Explores a spiritual foundation for creative film work and seeks ways to find common ground on which to build creative relationships. Austin’s inside look will prove fascinating not only to students and practitioners of the media arts but to anyone interested in this aspect of popular culture.
Ron Austin calls himself a survivor of Hollywood, but he is so much more than that. Like Melville’s Ishmael floating on the vast ocean after the catastrophe, Austin has attained hard-earned wisdom and a remarkable simplicity of spirit. He calmly cuts through the incessant chatter about moviemaking and restores us to the essence of film: a loving attention to the world, including the fragile beauty of the human face, and the drama of conflict and violence being transcended by forgiveness and mercy. Just as he learned from Charlie Chaplin and Jean Renoir, so Ron Austin ought to become a guide to a whole new generation of filmmakers artists capable of making films that are more deeply spiritual precisely because they are more deeply human.
Gregory Wolfe
editor of Image Journal Ron Austin, an experienced and insightful creative artist, opens a door to the wonder and the spiritual foundations essential to art, religion, and life itself. John Furia
Former President, Writers Guild of America, Director of Screenwriting Program, University of Southern California School of Cinema Television With humanity, generosity, and a wisdom that comes from a lifetime of experience as a child actor with Charlie Chaplin himself, as a screenwriter in Hollywood, and as a professor at USC’s film school, Ron Austin explores the spiritual foundations of cinema. His brief spiritual history of film in this book is superb and should keep your Netflix list full for a year. Here is a small work that is anything but slight. Robert K. Johnston
author of Reel Spirituality According to Pope John Paul II, what we call emotion is often just excitement, lacking the depth and seriousness of genuine emotion, for which we are too distracted. In today’s world, much of the distraction takes the form of visual over-stimulation. But, as Ron Austin knows so well, the cinematic arts are capable of rescuing us from what Robert Bresson called the ‘school of inattention’ and reviving our capacity for deep emotion and serious reflection. Ron’s marvelous meditation reminds us that the art of filmmaking remains important because we humans must be in the mood for truth and film, having a liturgical vestige, is capable of putting us in the mood. Gil Bailie
Founder and President of the Cornerstone Forum In a New Light opened my eyes to the rich history of cinema and the many ways art and spirituality have been linked through film over the last century. Ron Austin writes with subtlety and depth as he explores such themes as evil, transcendence, hope, sacrifice, imagination, and redemption. This is a work of broad thinking and deep faith. D. Michael Lindsay
author of Faith in the Halls of Power
