Atheism and Godlessness in Film

[chaddoli]

Jumping off of the very interesting "Arts and Faith" thread, I wanted to discuss films that are particularly atheist. I am an atheist myself, but still absolutely love and am moved by spiritual filmmaking. So many great filmmakers are admittedly very religious or spiritual (Bresson, Dreyer, Bergman, Tarkovsky, many others); I wanted to look at some distinctively atheist artists and how their feelings on religion affect their work (I know of Bunuel, Pasolini, Cronenberg, Woody Allen, Fassbinder and - I'm guessing? - Antonioni).

I don't want to confuse atheism and cynicism, as it is easy to do. But I also don't want to rule out films that simply have "godless" world views, worlds without a sense of common morality, because I believe their messages, or presentations of this world view to be relevant to this topic.

For example from the Arts and Faith list, though I believe it to be a masterpiece, I strongly disagree with the inclusion of Unforgiven, as I find it to be a film that takes place in a particularly godless world. One of the last lines of the film,

SPOILERS:

Little Bill: I don't deserve this.

William Munny: Deserve's got nothing to do with it.

and then he shoots him.

It's this total lack of any kind of underlying, natural moral code that I'm talking about. Despite what he did to Ned, Little Bill does NOT deserve his fate. He was just doing his job. But Munny understands that doesn't matter in the least. Also, I find the ease of Munny's return to his old ways particularly telling, indeed he truly is, and will always remain unforgiven.

I also don't think Bela Tarr should be on that list.

Anyway, I'm sure what you all have to say will be much more interesting. I am particularly interested in everyone's thoughts on Fassbinder and Antonioni on this subject, and even Woody Allen, as I think of Crimes and Misdemeanors as a particularly atheist film (though I might be confusing atheism and cynicism myself).

[godardslave]

if woody allen isn't an atheist, i'm god.
or maybe he is just undecided.

[sevenarts]

Interesting topic, though I'm not too sure about the inclusion of Bunuel as an atheist without some qualifications. Despite his continual statements about his own atheism, he seems to have more of a continual engagement with religion in his work -- on a par with Bergman, although perhaps leaning more towards the atheistic pole than Bergman does. Still, I'd say both those directors are examples of largely atheistic individuals who nevertheless maintain some relationship with religion and spirituality in their films.

Another interesting case seems to be Polanski. I'm not sure what his actual status is, but there's a definite undercurrent of outright hostility towards religion in his films. Virtually all of Rosemary's Baby seems to be a good example, especially the fractured flashbacks that take stabs at "Catholic guilt" and paint a pretty oppressive portrait of the role of religion in Rosemary's life. And in The Tenant, the priest's eulogy -- though obviously a product of Trelkovsky's delusions -- also seems to be an overblown parody of the kinds of things Polanski believes religion to be about: namely, fear, guilt, and repression.

I wonder if Godard should be included here, not as someone who is overtly atheist (though I'd be very surprised to find out he wasn't) but as someone whose films capture an almost godless world, certainly a world almost entirely devoid of religious or spiritual expression or aspirations. Godard is a totally worldly, humanistic director -- his concerns are for people and their interactions and their world, and I can't remember any of his characters or films having much to say about God or gods or religion on any large level (if at all??). Probably the truest form of atheism is this total lack of concern for the spiritual realm, which I think is fairly difficult to achieve except in people who have not been exposed to much religion at all in their lives. This is clearly not the case with Bergman and Bunuel, and based solely on his films I'd venture a guess that Polanski had some religious background as well.

My own experience would fall into the Bergman/Bunuel camp, too; I was raised Catholic and only in my teens began moving away from religion towards a non-commital atheist/agnostic position. Perhaps it's for this reason that I like to see films where the directors seem to be wrestling with and exploring spirituality -- either from a largely atheistic position or a more religious one.

[Ste]

I am confused by your equation of "godlessness" with a "lack of a natural moral code". All societies -- human and animal -- have accepted standards of behaviour, or codes of conduct, that they adhere to; the alternative, anarchy, being too unstable a system to exist over long periods of time. The idea of God, or gods, just happens to be the most convenient -- and by far the most popular -- method of controlling large numbers of people that humankind has come up with so far. There are other methods, of course, but that is beyond the scope of your question.

I don't say this merely to be obtuse. I am an atheist myself, but it was never a day-to-day issue in my life until I moved to the United States five years ago. (Few people in my native England take the church terribly seriously; the Church of England is, after all, a political invention first and foremost.)

