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Book reviewed: Crystal L. Downing, The Wages of Cinema: A Christian Aesthetic of Film in Conversation with Dorothy L. Sayers (InterVarsity Press, 2025). [Reviewed by Alex Wainer Palm Beach Atlantic University]
Reviewed by: Alex Wainer, PhD
Reviewer Affiliation: Professor Emeritus of Communication and Media Studies, Palm Beach Atlantic University, West Palm Beach, FL
Total pages: 244
ISBN-13: 978-1-5140-0880-5
In the twenty-first century, Christian filmgoers often seek movies that are broadly entertaining without too much sex and violence but with clear messages about right and wrong. They desire more faith-affirming films and are happy to support films that endorse their Christian beliefs, even if they lack the professionalism and artistry of studio and independent cinema. In an effort to rectify this problem, Crystal Downing’s new book uses the aesthetics of Dorothy L. Sayers to explore how Christian audience members can come to appreciate works of cinema that are both entertaining and possess artistic integrity, challenging them to look beyond moralistic tales and blockbuster spectacles while introducing them to some exemplary hidden gems.
Sayers (1893-1957) began her writing career as the creator of amateur detective Lord Peter Wimsey in a series of classic mysteries, moved on to essays on Christianity and art, translated Dante, and wrote The Man Born to Be King, a cycle of radio plays about the life of Christ that was a forerunner of The Chosen. A friend and correspondent of C.S. Lewis, Sayers’ diverse career rivals that of such great twentieth-century Christian writers of fiction and nonfiction as Lewis, J.R.R. Tolkien, and G.K. Chesterton. Although she was a film aficionado, her work was more cinema-adjacent than film-focused, but her commentary on other art forms is broadly applicable to cinema.
Sayers never wrote extensively about the aesthetics of film, but Downing applies her discussion of Christianity and creativity to film. For example, she writes: “Sayers’ description of effective detective fiction could, in fact, summarize artistic cinema: ‘The essential facts of the HOW arrange themselves to form a synthesis (by which time, of course, they usually include the WHY as well)’” (p. 13). Sayers insisted that “for any work of art to be acceptable to God it must first be right with itself. That is to say, the artist must serve God in the technique of his craft” (quoted in Downing, p. 9). Much content can be true but badly executed. Downing cites Sayers’ The Mind of the Maker to discuss her aesthetic conception of quality work, which is connected to Plato’s vision of the good, the beautiful, and the true. Downing writes of Sayers’ view that “the good is ‘good craftmanship, beauty is artistic beauty, and truth is structural truth’” (p. 5). Downing applies this in a journey through the histories of film’s dramatic predecessor, theater, and through film theories, incorporating Sayers’ biographical development as an author, essayist, and playwright whose work consistently exemplifies her insistence on excellence of execution. Downing notes that “just as Dante sometimes explores parts of the Inferno and Purgatorio with little input from Virgil, so also this book invokes historians and cinephiles with little input from Sayers, nevertheless, her Christian aesthetic grounds this entire study” (p.19). Sayers’ input is rather unevenly applied, perhaps leading to author’s choice for a subtitle—In Conversation with Dorothy L. Sayers—as Downing brings others’ comments into the conversation for much of a chapter.
The first chapter, “The Religious Origins of Film,” starts with an examination of Greek plays as the roots of Western drama, tracing how theater informed and influenced early cinema with enduring plot conventions and character types. Indeed, many film directors started in the theater, including Russia’s Sergei Eisenstein and Sweden’s Ingmar Bergman. Both directors brought artistic concerns to their films with great impact even though the medium was appealing to the masses as mostly entertainment. This chapter also discusses the fraught history of the Christian church’s response to drama, with alternating but typically negative attitudes toward representational stage and later cinematic productions. Sayers would herself receive outrage from churches during World War II. She was given the task with creating a series of radio plays on the life of Christ for the BBC, and as word got out that she was avoiding archaic King James dialogue in favor colloquial modern speech, the BBC asked her to make changes. Sayers refused and was ready to abandon the project, so committed was she to the integrity of her work. (A full account of this is found in Justin Phillips’ C.S. Lewis at the BBC, an account of wartime broadcasting by a BBC far more concerned with Christian influence than it is today.) It was only after the radio audience heard Sayers’ engaging storytelling that the public embraced the series, making it a perennial production for the network for years thereafter.
