Phenomenology and the Religious Experience of Film Dissertation

The Address of the Soul: Phenomenology and the Religious Experience of Film

Dissertation

Presented in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree Doctor of Philosophy

in the Graduate School of The Ohio State University

Carl Edward Laamanen

Graduate Program in English

The Ohio State University

2019

Dissertation Committee

Ryan J. Friedman, Advisor

Jared Gardner

Isaac Weiner

Copyrighted by

Carl Edward Laamanen

2019

Abstract

This dissertation fills a gap in phenomenological approaches to film and creates a framework for religious experience that grounds it in the body, arguing that bodies have religious experiences when they become aware of the deep connections they have with the world and the material realities that run underneath existence. In the viewing experience, film and spectator enter into a relationship with each other, and this relationship shapes religious experience for viewer and film. I argue that religious experience begins with the body and is produced through material relationships between bodies, claiming that film itself, through its relationship with the world and viewer, has religious experiences and, indeed, a soul. To demonstrate this, I interrogate my own spectatorship, considering films and moments in them that have sparked my own cinematic religious experiences—mysterious voice-overs and strange sounds, fractures in the formal and narrative worlds of films, and sequences that prompt new ways of seeing.

My experiences come from a wide spectrum of cinematic traditions and time periods, among them contemporary U.S. art house, post-revolution Iranian film, and Pather

Panchali, a masterwork of Indian cinema. Through close attention to my own viewing practices and detailed filmic analysis, I advance a spectatorship that sees through the eyes of faith, trusting in film to re-connect us to the material world and open up new possibilities of being in the world.

Dedication

To Mom and Dad

In Loving Memory of Luca Coppa

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Acknowledgments

I would never have been able to complete this dissertation or degree without the support of the communities that have come up around me during this process. I am humbled by the millions of conversations, thousands of books, and hundreds of people who have shaped me and this dissertation. I wish I had room to thank you all, but that would require a dissertation in of itself.

First and foremost, I have to thank my parents for all their love and support over the years. I am just as surprised as you to find myself here. You taught me to love reading, work hard, and pay attention to the little details, all indispensable elements of completing a dissertation. I could not have done this without you.

While my parents taught me to love reading and learning, Luca Coppa taught me to love writing. Luca, I look forward to the day when we meet again in the age to come. I know you’ll have a cigar waiting for me.

I have been blessed to have a large number of wonderful teachers and mentors in my time as an undergraduate and graduate student. Collin, Jen, and Kim, thank you for all you taught me at Grove City and for your continued friendship and professional advice since. Allison, Jen, and Scott, thank you for transforming me into an academic and pushing me to follow my passions. For anyone who I took a course with or offered me feedback on my work, I thank you for sharpening my writing and thinking.

To my dissertation committee, thank you for trusting me enough to let me write this kooky thing. Isaac, you gave me the confidence to write about my own experiences.

Jared, your encouragement always came at the moments I needed it most. Ryan, your swift feedback, critical eye, and willingness to help has made this process as painless as it could be.

To my Ohio State colleagues, it’s been a long journey and I’m glad to have had you on the road with me. Bethany, your friendship has been vital to my survival the past couple of years in a way I could not have envisioned. Mike and Gregg, I think we just might make it after all. Chris, our conversations have always been productive and I’m so glad our paths crossed. Grandpa’s Cheese Barn, thanks for all the memories and free beer

(No I in Denial sucks)...hope you find another football guy. Sidd, it’s been a pleasure to root against the Cavs alongside you, even if you are a Heat fan.

I cannot imagine getting through this program with the support of St. Augustine’s

Anglican Church and its clergy and parishioners. Fr. Kevin, I swear to make it back for a

TNMG, and I thank you for your constant encouragement. Fr. Ric, although I don’t mention the egoic mind here, I think you’ll find I soaked up a lot of the wisdom you’ve dispensed over these five years. The Bowser Home Group, I will miss the dinners and conversation, and maybe even the table questions. Bob and Beth, thank you for taking pity on a poor graduate student and feeding me. Jeff, I’m always up for a game and a brew. Daniel, Lauren, Alex, and Rachel, I miss you guys and am so grateful for the few years we got to spend in the same vicinity. To everyone else, thank you for your prayers, ceaseless encouragement, and support.

Jacob, Jai, Jeff, Jon, Josh, and Matt, thanks for all the Magic. I would have never thought that a few Fridays a month would turn into this kind of friendship. Keep kicking butt at the Guardtower!

Shout out to the Omicron Xi class of 2011. Your friendship has been a constant presence since the end of college and I thank you for that.

Blake, thanks for the hours of conversation about music and life. I didn’t work the title of our podcast in anywhere, but I hope there is sufficient Percy for you here.

Uncle Dave, thank you for your support and love over the years.

To my old friends, thanks for staying in touch over several years and many states.

Joel and Andrew, it’s certainly been a wild ride, and I’m only a little upset that both of you became doctors before I did. Thanks for the hours of conversation about anything and everything. We’ve got many more ahead of us. Chris, I’m glad we never stopped being nerdy and thanks for watching bad movies with me. Andraya, Diana, and Emily, thank you for introducing me to perspectives and ideas I never would have encountered without you. Mike, Katy, Tim, Robin, DL, and the whole Noes crew, I dread the thought of a New Year without you. Joel and Ben, my CoD and OW squadmates, thanks for the all many hours of necessary distraction.

Music is a huge part of my life, and while you’ll notice a few lyrics throughout this dissertation, I wanted to thank some of the artists who I listened to constantly while writing. Thank you to David Bazan/Pedro the Lion, Gang of Youths, Cloud Cult, The

Hold Steady, The National, Modest Mouse, and many, many more.

Vita

2011…...... B.A. Communication Studies and Spanish, Grove City College

2013………………...... M.A. English, Texas Tech University

2014 to present…………..Dean’s Distinguished University Fellow, Department of

English, The Ohio State University

Publications

‘“He who kills the body, kills the soul that inhabits it’: Feminist Filmmaking, Religion,

and Spiritual Identification in Vision.” Journal of Religion & Film 20.2 (2016).

“Preaching in the Darkness: The Night of the Hunter’s Subversion of Patriarchal

Christianity and Classical Cinema.” Journal of Religion & Film 18.1 (2014).

“What Does God Hear? Terrence Malick, Voice-Over, and The Tree of Life.” Cinephile

8.1 (2012): 15-19.

Fields of Study

Major Field: English

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Table of Contents

Abstract ...... ii Dedication ...... iii Acknowledgments...... iv Vita ...... vii Introduction. Magical Movies and Childish Ideas ...... 1 Chapter 1. A Phenomenological Approach to the Religious Experience of Film ...... 26 The Film’s Body ...... 33 Digital Cinema and the Film’s Body ...... 43 Religious Experience ...... 55 The Material Soul ...... 66 Immanence and Transcendence ...... 72 Chapter 2. The Listening Body: Voice, Music, and Sound in Cinematic Religious Experience...... 91 Voice ...... 99 Music...... 122 Sound ...... 135 Chapter 3. Standing in the Gap: The Écart and the Cinematic Thin Place ...... 152 Post-Revolution Iranian Film and Cinematic Reality ...... 166 Chapter 4. For the Love of Film: The Cinephiliac Moment and Religious Experience . 204 Cats ...... 226 Trains ...... 238 Rain & Ripples ...... 253 Conclusion. Watching Faithfully ...... 266 Bibliography ...... 285 Films Cited ...... 300 viii

Epigraph Citations (In Order of Appearance) ...... 304

Introduction. Magical Movies and Childish Ideas

“I’m done being stupid and worried and dramatic, So I lay down my every disguise. If ever I can’t see the magic around me, Please take my hands off my eyes.” — Cloud Cult

In the opening sequence of Gravity, Ryan Stone (Sandra Bullock) stops breathing and so do I. Matt Kowlaksi (George Clooney) speaks over the radio, reminding us both to breathe, and breathe we do, ragged gasps of air, sucking the oxygen out of our suit, our room. The visceral connection formed between me and Gravity in its opening sequence brought me to a place where I literally felt out of breath, my body in sync with the film.

The first shot in Gravity’s dizzying opening sequence lasts over thirteen minutes, a relentless assault on the senses, ratcheting up the tension as the camera spins and floats, asking me to abandon myself to the flow of the film. And abandon myself I did, especially when I first saw the film in the theater in 3D, an experience I still remember for its sheer ability to overwhelm my own sense of perception and make me feel like I was flying through space along with Ryan. I can only recall one other filmic experience like it—the Omni-Theater at the Boston Science Museum, where I would visit on field trips, its spherical screen stretching across a dome, enveloping me on three sides. When the dome lit up with aerial footage, I remember that same feeling, like I was flying over

1 the earth, my legs dangling over the edge of the plane’s wing, and that, at any moment, I might fall—I loved it. Perhaps, at the Omni-Theater, the first seeds of this project were planted, as there was no doubt then that the cinematic experience involved my whole body.

I had been studying film for several years before I happened upon a theory of film that described this kind of embodied interaction with the cinema. When I discovered the work of Vivian Sobchack (the title of this project an homage to her book, The Address of the Eye: A Phenomenology of the Film Experience), it was a candle in the darkness, and the closer I got to it, the more it illuminated my own work. While I now had a theoretical framework that helped me make sense of the spectator’s experience as it related to the body and film, a question still loomed large, one that film phenomenology had yet to grapple with—what about religious experience at the cinema? What about those moments that seem to transcend our conventional experience? Where do they come from and can you have one at the cinema? Sobchack and others have hinted at cinematic religious experience, and whether those hints were unexplored due to a larger issue at hand or dismissed due to other presuppositions, I found those explanations of religious experience and spectator experience lacking. The more I thought about it, the more I looked back at my own experience at the cinema and found exhilarating moments, moments that had changed how I looked at the world. As I started to explore this idea, I asked professors, colleagues, friends, and acquaintances, and many of them expressed having similar experiences while watching film. The films they cited were not the ones I did—in fact, most of them have never heard of the films that I write about here—but most of them

2 could recall at least one cinematic moment that seemed to put them in touch with something beyond themselves.1

In a secular, modern society that has supposedly eradicated superstition, these moments at the cinema stand out to me, suggesting that the forces of modernity have been unable to entirely close the “immanent frame” (Taylor 542). Philosophers, academics, and scientists have tried their best to disenchant the world, but people continue to be drawn to experiences that rebel against the logical, rational structures constructed by our modern institutions. “The gods were not turned back at the borders of the modern,” offers Robert Orsi, “[their] unseeing was an achievement; the challenge is to see them again” (252). In contrast to those who see religious experience as a figment of the imagination, Orsi takes it seriously, mobilizing the Catholic concept of “real presence” as a way of recovering an awareness of the gods and our relationships with them in the real, material world (2-11). Along with Orsi, I look for a re-recognition of this presence, understood by those who lived in what Charles Taylor calls the “enchanted age,” a time where humans saw themselves as connected with not just other people around them, but the world and the things in it (33-34). I argue that this world presents itself to us in our relationship with the cinema, where it surfaces and impinges upon our modern understandings of the autonomous, self-contained individual, drawing us out from the solipsism that marks our secular age. In this enchanted world, our bodies and the bodies on screen speak to each other.