Morality is both an issue of personal conscience and one of practical concern. We do what we do because society has taught us that it is the right thing. Fear of the law, or some other repercussion, also prevents us from acting in an anti-social manner. But American atheists -- and I'm not necessarily assuming that you are an American here -- are obsessed with weighing their lack of a supernatural belief structure against what they simultaneously perceive as being the exclusive domain of religious groups i.e. a common, societal sense of morality. I know some very mixed up, unhappy atheists as a result of this kind of thinking.

I can think of many acts in cinematic history that can be interpreted as "godless", on your terms, but no films (off the top of my head, anyway) that exist completely and absolutely in a moral vacuum. There is always a price to be paid, one way or another, for one's actions. If anyone out there can name such a film, I'd be interested to hear of it.

[Ives]

Regarding Unforgiven - One could argue that Munny is meting out justice to those who deserve it but believe themselves to be innocent. Clearly, in this film, noone is forgiven. I never thought the title referred only to Munny. It refers to all the characters in the film, except perhaps the prostitute with the cut up face, and maybe Davy-boy. The cowboy who does that to her, the women who plot against him, the owner of the saloon, Little Bill, etc; all are culpable for something, whether it is the inability to control rage, or the desire to seek revenge, or the refusal to treat people equally. All the characters spiral into chaos. And there is Munny, the Angel of Death, guiltless and conscience-less as he carries out judgment.

I don't view this as an atheist film. I see it as a conscious expression of the world, twisted by violence, corruption, and denial of God.

I love the film, and I love hearing other people's views on it! Sorry to tangent-ize!

[bunuelian]

Regarding Bunuel, my feeling after having read a good deal about him and watching his films is that he claimed to be an atheist because that statement alone was a highly subversive act in his day. Atheists were toward the child molester end of the scale of social deviants, and brazenly declaring himself as one of them was a way to brand himself as a rebel against the Spanish establishment. On the other hand, it's tempting to find the widespread movement to see Bunuel as actually religious as just another ploy by those who want their cake (his films and legacy) and to eat it (by coopting his vision as somehow actually religious after all) too.

It will be hard to find an "atheist" cinema, because "atheism" is not a movement or an ideology, it's only a lack of belief in a deity. It doesn't mean that one actively disbelieves (i.e. "There is no god."), though this is a form of atheism. It means only that one doesn't believe in a god (i.e. "I don't believe in a god."). People who take religious belief for granted often fail to see the distinction, because they often (apparently) assume that religious faith is inherent in everyone, and one has to decide to lose it. This same myopic reasoning is used to argue that people choose to be gay. I didn't choose to be an atheist, I simply don't believe in a god.

As such, a truly "atheist" film is both very easy and very hard to identify. On the one hand, any film that simply never mentions god is atheist, because god isn't in the picture unless the viewer projects it into the narrative. Your standard summer romantic comedy frequently fits this category, as do most flicks. The crisis of faith seen frequently in Bergman could be seen as "atheist," but the elusive nature of the "god" concept virtually ensures that any debate on the topic will collapse into rhetorical gamesmanship: "He lost his faith because he didn't let Jesus into his heart, and if only he'd let him in he wouldn't be so unhappy!" etc.

Atheism has absolutely nothing to do with morality, and in fact religion is used so often to justify immoral acts that it's hard to know where to begin. Are all the religiously-motivated slaughters throughout our history to be conveniently disregarded as "atheist" to preserve the good name of theism? The lack of a warm fuzzy ending in a film doesn't make it atheist, it just makes it less commercially potent. That a film doesn't stroke the audience's presumptions about an all-encompassing goodness hardly pushes it into atheist territory - it has to take a stance about belief in a deity before the label can be applied. Perhaps if the murderous gunslinger shot a priest in the head and said, "there ain't no god" and then went on to live a happy life, an argument could be made for this being "atheist." But it's just that kind of witchburning attitude about atheism that actually flips such things into decidedly theist territory: atheists are sick and need to be contained. Obviously there's a subversive element to such things (i.e. the kid shooting himself in El Topo) but the political and social elements do not justify the "atheist" label. I would go so far as to argue that the only people interested in labeling anything as "atheist" aren't motivated by the philosophical stance of a film, but rather by their own desire to use the label for some other purpose. Because "atheism" means nothing on its own, it defines only an absence.

