Can film provoke faith?

To approach religious faith from the experience of film viewing might be seen as a transgressive endeavor. The reasons for choosing this approach for Perfect in Weakness include the author’s close relationship with the film medium—besides being a priest in the Church of England, Colin Heber-Percy is a screenwriter and an enthusiastic film viewer—but also the very essence of the oeuvre he explores through the pages of this book: Andrei Tarkovsky’s Stalker, released in the Soviet Union in 1979. Anyone having watched this film will agree in considering the experience it elicits as unsettling at the very least. Stalker is an invitation for the viewer to wrestle with deeply human (and troubling) questions, among which the issue of faith is certainly salient. As put by the author in the introduction, the problematic nature of faith could be aptly grasped in the light of some science fiction films, such as Steven Spielberg’s Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977). One of the common threads that runs through this type of films is that the person who receives the message from the extraterrestrials is deemed mad. In this vein, Tarkovsky’s fifth feature film could be arguably seen as an alien encounter film, since its characters embark on an uncertain journey that confronts them with foolish situations that require a similarly foolish answer of faith.

One might ask why Heber-Percy is so interested in discussing a film’s potential to rediscover faith as a transgressive experience. In the first chapter of the book, he addresses the metaphysical and cultural context where we live as the ‘perhaps predicament’ (p. 18), that is, a situation where the positivist sort of rationality fostered by the Enlightenment, guarantor of epistemological certainty, has been unmasked as a deceiving fabrication. In line with this insight, John Caruana and Mark Cauchi—editors of Immanent Frames: Postsecular Cinema between Malick and von Trier, a book written in a spirit akin to that of Heber-Percy—also note how the option ‘for the presumed safety of objective knowledge rather than the fragility of belief as faith or trust, which requires a commitment of the heart […], comes at a serious cost’ (Caruana and Cauchi 2018, 8). In the end, these promises of security and certainty turn out to be damaging because they neglect a fundamental aspect of our human condition: weakness. To be human is to be weak, limited, always on the brink of failure. Hence, just as human behavior is inextricably bound to weakness, so it is in need of faith. ‘In Stalker, faith is folly and weakness, but at the same time it is the unsurrenderable ground of all human, fallible experience’ (p. 7), states Heber-Percy.

The faith response to that ‘perhaps predicament’ which defines humanness is not grounded on any certainties, but on risk. Risk makes us human, as Stalker suggests. Those decisions that shape our lives often entail a certain amount of risk. And, above all, there are occasions when a person might find herself in an ultimate situation—what Karl Jaspers termed a Grenzsituation, as the author points out (p. 29)—that involves the highest level of risk and consequently of failure. The kind of faith that the latter situation demands is the one that could be properly referred to as religious; it is the one that lies at the core of Tarkovsky’s film. Heber-Percy unfolds this notion of religious faith throughout his essay with the aim of dismantling the sense that religious life should be static (as put in the motto ubi stabilitas, ibi religio, attributed to Abbot Lugidus). He presents the terrain of faith as ‘radically unstable and unpredictable and borderless’ (p. 97) in a way reminiscent of John Henry Newman’s sermon ‘The Ventures of Faith,’ preached in 1836. Newman maintained that religious faith consists of making ventures for heaven, ‘yet without the certainty of success through them.’ This, he said, ‘is the very meaning of the word ‘venture;’ for that is a strange venture which has nothing in it of fear, risk, danger, anxiety, uncertainty. Yes; so it certainly is; and in this consists the excellence and nobleness of faith’ [Newman (1909), 296].

Perfect in Weakness takes a step further in its exploration of faith. It notes how the kind of faith embodied by the characters of Tarkovsky’s film—most notably by the Stalker himself—could be addressed as specifically Christian. If religious faith implies absolute failure as a possibility, Christian faith contains failure as a fact. The crucifixion of Christ is perhaps the worst failure that has ever taken place in human history. Similarly, both the parables uttered by Christ and the plot of Stalker are surprisingly deceptive: ‘the first will be last, the criminal becomes the guide; the fool becomes the instructor; failure is the only route to success’ (p. 77). The author holds that Tarkovsky’s oeuvre might be termed as Christian not because of its Christian references—which are undeniably present: electricity poles forming a Calvary scene, three figures around a table as in Andrei Rublev’s Trinity icon, a man with a crown of thorns, and so on—but because its narrative is essentially shaped by weakness and failure: it is cross-shaped.