1 While I will eventually complicate this description of religious experience, the conversations that I had tended to fall into this general understanding of religious experience. 3

Back in base camp decontamination, Dr. Louise Banks (Amy Adams) takes off her hazmat suit and sucks in a deep breath of air, trembling after her first encounter with the aliens in Arrival. I hold up my hand and it is shaking. We both breathe, now free of the suit, trying to calm our nerves. Ten minutes ago, Louise walked out of the base camp, shrouded in this orange suit, her shallow breathing prominent in my ears, as I heard what she heard, voices coming in over the suit’s headphones and outside sounds muffled, the camera swinging behind her to give me her perspective. In this moment, the film asked me to enter into Louise’s experience, to connect and empathize with her, as her breathing, like Ryan’s, sparked something primordial in my body. I am no longer, and never was, a passive spectator, but an embodied participant in the life and world unfolding on the screen, drawn in and exhaled by its breath. Significantly, this breath comes from a person, a character, vastly different than I, who is undergoing something I have never and will never (unless something radically changes) undergo, yet, in these ten minutes, my body finds purchase in Louise’s experience, bringing us together—the movies working their magic yet again, a magic that springs from our embodiment in the world.

We are our bodies and they form the ground of our experience as we interact with the world. I operate, first and foremost, from this presupposition, which profoundly shapes the other two major presuppositions that ground this project and my argument.

Phenomenology, particularly that of Maurice Merleau-Ponty, forms the foundation of my presupposition of embodied existence and being in the world. For Merleau-Ponty, the lived-body, as the foundation of my being in the world, precedes perception. I cannot imagine or conceive of a world except through a body, my body, and any efforts to do so

4 result in philosophies that do not take the body or the material world seriously, such as those found in various dualisms that separate the mind from the body. In Phenomenology of Perception, Merleau-Ponty critiques Cartesian dualism, using a number of different concepts—physiological, psychological, spatial, sexual, and linguistic—to demonstrate the unity of lived, embodied experience. After parsing these issues, he arrives at the idea that the lived-body serves as starting point of perception and, indeed, existence: “Whether it is a question of the other person’s body or of my own, I have no other means of knowing the human body than by living it, that is, by taking up for myself the drama that moves through it and by merging with it” (Phenomenology 205). In taking up and merging with this drama, we step out into the world and live, experiencing it through our bodies.

Religion and religious experience, despite its frequent association with immateriality, also proceeds from embodied, material existence. In claiming this, I seek to bring religious experience back to earth, finding it in the experiences of every day and every one. Born from the relationships between our bodies, others, and the world, religious experiences are as unique as the bodies that have them. Rather than trying to extrapolate universal precepts from them, as early scholars of religious experience did, or arguing for the total social construction of these experiences, as current scholars do, I dive into their contingency, into the utter individuality of each lived-body’s experience.

This is not to universalize individual experience out of history, culture, or society, but to embrace that situatedness more fully to recover the body that lies underneath, as Jenny

Chamarette explains: “The phenomenological body-subject of Merleau-Ponty is

5 fundamentally not ahistorical; rather history is irreducible to the body-subject and vice versa” (243). Shaped and formed by our cultural and historical experience as we are, we are nonetheless capable of acts that shatter expectations and transform circumstances— even still, the body and the world surprise us. Each person contains an infinite well of experience and wisdom, and reducing them to a number in a census or a dot on a graph demeans them. I am, as a situated body, subject to the cultural and societal forces around me, but not reducible to them. Clearly never cut out to be a social scientist, I believe that we learn the most when we attend to the depths of our subjective experience and that of those around us.

I have long tried to convince myself that my research was “objective,” unwilling to admit that every project I cared about was in some way a reflection of the debates going on in my head and the pre-occupations of my heart. About halfway through writing this dissertation, after a meeting with a committee member, I realized that I have ever only been researching myself, and admitting this is not narcissism or arrogance, but simply a statement of fact. If I believe that every person’s experiences are worthy of study and attention, why exempt my own? Indeed, whose experiences could I ever hope to have the same access to as my own? As I continued to write, I found the process freer and easier, now that I had given myself the license to speak from my own experience without having to maintain the pretense of objectivity. I soon discovered other scholars using their own experience as the foundation for research, as they pushed back against what Marilynne Robinson calls the “core assumption...of ‘modern’ thought,” the idea

“that the experience and testimony of the individual mind is to be explained away,

6 excluded from consideration when any rational account is made of the nature of human being and of being altogether” (Absence 22). While I would replace Robinson’s “mind” with “body,” this point still stands and provides the basis of the second assumption that guides this dissertation: my own experiences are valid to study and that study produces significant and substantial knowledge.

In shifting my focus to my own experience, I have discovered that studying it is every bit as difficult and rigorous as parsing a text or distributing a survey, for I am trying to remember and capture experiences that cannot be duplicated. Musing on the “thirty- seven years” spent on his farm, Wendell Berry talks of “learn[ing] a language particular enough to speak of this place as it is and of my being here as I am,” a language that adheres to a specific place and time (45). In seeking to “make my language more particular,” to dig deeper into the experiences that make up my life, “I see that the life of this place is always emerging beyond expectation or prediction or typicality, that it is unique, given to the world minute by minute, only once, never to be repeated” (Berry 45).

While science deals with repeatable events, a key element of the scientific method, the humanities take up the glory of the moments that cannot be repeated, the moments that make up existence. For Berry, and I echo his conclusions, seeing the world in this way enables me to see “that this life is a miracle, absolutely worth saving” (45). If this life is worth saving, then the moments that make it up are also worth saving, and they should be recorded and researched vigorously, an idea that has recently gained traction in academic circles with the concept of autoethnography.

Autoethnography, as an approach to research, melds together autobiography and ethnography, in which the researcher attends to his/her/their subjectivity as they research contemporary culture and their place in it, doing their best to disseminate their findings through evocative and compelling writing. By pursuing research in this manner,

“autoethnography…theorizes the dynamic relationship between the personal and the cultural,” insisting that both are relevant and necessary components of understanding and researching experience (Adams and Jones 153). Arthur Bochner and Carolyn Ellis outline four elements of autoethnography in their book Evocative Autoethnography, and I have done my best to follow them, most evidently in the last chapter and conclusion. First, while autoethnography takes up “an orientation to research,” “writing is central” to the process, as the autoethnographer must be sure to present this research in an engaging manner (Bochner and Ellis 66). Second, Bochner and Ellis “emphasize both the ethnographic, outward lens (toward culture) and the autobiographical, inward scrutiny

(toward the self), however blurred, of a vulnerable observer,” pointing towards the dual perspective that the autoethnographer inhabits (66). Third, they point to “the first-person voice” as the primary point of view of autoethnography while also “emphasizing the variety of forms [it] can take, as well as the numerous and diverse stylistic features by which its concrete action is expressed,” leaving room for the autoethnographer to find their own voice (66). Bochner and Ellis conclude this definition of autoethnography by highlighting the “multiple layers of consciousness, self-consciousness, and reflection” that appear in autoethnography, as the autoethnographer wrestles “with dilemmas and contradictions of being alive” (66). Autoethnography lives in the cracks and paradoxes of

8 existence, in the same kind of liminality that has always fascinated me and been a constant presence in my research.

As such a body, situated in a specific cultural and historical position, I am well aware of my own biases and how they surface in the texts of this dissertation that have prompted my cinematic religious experiences. The films that I discuss in this dissertation will seem, for lack of a better word, academic, as the films that have impacted me the most tend to be the ones that I have spent time studying and thinking about over the course of my post-high school education. While these films come from a number of different national cinemas, they mostly fall into the category of “art cinema,” which

David Bordwell calls “a distinct mode of film practice, possessing a definite historical existence, set of formal conventions, and implicit viewing procedures” (151). One of the defining conventions of the art film is “the device of ambiguity,” through which the film brings together its “realistic” and “authorial motivations” to drive home the point “that we are to watch less for the tale than the telling, that life lacks the neatness of art and this art knows it” (Bordwell 156). The art cinema and its ambiguity seems well suited to creating religious experience at the cinema, both a function of the openness of interpretation created by the ambiguity and of my own taste as someone who wants to be

“smart” enough to understand these films. As a result, I am often paying more attention when watching an art film and allowing myself to imagine different interpretative possibilities that could be closed off by a more straightforward narrative film. While the bulk of my analysis will draw on art cinema, cinematic religious experience should not be limited to films that fall into this mode.

Aware of my reliance on art cinema throughout this dissertation, I have incorporated examples from different film practices and traditions at the beginning of each chapter (although The Fits, which opens chapter two, falls into the art film category) in an effort to demonstrate the wide-ranging possibilities of cinematic religious experience. These films, drawn from contemporary Hollywood, classical Hollywood, and silent cinema, offer me a chance to examine art cinema as it relates to other cinematic practices, a vital part of understanding its effect on me. “We cannot construct the art cinema in isolation from other cinematic practices,” argues Bordwell, and I would argue the same for cinematic religious experience (157). While my interest in art cinema has led to many of my religious experiences at the cinema, these experiences have been created in relation to the totality of my cinematic experience from watching classical

Hollywood films growing up to examining the wide swath of film history in graduate school. Each person’s history of spectatorship will affect them differently, and it is not for me to predict when and where cinematic religious experience may occur; this spontaneity plays a significant role in the power of these religious experiences.

Importantly, the filmic anecdotes that open chapters two through four all come from my experiences as an academic, connecting to the larger organizational principle behind my choice of texts in this dissertation.

