The San Antonio Independent Christian Film Festival

Well -- the San Antonio Independent Christian Film Festival strikes again. And I have yet to get my thoughts on the matter wholly in order.

I haven't actually seen any of these movies. I'm working off of scattered summaries, trailers, and mission statements at the moment. But I definitely want to get my hands on one of the festival DVDs at some point. If this is the future of Christian filmmaking, I want a solid picture of the mess it's heading into, and hopefully some solid ideas of ways to provide a counterpoint.

Note the word "counterpoint." Unlike last year, I'm not going around yelling that the SAICFF is a disgrace to Christian art and culture, a dead end, and that should we scratch the festival and its guidelines and start over. There are problems, to be sure. But I was far too harsh in my initial assessment. I've reread the 2004 entries, and there are some promising summaries in the mix. After Hours, The Art of Play, From Joseph's Quill, and Nellie, among others.

I have no clue if the finished products do justice to the summaries or not. Images of horrific acting, bad lighting, poor scoring, poor dialog, and glaring moralizing immediately spring to mind, and I'm inclined to think that the answer is "or not." But I can see good films potentially being made out of some of these summaries, and this is a most encouraging thought. The festival and its guidelines do not have to be a dead end street. A good director can make something thoughtful and worthwhile under them.

Many of the movies this year also appear promising. No Greater Love, The Narrow Path, and A Journey Home, among others. Again, good acting, good filmmaking technique, good development, characterization, wit, and subtlety would be necessary (especially for other possibly good ones like Bubble Trouble,Growing Up, and Engel in America).

Assorted scattered reports say that the quality has risen this year, so maybe a couple of these hit gold this time.

Either way, they're clean, family friendly, moral, encouraging, Christian films -- just like the guidelines and festival makers want.

And as wonderful and encouraging as all these might be, they also come nowhere close to encompassing the potential breadth and depth and impact and height of Christian filmmaking.

If the SAICFF becomes the face of Christian movie-making, we are in quite a bit of trouble. Making family-friendly movies is a worthy goal; making clean movies is a worthy goal; making movies that have a nice and wonderful resolution (with clear answers!) at the end can be a worthy goal. But I can't agree that these are the only truly and deeply "Christian" movies that can be made. Or that they're the ideal standard a Christian movie should strive for.

First off, this world is a screwed up place, where bad things happen, where evil things happen, and where things aren't always nice and pretty and family-friendly. And often, if you're going to tell a story fully and deeply, you're going to have to deal with this sort of thing. If you're going to write a film that grapples seriously many of the evil, difficult, messy parts of reality, you're going to have evil-difficult-messy-uncomfortable parts in the film. Often things that you can't just brush over with a happy smilie Jesus-loves-you! face at the end.

Secondly, this world is a place where the answers to things aren't always clear and obvious and written the sky -- where people make horrific choices and mistakes, and where people think they are doing right, but are actually doing quite the opposite. And where the old man still exists in the redeemed, and where God's common grace shows up in the unredeemed. If you're going to make a film that tackles deeply important things fully and truly, this sort of mess and difficulty will probably show up in your film as well.

Going back again to the CS Lewis lectures...one of the incredible things about fiction is that it can be "at rest in a degree of ambiguity." It can "provide the exceptions to our generalizations, reminding us that our generalizations are generalizations."

SAICFF films appear to run into barriers and problems in both of these areas. There's a strict limitation on the portrayal of negative parts of reality. And, although it's a bit harder to pin down, SAICFF films also seem a bit reticent to allow a "degree of ambiguity," or to focus on "exceptions to the generalizations."

In one sense, this is not necessarily a bad thing.

People like me who tend to like a degree of ambiguity need people out there saying, "NO! SOMETIMES THINGS ARE CLEAR AND OBVIOUS! GET BACK IN LINE, YOU PROTO-HERETIC!" And while dark and troubling movies serve a good and necessary purpose, warm and encouraging and uplifting ones serve at least as vital a role.

SAICFF films will tend towards a certain emphasis and tone. Flickerings films tend toward another. Other Christian groups will tend towards other ones. Counterpoint. Hopefully. As long as we aren't killing one another over it, in which case it'd be more like John Cage than Bach...

(And really, it's not that simple, because these groups are often saying rather mutually exclusive things about culture, art, and Christianity's relation to the world. My brain hurts at the moment, though, and I've got a paper to write, and this is thing is already super-long, so part 2 will not get written anytime soon).