[mmacklem]

I read an interview with Ingmar bergman where he was talking about how his movie career gradually travelled from the perspective of how God works within the world to how the world comes to grips with a God that has deserted it. (I can't remember the reference, perhaps someone can help me out here.)

Personally, I am on a movie mailing list with several friends who are atheists, and I am the only Christian on the list, and I often argue in conversation that there is a very fine line between a Christian cinema and an atheist cinema, because atheism at least considers the problem of the nature of God and comes to the conclusions that God is absent, whereas a Christian aesthetic in film at least considers the same problem. Kind of like that saying that the opposite of love isn't hate, it's indifference: believers and atheists are considering the same problem, and thus most of their conversation at least is on the same topic, and posing the question of why one doesn't just conclude that God doesn't exist is a key to strengthening one's faith (or at my own, personally).

With that in mind, some of the most intense spiritual films I've seen are the ones that I really have no idea what conclusion they come to on the question of the existence of God, like Persona or Last Year at Marienbad or The Sacrifice.

[Gropius]

I wonder if Godard should be included here, not as someone who is overtly atheist (though I'd be very surprised to find out he wasn't) but as someone whose films capture an almost godless world, certainly a world almost entirely devoid of religious or spiritual expression or aspirations.

As a Marxist/Maoist, I think Godard would be an atheist by definition.

Rather than a religious-atheist dichotomy, I think a better way to frame this discussion is in terms of religion (or 'the metaphysical') versus materialism. Most realist films could be said to take place in a 'materialist' world, and in fact it is possible to interpret almost all films as 'atheist' if one discounts the characters' beliefs as mere delusion. 'Fantasy' films, or those in which something literally/physically impossible takes place, are more open to question, but are still reconcilable with materialism within, for instance, a Freudian dream framework.

As a materialist myself, the question of religion in film is a somewhat uncomfortable one. So many of the 'auteurs' who are held up as great (like Chaddoli mentions: Bresson, Bergman, Tarkovsky, etc.) have a conscious spiritual quest taking place in their work, and sometimes I wonder if e.g. Tarkovsky fanatics are seeking some sort of secular substitute for religion in cinema. For this reason, I think one should be wary of regarding film as some sort of 'transcendent' experience, rather than just one of many types of human creativity. The cult of the auteur also feeds into this, which is why it can also become unhealthy. Film directors have no greater insights into existence than any other group of humanity.

[chaddoli]

As to Woody Allen: I do find Crimes and Misdemeanors to be a particularly atheist film, and this also gets back to what I was discussing in terms of a world without an inherent moral code.

SPOILERS:

Crimes and Misdemeanors is an atheist film because in the end, after listening to the rabbi and remembering his father's teachings, Judah chooses to go on with his life, chooses to not let guilt overcome him. The rabbi's point seemed to be that this is impossible; there is an underlying, inherent moral code in the world and someone who violates it will be punished in one form or another. This is god's world. Because Judah's life is ultimately NOT ruined, because he proves that one can overcome or circumvent this supposed inherent code of morality or justice with the simple power of will, the film seems to be displaying, quite clearly, an utterly godless world.

[jorencain]

As to Woody Allen: I do find Crimes and Misdemeanors to be a particularly atheist film, and this also gets back to what I was discussing in terms of a world without an inherent moral code.

SPOILERS:

Crimes and Misdemeanors is an atheist film because in the end, after listening to the rabbi and remembering his father's teachings, Judah chooses to go on with his life, chooses to not let guilt overcome him. The rabbi's point seemed to be that this is impossible; there is an underlying, inherent moral code in the world and someone who violates it will be punished in one form or another. This is god's world. Because Judah's life is ultimately NOT ruined, because he proves that one can overcome or circumvent this supposed inherent code of morality or justice with the simple power of will, the film seems to be displaying, quite clearly, an utterly godless world.

MORE SPOILERS, I GUESS:

I completely agree with that, and would say that "Match Point" obviously operates on a similar level. The difference is that the main character really wants there to be a God, which is why he seems on the verge of confessing to the police, and part of him wants to be punished. Judah chooses to go on with his life, but Rhys-Meyers' character goes on with his life almost against his will.

[nick]

As to Woody Allen: I do find Crimes and Misdemeanors to be a particularly atheist film, and this also gets back to what I was discussing in terms of a world without an inherent moral code.

