The Church was the Palme d'Or winner in 1986 and to this day I still find it incredible that The Church won, even today the film can be questionable because of its ideology or the ideas within it.
The film is set in the eighteenth century, in the context of the recent invasion of the American continent by the European powers. The Spanish priest of the Christian Jesuit order, Garbier, leads a number of priests to the dense forests of South America on a missionary mission. Among them was the slave trader Rodosa, who was remorseful and bitter for having accidentally killed his brother. The peace that had existed for more than a thousand years among the indigenous peoples of South America was gradually disrupted by the arrival of the Europeans, and the dense forests were divided into colonies of various countries that captured and sold the indigenous peoples into slavery or simply slaughtered them at will.
Indigenous peoples had to move deeper and deeper into the forests. Christianity, on the other hand, saw such a huge continent, still untamed by the teachings of God, and went to great lengths to establish parishes all over South America, spreading their faith and culture. Indigenous people who had been expelled and had nowhere else to go fled to the various parishes, offering faith in Jesus in return for safety. The Jesuits quickly rose to power in many parts of South America. However, the profits of the colonies and the slave trade attracted the European powers, who began to covet the Church's property and began to use various means to force the Church to make concessions and dissolve the parishes in order to establish further outright colonies. By this time, the nation states of Europe had risen one after another, the Middle Ages had long since come to an end, and the Pope was no longer as powerful as before in Europe, unable to control the rising nation states, and even having to be careful to maintain the balance and preserve the Church's orthodoxy in Europe. So, in order to preserve the Church's rights in Europe, all the dioceses in South America had to be abandoned. But this provoked the indignation of Gabrielle and Rodosa, who, in order to preserve their faith and save the lives of the people, set out to organise a fight to the death against the invading powers. In the end it becomes a magnificent epic.
The film is remarkable for its sensationalism, starting with the cinematography, which allows the vastness of the forest and the beauty of the waterfall, the mystery of nature, to be conveyed through the camera, creating an imposing backdrop. Then there is the effort and sacrifice of the Christians who pledged to defend their faith to the death. As the clergy command the natives in the face of the advanced Spanish army, carrying crosses in flaming martyrdom in defence of their faith, waves of mournful and magnificent music hit our nerves. Brilliant, grandiose, tragic, and extraordinary, it might be called an epic, but it is difficult to hide one of the ideological no-go areas and contradictions that lie behind this film. In ancient times, when communication was not yet established, and in isolation from each other, civilisations developed individually, forming their own cultures and systems. The Maya, Aztecs and Incas of Central and South America, in particular, had their own unique cultural systems. However, with the outward expansion and invasion of Western civilisation, many of these civilisations have now long since gone up in smoke. This invasion was always twofold: one was ideological, a system in which fanatical missionaries always travelled thousands of miles in order to sow the Gospel of God and bring Christianity to various countries in a pious manner, promoting it on a massive scale from monarch to secular; the other was power, a forced invasion with advanced force, plundering wealth and resources, slaughtering populations and conquering lands.
Sometimes these two invasions are consistent, with missionaries going forward to knock on doors, followed by a hard military invasion if no passage can be opened, followed by the forcible sowing of the teachings of Christ in strange lands, warfare and slaughter, and the taming of the multitudes by gentle discipline. But again, sometimes this was not consistent; after all, religion in Europe was mostly moderated by the Pope, while armies were controlled by individual states, and conflicting interests brought both sides into conflict. The Church clearly speaks of the latter situation.
Although Christianity preaches tolerance and fraternity, salvation and faith. But religion is still founded by men and presided over by men, and this inevitably leads to selfishness and interests of their own. Fanatical Christian missionaries can travel around and even give their lives for their faith. They would also risk their lives to help poor vulnerable people in the midst of war in order to implement God's spirit of fraternity. Even in the old days, when the Nanking Massacre took place, many churches took in the citizens of Nanking and became havens in troubled times. This was also the case in The Church, where several clergy gave their lives to defend the parish and to protect the indigenous people who were fleeing the area. But there is also a selfishness in this: it is about spreading the faith of God and expanding the influence of the Church.
The exclusivity of Christianity, in turn, dictated that its entry would be with a view to eradicating the original native faith. The ancient Greco-Roman gods were overthrown or scandalised, and the totems of the various indigenous tribes were burned as a result of the entry of Christianity. The indigenous children in the film, while learning advanced culture from the advanced Western missionaries, must on the other hand completely abandon the history and culture of their people. As the children peacefully sing their beautiful chants, although they sound like heavenly music, they are also permeated with sadness and despair, like beautiful wildflowers that have finally been put into a greenhouse, subjected to various constraints, and then become 'normal' but sickly. In the history of the world today, there is a trend towards a gradual ideological and discursive weakening of the white West, and the massacres and conquests of the past have indeed become an indelible scandal of Western history. However, this invasion of the spiritual remains ambiguous and vague. The Church is to be commended for having the courage to take up the theme of attacking white aggression, but it still seems to take for granted, even somewhat presumptuously, such an intellectual invasion as the Aborigines' abandonment of their own culture and their acceptance of the Christian faith. However, we also see that the natives did not join because they decided that the whites were religiously superior, but more because they feared the slaughter of the hardened ships and cannons. The ignorant natives chose to kill their hearts to save their bodies in order to survive both physically and spiritually, but do people in the civilised world also believe that killing the heart is righteous and killing the body is a sin?
