Sightlines · Character course
The Camera and the Collar: A Century of Filming the Religious Life
Cinema has always had a problem with faith: how do you photograph something that, by definition, cannot be seen? The eleven films in this course are the medium's best answers, and each one is a formal invention — a new way of pointing a camera at a person in a habit or a collar and catching what moves behind the vows. The through-line runs from a face in 1928 to an institution in 2015 and back to a face in 2018: cinema first learned to film the believer, then the doubter, then the Church itself, and each generation of filmmakers stole tools from the last. Watch these in order and you are watching a single hundred-year conversation, conducted in close-ups, shadows, silences, and locked-off frames.
Everything starts here, with the discovery that the human face, filmed close enough, is a religious landscape. Dreyer and cameraman Rudolph Maté threw out the rulebook of screen geography — you can never quite map the courtroom — and made the extreme close-up the film's basic unit, shot on new film stock that could finally record skin as skin: pores, sweat, an unmade-up tear crossing Falconetti's cheek. The formal gamble is total: a clash between one woman's private, direct experience of God and the paperwork-and-procedure machinery of the churchmen judging her, staged almost entirely as faces against bare white walls. Nearly every film in this course descends from it — Bergman's held close-ups, Bresson's fragmented framing, Ida's blank-faced novice against empty plaster all trace straight back to this room. Watch for how Dreyer holds a face past the point where a normal film would cut; that extra beat, where feeling gathers without an outlet, is the invention.
Fifteen years later Dreyer returns to the witch trial and inverts his own method: where Joan was blinding white, this is darkness — faces surfacing out of black like seventeenth-century Dutch paintings, white collars and pale skin against deep shadow. Made in Denmark under Nazi occupation, it turns the persecution story inward, into a pastor's household, and asks what a community's fear does when it needs someone to blame; the camera answers with slow, gliding tracking shots through shadowed rooms, a drifting gravity Dreyer had developed in the years between. The great technique is duration on a face after the dialogue is done: Dreyer keeps the shot running until you stop reading the face for information and start watching it as an event — a thought arriving that its owner hasn't admitted yet. It's the bridge film: Joan's close-up wedded to painterly darkness, and the direct model for the interrogation of desire inside a religious house that Black Narcissus would electrify in color four years later.
Then the habit meets Technicolor. Jack Cardiff, studying how Vermeer let window-light fall on skin, built one of the landmark achievements in color photography — and deliberately broke the polite color-harmony rules that Hollywood's Technicolor establishment enforced — to tell a story about nuns in a Himalayan palace where the wind never stops and discipline starts to slip. The invention is color as psychology: a convent of whites, greys, and cool blues into which single saturated notes — a flower, a jewel, a painted mouth — intrude like sins. Where Dreyer filmed faith in black and white as light versus dark, Cardiff films repression chromatically, and his hard, low-angle lighting of a face in crisis imports the old German Expressionist distortions into an English studio picture. Watch the moment a nun applies lipstick in a dark room: nothing happens but color arriving on a face, and it lands like a thunderclap — the whole film's argument in one shot.
Bresson takes Dreyer's face and does the unthinkable: he empties it. A young priest arrives in a grey French village, keeps a diary, and the film gives you the hand writing, the tired voice reading, and then the image of the thing just named — a triple echo of pen, voice, and picture that turns narration into liturgy. This is the film where Bresson stopped directing actors and began arranging what he called "models": non-performers drained of theatrical expression, so that spiritual states register only as fatigue, posture, the way a hand holds a gate. It is the deliberate opposite of the polished literary cinema around it in France, and it invents the genre half this course belongs to — the priest-in-crisis film, where holiness looks exactly like failure. Watch how much Bresson withholds: events happen off-screen, light stays overcast and even, and the drama moves entirely into the gap between what the voice says and what the face refuses to show — the blueprint Winter Light, Ida, and First Reformed all build on.
Every tradition needs its heretic. Buñuel — the old surrealist provocateur, lured back to Franco's Spain — films a devout novice's experiment in charity with a camera of perfect classical calm: José Aguayo's deep-focus black and white never underlines, never editorializes, just regards. That's the trick: photograph the scandalous thing as plainly as a documentary and its strangeness becomes undeniable. Where Bresson films objects as vessels of grace, Buñuel films them as vessels of appetite — watch how a skipping rope, a crucifix, a table setting keep returning with new charges attached, props passed from innocence to obsession without a single nudge from the camera. It is the course's great counter-argument, smuggling the anticlerical dream-logic of 1920s surrealism into a festival-prize art film, and it sets up the darker question The Exorcist will ask a decade later: what if what erupts beneath piety isn't grace at all, but drive?
