Believing in Film: Christianity and Classic European Cinema
MARK LE FANU
(I.B.Tauris, 288 PP, £72)
Tablet bookshop price £64.80 • Tel 020 7799 4064
Most critics have at some time cited the vital influence of a past artist or artwork on a modern author, then received a letter claiming that our lovingly located creative keystone was completely unknown to its supposed disciple.
This shows that cultural criticism, as the considerable cinematic scholar Mark Le Fanu acknowledges in his latest book, can only ever be a matter of educated guesses. As artists can be particularly resistant to religious exegesis – Philip Roth and Woody Allen rejecting identification as Jewish writers, François Mauriac seeing himself as “a novelist who happens to be a Catholic” – Le Fanu is notably bold to address the relevance of Christianity to the work of major twentieth-century European film-makers, many of whom identified as atheists or anti-clerics.
Adult definition as secular cannot, however, negate earlier immersion in faith. Imagine that Roth, Allen and Mauriac had been raised Baptist