SPOILERS:

Crimes and Misdemeanors is an atheist film because in the end, after listening to the rabbi and remembering his father's teachings, Judah chooses to go on with his life, chooses to not let guilt overcome him. The rabbi's point seemed to be that this is impossible; there is an underlying, inherent moral code in the world and someone who violates it will be punished in one form or another. This is god's world. Because Judah's life is ultimately NOT ruined, because he proves that one can overcome or circumvent this supposed inherent code of morality or justice with the simple power of will, the film seems to be displaying, quite clearly, an utterly godless world.

This is an interesting interpretation and well thought out; however, I disagree slightly. While I agree about the idea that morals are most definitely subjective, or related to a particular culture (simplified), this doesn't really negate the existence of a divine being. Aside from the idea that the Rabbi believes there is any inherent moral code, one can always take the argument that perhaps there is a God and that he is just letting everyone do whatever they want. I am not familiar with a belief in God that presupposes divine punishment occurring in the "first life," this always seems to occur in the "afterlife" or a "next life." Sure there are plenty of religious individuals and groups who are more than happy to lay down their "divine" punishment right now but I for one have never found in any religious teachings that actually justify these acts of self-righteousness. The film for me doesn't deal with the existence or lack there of of a God or god's. The same goes for matchpoint in my mind, only this time, as has been pointed out, the main character's own moral choices are harder for him to get over. This is like parents who use fear to instill a belief in God in their children. It's much harder to get over not believing in God when there is a fear immediately associated with it.

[mmacklem]

*** MORE SPOILERS ALERT ***

In the context of Crimes and Misdemeanors, I think the primary storyline is far more ambiguous then its being interpreted here. True, the response of the main character is to reject the existence of God and just move on with his life. But I do think that the movie presents him as giving up the existence of a moral code in the process, and thus does still equate the moral and spiritual dimensions (i.e., in a world without God there is nothing to hold you to the morals that you believed in a world in which God exists). The main character is responsible for the death of another human being, which tortures him while he feels condemned for it due to his moral code, but which is fine once he moves on by rejecting the enforcement of his moral code.

Keep in mind that in this interpretation, I am not arguing that atheism = no moral code, quite the opposite in fact. I am instead arguing that Crimes and Misdemeanors forces that equation if you argue that it is an atheist film. In fact, I would say that although it presents a character who rejects the existence of a God, it also shows the price that he pays for that decision.

Now in the context of the same film, I'm surprised that the running subplot about the documentary about the philosphy professor has not come up. Here is a guy who is presented as arguing for a philosophy that is constantly framed within an acceptance of life and love and so forth, and he eventually rejects all of that and instead kills himself. From the final sequence of the film:

"We're all faced throughout our lives with agonizing decisions, moral choices. Some are on a grand scale, most of these choices are on lesser points. But we define ourselves by the choices we have made. We are, in fact, the sum total of our choices. Events unfold so unpredictably, so unfairly, Human happiness does not seem to be included in the design of creation. it is only we, with our capacity to love that give meaning to the indifferent universe. And yet, most human beings seem to have the ability to keep trying and even try to find joy from simple things, like their family, their work, and from the hope that future generations might understand more."

[mmacklem]

One more follow-up from my last post on Crimes and Misdemeanors: in Judah's opening speech, he says:

"I remember my father telling me, "The eyes of God are on us always." The eyes of God. What a phrase to a young boy. What were God's eyes like? Unimaginably penetrating, intense eyes, I assumed."

So his rejection of God is a rejection of an all-seeing, all-powerful, judging and punishing God who follows him throughout the movie. I think that the entire movie could be viewed as an argument between a world with a God who is always judging (in the Judah storyline), and a world with no God but just loving people (in the Woody Allen / philosphy professor storyline), and the comparison of where both of them get you in the end (in the form of the meeting of the Woody Allen and Martin Landau characters in the final sequence).

