Believing in Film
By Mark Le Fanu,
IB Tauris, 368pp, £60/$78
Film critics live in the dark, often literally underground – in basement screening rooms and other burrows – but they are hoping for light. How disappointed they must be. John Fowles, in his novel Daniel Martin, says of the commercial cinema: “One can no more enter the game innocently than a house with ‘Bordello’ in neon lights across its front.”
This serious and sober, even somewhat austere, book by the distinguished film writer Mark Le Fanu sets out in a different direction to tackle the paradox that, in an increasingly secular age, religion, and specifically Christianity, plays an active role in more films than one might expect.