The differences between theater and film are the concern of Chapter 2, “The Stigmata of Theater vs. the Stigma of Film.” As the title suggests, this chapter plays on three meanings of stigma (plural stigmas or stigmata): (1) the scars of Christ’s crucifixion, (2) any mark made by cutting, and (3) a mark of public disapproval. Downing notes that in Sayers’ “The Church’s Responsibility,” in The Life of the Church and the Order of Society, Being the Proceedings of the Archbishop of York’s Conference: Malvern 1941, she likened the incarnational phenomenon of a play evoking its story and characters through actors on the stage to church life, writing, “‘I recognize in the theater all the stigmata of a real and living church’” (p. 44). But film lacks theater’s presence and religious origins; and thus its “stigmas,” according to Downing, are the cuts or edits that make up its many shots to tell a story. It is in attending to film’s inherently constructed display of images (and sounds) that film art is appreciated. The chapter traces how early filmmakers discovered the inherent potential of images: editing and cuts were employed to discover and advance the medium for entertainment or artfulness. The chapter proceeds through film’s development as it struggled to demonstrate its artistic potential while being stigmatized for lacking the status of live theater. Downing does a very extended analysis of how the film Birdman is a dialectic between the crassness of film, based on its appeal to the masses, and the reputed artistry of theater. Here Sayers herself seems to be relegated “backstage,” disappearing from Downing’s discussion of the film and not appearing for the rest of the chapter.
Chapter 3, “The Theater of War,” discusses Sayers’ work during WWII and evaluates selected war films against her artistic standards. It was during this time that one of Sayers’ Lord Peter Wimsey books, Busman’s Honeymoon, was adapted by a Hollywood studio as Haunted Honeymoon. The chapter discusses various war films and their directors, comparing David Lean’s The Bridge on the River Kwai with a much lesser-known film Downing believes is a greater achievement, The Railway Man. One of the book’s values is the offering of lesser-known films that Downing believes meet Sayers’ standards of well-made work.
The next chapter, titled “From Silent Film to Sound Work,” discusses film’s transition to the use of microphones to capture dialogue. Downing notes Sayers’ observation that sound’s advent only increased the attraction of movies as escapist entertainment with little concern for artistic expression. Perhaps some of this criticism arose from her unhappy experience of trying to get one of her Wimsey stories adapted into a film titled The Silent Passenger. Upon seeing the finished script, Sayers sought to withdraw from the shoddy work. Downing believes this strengthened her commitment to the excellence in workmanship she increasingly espoused, hence the “sound work” double entendre in the chapter subtitle. This was thematically articulated in her play, The Zeal of Thy House, about the work ethic of a cathedral builder, in a scene where the archangel St. Michael explains the trinitarian nature of human invention and its relation to God’s creativity. Downing explains:
Through St. Michael, Sayers establishes that creativity in a single human has three personas, thus fulfilling a specifically Christian vision of the imago Dei. As the archangel explains, human creativity begins with a creative Idea, by which a maker conceptualizes a work in its entirety, outside time, paralleling God the Father. Consubstantial with the Idea is its incarnational activity, as when artists talk about fleshing out their ideas—even before they put them on paper, canvas or screen. Michael parallels this activity with the Son of God, the “Energy” of creation “working in time.” The third persona of the imago Dei is creative Power, which like the Holy Spirit, generates response in individuals, opening their hearts and minds to Idea and Energy. As with our trinitarian God, these three—idea, energy, and power—“are one” in the mind of each human creator. (p.113)
Chapter 5, “The Mind of the Filmmaker,” expands on this aesthetic concept. Downing contrasts this trinitarian aesthetic with what Sayers called “artistic Arianism,” using the Christian heresy metaphorically to describe films that are “all technique and no vision,” i.e., no artistic expression of reality, consequences, or a greater moral order. Downing presents a broad overview of film theory in the next chapter. She leads by noting that Sayer’s Christian aesthetic of film brought qualified endorsement from C.S. Lewis who balked at the idea of finite artists’ analogy to the Trinity’s infinite creativity. From there Downing traces the high points of film theory through the twentieth century, including Bazin’s realism and the auteur theory, noting its increasing opacity in the postwar era.
The last two chapters deal with issues of gender and love in film. Chapter 7, “Seeing Women,” addresses feminist film theory and how women have prospered or been sidelined in film production, ending with an analysis of the Barbie movie. Chapter 8, “Love on Screen,” explores how artistic integrity can overcome the impulse to over-eroticize film content, instead portraying sacrificial love in ways that some viewers may find some surprising, even countercultural, such as in Lars and the Real Girl (2007). Here again, Sayers recedes into the background, with C.S. Lewis’ comments and his The Four Loves informing much of the commentary.
Downing’s book is an interesting, deeply informative, and at times peculiar application of Sayers’ insights in Christian creativity. The Wages of Cinema plumbs deeply into the essays and comments of Dorothy L. Sayers seeking to connect her zeal for artistic integrity and creating after her Creator with the art of film. The book’s greatest contribution may be that it reorients believing readers toward films that rise above the passing fancies of popular cinema towards lasting expressions of what film narratives and technique can accomplish, enduring just as Sayer’s own plays and books have.