The bleakest station, and the most rigorous. A Lutheran pastor conducts services in a near-empty Swedish church while his own faith has gone hollow, and Bergman strips the form to match: Sven Nykvist's flat, diffused winter light refuses all glamour, lying on skin "like a verdict," in a chamber drama that runs roughly from one noon service to the next. The radical move is a close-up pushed past even Dreyer's endurance — a woman reading her letter straight into the lens, held for nearly seven minutes, no music, no reaction shot, no relief. Bergman inherits Dreyer's face and Bresson's exhausted cleric (the debt is explicit) but adds a new subject: not faith persecuted or faith failing, but the forms of religion continuing after the content has drained out — a man performing rites he may no longer believe. Schrader will lift this pastor almost whole for First Reformed; watch this first and the later film doubles in depth.
Now the scale explodes. Tarkovsky films Russia's great icon painter — a monk moving through the violence of the medieval fifteenth century — in vast, minutes-long takes that refuse to cut away from discomfort or to punctuate revelation with an edit; the camera cranes and drifts like a witness, not a narrator. Structurally it does for the saint's life what Dreyer did for the trial: no psychology, no explanations, just what the man endures and sees, arranged in episodes across decades. Made inside the Soviet system and quietly dismantling the propaganda-epic tradition it was funded to continue, it asks whether art — icon painting, bell casting, filmmaking — can be made in good conscience amid catastrophe. Watch the prologue: a man, a homemade balloon, one minute of flight over a river — a self-contained parable about the cost of making things, shot in a single astonished gaze, before the hero has even appeared.
The tradition crashes into the American mainstream, and the collision is the point. Friedkin's masterstroke is to shoot the supernatural with the handheld, cold-lit, reportorial grammar he'd just perfected on a cop procedural — the demonic covered like news rather than staged like gothic theater, which is exactly why it feels unbearable. Notice how long the film spends in hospitals before anything unholy speaks: machines humming, doctors reading a child's body for a name, two modern institutions — medicine and Church — tested in sequence. Its priest is this course's lineage in a new key: a Jesuit losing his faith, a crisis straight out of Bresson and Bergman, now carrying an exorcist's bag. Buñuel's insight that appetite seethes beneath the social surface returns here at full volume, in an affluent Georgetown home where nothing gothic ever intrudes except what the vérité camera calmly documents.
Sixty years of this tradition, distilled to eighty minutes. A young novice in 1960s Poland, days from her vows, learns she has a family history she never knew, and Pawlikowski frames her story in a boxy, old-fashioned Academy ratio on a locked tripod — with the film's signature gesture: people pushed to the bottom of the frame, the upper half given over to blank wall and winter sky. That emptiness overhead is not decoration; it is the film's actual subject, the unanswered space every composition keeps open. The debts are worn openly — a first-time non-actress with a withheld, near-blank face out of Dreyer and Bresson; drama carried by silence and what happens off-screen — but the invention is to weld that convent-film austerity to a road movie through a country's unburied wartime past. Watch what the static frame does when something finally moves inside it: after so much stillness, the smallest gesture detonates.
Here the camera turns from the believer to the institution — and deliberately refuses every beautiful tool this course has celebrated. McCarthy shoots the Boston Globe's investigation of clerical abuse in the flat, functional grammar of the great 1970s newspaper procedurals: unglamorous offices, over-the-shoulder shots, a camera that breathes but never performs, cuts placed not on faces but on information secured. That plainness is an ethical decision: a story about an institution's manufactured silence told without a single manipulative flourish, the church steeples appearing again and again at the edges of ordinary Boston frames until you notice they're everywhere. It is the course's photographic negative — no transcendence, no held close-up, faith examined entirely from the outside as a system of power — and the film's most unsettling craft choice is to include the newspaper itself among the institutions that chose not to know. After nine films about what the collar means from within, this one asks what it concealed.
And then the synthesis — by the man who literally wrote the book on Dreyer, Bresson, and this whole style before directing a frame. A pastor of a historic upstate church keeps a handwritten journal (Bresson's diary, almost beat for beat), doubts like Bergman's winter pastor, and is framed by Alexander Dynan's camera in static, head-on, symmetrical compositions where movement is rationed so severely that when the camera finally travels, it lands like an event. Schrader's addition to the tradition is the twenty-first century itself: ecological dread as the new content of the old crisis, despair treated as a genuinely theological problem rather than a diagnosis. The opening shot teaches you the film's whole discipline — a man, a bare desk, a notebook, a frame that will not move — and asks you to adopt the same posture: sit still, look, endure. Watch it last and every earlier film in the course flickers inside it, like a century's inheritance being counted out page by page.
What this sequence traces, finally, is a set of tools invented for one impossible job — photographing the interior life of people who have staked everything on the invisible — and the way those tools kept escaping the cloister. Dreyer's held close-up became Bergman's seven-minute letter and Pawlikowski's blank-faced novice; Bresson's emptied performances and diary structure became Schrader's whole architecture; Buñuel's poker-faced camera became Friedkin's vérité demon and, in a strange way, McCarthy's scrupulous newsroom plainness. The arc bends from faith filmed as radiance, to doubt filmed as endurance, to the institution filmed as evidence — and then, in the last two films, back to a single face under an empty sky, as if cinema decided the old question was never settled. It wasn't. That's why every one of these films is still worth the dark room and the full attention they were built for.