All of life's riddles are answered in the movies.

Steve Martin

Film is one of the three universal languages, the other two: mathematics and music.

Frank Capra

Unless society begins to understand that unless it uses its most powerful communication medium to produce its most powerful images of its most powerful hopes for humanity, there is no hope for humanity.

Neale Donald Walsch

Movies, cinema, the Silver Screen - in the last century billions of human beings were entertained, enthralled, educated, moved to tears and laughter in the flickering glow of projected light on a screen … a celluloid field of dreams.

Considered “an invention without a future” by Henry Lumiere, inventor of one of the first motion picture cameras in 1895, the first “movies” were three to five minute black and white, soundless moving pictures. Within a decade of Charlie Chaplin’s first on-screen appearance, the industry had moved from New York to Los Angeles and other actors like Mary Pickford, Douglas Fairbanks Jr., Fatty Arbuckle, and the Keystone Cops were garnering unheard of weekly wages and rising to stardom.

Henry Lumiere’s Cinematographe

When the world's first successful commercial sound pictures, Don Juan, featuring John Barrymore and The Jazz Singer starring Al Jolson came out in 1926 and 1927, audiences were wowed. Reel after reel, life was being projected back to us at 24 frames per second, and we couldn’t get enough.

By the 1930s and 40s, the “Golden Age” of film, Hollywood had identified major popular genres and begun to rely on cinematic formulas for success. Westerns, horror, and adventure films were early favorites. Star power was key. Because human beings long for mirrors that reflect who and what we are, moment to moment, movies inevitably began to reflect social movement.

As the Depression years deepened their grip on the American economy and morale, musicals and comedy helped lighten the load. Cinematic ballads to Europe’s beleaguered forces helped bring America into World War II. The heroics of the Allied troops were a movie staple throughout the Cold War, even as the youth culture became both target audience and subject matter in the fifties. Counter-culture art films rose in popularity during the anti-war movement and social revolution of the sixties and early seventies. The 1980s and 1990s saw a proliferation of Big Blockbuster films – cinematic mirrors of our societies’ focus on materialism and our resultant bloated economy.

Film R us

“No art passes our conscience in the way film does,” said Ingrid Berman, “[it] goes directly to our feelings, deep down into the dark rooms of our souls.”

Traditional storytelling may be gripping. Live theater, a millenniums-old art form, may show us who we are. But no other form of expression shows us ourselves, twenty feet tall in living Technicolor ™ as we posture and take pratfalls, expose our deepest fears and longings, find love and have it taken from us, seize life and throw it carelessly away.

With advanced visual effects and sound technology, audiences feel they are practically immersed in the movie. Armies march, mythical beasts attack, Harry Potter swims to the bottom of the lake and despite his gills, we hold our breath in panic and empathy – unconsciously exhaling as he rises to the surface. The space of personal imagination required by storytelling and theater … that buffer is gone.

“Film gives us an experiential reference point, that burns deeply into the mind of humanity far more pervasively and impactfully than any book or reading or even a stage play could possibly do,”says Neale Donald Walsch, author of Conversations With God and a production consultant for the movie version being produced and directed by Stephen Simon. “So I think that filmmaking, for that reason, is extraordinarily powerful… perhaps the single most powerful communication device yet created by humanity.”

With this awesome power comes responsibility – something Hollywood as a whole has not yet comes to terms with.

Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings trilogy and King Kong draw us into some of humanity’s greatest mythologies and archetypes and allow us to expand our sight into the magical realms where all our ideas reside. And yet, the medium’s capacity to transport audiences is a two-edge sword. The technical effects that allow our spirits to soar as Gandalf arrives at Helmsdeep on his white stallion also take us into terror, gore and mayhem in shoot’em-ups and slasher flicks. Special effects also drive production costs off the Richter scale, pushing an already formula-driven industry to depend more and more on those formulas.