[montgomery]

All this discussion about Crimes and Misdemeanors only reinforces why I thought Match Point was so poor. I didn't like Match Point and have a hard time seeing it as anything other than a clumsy, more superficial version of C&M One of the main reasons is because of what we're discussing here. Chris, the character in Match Point, is, or appeared to me to be, a psychopath. The fact that he committed the murder himself would be more shocking if he ever had anything akin to a spiritual or moral crisis. There is a moment of panic, and a half-sleepless night in which he justifies the murder to himself (and his victims), but all of this is related to the stress of the situation. Also, Chris is a far more active criminal, and I don't know how anyone can sympathize with him. Murder seems to occur to him right away when the situation gets out of hand, and he has little trouble going through with it. Judah in C&M is a far more human. He starts off with a relatively small, common trangsgression: an affair. He allows the murder to happen, and calls for it, but in the most passive way, to remove himself from as much possible blame and guilt. He doesn't even bring it up; he makes his brother broach the subject. Crimes is about someone losing his faith in god. It has an ironic twist, because on one hand he "prospers," as he says in the film, but on the other hand, as Cliff tells him, his worst fears are realized: there is no morality, there is perhaps no god. Crimes and Misdemeanours is devestating, and probably Allen's greatest work, which makes it all the more strange that he needed to make an inferior version of it. The theme of "luck" in Match Point does not carry the same weight. First of all, unlike Crimes, Allen spells out the theme for us in the opening voice-over (this is clearly Allen talking--I know, because he's said the same thing about luck many times before--and it's to the detriment of the film that he puts it in Chris' mouth, as if it's Chris' philosophy and the film is about him seeing this philosophy through. It's also extremely didactic). I agree with Allen about luck--I do think everything is basically luck . But I don't think Match Point is an interesting exploration of luck. It seems to me that Chris is unlucky, not lucky. He has one stroke of luck--the ring incident. But if he had better luck, he wouldn't have had to murder anyone, much less a girl he seems to love more than his wife.

[Gordon]

In 'realistic' or non-religious films (ie. discounting King of Kings, The Greatest Story Ever Told) that are, nevertheless ultimately theistic, they often have to go extreme lengths to show the presence of a divine being, ie. the ending to Dreyer's Ordet. A more subtle technique is used in William Peter Blatty's, The Ninth Configuration, when Cutshaw gets Kane's medal at the end. It's hard to show the omnipresence of a divine being in Art in a non-gratuitous or ridiculous way. It would be very difficult to show the lack of a divine being in Art, also. Even if a supreme Divine Being was proved to exist and it presented codes of conduct for humanity, there is nothing to stop certain individuals for disobeying those codes. Even if they were punished whilst in their corporeal state here on Earth by the Divine Being, would it really be 'justice'? Their crime, murder for instance, would still remain, the victim(s) would still suffer, also. This is already the case among our species, anyhow: a man commits a murder; he is caught; sentenced to a long imprisonment or death; he gets out, murders again or is put to death or dies in prison, but other brutal crimes are still committed throughout the world.

There is a undoubtedly a 'will' in Nature and it is amoral and often operates in seemingly irrational ways. Mankind was, and is, brought forth by this will. The energies involved are inconceivable. Man is part animal, yet has strove for over 100,000 years to overcome all what he saw or sees as 'problems'. There is the theory of 'partnership' cultures, which existed from 14,000 BCE to around the fall of Classical Greece, though smaller communities existed among so-called 'Pagans' up until the 16th Century and of 'dominator' cultures in Industrial, Capitalist, Modern Societies. The so-called 'Pagan' values, habits and customs, involving boundary-dissolving rituals through the use of psychedelic plants (psilocybin mushrooms, DMT-containing roots and snuffs) and potions, such as the elusive Soma. In these cultures, worship of Goddesses and of a Supreme feminine supra-consciousness, which was experienced or intuited whilst in states of euphoric altered states was what held everything together. The onslaught of bastardized Judeo-Christian beliefs, religious wars, spice trading, empire-building, industrialization and so and so forth, eradicated much of these cults, cultures, communities, etc, but no the beliefs and an unconscious longing to return to a paradisical 'garden' has rigidly remained with us for over 8,000 years. With orthodox Judeo-Christian (ie. not including Gnosticism, Kabbalah, etc) systems, there is no psychedelic plant use, though there were mushroom cults during the time of Christ and had been for a long, long time and there is a very persuasive theory that the man who is said to be Christ was either part of those cults or was used as a smokescreen to distract the Roman authorities from those cults. The point is that all this talk of "GOD" in atheistic terms that we have had since the early 19th Century from Kierkegaard, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Heidegger, Russell, Sartre (all immensely interesting men and theories) focus on the classic male deity (Schopenhauer was the least bothered by God) and overlook a vast archaic world of values, ideas, beliefs, rituals and events; Nietzsche was the most aware, but in the end, settled on Dionysus as his inspiration, which was a good choice as far male dieties go, though Dionysus may have been half-human, half-god. "God" might be "dead", but looking at certain aspects the world and human behaviour closely today, it seems like a rebirth of the Goddess in the minds is underway, but its too early to tell what it will lead to.