The films that I consider in depth in this dissertation appeal to me not only because of my enjoyment of art cinema, but also due to my experience as a film studies scholar. I encountered many of these films and their directors for the first time in graduate school or after I had decided to begin researching film more deeply, and they

10 agreed with the taste I had already been cultivating as an undergraduate, due to the possibilities they offered for deep interaction with the ideas of film scholarship. The presence of these films and directors in this dissertation highlights how academic study has shifted and solidified my taste in film, while the organization of my chapters explores the ideas and issues that have inspired and challenged me through my academic trajectory. I have long wrestled with the questions of materiality, the body, and the soul that constitute the larger argument of this dissertation and the first chapter, even if they were only present implicitly in my earliest graduate work. During my Master’s degree, I latched on to the theory and ideas of Michel Chion, which formed the basis for my interest in film sound, the topic of the second chapter. I connect Terrence Malick’s films with Chion, as the first article I published was about Chion’s ideas about the voice-over as they related to The Tree of Life, which had recently come out when I wrote that article.

In the first year of the Ph.D. program, I took a class on world cinema and wrote about

Iranian film, transforming an earlier personal interest in these films into an academic one that persists in the third chapter. Finally, in the fourth chapter, my move towards autoethnography emerges, something I started thinking about in the final year of writing the dissertation. While the personal content of this dissertation does not proceed chronologically, its organization follows the evolution of my thought throughout graduate school, as each chapter incorporates the insights of the previous one, working together to offer a sort of apologia for my approach to film studies and my belief that film can help us see the world differently.

Indeed, as I offer this notion, I think back to where my larger interest in film studies began: the first of Christopher Nolan’s Batman films, Batman Begins. I went to see it one night in the summer before my junior year of high school with my friend Mike and his brother Sean. We went into the theater while it was still light out, and as we walked out into the dark, I remember feeling like something magical had happened, as if the film itself had transformed day to night. Even now, I find it hard to explain just what

Batman Begins meant to me back then, as I re-watched it recently and did not experience the same sense of grandeur that encompassed me upon that first viewing. Back in high school, Batman Begins made me think about things outside of the film’s narrative—it spoke to issues and ideas that I was thinking about in my life and my world. It was the first film that I had seen that had that effect on me, and I recall conversations with friends that shared this sentiment. Batman Begins, as unusual as it seems, made me look at movies differently, and I began to look for films that spoke to me on a deeper level. On that night, film became something more than entertainment to me, as a new world opened up to me on the screen and the impact of that world blossomed into what I have spent most of my adult life doing: studying and talking about movies.

Although my connection with one film may have been the genesis of my journey into film studies, as I have worked on this dissertation, I have been reminded of the relationships that have brought me here. Not just my relationships with the movies themselves, but with the people who I have watched and discussed these films with, as they add their voice and experience to mine. Merleau-Ponty suggests that “the phenomenological world” surfaces in “the sense which shows through at the intersection

12 of my experiences, and at the intersection of my experiences and those of others, by their engaging each other like gears” (“What” 67). In these intersections and relationships, we find the lived world, which brings me to the final assumption that underpins my argument: the world should be understood as relational, not mechanical. Berry points to

“the danger that we can give up on life…by reducing it to the terms of our understanding and by treating it as predictable or mechanical” (6). Merleau-Ponty describes the same kind of mindset in “Eye and Mind,” where humans and the world are reduced to their

“operations” and “conceived” of as “human machines,” constructed and thought of through “a few abstract indices” which robs the body of its ability to ground science in

“humanity and history” (352). For Berry, this kind of “reductive science” has universalized the “idea that the world, its creatures, and all the parts of its creatures are machines,” and this idea has contaminated the language we use to speak of the world with significant consequences for how we think about the world (6).

Language is a powerful tool for shaping how we think about ourselves and the world, and it does this primarily through metaphors. George Lakoff and Mark Johnson argue “that metaphor is pervasive in everyday life, not just in language, but in thought and action,” meaning that “[o]ur ordinary conceptual system, in terms of which we both think and act, is fundamentally metaphorical in nature” (Metaphors 3). The metaphors that our culture uses informs our “social reality” which then “shapes [our] experience of the physical world,” therefore “metaphor plays a very significant role in determining what is real for us” (Lakoff and Johnson, Metaphors 146). To call human bodies

“machines” or the world a “system” is to employ a metaphor that begins to structure a

13 culture’s thoughts about the reality of those bodies and that world, changing reality to reflect these metaphors. Berry sees these mechanistic metaphors as highly dangerous, as they have led to “the assumption that fleshly bodies are machines full of mechanisms, fully compatible with the mechanisms of medicine, industry, and commerce; and that minds are computers fully compatible with electronic technology” (6). From this mechanistic standpoint, our language has shifted its attention from the specificity of things themselves towards a reductive analysis that privileges generality and objectivity over subjectivity.

While this shift towards mechanistic language has allowed for increased scientific and technological development, it came with its own consequences. Berry identifies two main problems with this type of language and the reality that it seeks to create. First, “this usage institutionalizes the human wish, or the sin of wishing, that life might be, or might be made to be, predictable” (Berry 6). Second, although this “language…has gained a certain analytical power,” it “has lost much of its power to designate what is being analyzed or to convey any respect or care or devotion toward it” (Berry 8). Due in part to this shift in metaphors describing bodies and the world, we have, in the United States at least, found ourselves in a reality where corporations treat employees as machines to be used until broken, subject animals to unspeakable cruelty to produce cheap food, desecrate the earth to procure more oil, and manipulate the political and legal system to ensure their continued survival. In recent years, many have seen the damage done to the environment and human dignity and have pushed back against it, however, as Berry notes, the language that has been used in this pushback often describes the world in the

14 same way as the language of mechanism, and thus does not have the power to solve the problem: “It is impossible to prefigure the salvation of the world in the same language by which the world has been dismembered and defaced” (8). To begin to find a solution to these issues, we must return to other ways of understanding the world to which science can add and complement, rather than be the single interpretive lens through which we consider the world.

Science tells us important things about the world, but when it tries to generalize about individual lived experiences of the world, it oversteps its bounds and become scientism, “a philosophical position that exalts the methods of the natural sciences above all other modes of human inquiry” (Ryder).2 Merleau-Ponty speaks to the philosophical presuppositions of scientistic thinking, arguing that they devalue the world and our place in it: “To say that the world is, by nominal definition, the object x of our operations is to adjust the scientist’s epistemic situation to the absolute, as if everything that was and is has never existed save in order to enter the laboratory” (“Eye” 352). Phenomenology combats this mode of scientistic thought by returning to the world as given in our experience that exists before analysis and categorization:

To return to the things themselves is to return to that world which precedes

knowledge, of which knowledge always speaks, and in relation to which scientific

determination is abstract, significative, and dependent, as is geography in relation

2 While most scientists pursue science in its proper context, the philosophical legacy of scientism has permeated popular culture, where one must either choose science or religion as the dominant paradigm for viewing the world. Both atheists and believers alike have fanned the flames of scientism by attempting to disprove or prove God and/or Creation through the scientific method or scientific evidence with the end goal of winning an argument rather than helping each other see the world more fully. 15

to the countryside in which we have learnt first what a forest, a prairie, or a river

is. (Merleau-Ponty, “What” 57)

In returning to the things themselves, we encounter “the idea of the preciousness of individual lives and places,” which, Berry claims, “does not come from science, but from our cultural and religious traditions” (42). Robinson concurs with Berry, adding that

“there is no moment in which, no perspective from which, science as science can regard human life and say that there is a beautiful, terrible mystery in it all, a great pathos. Art, music, and religion tell us that” (“Freedom” 15). With this being said, I do not view science as the enemy of religion, as when scientific inquiry does not claim philosophical authority and religion does not claim scientific authority, these two modes of considering the world can and should complement each other.3

I still have strong and somewhat frightening memories of science versus religion debates, and I remember almost having an emotional breakdown in high school as I tried to reconcile the young earth Creationism of my upbringing with contradictory scientific evidence. I ended up reading a book where the author discussed that the Hebrew word for

“day” in Genesis could refer to an unspecified period of time rather than a literal, twenty- four hour day, something I had never heard before. In that moment of revelation, the

Bible ceased to be a science textbook that I could use to win arguments and revealed its true power as a book that speaks with religious and symbolic power about truths of the world that fall outside of science’s purview. I see both the scientific and religious

3 Robinson says this with cutting clarity: “Science can give us knowledge, but it cannot give us wisdom. Nor can religion, until it puts aside nonsense and distraction and becomes itself again” (“Freedom” 18). 16 worldviews as necessary to exploring the world and our place in it, and if it seems like I am pushing back unnecessarily hard against science, it is only because I think the scales have become a bit unbalanced, creating consequences for how we think about ourselves, others, and the world. Drawing on the insights of current neuroscience, Iain McGilchrist argues that our Western fascination with logical, rational thinking has created an imbalance in our brains where the left hemisphere has taken precedence over the right

(240-56). McGilchrist suggests that “the essential difference between the right hemisphere and left hemisphere is that the right hemisphere pays attention to the

Other…with which it sees itself in profound relation” (93). While the analytical and linguistic tools of the left hemisphere are vital to help us gain knowledge about the world, we cannot lose sight of the “profound relation” that connects us to the world and others provided by the right hemisphere. We need a way of talking about the world, the bodies that inhabit it, and the relationships that are formed between them that comes from looking at the world with an integrated perspective.

In regards to finding a new way of speaking, I am reminded of a conversation I had with a friend one night while cooking us dinner. While observing a stew thicken, I suggested that cooking is magic, and she replied, “Uh, no it’s science.” I granted her that science can explain the chemical processes behind cooking, offer explanations for why we like certain foods and how our tastes have developed, and, indeed, even help me become a better cook. Yet, when I stand over the stove and see a steak sear, smell onions and garlic, and hear the sizzle in the pan, the last thing I am thinking about is the Maillard reaction. Instead, I am being drawn into the mysterious interactions of the things of the

17 world as they create something magical. Finding magic in the act of cooking changes my perspective on food itself, transformed “through some dim dazzling trick of grace” that offers another outlook on the world (Percy, Moviegoer 235). Encouraging this careful attention to the world, Episcopal priest Robert Farrar Capon suggests that our “real work is to look at the things of the world and to love them for what they are,” and though this work “can cost [us] time and effort…it pays handsomely” (19). “Inattention,” on the other hand, “costs [us] dearly,” as Capon colorfully describes what happens when we forget our attachment to the world: “Every time [we] diagram something instead of looking at it, every time [we] regard not what a thing is but what it can be made to mean to us…[we] get grease all over the kitchen of the world” (19-20). If we attend carefully to things and the world, we may find a language with which to speak about them, a language which foregrounds their magical individuality and unpredictability—the language of the cinema.

