer the choice to the character’s essential
nature.
Beneath the surface of characterization, regardless of
appearances [emphasis mine], who is this person? At the
heart of his humanity, what will we find? Is he loving or
cruel? Generous or selfish? Strong or weak? Truthful or a
liar? Courageous or cowardly? The only way to know the
truth is to witness him make choices under pressure to take
one action or another in the pursuit of his desire. As he
chooses, he is.
“As he chooses, he is.” The historical development of icons suggests
that iconographers increasingly grasped the defining power of narrative.
Historian Thomas Mathews notes a fascinating piece of data: “Rare in the
period before Iconoclasm, narrative icons are ubiquitous from the tenth
century on.” While Mathews does not go on to explain why the
Iconoclastic challenge would cause such a sharp increase in narrative
icons, the answer seems obvious to me. Iconoclasm accused iconophiles of
worshipping the image itself rather than the personal prototype of Christ.
It seems then that the iconophiles believed an increased emphasis on the
narrative of Christ was the best way to signal they were actually focusing
on the person of Christ. Anticipating McKee’s principle, the liturgical
cycle of the icon focuses precisely on the key choices Jesus made under
ever increasing pressure. From the Incarnation to the Baptism to the
Passion, Jesus chose the path of Savior. In many of those icons, Jesus’
humanity is movingly revealed in gestures that suggest he is experiencing
the enormous pressure involved in these choices.
Movies visually present a powerful narrative record of a character’s
most dramatic choices. A motion picture is even better than painting in
this regard because narrative is fundamentally about a subject in motion.
A movie as icon would compile the series of narrative icons displayed in
the liturgical cycle and project them in one continuous motion.
From all this it would seem that movies about Jesus (and other holy
saints) can function as icons. And indeed Cheng is not alone in having
experienced a personal encounter with Christ through movies like Jesus of
Nazareth. Still, the issue of the actor’s illusion nags. In my own
interaction with such movies (and also with live dramatic presentations
like passion plays), I have great difficulty fully experiencing the event
as a contemplation of Christ. I am easily distracted by the obvious
discrepancy between the actual person before me and Christ, and even more
distracted by the fact that the person is actively trying to pretend away
the discrepancy. Moreover, successfully pretending to be the Son of God is
a rather daunting task. None of the actors who played Jesus in the various
major Christ movies has ever really won critical acclaim; in fact, they
often seem to give very muted performances that make them the least
dramatically compelling character in the entire movie. I believe this is
why the most successful movie that included Christ as a character, Ben Hur
(winner of 12 Oscars in 1959), did not actually show Christ on the screen
but instead depicted him via other characters’ reaction to him. The cool
chariot race scene probably also helped.
The medium seems to need a link with Christ that escapes the pretense
of such a direct connection. The real iconic potential of movies may lie
in presenting narratives that strictly speaking are not the actual Gospel
narratives – but nevertheless signify the person of Christ. To imagine
that possibility, consider the following spectrum:
Parable ð Analogy/Symbol ð Abstract Statement ð Story ð
Prototype
Father Gabriel in
The Mission (1986) Jesus died like a lamb Jesus sacrificed
himself for humanity Jesus’ Crucifixion Jesus
On the far right stands the prototype, the person of Jesus Christ. He is
the true subject whom we wish to encounter, to be present with, to know.
The story of his crucifixion clearly signifies him but it still stands at
one level removed: no one story exhaustively defines a person and being
present with a person is still different from knowing the person’s story.
In turn, abstract statements of truth signify the story without exhausting
the story since the crucifixion contains more meaning than just any one
statement. The statement does ultimately signify the person but only by
going through the story: “Jesus died for humanity” is only comprehensible
via the actual crucifixion narrative. In similar fashion, an analogy
stands yet even one further level removed and must go through the realm of
statement to story before reaching the prototype. Finally, the narrative
of Father Gabriel dying for the native tribe in The Mission acts as a
parable. His story must go through the level of analogy/symbol first: he
is unlike Jesus in that he did not “die for humanity” but like him in the
sacrificial manner of his death. However, it eventually does link up with
the prototype himself. One can think of other cinematic parables that
traverse this spectrum via different analogies, statements, and Gospel
stories. In such a manner, it is quite possible to view recent movies such
as The Shawshank Redemption (1994), Babette’s Feast (1987), and even the
action adventure The Matrix (1999) as all winding their way to Christ.
In this spectrum, the key theological question is “How far can the
link between image and prototype be stretched and still serve as an icon?”
Can an image of a subject begin at the level of parable and still serve as
the vessel in what Florensky calls “the iconic journey?” Space does not
allow me to more fully explore that question here, but suffice to say that
much in the theology of the icon suggests that images may start further out
on the spectrum and move towards Christ.