So, with that in mind, I think that atheism, if we are so speak plainly, is non-belief among Westerns in the Judeo-Christian "God" (ie. Yahweh / Jehovah), Islam's "Allah" or so a slightly lesser extent, Hinduism's "Vishnu", all of which are archetypal representations of a metaphysical force that has barely been intuited to any substantial degree among human beings. These forces may not even have created the physical Universe, but they may thought of as some kind of source of the consciousness, intelligence and imagination of the Earth and its inhabitants and their domain may be visited by us shamanically through certain plants, fungi. A plant that sends you to a three-dimensional netherworld where you are shown and given complex, 'foreign' information? That's very, very disturbing and extremely hard to explain satisfactorily.

This is my highly truncated view of it all. Where and how Cinema fits into all of that, God (!) only knows. Movies seem trivial in light of such weighty issues. All of those serious, intellectual European art house films of Bergman, et al don't really ask the right questions, I feel, though I admire many of them for various reasons. To me, films like Murnau's Faust, The Wizard of Oz, It's a Wonderful Life, Powell-Pressburger's A Matter of Life and Death, John Boorman's Zardoz, Jodorowsky's Holy Mountain, Herzog's Every Man for Himself and God Against All and Heart of Glass all have more power, truth and substance than any of Bergman's dour post-1960 films, for example. Woody Allen's, Crimes and Misdemeanors, which I saw for the first time recently, is a typical post-modern 'dark drama' of the lack of morality in the world, which points towards God's absence as the possible justification of immoral behaviour. It's hard to tell whether it is Woody or certain viewers who are being intellectually cynical. Who's to say what happens to Judah Rosenthal in later years? The repressed his guilt into his unconscious, that's how I see it. It's an ambiguous, thought-provoking ending.

The effects of "Godlessness", of course, would mean little to a Buddhist. Nihilism is the only state that we should fear. There's nothing ambiguous about nihilism; it has many forms and doesn't always manifest in physically destructive ways.

Modern Western man, be he of Judeo-Christian faith, agnostic or a staunch atheist, often floats into extreme decadence, nihilistic despair or gleeful (self or other) destruction. This is because, he has lost contact with the deeper, primordial forces and sources: the uncategorized 'plant consciousness'; eros; the Logos; dead ancestors. Christian dogma; the Crusades; destructive expansionism and culture eradication; the Witch-hunts; the so-called ages of 'Enlightenment' and 'Reason'; the Industrial Age; Capitalism and a Century of War; technological liberation that turned to alienation, followed by what Colin Wilson perceptively called, "the Age of Defeat" have led mankind further and further away from its authentic, compassionate, loving Source. No amount of wars, money, intellectualism or computers will save us. The only 'tool' that could save us is psychedelic plants, which since the 70s, have been pooh-poohed in the media-government arena. The boundaries have to be dissolved before we can see what the true reality is. Left as it is, our world will become fully nihilistic, violently nihilistic. Thankfully, I "wasn't born to follow".

[Oedipax]

Rather than a religious-atheist dichotomy, I think a better way to frame this discussion is in terms of religion (or 'the metaphysical') versus materialism.

I'm not sure it can be divided along these lines, either - I'm thinking of a certain tendency in some filmmakers to evoke the spiritual through largely materialist means. Bresson is the key figure here, and we see traces of that sensibility in the Dardennes and also in the "Death trilogy" of Van Sant.

In the latter case, by the time he gets to Last Days, Van Sant does evoke explicitly the fantastic/spiritual in the shot of Blake's spirit leaving his body and climbing the ladder. But in Elephant, for instance, our exposure to what we might call "grace" or "transcendence" happens entirely within the ordinary day-to-day activities of teenagers. I'm thinking in particular of the shot of the athlete (wearing the red hoodie) as he ascends the stairs on the way to meet his girlfriend; the camera pans up as it follows behind to show brilliant natural light filtering in and illuminating the staircase. But also the way the actors' faces are shot, strangely luminous, the vibrancy of the colors, the way Van Sant (and Harris Savides) emphasizes the beauty of what one might normally think of as rather banal.

[GringoTex]

It's been said in the forum several times before but always worth repeating (like a good cast.)
Bresson's last movie is the most direct imagineable statement possible of a vision of life in the total absence of a god.