Yet, the cinema, as we now know it, was born of the same modernity that I find troubling, a new technology, like the telephone and train, that changed how people saw the world and interacted with others. How can a medium like this, mechanical (now digital) and modern to its core, ever hope to speak to the individuality and particularity of the world? Indeed, early film theorists and critics pointed to the reproducibility of the cinema as one of its defining features, one that could be used for good or ill. For Walter

Benjamin, film marks one of the ways in which “mechanical reproduction” has changed the significance of the aesthetic object, and, even if film can enact positive change, its ontological status as a mechanically reproduced object carries “a destructive, cathartic

18 aspect, that is, the liquidation of the traditional values of cultural heritage” (668). As such, the work of art’s “aura,” “its unique existence at a place where it happens to be,” disappears in mechanical reproduction, which “emancipates the work of art from its parasitic dependence on ritual,” allowing the work of art to serve political ends (667-70).

Benjamin sees benefits of mechanical reproduction in the disentangling of art from ritual

(of the “magical” and “religious” kind) and film’s ability to make the “unconscious” available to the spectator, as he ties film’s “revolutionary functions” to its obliteration of ritual (670, 680). Mechanical reproduction, however, more readily serves the interests of capitalism through homogenizing culture and distracting the proletariat from revolution, as Benjamin and his fellow critics in the Frankfurt School, like Theodor Adorno, argue.

While some elements of the Frankfurt School’s critique of what Adorno calls the “culture industry” ring true, I find their larger arguments trapped within a similar reductionism to that of scientism.

The ideological and psychoanalytic criticism of the Frankfurt School has trickled down through film theory, most evidently in apparatus theory of the 1970s and 80s and the ideological criticism that came from it. In these theories, the impulse that marked

Benjamin’s critique gets carried to the extreme, as the totalizing power of the cinema o elides the real spectator entirely, replacing them with an ideal viewing “subject” created by the film. The cinema creates this “subject” as the process of mechanical reproduction ensures that every spectator has access to the same filmic experience, one that usually reinforces the dominant hegemony. If the cinema operates in this way, then it promotes a problematic universality that seeks to trick its audience into subscribing to values and

19 ideologies that serve to oppress them.4 Adorno argues that the culture industry has created this kind of oppressive situation: “If the masses have been unjustly reviled from above as masses, the culture industry is not among the least responsible for making them into masses and then despising them” (106). Yet, in trying to describe the problem and work against it, Adorno, Benjamin, and later theorists adopt the language and paradigms of modernism to solve a problem created by modernism. In doing so, they reduce particular spectator experience to the data of subjects in a mass experiment, posit a universal cinema that serves their political critique, and fall prey to an intellectual elitism that reviles the masses just as much as the culture industry does. For these theories of the cinematic experience, human spectators no longer have any agency, because they have been reduced to machines which only respond in one way, conditioned by invisible forces to believe certain things about the world.

While the cinema, as a technology, is mechanically and digitally reproducible, I think it a mistake to ascribe that same reproducibility to spectator experience, as each spectator has their own unique experience at the cinema. As I will argue below, the cinematic experience is created through a relationship between spectator and film, where spectator and film encroach on and intertwine with each other. In this way, each film activates different viewing possibilities for individual spectators which overflow the bounds of ideology, even though they may be encased within ideologies that should be challenged. Each film creates a multiplicity of unique and sometimes contradictory

4 There are plenty of examples of films and film movements that do this very thing, and I do not wish to suggest that ideological criticism is without its merits, however, I think its premises and patterns of thought carry wider reaching consequences that are just as problematic as the hegemonies they critique. 20 viewing experiences, depending on the position of the spectator in regards to the film. I think here of African-American critics like bell hooks and James Baldwin who, in their writing on cinema, remain aware of and critique problematic ideologies present in popular cinema even as they point to moments of awareness and engagement that sprung from their experiences of those films. In the final section of The Devil Finds Work,

Baldwin discusses The Exorcist, a film he finds troubling on a number of levels, yet one that nevertheless showed him something profound about the “mindless and hysterical banality of evil”: “The Americans should certainly no more about evil than that; if they pretend otherwise, they are lying and any black man...can call them on this lie: he who has been treated as the devil recognizes the devil when they meet” (121-22). If I have ears to hear, I can learn from others’ experiences at the cinema, letting the individuality of their experience affect me. After all, most of us do not go to the theater or watch movies alone in a vacuum (except for us academics) precisely because we want to know what our friends and loved ones thought about the movie we just saw. We inherently understand that we experience movies (and art in general) differently from other people and seek out their perspectives to enrich and challenge our own. Rather than reducing us to unthinking consumers of an ideology, the cinema pushes us towards the particularity of others’ experience.

The way of seeing offered by the cinema, I would suggest, asks us to look at the world through the lens of the fairytale. The fairytale seems to have very little to do with the serious world that we inhabit, as the world of fairytales remains entrenched in the enchanted age, where magical spirits and forces exist at every turn. G.K. Chesterton

21 argues that we should view the world through the logic of the fairytale, calling out the

“materialists” of his day (early twentieth-century England) for “talking of the actual things that happened—dawn and death and so—as if they were rational and inevitable”

(47). For Chesterton, the idea that “two strange things [are] physically connected” does not mean that they must always be so, as science would claim, as the logic of fairytales allows us to “imagine” something different (49). Taylor echoes Chesterton’s argument, when he claims that “disenchantment dissolved the cosmos,” and left “a universe ruled by causal laws, utterly unresponsive to human meaning…indifferent, like a machine” (280).

Rather than assume the primacy of these “laws” that reduce the movements of the world to mechanism, we can provide a different answer:

When we are asked why eggs turn to birds or fruits fall in autumn, we must

answer exactly as the fairy godmother would answer if Cinderella asked her why

mice turned to horses or her clothes fell from her at twelve o’clock. We must

answer that it is magic. (Chesterton 49)

In claiming that the world runs on magic, Chesterton suggests a different set of words to explain this point-of-view: “The only words that ever satisfied me as describing Nature are the terms used in the fairy books, ‘charm,’ ‘spell,’ ‘enchantment’” (50). With that final word, Chesterton points us back to the enchanted world, one where magic traverses the space between our atoms, forging relationships between us and the world, relationships that the cinema explores.

Early in film history, two main ideas about the medium emerged, which Kracauer famously identified with the Lumière Brothers and Georges Méliès: realism and

22 formalism (30). As examples of the realistic tendency, the actualities that the Lumière

Brothers filmed and screened showed moments of real life, like a trains arriving in stations and people leaving work “for no other purpose than to present [the world about us]” (Kracauer 31). Méliès, on the other hand, “freely interlinked imagined events according to the requirements of his charming fairy-tale plots” and “created his illusions with the aid of techniques peculiar to the medium” (Kracauer 32). Kracauer argues that these tendencies live in tension in any work of cinematic art, as, ultimately, that work always exists in relationship to the real world, given the cinema’s connection to a photographic ontology (38-40). While I will set aside the question of cinematic ontology until the first chapter, Kracauer’s larger point about realism and formalism highlights an important aspect of the cinema’s power to help us encounter an enchanted world. The formalist tendency allows the film to imagine and create ways of seeing this world and gives them to us through its perceptions, while realism grounds these perceptive modes in the material world, opening those possibilities up to our bodies. In our viewing experiences, we find a world that reaches out to us and shows us the magic that animates even the most mundane aspects of our existence. I do not think it a coincidence that one of the earliest precursors to cinema as we know it now was the “magic lantern,” as the cinema remains magical to this day.

With this idea of the cinema at the core of my argument, I proceed from the assumptions I have laid out in this introduction to argue for the cinema’s ability to draw us into religious experiences that enable us to see the world differently. The first chapter lays out my theory of phenomenology and religious experience at the cinema, as I

23 consider questions of cinematic ontology, Transcendence, and the nature of the soul. The other three chapters provide examples of how the cinema and my religious experience of it has shaped my understanding of the world by creating new possibilities for living in it.

The second chapter argues that film sound heralds the reality of the enchanted world lurking behind the modern one, while the third chapter explores the tension that comes when film plays with its connection to reality, sometimes reshaping it entirely. In the final chapter, I draw on my own cinematic experiences most heavily, using them to highlight some ways that the cinema has transformed how I live in and see the world. I conclude by encouraging us to watch faithfully, that is, to assume a stance before the world that takes up our existence as a gift in faith, the cinema helping us ground ourselves in this position before the world.

~*~

If one were to suggest that the ideas I have offered in this introduction and will explore over this dissertation are very naïve, exceedingly optimistic, or overly imaginative, well, I would offer little rebuttal. Perhaps they are, but they may also be the ideas we need right now, as Brent Plate seems to think: “If imagination and a greater connection to the stuff of nature are childish things, then so be it. This world is weary of grown-up ideas” (History 224). Full of wonder and gratitude, childlike thinking offers an antidote to the current toxic public discourse by returning a measure of innocence to us, as Christian Wiman describes: “To be innocent is to retain that space in your heart that once heard a still, small voice saying not your name so much as your nature, and the wherewithal to say again and forever your wordless but lucid, your triumphant but

24 absolute, yes” (64). Turning away from cynicism and apathy provides a path to “protect this space so it can protect you,” as you look out on the abundance and mystery of the world in wonder and joy (Wiman 64). I write this to myself as much as I do to you, as I find it incredibly difficult to step away from my adult worries and the “serious” business of life to embrace childish things. In a song by The National, “The Geese of Beverly

Road,” lead singer Matt Berninger tells the story of “a bunch of kids running up and down Beverly setting off car alarms” from their perspective, and one of the lines in the song has always stuck with me (Kelly). “We’re the heirs to the glimmering world,” sings

Berninger, his low baritone resonating with the wisdom of these kids, who still know the truth of the world (“Geese”). On my best days, I am running down Beverly Road with them, exultant, lost in the thrill of life.

Chapter 1. A Phenomenological Approach to the Religious Experience of Film

“My whole life has been movies and religion. That’s it. Nothing else.” — Martin Scorsese

While I have seen my dad watch many movies at home, I have only seen him go to the theaters to see one movie—The Passion of the Christ. Fourteen years old, I remember feeling a bit strange going to the film, a combination of surprise at my dad going to the movies and a sort of hesitant anticipation for what I was about to see, as I had heard about the brutality of the film from friends at church who had already seen it.

Although it has been fifteen years since I saw the film, I recall a few moments with shocking clarity, moments that encompass far more than just what I saw on the screen.