Consequently, this book invites the viewer to engage with Stalker in a way that certainly differs from mere academic deciphering. ‘I will assume for the sake of argument (but also from personal conviction)’—writes Heber-Percy—‘that the experience of watching a film can be a conversion, a metanoia’ (p. 8). Behind this assertion there is a more relevant one, namely that Christian faith endures to the extent that it is life changing; this is arguably one of the great insights contained in Heber-Percy’s essay. ‘I believe Stalker, and the risk-laden ideas to which it gives expression, presents contemporary Christian apologists with a challenge, and an opportunity. It is an opportunity that, were it to be grasped, would bed Christianity back into its apocalyptic, mystical roots’ (p. 21), he asserts. Drawing upon the author’s words, one might say that Tarkovksy presents us with a challenging opportunity, a path that paradoxically needs weakness and failure to prosper. This is what underlies the prayer of the Stalker for his two journey companions: ‘Let them be helpless like children. Because weakness is a great thing and strength is nothing.’ He is echoing the words of Saint Paul in 2 Corinthians 2:19—‘for power is made perfect in weakness’—that have inspired the title of the book. This helplessness referred to by the main character is the condition for those journeyers—and for us viewers—to be open to see in a new way.

Stalker as a whole ‘is at least partly about seeing, about revelation’ (p. 86), writes Heber-Percy. The film unfolds as a journey narrative that is ultimately apocalyptic (following the literal meaning of this term), since it is oriented towards a final revelation, a miracle, in a sense that resembles the Road to Emmaus story in Luke’s Gospel (24:13-35). At the same time, the journey undergone by the three protagonists is intended to be paralleled by our own journey as viewers, which raises the pressing question: can the film medium provoke faith? In addressing this question, the book compares the nature of the film medium to that of an icon. There is no meaning, no message, underlying an icon; likewise, there is no meaning hidden beneath the film’s surface, waiting to be unearthed. ‘Film is absolutely superficial’ (p. 80). Thus, its revelatory condition lies in its superficiality, in its appearance. In his the first part of Cultura y verdad, an essay on the relationships between culture and Christian faith, Fernando Inciarte affirms that ‘the spiritual place of Tarkovsky is that of an iconic Christianity, for which appearances are not deceptive’ (Inciarte 2016, 113). Both icon and film offer us ‘a reflective surface, or a surface that offers the possibility of reflecting back to us an image of ourselves transformed, converted, freed’ (p. 81). Here is the substance of the revelation contained in Stalker. ‘If I looked into a mirror, and did not see my face, I should have the sort of feeling which actually comes upon me, when I look into this living busy world, and see no reflexion of its Creator’ [Newman (1908), 241]. The words written by John Henry Newman in his Apologia pro Vita Sua also help to illuminate the crux lying at the bottom of the aforementioned insights.

Last of all, it is well worth noting some features of this essay that might be deemed as formal, but that effectively echo the unsettling spirit of Tarkovsky’s fifth feature film. Perfect in Weakness stands as a methodologically messy book. According to the author, its methodology consists of ‘bringing apparently unrelated or unexpected, even unhelpful, fragments and ideas into juxtaposition in order to reveal the contours of the impossible, the ungraspable’ (p. 55). The book introduces illuminating insights from the fourth century church father Gregory of Nyssa and from Models of Contextual Theology by Stephen B. Bevans (Bevans 2002)—two key conversation partners through these pages—but also some playful and disruptive quotations from David Bowie, Susan Sontag, Gilles Deleuze, Stanley Cavell or Victor Fleming’s The Wizard of Oz (1939). In line with the main characters of Stalker, the reader of this book is constantly faced with challenging or even contradictory assertions, all of them aimed at distorting his or her preconceived ideas on religious faith. Hence, we might say that the experience of reading Heber-Percy’s essay turns out to be a thought-provoking journey towards a mysterious revelation. The question asked by the Stalker to his fellow journeyers is also addressed to us: ‘Are you awake?’

Pablo Alzola Cerero 
Ciencias de la Educación, Lenguaje, Cultura y Artes, Ciencias Historico-Jurídicas y Humanísticas y Lenguas Modernas, Universidad Rey Juan Carlos, Madrid, Spain
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