Bonhoeffer

Movies about martyrdom

Christianity in cinema is not usually impressive in our times. Especially interesting is the weakness of storytelling when it comes to contemporary stories. Whatever one may say about old stories, recounting the events of the 20th century, for example, means confronting the various opinions & “the climate of opinion” that are largely inimical to religion & perhaps often enough also inimical, or at least indifferent, to morality. So it’s very hard to display character or explore its connection to God.

I thought about all this in watching a new movie about a new martyr, Dietrich Bonhoeffer. You can read all about it at L&L—I’ll lead you off with the praise for the movie:

Bonhoeffer the movie is an attempt to deal with this problem, which may be the most urgent problem for Christianity. From the artistic point of view, it offers an alternative genre to the hagiography: the Bildungsroman. From the technical point of view, it’s unusually accomplished. From the broader intellectual point of view, it is an attempt to marry democracy & religion in a rather secularizing age; part of that attempt is to lend some of the moral dignity of the life of faith to the rather more banal, not to say the obsolete habit of watching movies. It’s obvious, though not something we talk about, that Christianity will outlive Hollywood.

First of all, Bonhoeffer is so satisfying as a film because it looks like a major Hollywood production, shot by Ridley Scott’s cinematographer John Mathieson. The same professionalism also marks the work of editor Blu Murray, who has learned to cut working on Clint Eastwood’s movies for 20 years. This kind of talent, unlike actors or expensive locations, is rarely spotted by amateurs, but it makes the difference between persuasive movies & those we reflexively disdain because they don’t measure up to our demands of professionalism. We care normally about the character; but the movie as such is just images in sequence, so to speak moving the character along, & to get that wrong is to fail entirely; here, Bonhoeffer succeeds.

Bonhoeffer is secondly compelling as a biography of a moral hero, a creature of experience who becomes representative of our moral aspirations. The relationship between experience & reflection is translated cinematically by flashbacks mixed among the prison scenes, adding a chronological element to the narrative. Since the two elements in this narrative correspond to becoming a man & living as a man in terrible times—that is facing up to life’s tragedy & facing death without fear—there is something astonishing about the story, which movies have in recent generations avoided, as though the spectacle were too strong for our more squeamish taste.