Show God some nice films, says award-winning artist

By Meg Johnstone

BRUCE

Marchfelder, who attends St. John's Shaughnessy Anglican Church, will be one of the speakers at the Regent College 'Dialogue on Film and Faith' on September 28. He is also moderating a workshop at the Vancouver International Film Festival Trade Forum.

CanadianChristianity.com: You've now made severally internationally recognized short pictures, you've been to Cannes, and are currently teaching at Vancouver Film School. Where do you see your film making career going from here?

Bruce Marchfelder: You only have one chance to make a first feature. There are various doors open to me right now, not the least of which is the Cannes film festival who love to champion the emerging film maker. As is the case with someone like Steven Soderbergh or P.T. Anderson, some of the respected independent film makers, they worked out a lot of their mistakes shooting short films. This what I communicate to my students, or people interested in entering the film industry. So the next step -- I have three different projects in three different stages of development, and it's a matter of choosing which project to go out with. Which is the film that's going to establish myself not only artistically, but unfortunately, there are commercial imperatives that you're having to accomodate in this medium.

Every time I've been up to plate with my short film, I seem to have got on base. You don't necessarily swing for the bleachers, you just want to connect with the ball and hopefully get on base. It's very very hard to do that. A major film festival like Cannes or Sundance receives thousands of feature films for submission. They select maybe 35 to program. Only three or four get distribution. Of those three or four, only one out of 10 will be profitable. Two or three will break even, the rest will be losses. The statistics are tremendously against success.

For anything that relates to Chistian content -- which is a whole other discussion, I'm with Dorothy Sayers that good story is good theology -- the standards of excellence have to be that much higher in terms of production value, and the way in which the content is deployed has to be that much more deftly handled.

CC.com: So you're saying that having Christian content is a liability in film?

BM: Not at all. I just think you're actually dealing with gunpowder. It's the nature of Christian content. I believe we've done ourselves a great disservice as a community by ghettoizing our understanding of art and culture. We have created an insulated, retreatist sort of mentality with respect to the arts. What I'm looking for is that more responsible, comprehensive, difficult theological aesthetic. At the ['Dialogue on Faith and Film'] I'm going to deal with what I would consider good film making as a Christian, not Christian film making. I'm looking for excellent films made by Christians, rather than Christian films made by excellent Christians.

I think the struggle is two-fold as an artist. Rather than representing the holy, we're supposed to evoke the holy and transcendent God who is preoccupied with his creation, such that he would be prepared to do anything to repair that relationship between man and himself. That's a very provacative, incarnational thing. If we can evoke that -- I have no idea how that's going to take place, I'm going to give examples at the 'Dialogue' -- that's one thing.

The other thing has to be to create a capacity within the person experiencing the art, such that they could recognize that evocation of the holy. There's that wonderful picture that C.S. Lewis has in The Last Battle of the dwarves eating straw at the stable. There's a banquet laid out before them, but they would prefer to eat the straw, because they're incapable of seeing. And this is an evangelical problem. We're always answering questions that no one's asking. What we want to be doing in our art is to be able to stir those questions, to create that capacity, to create a level of humility. Actually, it's a way of seeing.

Within the film process, we are introducing these capacities for humility, for a capacity to understand that we are referential creatures, we refer to something greater than ourselves. We do not just reiterate God-talk. I have huge issues with how evangelicals deal with the art of scripture. Scripture points to the meta-narrative. I believe in inerrancy of scripture and all that, I'm an evangelical right down the line. But it's the difference between getting a love-letter in the mail, and you analyze it, you look at it, you treat it as authoritative and so on, but at some point you've got to read it and realize, "Wait a minute -- it's the ideas that stand behind this love letter -- someone loves me."

Film making is the one business that people think that anybody can do, and yet it's one of the most complicated. [We need] people who are responsible for making films meet the standards of the public square. That same excellence that Paul had academically in engaging folks in Athens, that same rigor, that same focus, the same credentialling that he pulls out, we do not do when it comes to motion picture production. And we've suffered dearly.

We need to demonstrate excellence and ability. And that's why I have one foot firmly in the academic environment. I've credentialled myself. I went to Yale Div, I was enrolled at Yale drama school. My first film went to Cannes, I've won the CBC national/BC Film award -- I hold myself to the highest standards on the one hand, and then academically I am rigorously trying to sort this all out. There's no one to look to. So you realize I'm putting incredible pressure on myself for my first feature. How the heck am I going to do it, right?

CC.com: It seems that much of the film industry is driven by what Vancouver film maker Alan Morinis just recently called "ambition, vanity and ego." You yourself declined to reveal your age in an interview in the North Shore News, saying that film making is an "age-sensitive business," and have said that "you're only hot [in the industry] for about 10 minutes." It seems that it's an industry that's driven by image -- it's all about the fleeting, the temporal -- rather than about substance. How do you as a Christian operate in that culture?

BM: It doesn't really bother me, because the nature of a motion picture is so fleeting. In an hour and a half, this strip of film sort of whips by, and you're in sort of a dream state. Actually, technically because there's a shutter that's actually flashing, half of your experience is in total darkness, but you're not aware of it. But your persistance of vision on your retina makes you believe you're seeing a succession of images flash across your brain. There's something very dream-like and fleeting in that. It's the same way that we would have all huddled in the catacombs in the persecutions, and someone would have told us a story.

It is about creating an image. For a second there, we don't believe the storyteller is sitting there telling us anything. We are actually on this amazing green pasture with dragons breathing down our necks, or whatever the story is. The hero's journey is a flight of fancy; it's a dream state. It's the nature of this sort of artistic expression. We are to be transported.

I think in terms of the industry and so on, we just have to be smart. It's Paul suggesting to Timothy that you might want to get circumcised because we're going to be dealing with people of a certain type, and you know what, even though biblically you don't really have to any more, I think it might be better culturally that we fit. The fact that you show up in a business suit or work out and stay fit so you don't look like you're going to keel over on set -- it's natural. You meet the culture where it is.

Paul in Athens quotes the vernacular of the day. "I've read that one of your poets has said this." He doesn't even evoke Jesus' name. He refers to their icon and their imagery of the day. "Here's a statue I noticed 'to an unknown god.' Let me use it as a starting point. Have you considered this possiblity of a God that I'm going to now talk to you about?'" That's the way we need to engage. Christians are so belligerent and insensitive in a way that Jesus never was. We start unpacking our four spiritual laws. It's incongruent to anything I understand about our God who's prepared to lay his life down for us.

We do have to put on wolves' clothing, as it were, as we walk in. Joseph, to get to his position, probably had to pick his battles very carefully. Most evangelical Christians would not have gotten as far as him. We don't choose our battles well, and we don't understand that the Lord puts us in these places where we can really make a dent on the universe.

Media is just one. I'm called to film making because no one has claimed it for the kingdom. I'm not doing it because I'm going to have an impact with millions of people. That's a human, very secular return-oriented, bottom-line business mentality. Paul got imprisoned. That did not equate economically. He basically got shut out, he couldn't do any radio interviews. But to his left and right three changes a day, there was a Roman centurian guarding him. And we know for a fact historically that it was the Roman garrisons that became Christian first. And most likely it was because they were witnessed to and evangelized by Christians in prison. So that's God's strategy. So forget about man's strategy, this 'if we can convert the media, then suddenly we'll have kingdom on earth.'

We're called to film making because, bottom-line, the Lord wants to see some nice films. He's actually seen some very nice films made by his servants who haven't come to know him. A lot of us are being called to this just to please our maker, the same way Eric Liddle 'feels his pleasure' when he runs.

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Malcolm Parry, Vancouver Sun, September 5