Why risk producing message-driven films when splatter films and blockbusters are guaranteed money makers? Why dabble in thoughtful, spiritual portrayals when the biggest industry target audience is under 35? With an eye chronically on the bottom line, explosions, car chases, explicit sex, dark imagery and violence rule Hollywood today because they sell.

A new genre

But if Film R Us, there is definitely more to explore than the sludge covering the bottom line. Filmmakers like Stephen Simon, producer of What Dreams May Come and Somewhere in Time, Will Arntz, Betsy Chasse and Mark Vicente of What the BLEEP Do We know!?, Victor Salva, director of the forthcoming The Peaceful Warrior and newcomers like Ward Powers, producer and director of One, are focused on shining a different light on - and into - humanity.

“There are so many people alive today who are so sick and tired of the cynical approach that most media takes to entertainment, who are sick of the doom and gloom, who are sick of seeing humanity as being portrayed as being relentlessly and completely dark and selfish and greedy and violent,” says Simon, who has just wrapped shooting Conversations With God. “There are literally tens of millions people in the United States, and hundreds of millions of people around the world who are getting to a point where they're saying, ‘Enough.’”

Stephen Simon directs Henry Czerny on the set of Conversations with God.

Message movies have always been a part of mainstream Hollywood (think 2001 – A Space Odyssey, Star Wars, ET, Being There)But in the last several years, ever more numerous films with deliberately higher-minded content have made their way into theaters. Some have been blockbusters like Lord if the Rings, Matrix, Sliding Doors and Sixth Sense. Others, like Indigo and What the BLEEP!?, have come from small independent companies.One is a home-brewed yet powerful documentary that was born when Michigan trial lawyer Powers woke up one morning with an overwhelming desire to produce a film about oneness.

A critical mass seems to have been reached in consciousness, and the morphogenic field of “spiritual cinema” finally grown large enough to be recognized as its own genre.

In answer to the demand for more uplifting movies, Simon co-founded a Spiritual Cinema Circle in 2004 with Gay Hendricks. A subscriber based movie-of-the-month type club, Circle subscribers pay $20 every month to receive four short feature and/or documentary spiritual films on DVD that they can keep. Currently the Circle has over 21,000 subscribers in 70 different countries around the world, and over 200Spiritual Cinema Circle movie groups and film clubs have been established in the U.S. .

Both William Arntz and Betsy Chasse, co-producers and directors of the 2004 film, What the Bleep Do We know!? agree Bleep’s success really was a matter of perfect timing. When Bleep hit the theaters people were poised, ready and eager, to engage deeply in thought-provoking cinematic material. Not only did the movie strike a profound chord with those willing to address questions about the nature of reality, consciousness, spirituality and science, the audience made its presence known at the box office.

So far “Bleep” has grossed over 12 million in the U.S., and sold over a million DVDs. Currently playing in over 17 foreign countries, it has spawned two books, conferences, international study groups and now, a new version entitled What the Bleep - Down the Rabbit Hole which will be released in theaters by Samuel Goldwyn, February 2006.

“I think that what “The Bleep” did was, it took the definition of spiritual cinema itself and sort of made it a little bit more definable, like hit it on the nose,” says Chasse. “There are movies like Groundhog Day that can be construed as spiritual cinema – and frankly I think it’s one of the most spiritual movies of all time. But it can also be a regular movie - it totally depends on who watches it. Because some people watch Groundhog Day and they don't see anything spiritual at all. All they see is Bill Murray being funny. But if you watch What the Bleep, it's pretty clear what that's about.”

Broad spectrum in approach and content, spiritual cinema is not religious cinema and usually avoids portraying accepted religious dogma or doctrines. Rather it addresses issues of love, death, rebirth, evolution and transformation in a wide variety of ways that include both feature and documentary styles. And lest anyone think that “spiritual” movies might lack punch, think again. The depths of human psychology and emotion, our endeavors and our dreams, our greatest fears and our greatest hopes all provide fodder for this sensitive, developing genre.

“We do have violent, dark sides to us as human beings, absolutely. And I don't ascribe to the ostrich theory that we should just ignore that,” says Simon.