Christ (Jim Caviezel) being whipped, strips of flesh being torn off his back. My mom catching her breath and covering her eyes. The collective, involuntary groans of the audience. My hands, squeezing the armrests of my seat. The final nail driven into Christ’s wrist, blood spurting in the air, shockwaves of pain radiating up my arm. And, at the end of the film, silence, as people left without saying a word, stunned, reverent, or both. I do not need to see The Passion of the Christ again to know that it left its mark on me, and it was a filmgoing experience that I am confident many, maybe even my dad, would call a religious experience.

Of course, The Passion of the Christ was designed to create precisely this kind of religious experience at the cinema, and going to the film was marketed as an act of devotion. Released during Lent, the penitent season that leads to Easter in the church calendar, the film takes its viewers through the Stations of the Cross, a common devotional practice during Lent and Holy Week. Even at our evangelical Baptist church that did not celebrate Lent and was generally suspicious of anything vaguely Catholic, our pastor encouraged us to go to see The Passion and soon it was all anyone was talking about at youth group and on Sunday morning. Surrounded by all this, it does not surprise me that I remember the film so strongly, as I was primed by the culture and people around me to experience something powerful when I sat down in that theater to watch it.

As significant as the cultural discourse and societal pressures surrounding The Passion were, they do not invalidate or undermine the authenticity of my experience or that of my friends, family, and fellow churchgoers at the film, as every time any one of us goes to the movies, we carry our lives, beliefs, and expectations into that experience.

While The Passion of the Christ serves as a useful example to begin this dissertation, films that are explicitly religious will not be my focus in the remainder of this project, as I strive to speak more broadly and openly about religious experience at the cinema. If I were to focus only on religious films, I would be putting boundaries on religious experience at the cinema and only granting that experience to the religious people who would go see such films. This has been a problem with much academic study of religion and film, as scholars (usually religious ones) have tended to direct their attention to films about religion or look for religious concepts in popular film, turning the

27 field into a study of “the representation of religion in film,” where serious consideration of film as a medium has been undercut by a focus on the narrative content of the film

(Plate, Religion 50). Moreover, many explicitly religious films tend to be polemical, intentionally or otherwise, sparking controversy by what they leave in or what they take out. For its part, The Passion of the Christ was critiqued as being anti-Semitic upon its release, and Mel Gibson’s actions following the film have done nothing to alleviate that charge. Other films, like The Last Temptation of Christ, faced opposition from religious institutions and leaders for its depiction of Jesus, and the cultural uproar around that film may, in fact, say more about religion than the film itself. While the cultural and societal debates that surround these kinds of films are compelling, they are not the debates of this dissertation, but they do highlight some of the larger societal issues at stake when we talk about religious experience at the cinema. The belief that the cinema can create powerful experiences lies at the core of these debates, and early theorists, viewers, and critics often saw a religious dimension in this power of film, regardless of the film’s content, as they tried to explain the benefits and drawbacks of that power.

As the cinema became more than a sideshow attraction of moving images thanks to advances in technology and editing, many began to see new potential in it. For the early Soviet filmmakers and theorists, the cinema’s revolutionary potential was immediately obvious, and they turned its power, whether of their own free will or at the government’s insistence, towards a socialist message. Through a dialectical theory of montage, Sergei Eisenstein connected the formal qualities of his films to socialist ideas, believing in the power of the cinema to change and move its spectators: “The film’s job is

28 to make the audience ‘help itself,’ not to ‘entertain’ it…To furnish the audience with cartridges, not to dissipate the energies that it brought into the theater” (Film Form 84).

While Eisenstein’s films clearly have a political message, his understanding of the relationship between spectator and film resonates with spiritual urgency: “The image planned by the author has become flesh of the flesh of the spectator’s risen image. . . .

Within me, as a spectator, this image is born and grown. Not only the author has created, but I also—the creating spectator—have participated” (Film Sense 34). Eisenstein would eventually run into the unflinching doctrines of Stalin-era socialism and have to leave

Russia, unwilling to bring his theory and artistic convictions in line with the demands of the Soviet film industry. In Eisenstein’s theory, as in other early film theory, especially that of Belá Balázs, I see a profound acknowledgement of the cinema’s ability to transform its spectators.

In the United States, as sound cinema came into its own, religious organizations were likewise becoming aware of the cinema’s transformative power and saw the need to steer this cinematic influence in the “right” direction. In 1929, Jesuit priest Daniel A.

Lord and layman Martin Quigley wrote what, after revisions by several prominent studio heads, would come to be known as the Motion Picture Production Code, a document that set standards for what could and could not be shown in Hollywood movies. The Code was not rigidly enforced until Joseph Breen, a Catholic himself, became head of the

Production Code Administration in 1934, turning the Code into “a homily that sought to yoke Catholic doctrine to Hollywood formula” (Doherty). Whether or not the Code actually made its spectators more moral (I would be surprised if it did), its creation

29 sprung from an acknowledgement of the power of the cinema to change people. While the Code, undergirded by Catholic thought, tried to use this power to teach people about the consequences of “sinful” behavior, its larger project was based in a fear of cinema’s power to lead people, especially children, astray. As such, the Code represents a negative view of cinema’s power, grounded in Catholic theology of the inherent fallen nature of humankind. The notion of the cinema leading people astray without their knowledge continues in post-Code film theory, heavily influenced by psychoanalysis and the cultural revolution of the 1960s.

With the influx of psychoanalytic theory into film studies, scholars turned their attention to the ability of film to overwhelm the spectator, replacing earlier, participatory models of spectatorship with ones that located the cinema’s power in its ability to take over the spectator’s mind. These approaches connected the cinema’s power to larger hegemonic forces, attributing its power to the force of global capitalism, and, in doing so, they shifted focus from the religious and moral effects of the cinema to economic and political ones. To be sure, the criticisms of this branch of film theory do carry a moral imperative, often a very important one, but they have moved the locus of personal and social change from religion to politics. I believe that the religious understanding of cinema’s power that I will offer below offers individuals more agency to change the world around them, enabling relationships with others and the world that valorize the individual, rather than reduce them to a political collective. With this religious understanding of cinema in place, I am interested in the “aesthetic engagement with film and with ritual” that comes from “the body that believes, that jumps in its seat when the

30 killer emerges from the shadows,” that is, the subjective experience of the viewer’s body in the relationship formed between viewer and film (Plate, Religion 66). This experience of film presupposes a participatory, embodied spectator who can become aware of unwanted ideologies, not a hypnotized mind that takes in whatever it sees on screen.

In taking an approach that foregrounds our embodied interactions with the cinema, I ground my thought in phenomenology, the branch of philosophy that examines our experience of the things, the phenomena, of the world. While contemporary phenomenology takes many of its terms and initial ideas from Edmund Husserl, most who currently practice phenomenology have turned to a more existentially grounded version of the philosophy found in the works of Jean-Paul Sartre, Martin Heidegger, and

Maurice Merleau-Ponty. Phenomenology proves tricky to define, as its “region of inquiry,” defined by Husserl’s maxim “to the things themselves,” encompasses “an infinitely open field, including all and any phenomena whatsoever—but only as they are given to experience” (Ihde, Experimental 17). In his attempt to define the movement,

Merleau-Ponty lists a number of seemingly contradictory positions held in tension by this philosophical approach, before positing that this “unfinished nature of phenomenology and the inchoative allure which has surrounded it are not to be taken as a sign of failure,” rather “they were inevitable because phenomenology’s task was to reveal the mystery of the world and of reason” (“What” 68). For Merleau-Ponty, this task of revealing the world and doing phenomenology is relentlessly subjective, as “I know [the world] on the basis of a view, which is mine” (“What” 56). Phenomenology begins with our bodies and asks us to consider our experiences as necessarily embodied, even as we reflect on them

31 to find “what is genuinely discoverable and potentially there, but not often seen” (Ihde,

Experimental 13). With phenomenology at the core of my thought, I turn to what happens when we, as bodies, watch a movie.

We experience the cinema with our bodies, not just comprehend it with our minds. Through this experience, we also know the cinema with an embodied knowledge that encompasses far more than intellectual assent or ideological dis/agreement. Our experience of the cinema is primarily relational, an intersubjective relationship between two bodies. This deep, embodied connection to the filmic experience, like the one I had during The Passion of the Christ, can lead, I will argue, to having religious experiences at the cinema, both for the viewer and the filmic body. The filmic body perceives religious experiences and expresses those to the viewer through its expressive organs. In more provocative terms, I will argue that films (and by connection, humans) have a soul, “the realization of the living body’s potential” (Goodman and Caramenico 5). To form this argument, I am approaching film studies from a phenomenological point of view, which

Jennifer Barker defines concisely in her book The Tactile Eye:

A phenomenological approach to the cinematic experience, then, focuses neither

solely on the formal or narrative features of the film itself, nor solely on the

spectator’s psychic identification with characters or cognitive interpretation of the

film. Instead, phenomenological film analysis approaches the film and the viewer

as acting together, correlationally, along an axis that would itself constitute the

object of study. (18)

In film phenomenology, both film and spectator are important, as they mutually create meaning for each other throughout the cinematic experience. As such, I will attend to both spectator and film, as they cannot be separated in any study that purports to analyze cinematic meaning.

The Film’s Body

“My body might have some good news.” — David Bazan

The relationship between spectator and film forms the foundation for the cinematic experience, an experience that comprises much more than just watching a series of images on a screen. Film phenomenology boldly claims that the cinematic experience is a living, breathing relationship between two bodies rather than an individual mind grasping the meaning of the film’s narrative and form; in other words, the film itself has a body that we interact with as we watch. The concept of the film’s body comes from Vivian Sobchack’s seminal work in film phenomenology, The Address of the Eye: A Phenomenology of Film Experience. My initial theoretical framework will be largely based off of Sobchack’s, but with some helpful additions and necessary complications from scholars who have followed in her wake as well as my own thoughts when it comes to issues relating to religion and spirituality. Phenomenology, particularly when applied in film studies, has skirted or ignored questions of religious experience, perhaps due to the fact that religious experience appears to be immaterial and ineffable, while phenomenology remains resolutely attached to the material world. Yet, 33 phenomenology, especially the existential phenomenology of Maurice Merleau-Ponty, carries with it an awareness of transcendence that speaks to questions of spirituality within the embodied world. Likewise, many of the scholars that work in film phenomenology adopt a somewhat mystical tone when speaking of connections between body, world, and cinema, even if they ultimately resist discussing religion or spirituality in any metaphysical sense.5 “Phenomenology is the door to the possible,” offers Ihde, and

I swing that door open to see what I might be able to find on the other side (Experimental

13). In this adventurous spirit, I venture forth into the unknown territory of filmic religious experience, starting with the embodied experience of the film.

