It's important to cultivate spiritual perception in all that we do. And it's becoming increasingly clear that this need is no less significant as we consider the world of film—or any aspect of the arts and entertainment. How are we being influenced by the movies we see? Can we be benefited by them? To what extent can movies play an uplifting role in society? What responsibilities, if any, do filmgoers have? These are some of the issues we discussed recently with David Sterritt, film critic of The Christian Science Monitor. Mr. Sterritt is a film professor at Long Island University and has taught courses on film at Columbia University and City University of New York. He also served for several years on the New York Film Festival selection committee.

Would you say that film is a mirror of society, or does it often tend to magnify the worst elements of society and so contribute to our problems? Well, it magnifies the worst and also the best. It magnifies everything. Films, as the old Hollywood cliche goes, are "larger than life." They magnify the good, the bad, the ugly, the beautiful.

Looking at films and television, we can see what's wrong with our society. We see crime and the unthinking emotionalism of lust or violence or simply anger and fear. We see all these things mirrored in films, but we also see the good. We see the human aspiration to make things work out, to create harmony, to express love, to experience community. We're just so used to it that we don't notice it so much anymore. You know, people say that we get numbed to the bad. We look at so much violence that it doesn't look violent to us anymore—we just accept it. Well, we get numbed to the good, too. We're so used to the cliché happy ending—the riding off into the sunset, the lovers' embrace. And yet we aspire to this, because ultimately love and community are the things that really count. We need to be more alert to the good depicted on the screen, which points us to the real and enduring.

To what extent would you say there is today a higher motive in the film industry, something beyond making money? To what extent are there people in the film industry whose primary desire is to uplift humanity? I wouldn't look for a whole lot of advanced thinking in the commercial movie industry or the commercial television industry. These are commercially driven enterprises. That doesn't mean that they're inherently bad. It just means that they have to operate within certain limits. And in fact the more the profit motive operates, the more problems we run across in the media.

Some people manage to create very clever and occasionally uplifting and insightful works within these limitations, but most people don't. Where I look for the kinds of things that are uplifting and insightful and spiritually enlightened is primarily outside the mainstream. That doesn't mean outside the reach of most people, especially in these times of cable TV and videocassettes. But it does mean probably outside your neighborhood multiplex. There are people out there, and there have always been—some of them in the United States, some of them in other parts of the world—who are creating work out of their own deepest convictions and out of what they find going on within their own hearts. It does exist.

Can you give an example of a movie that you feel has had a measurable positive impact, that has actually changed lives for the better? I think it's very hard to measure these things or come up with very specific examples of a movie having changed a life. Because even if you do find an example where it happened, the question then becomes: Was it for a day? Was it for a month? Was it for a year? Was it permanently? Or was it for two or three minutes?

This may be a bit of a digression, but it's well known that people watching a movie that espouses a good cause or a spiritual idea often feel really changed while they're watching the movie. But does it stay with them? Does it fundamentally change the way they live or think?

When you ask for examples—I was thinking about this recently—the example that keeps coming back to mind is the work of Horton Foote, somebody who's spent his life in the world of film, theater, and television. And what he's done, I think, is to manage to inform a secular art with religious values of the very best kind. And I think that's a rare achievement. He left the mainstream moviemaking world for many years after being an Academy Award winning screenwriter for To Kill a Mockingbird. Not because he was cynical, not because he was fed up. He was very interested in the movies that were being made, and he went to the movies a lot and took a strong interest and was involved in that way as a sort of private citizen. But movies were exploring some of the negative aspects of our society, and he just didn't want to do that himself. So he waited for his time, and during that time he wrote nine plays. And then he went back again when he saw the climate changing, wrote Tender Mercies, and won another Academy Award. And what's interesting is that there was obviously no compromise involved here. So, this proves that good things do happen in the mainstream—To Kill a Mockingbird was mainstream, Tender Mercies was mainstream. But he had to leave the mainstream for all those years when it veered too far away from his own particular strength.

He is somebody who has managed to make a very strong impact on the very visual medium of film. An impact of the right kind, bringing out spiritual conceptions. We see the overcoming of loneliness and fear and the worst kinds of human failings—the overcoming of these through love. There is a great deal of spirituality and enlightenment.

Here's a point that may seem to digress, but I think does relate to what we're saying. Cinema is a very materialistic medium. The only way you can get something on the screen is by photographing it, and you can't photograph it unless it's physical. So the challenge is to bring something greater, something higher, something deeper, something far more profound into our perception of this world where we find ourselves operating. And somebody like Horton Foote manages to do this quite brilliantly. Other filmmakers have done it too; he's by no means the only one. But he's done it perhaps in a way that American moviegoing audiences can relate to the most directly.

Another example is French filmmaker Robert Bresson, who made a film called A Man Escaped, based on a true story about a man who was thrown into a prisoner-of-war camp. And he's being held in a jail, and he's building this enormous, elaborate plan to escape. All of a sudden, just before it's time for him to escape, somebody else is thrown into the cell with him, a young man whom he's never seen before in his life. And the man has to decide if this person is a spy who's there to catch him or just somebody who happened to be thrown into the cell with him. And he finally decides that the only thing he can do as a spiritually-minded person is to trust the other man and to take him into his confidence and to realize that he must be with him for some good purpose. And sure enough, he never would have escaped if he had not had the other person there and taken him into his confidence, and so forth.

Now, it sounds like some kind of a thriller story, and on one level that's what it is. On the other hand, Bresson made the film in order to bring the message across that your well-being becomes a matter of faith, a matter of trust, a matter of love— even when your life is at stake and even when you're caught in a jail run by people who hate you.

What do you think we should take with us when we go to the movies? Should we take some particular expectation? Is there a way to be an intelligent film viewer like an intelligent reader? It's a good question. Films are very crafty; often they try to manipulate us at every stage. So I have a twofold answer. Number one, go in with an awareness of that. Go in with a recognition that films are very good at manipulating your emotions every step of the way. Even if you sit there and think, "Well, I'm not going to fall for that line and get tears in my eyes, I can see the movie's just manipulating me," probably forty seconds earlier the movie was manipulating you in some subtler way that you weren't aware of. So be aware of that. Be alert; don't let yourself be treated like a Pavlovian dog by a movie that has behind it decades of experience in making you feel and think in certain ways—at least while you're watching it.

And more important, probably, is that you should approach movies prepared to deal with, in the fullest sense, the bad and to accept and benefit from the good. Go in prepared to reject the bad, to correct the bad, to fend off the bad in your own thought while you're watching the movie. Remember, it's a social experience watching movies. And you influence the people around you as well. Number two, however—and this is the important thing for people who have written off the movies—go prepared with the thought that there just might be some good there. And that there just might be something uplifting, something that may even help your spiritual growth. One of the most despicable movies I've ever seen was one of the Rambo series. It's a good example of a movie that should be watched the way a dog watches a snake. Just look for its next wrong move and be ready to fend it off in your own thought. On the other hand, we can walk into a movie like Horton Foote's On Valentine's Day, and see people facing dire problems and overcoming them through the power of love.

Do you have any general comments on the future of the film industry? Where you think it might be headed? Where you would like to see it headed? I occasionally see things in the movies that make me feel better. They're about people who are trying desperately to raise themselves to a somewhat higher level than their society would expect them to be on. And I think the fact that these films exist always gives me hope for the future.