[good cast member]Which is the opposite of Atheism, right? An atheist isn't going to notice the absence of a god. That's all Bresson does notice in his last film[/good cast member]

In my mind, Ernst Lubitch and Howard Hawks are the most atheist of directors. God's absent and everybody's having either too good of a time or too much adventure to notice.

[zedz]

It's been said in the forum several times before but always worth repeating (like a good cast.)
Bresson's last movie is the most direct imagineable statement possible of a vision of life in the total absence of a god.

[good cast member]Which is the opposite of Atheism, right? An atheist isn't going to notice the absence of a god. That's all Bresson does notice in his last film[/good cast member]

In my mind, Ernst Lubitch and Howard Hawks are the most atheist of directors. God's absent and everybody's having either too good of a time or too much adventure to notice.

I'm with Langlois. For a genuine atheist filmmaker, surely their films are going to be marked by complete indifference to spiritual matters, so the scope of this thread is both too broad and too skewed. The filmmakers agonising over God's absence are lapsed, wannabe-theists (like Bergman, Bresson or Bunuel - who acknowledged his own ambivalence). Personally, I think wannabe-theists probably make the best films.

[Murasaki53]

How about Groundhog Day?

The endlessly repeating day mirrors the senselessness and banality of a godless universe. Connors' unsuccessful retreats into hedonism and self-destructiveness mirror our own responses to the lack of meaning.

And yet it is selfless behaviour that finally liberates him. So it's not the holier than thou types who get the monopoly on agape after all.

Plus, there's a few more laughs in it than you get from watching 'Diary of a Country Priest'. The cinema of Atheism therefore doesn't have to be dour or amoral.

If it wasn't a new film, I'd also make a case for 'The Proposition' here too.

[chaddoli]

Couldn't it easily be argued or assumed that God is punishing Bill Murray's character until he learns his lesson? And once he does, he is set free.

[tryavna]

Couldn't it easily be argued or assumed that God is punishing Bill Murray's character until he learns his lesson? And once he does, he is set free.

Or maybe it's a meditation on the concept of the "eternal return," whittled down to just one day. Thus we create our own heavens and hells by our actions each and every day.

[flyonthewall2983]

I'd love to read the original script. It's revealed that the actual day goes on for something like a thousand years.

[Antoine Doinel]

As to Woody Allen: I do find Crimes and Misdemeanors to be a particularly atheist film, and this also gets back to what I was discussing in terms of a world without an inherent moral code.

SPOILERS:

Crimes and Misdemeanors is an atheist film because in the end, after listening to the rabbi and remembering his father's teachings, Judah chooses to go on with his life, chooses to not let guilt overcome him. The rabbi's point seemed to be that this is impossible; there is an underlying, inherent moral code in the world and someone who violates it will be punished in one form or another. This is god's world. Because Judah's life is ultimately NOT ruined, because he proves that one can overcome or circumvent this supposed inherent code of morality or justice with the simple power of will, the film seems to be displaying, quite clearly, an utterly godless world.

I would like to disagree here. I think Allen very much believes in God, however in one that is absent/leaves the fate of the world to the people he created to inhabit it. In the greater context of the universe, I believe Allen feels that God has very little time or regard to watch over the actions of one tiny planet in the infinite universe. The problem with religion is that it considers human life as the most valuable one in God's eyes, when for all we know he's off in another galaxy watching over something far greater than we can even conceive.

Judah's "decision" to go on with his life is a rationalization, an excuse that prevents him from actually facing the choices he has made head on. And while he may not be ruined physically or financially, he is changed spiritually. I think Judah will forever be haunted by what he has done. And I think this is the rabbi's ultimate argument - that the spiritual damage our moral choices create is one we can never gauge.

[chaddoli]

I respect your opinion on this, but I believe Allen has made many comments to the contrary, stating that he is definitely an atheist.

[souvenir]

I respect your opinion on this, but I believe Allen has made many comments to the contrary, stating that he is definitely an atheist.

Not to get involved too much here, but I read this from the recent New York magazine with Woody and Scarlett Johansson on the cover:

Allen, film's most famous atheist, has even said Scarlett was "touched by God." So has Scarlett made Woody a believer?

"I can only quote myself from the movie Manhattan," he says. "Scarlett is God's answer to Job. God would say, 'I've created a terrifying and horrible universe, but I can also make one of these, so stop complaining.'"