Breaking silence through cinema

Alex Gibney’s documentary Maxima Mea Culpa may have influenced Pope Benedict XVI’s resignation.

Alex Gibney is one of the foremost figures in documentary filmmaking, famous for his exposés, of capitalism in Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room, and US military torture in Taxi to the Dark Side. The latter won him an Oscar in 2008.

The American’s latest film, Mea Maxima Culpa: Silence in the House of God, is the story of four deaf men sexually abused by a priest at their school in Milwaukee in the mid-1960s. It interrogates the Catholic Church’s abject reaction to child abuse. Such is the scope of the film it’s possible it has even played a part in the resignation of Pope Benedict XVI. The Pope’s possible legal culpability informs one strand of the film.

“It’s hard to know if it played a part,” says Gibney. “As a filmmaker, you like to think so. You want your films to have an impact and an influence and, hopefully, to change people’s minds. Taxi to the Dark Side was made at a certain moment in time and it did have an influence on the debate around torture then. But you can still watch that film today and learn a lot about human behaviour and institutions. It’s the same with this one. You know, I’d like to think it had some influence in terms of this historic moment when the Pope resigns, but I made it because I felt that there was something profound to say about how institutions get corrupted.”

Though he has made films on a range of topics, the corruption of institutions and centres of power is a recurring theme of Gibney’s. Gibney says he was anxious that Mea Maxima Culpa would be understood not as an attack on the Church, but at the way power has so corrupted its values.

“I felt it was pretty important, in the film, to find a way of signalling that the film isn’t an assault on faith, it’s a crime film,” he says.

“Otherwise, people tighten up and say, ‘I’m not watching this, because you’re going after me.’ And that, of course, is how the critics — like the Catholic League folks in America — try to portray it. They say, ‘No. We’re a tribe and this guy is going after our tribe’.”

“And it gets people hot. Bill Donohue, of the Catholic League, published my email and I was getting 20 or 30 hate-mails a day. And it was all about, ‘you’re going after us’. But those people never watched the film. If you watched the film, you’d see that the distinction is carefully wrought.”

Gibney filmed the deaf men recalling through sign language their childhood ordeals. This is particularly provocative.

“Maybe I didn’t think of it consciously while I was making it,” says Gibney, “but the very fact that they’re signing their trauma does allow us to appreciate it in a way that we might not do otherwise.

“And we debated a lot about whether to use subtitles, instead of voiceover, and I got pressure from some quarters to use subtitles, because it would emphasise how much they had been victimised. But that was precisely why I didn’t use them — because I didn’t want to separate them. You recognise that they have a different language, but in spite of that difference we have a common humanity.”

*Mea Maxima Culpa: Silence in the House of God is released this Friday