Stories From the Silver Screen

The beginning of a new series about films so riveting that they deserve to be remembered long after they were first seen.

In all the years I’ve spent in college classrooms, stretching as far back as the days of pre-digital learning, two things have increasingly stood out about the students I teach, each unmistakably related to the other. The first is that fewer and fewer of them will actually show up fully dressed for class, preferring instead a level of dishevelment often indistinguishable from wearing pajamas. This could be a residue from the days of Covid when, owing to the lockdown, we were all given permission to dress that way. Who knows?

The second is that almost no one ever seems to have read a single book, certainly not any of the ones I’ve assigned. (A witty colleague of mine describes them as “anti-semantics,” which is at least an improvement upon the usual “anti-Semitics” one finds among students of elite colleges and universities—which ours, happily enough, are not.)

This leaves me, nonetheless, with a single nagging suspicion about my students: that when the time comes to retire, no other impression will survive save that far too many of them were both slovenly and stupid. What self-respecting professor wants to end a career knowing that it was mostly ill-kempt and imbecilic students who signed on to take his classes? Not a happy prospect, let me tell you.

Do I exaggerate? Yes, of course I do. And so, thank God—and our admissions team—that over the years I have been regularly surprised to find so many eager and bright students, all wonderfully docile and pious, too. Still, as Chesterton would say, it is sometimes necessary to exaggerate in order to tell the truth. And the truth is that a great seismic shift in student sensibility appears to have taken place, with the result that more and more young people these days seem no longer interested either in learning from books or even looking as if time spent in reading them might warrant their dressing up to talk about it. It has all become simply too boring to get exercised over.

And while I’m not sure exactly when the break began, or even if it matters, I suspect it may have happened around the time I stopped asking them at the start of a new semester what books they’d read over the summer and why they might have felt especially moved to talk about them. As it turned out, most of them hadn’t read a thing, much less been so enthralled by what they read to want to tell anybody about it.

But they had seen movies, heaps and heaps of them, which got me thinking about how I might yet manage to reach them. Why not through a medium other than the one I’d spent years in graduate school trying to master? Scrap the syllogism and start telling stories, is that it? And do we not already have the perfect story? Which is to say the one God Himself tells in the sending of His Son into a fallen world in order to show us that, for all its ignorance and iniquity, it is worth dying for? So, let that be the springboard to the higher life!

In the meantime, it can’t hurt to try and find out what films they’ve seen—or better yet, should have seen—and use that as a hook to draw them nearer to the things that ultimately matter. “And so each venture,” as the poet Eliot memorably puts it in Four Quartets,

Is a new beginning, a raid on the inarticulate
With shabby equipment always deteriorating
In the general mess of imprecision of feeling
Undisciplined squads of emotion…

Neither “gain nor loss,” he concludes. “For us there is only the trying. The rest is not our business.”

Thus I began a new and different tack, a wiser approach as it were, confirmed by a lesson learned from Miss Emily Dickinson, whose advice on the subject has proven to be wonderfully shrewd. “Tell all the truth,” she advises, “but tell it slant—

Success in Circuit lies
Too bright for our infirm Delight
The truth’s superb surprise
As Lightening to the Children eased
With explanation kind
The truth must dazzle gradually
Or every man be blind—

Isn’t this what the best movies ever made set out to do? Tell all the truth. Nothing less will do. But do it obliquely, not as a direct frontal assault upon whatever bastion of ignorance stands in the way. Not with an array of abstractions, mind you, even if they are erudite and true, because such airy constructs are quite often far too leaden to lift anyone. Don’t just say it, in other words. You’ve got to show it. The plane of glory will never be reached, writes the poet Czeslaw Milosz, “building the stairway of abstraction.”

I am only a man: I need visible signs.
I tire easily, building the stairway of abstraction.
Many a time I asked, you know it well, that the statue in church
lift its hand, only once, just once, for me.
But I understand that signs must be human,
therefore call one man, anywhere on earth,
not me—after all I have some decency—
and allow me, when I look at him, to marvel at you.

After all, the best education is never really about empty buckets waiting to be filled but of lighting fires waiting for someone to set ablaze. Only it must be done in love. Otherwise, as St. Paul tells the Ephesians (4:15), we will never achieve the full stature of Christ, in whom perfect truth and love are joined at the hip.

It’s not always easy to pull off, of course, which is why I can think of only two examples—God, who is perfect, and the artist, who is not. What do they have in common? Two things, the philosopher Jacques Maritain tells us: “That while they love their creations, they judge them without sentimentality.”

Always keep the two together, in other words, maintaining constant and exquisite balance between them. That’s the trick. “A condition of complete simplicity,” as Eliot himself reminds us in the final movement of his great work of artistry “Little Gidding,”

(Costing not less than everything)
And all shall be well and
All manner of thing shall be well
When the tongues of flame are in-folded
Into the crowned knot of fire
And the fire and the rose are one.

Here, then, are a dozen movies or so that, if not to die for, are yet eminently worth watching. They are so compelling, in fact, that they deserve to be showcased long after having first been seen. Which is precisely what this series aims to do. And while their absence from our lives is hardly incapacitating, nevertheless, so impoverished would we become that, had they never existed, it would then be necessary for someone to go out and make them.

While each of the twelve remains distinctive and special in its own way, what unites them all is their witness to God—indeed, to that “poetry of the transcendent” about which an old and dear professor of mine would often speak. Think of them as so many cunning traps designed to divert our attention from all that is boring and banal, thereby freeing the mind and heart for a far wider, deeper, more richly expansive world—a world God intended for us to enter from the beginning.

So, turn the lights down low and let the cameras roll…