Film has the potential to be so engrossing perceptually for
the viewer-auditors that the medium can engage the human condition at a deep,
unconscious level. At that level, the subconscious protects us in the games we
so seriously play. If done well,
film-making crafts a coherent and complete story-world into which the voyageur can
be temporarily lodged before returning to the ordinary world that now looks
somehow different. The subtle perceptual change can result from part of the
viewer’s subconscious having been made transparent, or realized, while in the
film’s story-world. As concerns the religious domain, I contend that the medium
has only touched the surface in holding a mirror up to ourselves. This is not
to say that more anti-religion movies, such as Last Temptation of Christ, are the answer; neither are more palliative,
apologist films, like The Ten
Commandments and The Greatest Story
Ever Told, the way to greater self-awareness for homo religious. On account
of their un-questioning, one-dimensionality (even when viewed with 3D glasses!),
these films are more alike than their respective leitmotifs would suggest. Most
importantly, none of these films raises penetrating questions that assume the
validity of “the other side.” Nietzsche advocates approaching truth itself as a
problem rather than as something whose validity is held to be beyond question
(i.e., sacred). A film can subject truth itself as a problem
(rather than as a conveniently partisan given) and enhance, thereby, human
awareness of just what we are up to when we take ourselves as religious,
whether in self (or group) identification or conduct. Once a film gets a grip
on a truth and makes it a problem rather than a pallid backdrop, you can bet
the river Styx in the human unconscious will be stirred, lapping over its banks
as it tries to order its new-found energy gained from the antiseptic sunlight.
My question here is whether Agora transcends
below the patina of reactionary anti-religion films to widen our collective consciousness
at the expense of hypocrisy and denial.