For instance, John of Damasucs notes that God, angels, and other
spiritual realities are inaccessible to our soul’s comprehension “unless we
can envision analogous shapes” and reflect on those shapes with our
minds. Analogy bridges a key epistemological gap, and analogy in turn
is frequently comprised of images from human existence. Fortunately, God
has given humans a vast treasure of appropriate analogies to construct that
bridge. John rejoices that “we see images in the creation which, although
they are only dim lights, still remind us of God.” Thus, the practice of
all visual arts can be understood as mining creation for ever more
analogies to God. Images of all visible creation and human life – and not
just of Christ – are authorized. “In a word,” John concludes, “it may be
said that we may make images of every form we see, and our apprehension of
these forms is a kind of sight.”
One can conceive of the movie-as-icon as the retelling of parables
found in the created order. Such parables visually highlight the
analogous/symbolic nature of all of creation. In doing this, cinematic
parables actually redeem creation. Perl asserts that creation’s true
nature is revealed only in its symbolic purpose: “The cosmos as a whole and
each being in it is only by being and insofar as it is a symbol of God in
an ontological way.” The task of redeeming creation for its originally
intended purpose is a rightful use of new technology like cinema. As
Evdokimov insists, “A return to the source does not mean that one does not
use present-day technology nor goes back into the past.”
The being that most clearly serves as a visual pointer to God is the
human being. Nellas summarizes the Orthodox emphasis on humanity made in
the image of God: “The category of biological existence does not exhaust
man. Man is understood ontologically by the Fathers only as a theological
being. His ontology is iconic.” Cinema is especially suited to reveal
the iconic nature of man. While other visual mediums like painting and
photography frequently take nature and even inanimate objects as their
subjects, cinema (along with live theater) almost exclusively focuses on
human culture. Such a focus is the vision of the icon. Evdokimov reasons:
“If every man in the image of God is his living icon, culture is the icon
of the Kingdom of heaven. At the moment of the great passage, the Holy
Spirit will touch this icon with his light fingers; and something of it
will remain forever.”
Cinema is but the most recent expression of a lasting feature of
human culture: the desire to tell stories. Humans are the only beings in
the cosmos (as far as we know) that for eons have sat around a flickering
fire to tell stories. Might not cinema retell all those human stories in
the true light, the eternal “light of the world?”
Conclusion
In this paper, I have sought to construct the first few exchanges of
a conversation between the theology of the icon and the medium of cinema.
I believe the conversation is most fruitful when centered on the defining
feature of the cinema, which is that it is a medium in motion. In
analyzing how cinema and the icon present the motion of time, the viewer
and the subject, I hope I have suggested the potential insight available to
both parties in such a dialogue.
Such insight is especially needed now since our epoch is experiencing
a sweeping cultural shift from the written to the visual, a sea change in
which cinema represents only the first wave. We need time tested
theological bearings to navigate all the new visual media flowing over our
airwaves, cable lines, and Internet connections. Cinema presents an
excellent case study for those searching for new icons for our epoch. In
my opinion, the theology of the icon both affirms cinema’s iconic potential
and can act as an elder mentor to the church’s use of this younger medium.
Some may accept the value of the conversation between icon and
cinema, and yet still feel uneasy about granting the movie the same status
as a holy icon. Especially for those in the Orthodox tradition, this move
may still seem like a violation of the essential meaning of the icon.
Vasileios makes a distinction that perhaps captures this uneasiness: “A
religious picture is an altogether different thing from a liturgical icon.
The one is a the creation of someone’s artistic talent, the other the
flower and reflection of liturgical life.” An icon is meant to be
organically intertwined with the liturgy and the liturgical space of the
church. How can one claim that an image displayed while audiences munch on
popcorn is participating in the church’s liturgy? How can one claim that
an image featured in neon lit multiplexes and strip malls occupies a
liturgical space?
Once again, I believe a hopeful answer is suggested by the
iconographic tradition itself. The history of the church demonstrates that
liturgical space was never defined statically once and for all. For
instance, the early church faced severe restrictions in the places and
times it could celebrate its liturgy. Constantine’s conversion brought a
dramatic expansion in what constituted a holy place. Herrin reports: “This
fundamental change in the position of the Christian communities was
responsible, by and large, for the development of Christian art. Once the
faith could be celebrated openly and above ground, it needed larger
buildings and these required decoration.” Moreover, Constantine also
enlarged the geographical range of loca sancta (holy places) in Palestine,
which in turn fostered an increased devotion to the early martyrs, which in
turn increased demand for icons of such saints. In short, the
definition of liturgical space is a historically dynamic process.