Before getting to the film’s body, we must first consider the “film experience,” as

Sobchack calls it in the subtitle of The Address of the Eye. Published in 1992, The

Address of the Eye was on the forefront of a new movement in film studies away from the psychoanalytical models of spectatorship and film experience that pervaded the late

1970s and the 1980s. Along with historical and reception studies approaches to spectatorship, film phenomenology pushed back against ideas of the passive spectator, hypnotized by the film’s apparatus into an ideal viewer that fully assimilates the film’s ideology. A year prior to Address of the Eye, Allan Casebier advanced a Husserlian approach to film phenomenology with the intention of replacing a Metzian/Lacanian

“idealist/nominalist theory of cinematic representation” with a “realist theory of cinematic representation” that posited the film as a real object that presents reality to the

5 Such as Sobchack in her essay, “The Passion of the Material,” where she delivers a beautiful ode to the possibility of transcendence within and in the material world, but makes sure that the reader knows that “what [she is] calling the unfathomable mystery of our own material being is not meant in any transcendental or religious sense” (296). 34 spectator, rather than the illusions that Metz claims the spectator encounters (4).

Sobchack and others that have followed take issue with Husserlian phenomenology and its final move to a transcendental reduction, which Sobchack calls “an unnecessary paradox” as “it is an abstraction from the Lebenswelt [lived-world] which cannot escape the Lebenswelt” (Address 38).6 Husserl’s transcendental phenomenology has not fared well in film studies or the humanities due to its essentialism, and Casebier’s monograph stands as one of the few attempts to apply Husserl to film theory. Importantly, however, it marks the beginning of phenomenology making its way into film studies, and demonstrates intentions within the field to move towards new conceptions of spectatorship and film theory. Starting with Sobchack, most scholars have moved from

Husserl towards Merleau-Ponty and existential phenomenology, which places a larger emphasis on embodied existence in the world.

In order to argue for the importance of the body in the world, Merleau-Ponty slightly modifies Husserl’s concept of intentionality, a key concept in phenomenology.

Intentionality, for Husserl, lies in the “correlation between subject and object,” where the subject intends toward an object through an act of directed consciousness (Spear). This correlation “structures and directs our experience,” and connects the “the intentional acts of consciousness” with “the intentional objects of consciousness” (Sobchack, Address

34). Merleau-Ponty points to a difference between “act intentionality” and “operative intentionality,” the first being an intentionality of “judgements” and “voluntary decision,”

6 The transcendental reduction being “an essential description of the phenomena of consciousness in all their possibilities for any existence” (Sobchack, Address 37). 35 while the second “establishes the natural and pre-predicative unity of the world and our life” (Phenomenology lxxxii). He is primarily interested in the second of these facets of intentionality, as it is operative intentionality that “provides the text” that phenomenology reads to better understand the nature of perception, the body, and the world

(Phenomenology lxxxii). Merleau-Ponty fleshes out intentionality by claiming that the body, not just the mind, intends toward the world, as “it is the lived-body that actualizes intentionality in the very gesture of being alive in and present to the world and others”

(Sobchack, Address 39). In this irreducible intentionality toward the world, the lived- body acts as both intentional subject and intentional object, “mediat[ing] between the interior world of consciousness and the exterior world of objects” (Barker 17). Building on this conception of intentionality, Sobchack pushes back against contemporary film theory of her time and grounds her theory of film experience in Merleau-Ponty’s thought.

Like many other film scholars in the early 1990s, Sobchack takes issue with some of the prevailing theories about spectator experience at the cinema. Claiming that “the act of consciousness is never ‘empty’ and ‘in-itself,’ but always intending toward and in relation to an object,” Sobchack argues that prominent film theories have “abstracted and privileged only one of [the] parts” of the film experience, rather than “the whole correlational structure” of intentionality that we see in “the mediation of an activity and an object” (Address 18).7 Thus, for Sobchack, in order to correct the mistakes of past film theory we must consider the totality of the film experience, which Sobchack conceives of

7 Sobchack suggests that formalist theory focuses on expression, suppressing perception and mediation; realist theory focuses on perception, suppressing expression and mediation; and contemporary theory (psychoanalytic and Marxist) focuses on mediation, suppressing expression and perception (Address 19). 36 as “a system of communication based on bodily perception as a vehicle of conscious expression” (Address 9). For Sobchack, this relationship between perception and expression exists for both film and viewer, suggesting that “[the film] is as much a viewing subject as it is also a visible and viewed object” (Address 21-22). In this manner, the “direct engagement…between spectator and film in the film experience” is

“dialogical and dialectical,” in which “both film and spectator are capable of viewing and of being viewed, [and] both are embodied in the world as the subject of vision and object for vision” (Sobchack, Address 23). This reversible structure of perception and expression in the film experience connects back to the intentionality of the lived-body, which allows Sobchack to make the next step in arguing for the film’s body.

Building from Merleau-Ponty’s rejection of a subject/object binary, Sobchack explains the lived-body’s relationship to the world in this way:

From its first breath, the lived-body constitutes both an intrasubjective and

intersubjective system in which being is both understood and signified as

significant—that is, as intentional. In that every lived-body is both the subject of

perception and expression, every lived-body lives the commutation of perception

and expression in a simultaneously subjective and objective modality. (Address

41)

Sobchack maps the human lived-body onto film by arguing that the reciprocity of the seeing and seen that we encounter in the cinema constitutes the film as an embodied

“seer”: “All film presents not only the seen but also the seeing. In so doing, it posits a lived, inhabitable, and intentional distance that structures and is structured by the act of

37 vision, a distance that begins at and ends in a seer who is capable of seeing, who is embodied” (Address 134). As seer/seen, the film has its own lived-body, distinct from the human body, but nonetheless involved in the same kind of embodied perception and expression as human bodies (Sobchack, Address 22). Jennifer Barker summarizes these claims well: “The film certainly perceives, experiences, is immersed in, and has a vantage point on the world, and without a doubt the film signifies, or otherwise there would be nothing at all for us to see, hear, feel, or interpret” (9). With this foundation in place,

Sobchack moves on to discuss the film’s body in more detail.

While Sobchack discusses various “organs” of the film’s body, she avoids reducing the film’s body to simply its cinematic technology, just as Merleau-Ponty argues against reducing the human body to only its anatomy.8 The cinematic technology is, of course, still important, but it does not form the entirety of the film’s body:

As a systemic ‘apparatus,’ cinematic technology functions to afford the film a

material instrumentality for its perceptive and expressive intention, and to exist

invisibly ‘behind’ the film’s perceptive and expressive activity as the film’s

ground, as its incarnate and substantial being, as the film’s body. (Sobchack,

Address 171)

So, like the human body, which “is a knot of living significations and not the law of a certain number of covariant terms,” the film’s body may “necessarily” exist because of its material technology, but “its material existence is sufficiently in its transcendence of

8 Merleau-Ponty on trying to reduce the body to a container for the mind/soul: “The union of the soul and the body is not established through an arbitrary decree that unites two mutually exclusive terms, one a subject and the other an object. It is accomplished at each moment in the movement of existence” (Phenomenology 91). 38 its technological origins and dependencies” (Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology 153;

Sobchack, Address 171). By considering the film’s body as more than the sum of its cinematic parts, Sobchack discusses technological change as part of the history of the filmic body, but argues for a continuity between various eras of cinema, despite their differing technological states: “The history of the film’s body is a history of intending bodies” (Address 259). Within this history, Sobchack does see a progression of the film’s body towards “increased possibilities for perception and expression, for choice and action,” however, this does not “guarantee that technological extensions of the film’s bodily powers of perception and expression will ensure the interest of its situation in the world to others” (Address 256). The technological extensions of the film’s body that

Sobchack discusses act as the film’s perceptive/expressive organs and constitute how the film intends towards the world and expresses these perceptions to the viewer.

Sobchack highlights three main organs of the film’s body: the camera, the projector, and the screen. “The primary function” of these organs, according to Sobchack,

“is to enable acts of introceptive perception and their expression,” beginning with movement of and in the film that is expressed to the viewer (Address 205-6). Sobchack pairs camera and projector, as their “co-operation…existentially enables and realizes the film as a ‘moving picture,’” the camera as the film’s “perceptive organ” and the projector as its “expressive organ” (Address 206). The camera “marks its perceptive competence in the existential performance of its materially embodied perception,” and its perception of the world is both “situated” and “finite” in its lived-body (Address 209). The film’s body makes it perception “sensible” to us through “its materialized activity of looking and

39 moving in relation to what it perceives,” while the projector “allows the camera’s perception its visible presence,” expressing these perceptions to the viewer (Address 209-

10). Finally, “the screen…is the substantial ‘flesh’ that allows the perceptive activity of the film situated presence and finite articulation” and “the material substance that enables the frame its function” (Address 211). For Sobchack, all of this cinematic technology works together to transcend the “essential material nature” of the film’s body, making the film’s body a “lived-body” that existentially engages with the world and others

(Address 220). Sobchack’s discussion of the organs and flesh of the film’s body is understandably brief, given the project of The Address of the Eye, leaving other scholars to flesh out—the pun is unavoidable—the film’s body more fully.

Both Laura Marks and Barker consider the possibility of cinematic touch, with

Barker taking this a step further by asserting and theorizing the film’s skin, musculature, and viscera. Taking off from Gilles Deleuze and his film theory, Marks advances a

“theory of haptic visuality,” suggesting that film can create a sense of touch through its images and its embodied connection to viewers (22). For Marks, haptic cinema does more than just encourage viewers to identify with images, characters, or ideologies:

“Haptic cinema does not invite identification with a figure—a sensory-motor reaction— so much as it encourages a bodily relationship between the viewer and the image” (164).

This bodily relationship enables the film to reach senses other than sight and hearing, making touch (and possibly smell and taste) available to the viewer through the film’s body: “It is common for cinema to evoke sense experience through intersensory links: sounds may evoke textures; sights may evoke smells…These intersensory links are well

40 termed synesthetic” (213). In this manner, Marks’ skin of the film is less literal than

Sobchack’s film body, but still serves as an important step forward in thinking about the embodied relationship between film and viewer and the experiences that the cinema can engender. Marks’ work serves as a starting point for Barker to explain and expand upon the film’s skin and what that means for the film’s body.

