Shadowlands and the Redemption of Light

Shadowlands1 sets up the problem of a comfortable academic who talks about love and pain, but seems to have neither. He is also a fantasy writer who insists on "magic" as a significant force against the rational analysis of his colleagues. He needs emotional experience, a close relationship with someone besides his brother, or the memory of his mother, to fulfill what God would make of him. according to his own lectures. He needs Joy Gresham's love to understand Love as more than courtly allegory, more than Aristotelian plot motive, to become a better teacher and, by implication, more fully human. If his wife's anguish and death become the means of his renewal, the loss of her vital presence, especially in the film version,2 makes every evidence of renewal seem commemorative. The emotional bonding with Douglas in the attic, the concluding stroll in the country, represent a commitment of self to another he should commit to, a continuance of Joy's good influence. Stanley Kauffmann sees the film as almost solely the triumph of two fine actors; he finds too many Hallmark scenes (26). But the film does not succumb to mere illustration. Through lighting, the locations of backgrounds, selection of shot distances and angles, and probably some lab work, the film deliberately de-glamorizes its settings to keep the human scale. Moreover, a careful structuring of imagery, scenic drama, and color tones helps embody the themes of the plot. The opening and closing frame shots clearly set up a contrast between dusk and day, shades of red-yellow set in gray-black and rich green-blue, between silhouettes of buildings that stand monumental in the evening landscape and sunlit fence, field and trees through which move living beings. In opening, the film replaces nature's curves with the straight lines of buildings and interiors; at the end, human structures are incorporated into natural English garden or "Golden Valley" imagery. The soundtracks also contrast: natural sounds (birds, cows) and a bell, modulating and swelling into a liturgical selection sung by a boys' choir as opposed to the conclusion's lightly romantic theme (a boy now in the scene), which merges with natural sounds. The opening metaphorically establishes a sense of mystery around the liturgical structure of the academy, within which is emphasized combative rationality, a hierarchy of reason. Two evening horizon shots open, one of a natural, unfeatured landscape, out of which appear, through a dissolve, the shadowy spires of Oxford. From sunset to skyline shadows to general darkness beginning to surround the buildings, the film jump cuts to a candle being lit, the candle-lit interior of a church, a flickering human interior set up "against" the darkness. The movement into humanity, the college community, assembled in the church is interesting for its deferrals. We hear a boys choir with orchestra, extra-diegetically, from the first shot, but the congregation and choir (without orchestra) in the church are not immediately seen. Instead the camera pans past a religious icon and candles, other carved or sculpted bodies and faces, to the heads and living faces of the congregation, but, curiously, not one is singing. Finally the traveling camera discovers the source of the sound, the boys choir, and the sequence ends in a close-up shot of one boy. The same boy and the solo voice of a young chorister will later connect to Joy's son, Douglas. At the end of this opening scene, we have only established an evensong service, a congregation and choir of heads in church, surrounded by traditional eyeless saints and the darkness outside. It's a long scene to establish as little as it does. Lewis, his brother, and his colleagues are deferred further, as the next sequence follows figures who walk into the gray commons, past an elder academic reciting the Latin grace, crane over students talking to the faculty table where we meet Lewis as he counters Christopher Riley's claim that he peddles the relics of medieval Catholicism. …