It is important to note that in both the Orthodox East and the
Catholic West, the iconographic tradition began and grew most under the
historical conditions of Christendom. Under such conditions, the church
building was the public space. The church’s liturgical display of icons
was the public ceremony of viewing images. However, what is the
church’s response when the historical conditions of Christendom have
dramatically changed? In the postmodern, post-Christian West, the church
building has long ceased to be the main public space, the display of icons
no longer the only celebration of image. In fact, in our increasingly
privatized culture, the movie theater and social conversations about
recently viewed movies are some of the few truly public spaces and
activities remaining.
A potential response to such changing conditions is suggested by a
popular subject in the iconographic tradition of Late Antiquity, Simeon the
Stylite. Simeon seems rather incomprehensible to many moderns; he is best
known for his monastic practice of spending most of his life on a tower,
receiving and dispensing divine visions. However, the fact that countless
icons were devoted to him testifies to how he captured the imagination of
generations. He clearly struck a responsive chord in his epoch. Susan
Harvey persuasively argues that Simeon’s transformative power lay in his
redefinition of liturgy and liturgical space. Her argument is important
and worth quoting at some length:
For to include Simeon within the eucharistic liturgy of the
church, the church had to move that liturgy outside its own
walls: the clergy ministered to Simeon where he was, on a
mountainside, on a pillar. By that move, the sacred order
enacted within the space of a sanctuary – contained within
the walls of a church building – was now found to be enacted
in the landscape itself. In the great cities of the empire
this was the era of the stational liturgy: a liturgy
performed throughout the urban space of its community, a
liturgy that claimed that space by public ritual as
Christianity’s own. I think we find a similar process
here… it was a matter of redefining landscape and the
identities that populated it.
In short, the icon of Simeon celebrates the church’s own motion, as it
moved its liturgy “outside its own walls” to claim new space for holy
encounters with Christ.
The church in the post-Christian society certainly requires new
missiological liturgies. For if the church is to be a church in mission,
it will need new practices and spaces where seeking unbelievers can gather
to explore Christ. Within the history of the icon, there exist hints of
such a liturgy. According to the Russian Primary Chronicle, Prince
Vladimir of Kiev led his entire people to convert to Christianity because
of his envoys’ experience with the liturgy and images in the Hagia Sophia.
The envoys described their experience in these words:
We knew not whether we were in heaven or on earth. For on
earth there is no such splendor or such beauty, and we are at
a loss how to describe it. We know only that God dwells
there among men, and their service is fairer than the
ceremonies of other nations. For we cannot forget that
beauty. Every man, after tasting something sweet, is
afterward unwilling to accept that which is bitter.
The need for a missiological liturgy is especially pronounced for the
postmodern seeker: she is not so much interested in listening to a lengthy
lecture on the rational arguments for Christianity, but is rather looking
for a more holistic, transformative experience that bypasses the dead ends
of modernist rationality. The Orthodox attention to the physical,
aesthetic dimensions of encountering Christ could empower the whole
church’s mission to such seekers. Evdokimov understood how art
communicates “beyond rational discourse” to make manifest the presence of
God: “The icon is a doxology, it flows with joy and sings the glory of God
in its own way. True beauty does not need proof. The icon does not prove
anything, it shows.”
If the church is to physically move towards seekers like my student
Cheng and if the church is to emotionally move them towards Christ, the
church will need new pictures of this “true beauty.” Might not these
pictures come from new saints who crouch on top of towers and cranes to
record a succession of holy images? And might not these camera bearing
stylites redefine the places where we can receive “the collective
presentation of the Christian salvation drama?” The icon in motion
belongs to the church in motion.
———————————-
[1]Most historians would date the advent of the movie age to Thomas
Edison’s display of the Kinetoscope on April 14, 1894 in New York City.
See Frank E. Beaver, On Film: A History of the Motion Picture, (New, York:
McGraw Hill, 1983), pp. 13-16.
[2]Joseph Pereira, “Expecting Absenteeism, Companies Are Girding For Star
Wars Film,” Wall Street Journal, May 6, 1999, from www.wsj.com.
[3]For such examples, see Robert Jewett, Saint Paul At the Movies,
(Louisville, KY: Westminster/John Knox, 1993); Bernard Brandon Scott,
Hollywood Dreams and Biblical Stories, (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press,
1994)
[4]Image as Insight: Visual Understanding in Western Christianity and
Secular Culture, (Boston, Beacon Press, 1985); Seeing and Belieivng:
Religion and Values in the Movies, (Boston: Beacon Press, 1996).