By theorizing cinematic touch in a distinctly phenomenological way, Barker suggests further possibilities for touch in the intersubjective relationship between film and viewer, even physical and erotic ones.9 Barker relies on Merleau-Ponty’s concept of

“flesh” to help explain how film and viewer can come into bodily contact with each other: “Flesh is the possibility for being that surrounds any one thing” that “implies an equivocation of body and things, such that they are of each other, neither raised above the other, both related and interdependent” (26-27). While distinct from the tangibility of the film’s skin, the concept of flesh allows Barker to posit a spectator “who joins the film in the act of making meaning,” as the film’s meaning is in found in the interaction between spectator and film (27). Barker conceives of the skin (human and filmic) as “the boundary between the body and the world,” and as such, it also constitutes a demarcation between “self and other,” an important site of creating meaning in the fleshly contact between two bodies (28-29). Like Sobchack, Barker resists reducing the film’s skin to its constitutive parts, instead claiming that “the film’s skin is a complex amalgamation of perceptive and expressive parts…coming together to present a specific and tactile mode

9 By erotic, Barker simply means that “film and viewer come together in a mutual exchange between two bodies who communicate their desire, not only for the other but for themselves, in the act of touching”— rather than seeking mastery or ownership, “the erotic touch…is truly intersubjective” (34-35). 41 of being in the world” (29). Both Marks and Barker foreground the ability of the cinema to activate sense other than sight and connect with the viewer on a bodily level.

Barker continues her discussion of boundaries throughout The Tactile Eye, and this focus on the liminality of skin, musculature, and viscera leads to some other important ideas about the position of the spectator’s body in regards to the film’s body.

For Barker, the spectator often crosses boundaries during the film experience, inhabiting space in a different way: “During the film experience, the spectator’s body lives in two places at once, because she directs herself through her body toward her own space and the film’s space at the same time” (85). In doing so, the film has the potential to generate

“empathy between our own body and the film’s body” as a result of the similarity between our movement and the film’s (75). We understand the film’s body in how it compares to our embodied experience and also in how it differs from it. In this empathetic relationship between our body and the film’s, we begin to see how film phenomenology advances a conception of spectatorship and film that offers radical possibilities for film to engage the viewer on a spiritual/religious level, grounded in the empathetic, emotional, and embodied reciprocity and reversibility of the intersubjective relationship between the bodies of film and viewer. Indeed, Barker describes this relationship in a mystical manner:

By movement of the film’s body or bodies and things on screen, we are made to

reckon with our perpetual immersion in and inspiration by something that moves

beyond, beneath, and within us all. In these moments, our tactile engagement with

the cinema allows us to recognize through embodied, perceptive and expressive

acts our situation in something larger. (157)

In many ways, my goal is to find this “something,” maybe something religious, that

Barker highlights, but does not define, in the cinematic experience.

In the years since Sobchack advanced the notion of the filmic body, the cinema has changed, moving from an analog process to a digital one. This shift has occurred quickly and brought positives and negatives to the filmmaking process, editing, and projection. While filmmaking and viewing is now more accessible than ever, has this move disrupted the filmic body, which once had clear connections to the material world?

Does digital cinema pose a problem to questions of embodied religious experience and spectatorship? Different scholars land on different sides of this debate, and the parameters and conclusions of this debate have important ramifications for my project.

As such, before attending to religious experience at the cinema, I will first explore the digital cinematic experience, as this is the way most people now experience film.

Digital Cinema and the Film’s Body

“Digital—what is this film?” — David Fincher

Since the 1980s, the cinema has progressively introduced digital technologies into what was previously an entirely analog process. While electronic tools for film editing had been used since the 1960s, the 1980s saw the release of a number of non-linear editing systems, and by the end of the decade, computerized non-linear editing systems

43 had become the industry standard. In 1995, Pixar’s Toy Story became the first completely computer animated feature-length film, heralding a shift away from tradition animation.

The replacement of analog film stock was not far behind, and the late 1990s brought the first films that were completely digital from camera to screen. This revolution in the material nature of the cinema has prompted a number of responses from the industry and the academy, especially once it became clear that digital cinema was rapidly taking over.

Outside of increased efforts from major industry players like Martin Scorsese and

Christopher Nolan to preserve analog film and still shoot their movies with it, Hollywood has embraced digital cinema without reservation, as it is more affordable and efficient in an age of ever-increasing movie budgets. The academy, on the other hand, has struggled with the loss of analog film and its relationship to the material world, leading to new theories and concepts about the digital cinema. Some have proclaimed the death of film, which in one sense is correct, if film is nothing more than the material celluloid and analog projectors of the past, while others have asserted that the cinema is more than its material foundation. Regardless of the life or death of film, questions surrounding the shifting ontology and materiality of film remain prescient for my project: if the material basis of the film's body has changed with the advent of digital technology, is it the same body that Sobchack theorized? Does film even have a body anymore? One thing is certain: the material basis of film has changed, bringing about an accompanying shift in its ontology, one that changes our relationship to the medium. However, are these changes substantial enough to drastically affect our embodied experience at the cinema?

Or do they merely exist in the abstract realm of theory, useful for debates at academic conferences and nothing else?

In The Virtual Life of Film, D. N. Rodowick argues that the shift from analogical to digital film changes our fundamental temporal relationship to what we see represented on screen. Going back to Andre Bazin and Siegfried Kracauer, Rodowick claims that the photograph and its analogical relationship to reality was a key element of early film theory and ontology, something now lost in the digital age due to the material differences between photographic and digital image capture. Rodowick claims that the analogical image constructs a relationship to the past that lends film its power: “All of film’s powers as an art of duration are indebted to this analogical causation through which we attribute a past (and passing) existence to the present image, an existence which is no longer actual or visible, but which works through the image as a virtual force” (79). The digital image also has a relationship to time, but given that its material basis is in “constant state of reproduction through a process of scanning, the electronic image is never wholly present in either space or time” (Rodowick 137). The ontological differences between analog and digital delivers a different temporal experience to us, “draw[ing] us toward the future rather than engaging us with the past” (Rodowick 177). While Rodowick suggests that this new relationship to time engendered by digital cinema may lead to new, exciting forms of the medium, his text betrays a nostalgia for celluloid film that undercuts any optimism he may have about digital cinema. More pessimistic than Rodowick, Sobchack also makes an ontological distinction between the “cinematic” and what she calls the

“electronic” to argue that they address their viewers differently.

Sobchack first hints at the differences between the cinematic and the electronic in a footnote in The Address of the Eye, during a section devoted to parsing out the different ontologies of the photographic and the cinematic. In this footnote, she suggests that through the functions of the “videocassette and player/recorder” like fast-forwarding and pausing, the electronic “has appropriated and transformed the cinematic,” an idea that she does not explain more fully until the book’s conclusion (Address 63, n. 14). In what seems like a strange move, Sobchack reduces the viewer’s experience with the digital/electronic to its ontology, suggesting that the medium radically alters how viewers experience the cinematic. I do think there are differences in a viewer’s experience of celluloid and digital film, but I find it odd that Sobchack, who has been pursuing a holistic approach to the cinematic experience, would reduce the electronic to its constituent parts so readily. For Sobchack, the electronic creates “a meta-world in which ethical investment and value are located neither in concrete things nor in human lived- bodies, but in representation-in-itself,” because these technologies replace the analog image with a pixelated, serial transmission (Address 301). In an even more forceful statement, Sobchack claims that “electronic space disembodies,” transforming a cinematic “world of imaginative and potential bodily habitation” into a superficial, abstract realm (Address 302). While I am deeply indebted to Sobchack’s work, I find her arguments about the electronic unconvincing and counterproductive to her larger product of re-capturing the relationship between viewer and film.

By casting the electronic/digital in such a way, Sobchack asserts that a “true” cinematic experience can only be had if a viewer interacts with celluloid film. I find this

46 troubling both practically and theoretically, especially in today’s digital climate. On the practical side, connecting the cinematic to celluloid so intimately means that almost no one, except those who seek out analog screenings, experiences the cinema in the way that

Sobchack has theorized; furthermore, this approach means that those of us who consider ourselves film scholars are often analyzing and critiquing something that is not truly cinematic.10 While I am certainly in favor of film preservation and think that the material history of the medium is significant, claiming that the cinematic relies upon celluloid veers dangerously close to elitism and removes the cinematic from the realm of the everyday moviegoer. Given that her theoretical outlook is committed to restoring the link between the spectator and the cinematic experience, Sobchack’s reluctance to see the cinematic within the digital becomes problematic, as it robs her theory of the ability to speak to and inform our everyday movie-going practices. Moreover, this intense focus on the “anatomy” of the electronic seems to contradict some of Sobchack’s earlier claims about the lived-body of the film.

Phenomenologically speaking, the lived-body is the body as it engages with the world through its intentionality and actions, wherein I first experience my body as “a dimension of my own existence,” not a physiological object (Madison 22). Thus, while dependent on the material and physical nature of the body, “whether human or cinematic, the lived-body is more than the ‘sum’ of its essential materials” (Sobchack, Address 220).

10 In contrast to Sobchack, Laura Mulvey sees the digital opening up new possibilities for the spectator and scholar, ones that allow new ways of examining the film’s perception of the world: “When celluloid cinema, viewed on video or DVD, is delayed by the pensive spectator, the presence of the past (the look and time of the camera) finds consciousness in the present (the look and time of the spectator), across the tense of the fiction (the look and time of the protagonist)…Out of a pause or delay in normal cinematic time, the body of narrative film can find new modes of spectatorship” (Death 191). 47

For Sobchack, the cinematic experience comes from the film’s lived-body expressing its perceptions toward and in the world to the audience in a manner that goes far beyond its constitutive parts (camera, screen, projector, etc.). If this is the case, then the differences between the material parts of digital and analog cinema do not radically alter the cinematic experience itself, as the film’s lived-body still expresses its perceptions to the audience in a similar manner. Even Sobchack’s description of the three main “organs” of the film’s body seems to suggest that what they are is not as important as how they function to constitute the transcendent function of the body, the sum of its parts. The digital cinema still makes use of Sobchack’s three main organs—camera, screen, and projector—and, while the changes in their material nature mark a shift in the materiality of the film’s body, the film’s lived-body still experientially and perceptually exists and intends toward the world and its audience as the cinema, not just the “electronic.” While

Sobchack is right to point to the ontological change that the digital has brought to cinema, she fails to see the new potential created by this shift in the film’s materiality. Rodowick does a little better, suggesting that while film has “disappeared,” the “cinema will persist, evolve, and undergo new transformations” (180). In recent years, scholars have taken up this evolution of cinema inaugurated by digital technologies, blazing a more optimistic trail forward.

