Page - 26 - in JRFM - Journal Religion Film Media, Volume 01/01

26 | roger Odin www.jrfm.eu 2015, 1/1, 23–30 the Catholic faith, which in this uncertain, changing world secures the presence of a powerful truth, permanent and consistent: God’s love for his creation. We shall now turn to the work on sound and image. What is striking is that, con- trary to what one might expect, the pictures (apart from the ones concerning popes) have nothing to do with the documentary form. They are more like pictures from a fictional film. Images are suffused with a halo, which makes them slightly unrealis- tic at the same time as it gives them great emotional force; pictures are composed like paintings (framing, colour, depth of field), often leading to the construction of a micro-narrative that can be summed up in a single word: care, help, teach, or search. Furthermore, there are no sounds to tie the images to reality; on the contrary, mu- sic plays throughout, emphatically, even pompously, in some great affective surge that seeks to carry us away. The editing is consistent with this momentum: shots are short but the transitions between them extremely elaborate and smooth, creating the effect of two great flows corresponding to two sequences in the commentary and music. Moreover, none of these sequences is static. The result is a succession of travelling shots, which produces a stirring sense of movement. i think it is now possible to make a suggestion regarding the target group of this video clip. This film is not out to convince atheists; there are too many religious pre- suppositions in its pitch. for the same reason, it does not seem to be targeting believ- ers of other faiths; nothing in its discourse is addressed to them. On the contrary, the film conveys many signs of emphathising with those already familiar with the Catho- lic faith: communication remains inside the Catholic religious (mental) space and the discursive mode combines with the private mode (references to shared history and memory).8 The commentary indicates a target group: the film addresses those who have moved away from Catholicism (“if you’ve been away from the Catholic Church we invite you to take another look”) and who it would like to bring back into the flock (the last words are “Welcome home”). however, i would suggest that the target group is in fact even more specific: mainly (though not exclusively) those who have turned away to evangelical churches. several features contribute to this assumption: the recurrent presence of pictures of regions where these churches have developed at the expense of the Catholic Church (Mexico, Brazil, more broadly South America, Africa, India); the metaphor of the family as an effective, reassuring community of mutual assistance (the image that Evangelical churches particularly like to project); the insistence on collective ritual (a basic element in the way evangelical churches operate) and on ceremonial pomp and tradition, going so far as to make the Catholic Church look slightly dated (for example, in the sequence on communion, the priest gives the host to a worshipper, which is rarely the case nowadays as people generally take it themselves). it stops short of the formal features associated with evangelical communication: the commentary plays 8 By private mode i mean the mode by which a group goes back over its past. Odin 2011, 89.