[5]See pp. 187-9.
[6]For examples, see Thomas M. Martin, Images and the Imageless: A Study in
Religious Consciousness and Film, (Lewisburg: Bucknell University Press),
pp. 48-9 and 105-9; Michael Bird, “Film as Hierophany” in Religion in Film,
eds. John R. May and Michael Bird, (Knoxville, TN: University of Tennessee
Press, 1982), pp. 4-21.
[7]See Paul Phan, Culture and Eschatology: The Iconographical Vision of
Paul Evdokimov, (New York: Peter Lang Publishing, 1985), p. 288.
[8]Jacquel Ellul, The Humiliation of the Word, trans. Joyce Hanks, (Grand
Rapids, Eerdmans: 1985), see especially pp. 102-6
[9]For Nikephoros’ words, see Byzantine Defenders of Images: Eight Saints
Lives in English Translation, ed. Alice-Mary Talbot, (Washington D.C.,
Dumbarton Oaks, 1998), pp.81-2
[10]Paul Corby Finney, The Invisible God: The Earliest Christians on Art,
(New York: Oxford University Press, 1994); Sister Charles Murray, Rebirth
and Afterlife: A Study of the Transmutation of Some Pagan Imagery in Early
Christian Funerary Art., (Oxford:
BAR, 1981).
[11]See Portraits and Masks, ed. M. Bierbrier, (London: British Museum
Press, 1997)
[12]Kawin, p. 42
[13]James Monaco, How to Read a Film: The Art, Technology, Language,
History, and Theory of Film and Media, rev. ed., (New York: Oxford
University Press, 1981), p. 236
[14]Pavel Florensky, Iconostasis, trans. by D. Sheehan and O. Andrejev,
(Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1996), p. 34
[15]Florensky, p. 35
[16]John of Damasucs, On The Divine Images, (Crestwood, NY: St. Vladamir
Press: 1977), p. 74
[17]p. 26
[18]For more on the techniques of montage, see Monaco, pp. 322-333.
[19]V.I. Pudovkin, Film Technique and Film Acting, 1929, 1937. Reprint.
(New York: Grove, 1970). See also Monaco, p. 185.
[20]Sergei Eisenstein, Film Form, (New York: Harcourt, Brace and World,
1949) and Film Sense, (New York: Harcourt, Brace and World, 1949)
[21]Archimandrite Vasileios of Stavronikita, Hymn of Entry: Liturgy and
Life in the Orthodox Church, trans. by E. Briere (Crestwood, NY: St.
Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1984), p. 83.
[22]Vasileios, p. 90.
[23]Vasileios, p. 82.
[24]For an excellent analysis of this and other examples of Eisenstein’s
time slowing montage, see Bruce Kawin, How Movies Work, (Berkeley:
University of California Press, 1992), p. 53 and pp. 265-273.
[25]Panayiotis Nellas, Deification in Christ, (Crestwood, NY: St.
Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1984), trans. by N. Russell, p. 41.
[26]Quoted in Phan, p. 279
[27]Florensky, p. 46-49
[28]Phan, p. 279
[29]Phan, p. 280
[30]Christoph Schönborn, God’s Human Face: The Christ-Icon, (San Francisco,
Ignatius Press: 1994), trans. L. Krauth, p. 137.
[31]Kawin, p. 48
[32]John of Damascus, p. 40
[33]John of Damascus, pp. 36-37
[34]Miles, Image As Insight, p. 44
[35]Vasileios, p. 90
[36]Miles, Image As Insight, p. 71
[37]Miles, Image As Insight, p. 73, emphasis hers.
[38]For instance, see Neil Postman, Amusing Ourselves To Death: Public
Discourse in the Age of Show Business (New York: Viking Press, 1985)
[39]Monaco, p. 125.
[40]Monaco, p. 122
[41]For a sophisticated treatment about how a movie viewer should read
various movements like framing, horizontal or vertical or diagonal lines,
and other compositional aspects, see Kawin, pp. 157-177
[42]Monaco, p. 126, emphasis mine.
[43]For an example of this sort of training, see the recent course
offerings by The Center for Christian Studies in Charlottesville, Virginia.
[44]Neil Anderson, with Hyatt Moore, In Search of the Source, (Portland,
OR: Multnomah Press, 1992), p. 151
[45]Judith Herrin, “Women and the Faith in Icons in Early Christianity” in
Culture, Ideology, and Politics, eds. R. Samuel and G. Jones, (London,
Routledge and Kegan Paul: 1982); See also Talbot, pp. 1-7 and 21-24. A
frequently cited iconoclastic text was Eusebius’ letter to the Empress
Constantia, which was one of the earliest examples of a male figure chiding
a female for a perceived overly emotional attachment to the image. See
Schonborn, pp. 57-60.
[46]Bissera Pentcheva, “The Poganovo Icon,” Lecture at Harvard Divinity
School, April 29, 1999.
[47]Quoted in Thomas F. Mathews, Byzantium: From Antiquity to the
Renaissance, (New York: Henry Abrams Publ., 1998), p. 114
[48]Miles, Image As Insight, p. 54
[49]Vasileos, p. 82
[50]See Monaco, p. 173
[51]Monaco. p. 30.
[52]See especially Ellul, pp. 27-37.
[53]Plato, The Republic, Book
VII. Margaret Miles also connects this
parable with the cinematic experience in her Seeing and Believing, p. 5.
[54]See Kawin, p. 43
[55]John of Damascus, p. 18.
[56]See John of Damascus, pp. 27, 35, 40 and 53.
[57]Theodore the Studite, On The Holy Icons, (Crestwood, NY: St. Vladamir’s
Seminary Press, 1981), p. 84
[58]Eric Perl, “Symbol, Sacrament, and Hierarchy in Dionysius the
Areopagite,” The Greek Orthodox Theoological Review 39/3-4, 1994, p. 343.
[59]Nellas, p. 33
[60]Theodore the Studite, p. 90
[61]For example, see John of Damascus, p. 35. The iconographic tradition
also features legends like Veronica’s Veil which recounts how the woman
with the flow of blood (Mark 5: 25-34) recorded Christ’s facial features in
blood as he walked on the road to Golgotha. The legend of King Agbar
receiving a veil from Jesus serves a similar function. See Nicholas
Constas, lecture at Harvard Divinity School, March 23, 1999.
[62]Emmanuel Levinas, Totality and Infinity, (The Hague, M. Nijhoff
Publishers:1979), p. 197; Jean-Luc Marion, God Wihout Being, trans. T.
Carlson, (Chicago, University of Chicago Press: 1991), p. 19.
[63]Florensky, p. 52.
[64]Herrin, p. 66
[65]Nicholas Constas, Lectures, April 22, 1999
[66]Quoted in Donald J. Drew, Images of Man: A Critique of Contemporary
Cinema, (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 1974), p. 15.
[67]Béla Balázas, Theory of the Film, 1952, Reprint, (New York: Dover,
1970). See also Monaco, p. 328.
[68]Liz James, Light and Colour in Byzantine Art, (Oxford: Clarendon Press,
1996), pp. 101-2.
[69]Henry Maguire, “Disembodiment and Corporality in Byzantine Images of
the Saints,” in Iconography at the Crossroads, ed. B. Cassidy, (Princeton:
Index of Christian Art, 1993), p. 76
[70]Kawin, pp. 227-8.
[71]Charles Taylor, Sources of the Self: The Making of the Modern Identity,
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard Univ. Press, 1989), pp. 95-97 and Alasdair
MacIntyre, After Virtue, (Notre Dame: Univ. of Notre Dame Press, 1981).
See also Stanley Hauerwas, A Community of Character, (Notre Dame: Univ. of
Notre Dame Press, 1981), pp. 36-52.
[72]Monaco, p. 9
[73]Robert McKee, Story: Substance, Structure, Style, and the Principles of
Screenwriting, (New York: Harper Collins, 1997), p. 101.
[74]Mathews, p. 60
[75]For example, an icon of the presentation of the baby Jesus to Simeon
shows the baby almost shying away as if he knows that this is the path to
the cross. See Nicholas Constas, Lectures at Harvard Divinity School,
April 22, 1999. Another interesting fact regarding the importance of
drama in the icon is the fact that the great defender of the icon, John of
Damascus, was also an accomplished playwright.
[76]John of Damascus, p. 76
[77]John of Damasucs, p. 79
[78]Perl, p. 320.
[79]Quoted in Phan, p. 286.
[80]Nellas, pp. 33-4.
[81]Quoted in Phan, p. 286l.
[82]Vasileios, p. 81.
[83]Herrin, pp. 60-1.
[84]Mathews, p. 65.
[85]Susan Harvey, “The Stylite’s Liturgy: Ritual and Religious Identity in
Late Antiquity,” in Journal of Early Christian Studies 6:3, 1998, pp. 538-
39.
[86]Quoted in Mathews, p. 98. See also Daniel Clendenin, Eastern Orthodox
Christinaity: A Western Perspective, (Grand Rapids, Baker: 1994), pp. 71-
93.
[87]Quoted in Phan, p. 285.
[88]Harvey, p. 525.
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