The digital’s ambiguous relationship to time plays a major role in the new experiences offered by the digital cinema. Rodowick identifies this as the major difference between digital and analogical cinema, but he stops short of offering any positive evaluations of this shift. Viewing digital ontology in a positive light, Mark

Hansen claims that understanding our relationship to the digital helps explain how we live as beings-in-the-world. For Hansen, the loss of the representational quality of the analog image is not a negative consequence of the shift to digital, but this loss “is more than made up for by the opening up of time’s heterogeneity to (human) experience, to an embodied materialization (in the form of the viewer’s experience) that simply cannot coincide with the temporal power, the temporal alterity, it materializes” (“Technical” 95).

A digital ontology operates within the digital cinema, which still holds to cinematic conventions, to open us up to a heterogenous flow of time that shows us our status as

“technical” beings who exist alongside and use technologies in our embodied experiences. Hansen sees a recognition of our relationship to digital technologies as liberating:

By exemplifying the way that technologies function as correlates of embodied

life...digital technologies help personal consciousness intervene creatively and

substantively in the production of presencing that constitutes—and constitutes as

an essentially technical process—lived reality itself, including the lived reality of

(constituting) consciousness. (“Media” 304)

Thus, digital technologies and the ontology of the digital have shifted our embodiment in the world, but this shift allows us to better understand how we have always related to the world as technical beings, that is, as bodies that use technology to extend and intend toward into the world. Considering the film’s body, then, digital technologies would seem to play a similar role, opening up the film’s perceptions to this non-linear flow of time. Yet, importantly, understanding the lived-body as essentially technical, as Hansen

49 does, suggests that while the digital opens up new possibilities for cinematic (and human) perception, the cinema still appeals to the viewer through an intersubjective relationship between two bodies that intend toward the world in similar ways through embodied action and perception. The ontological shift from analog to digital has significant consequences, but it does not undermine the idea of the film’s body or the way it interacts with human bodies, as both lived-bodies are and have always been technical in one way or another.

Hansen’s ideas and positive outlook on digital ontology has created the impetus for a few scholars to conceive of the cinema, especially in the digital age, as nonrepresentational or anti-representational, given the fact that analog causation is no longer the dominant means of filmmaking. For Scott Richmond, a nonrepresentational theory of cinema can be found in conceiving of the cinema’s major goal as modulating our proprioception, our “self-perception,” rather than opening us onto reality (7). The cinema does this through “illusion,” but Richmond defines illusion much differently than film theory has historically defined it: “Illusion as I mean it here is neither ‘not real’ nor

‘not really there’…Rather, illusion in this sense is a divergence or distance, registered within perception as palpable sensation, between cinematic and ordinary perception”

(13). The illusion that cinema provides affects our perception and self-perception, allowing us to reflect upon our own perceptive activities at a visceral, bodily level. By drawing our attention to the divergence between our perception and cinematic perception,

Richmond reframes Sobchack’s ideas for his nonrepresentational theory of cinema; here, cinema affects our bodies profoundly because of the differences between its perceptions

50 and ours, instead of the similarities. In laying out a theory of cinematic illusion,

Richmond turns both to the digital and the experimental film, displacing traditional accounts of intentionality in order to highlight how the cinema modulates our perception through a phenomenology of appearance.

Drawing on the work of Renaud Barbaras, Richmond argues that we must pay attention to the image and appearance in perception, stopping at the crucial moment before the image becomes an object, before it becomes a representation (69). In viewing film phenomenology this way, Richmond “suspend[s] its representational or ostensive vocation,” which frees the cinema from the ontological questions that we have been considering and also broadens the spectrum of what might “count” as cinema (69).

Richmond uses Merleau-Ponty’s conception of the flesh and the chiastic relationship between our bodies and the world to point to this intertwining as the place where we can begin to find these appearances, which are, in Merleau-Pontian terms, “invisible.” In this schema, “the worldliness of the cinema really does not lie at the end point of an ostensive function. The cinema does not give us a world because it represents a world but because it makes the invisible appear” (Richmond 93). Instead of intending toward an object in the world and expressing that perception to us, the cinema modulates our own perception at the level of appearance, but it still does this through its embodied relationship to us.

Richmond does not assert that the cinema does not have a representational quality, rather he attempts to explain the “encounter between a body in the world and an appearance in the world, onscreen” before representation happens (95). Understanding how the cinema appeals to and affects us and our proprioception is Richmond’s goal, and in proposing

51 this new theory of film phenomenology, he suggests that we can find our perceptual faith in the “illusions” that cinema embodies. As Richmond reminds us, however, these

“illusions” are not false, nor are they, I would posit, immaterial.

If you will permit me a bit of creative historical interpretation, I would like to take a critical look at the cinema’s ontological ties to analog photography and claim that those ties were never as solid as film theory has assumed. I am not denying that the foundation of the cinema lies in photographic processes, a fact that most early film theorists had to reckon with as they constructed their theories, but at some point, well before the recent shift to digital, this relationship began to come into question. Speaking to the immediate experience of a film, Rudolf Arnheim, writing in the 1930s, draws a clear distinction between the how the cinema represents reality and how we see it in everyday life: “Even at the most elementary level there are significant divergences between the image that the camera makes of reality and that which the human eye sees.” (127). For Arnheim, the cinema does not record reality as it is, but can give us “the world from the standpoint of an individual…that is, to make a very subjective experience accessible to the eyes of all”

(112). This subjective experience comes from the perceptions of the film’s body, and that subjectivity clearly moves cinema past the representational ontology of photography, regardless of the material origins of the film. Bazin, despite his long association with cinematic realism and photographic ontology, also speaks to the idea that the cinema moves past the photograph towards something new and difficult to define.

Throughout his famous essay on photographic ontology, Bazin does equate cinema and photography, a comparison which has grounded discussions of Bazinian

52 realism in film studies for decades, but he also places the cinema in its own category. In a telling moment, Bazin ends the essay with this cryptic line: “On the other hand, of course, cinema is also a language” (16). The photograph, importantly, does not seem to be a language, and with this line Bazin incorporates an ontology of language into his discussion of the cinema. Deviating from the typical interpretation of Bazin, I take this line as a jumping off point to assert a different kind of approach to cinematic language than, for example, that of Christian Metz and his efforts to construct a theory of film semiotics, as my approach associates the metaphorical capabilities of language with the cinema. Here, I refer to Lakoff and Johnson as they call for an “experientialist” understanding of language, one which combines objective and subjective approaches to argue that metaphor and its “imaginative rationality” structures our language (Metaphors

193). If the cinema’s nature is not purely the “objective” one of photography or the

“subjective” one of a mental state, but one of language, then, in fact, the cinema demonstrates that “we understand the world through our interactions with it,” interactions that are grounded in metaphor and lived out through our bodies (Lakoff and

Johnson, Metaphors 194). The cinema places before us these embodied interactions, offering us a chance to imagine new ways of being in the world.

The cinema, even without celluloid film, has not ceased to be material. Film phenomenology has shown us the film’s body as it exists as a material, lived-body, and scholars like Hansen and Richmond have suggested that, even with the rise of digital film technologies, the film’s body has persisted, although it may appear differently than before and our interactions with it may be of a different sort. As we’ve already considered, the

53 film’s materiality also foregrounds its ability to transcend that materiality through its materiality, or as Sobchack and others have suggested, a transcendence of immanence in immanence. The cinema exists within the flesh of the world but it also apart from it, both and neither at the same time. Discussing the role of breath in the cinema, Davina

Quinlivan puts forth a helpful term that encapsulates the cinema’s relation to materiality, particularly in the digital age: “(im)material” (3). For Quinlivan, breathing “troubles [an] opposition” between visible and invisible—she also creates the term (in)visible—and highlights “ambivalent dimensions of physicality and materiality” (3). These terms and the way that Quinlivan uses them throughout The Place of Breath in Cinema do an excellent job of demonstrating the liminality of breathing, how it seems to exist in two realms at once. I would like to take this a step further and assert that the cinema, not just breathing within it, is (in)visible and (im)material. The cinema constantly blurs the boundaries between the visible and invisible, the material and the immaterial, and in this liminality, we find the film’s and our religious experience.11 For film to have a religious experience, its materiality and status as a lived-body becomes essential. Rather than just projected illusions that are experienced through the mind, the cinema delivers its own embodied perceptions that often diverge from our own and affect our self-perception

(hence Richmond’s “illusions”). Recent work in religious studies has extracted questions of religious experience from the psychological and immaterial realms and begun to think about religious experience in terms of a material culture, world, and body. New thought

11 By the invisible here, I mean Merleau-Ponty’s conception of the invisible, that is, “the invisible of this world, that which inhabits this world, sustains it, and renders it visible, its own and interior possibility, the Being of this being” (Visible 151).

54 about and conceptions of how religious experiences happen and where they originate continue to make the very notion of “religious experience” difficult to define.

Religious Experience

“Religion, for better or worse, is vastly more like a film than an intellectual proposition.” — S. Brent Plate

As complicated as defining religious experience can be, two main ways of interpreting and understanding it have emerged in the academy over the past century: perennialism and contextualism. For perennialism, or what is commonly referred to as

“the perennial philosophy,” all religious experience springs from a singular source that animates each religion’s quest for knowledge and enlightenment. The religious experience, therefore, has an ontological ground in this “source,” making it a real experience of Transcendence. In contrast to this, contextualism asserts that language, culture, and society form and mediate religious experience, and that religious experience is constructed by the particular context of the person having the experience. As a result of these layers of mediation and construction, we cannot know if the religious experience has an ontological reality outside of our construction of it, and, even if it does, that is not what we should study. Over the next several pages, I will briefly trace the major ideas and conflicts of these two major positions on religious experience and their relation to my larger project in an attempt to bring them together. While there are foundational differences between these approaches that cannot be overcome, I will posit a via media 55 that integrates the significant contributions of each approach into a phenomenological, materialist framework that grounds religious experience in the body without losing the mystery and particularity of the individual’s experience.

Most academic discussions of religious experience begin with William James and

The Varieties of Religious Experience, an edited collection of lectures he gave about religious experience at the University of Edinburgh in 1901 and 1902. In these lectures,

James develops a theory of religious experience based on his interpretation of personal, rather than institutional, accounts of religious experience. Many of James’ insights into religious experience have endured in academic and popular conceptions of religious experience, especially experiences considered “mystical.” James claims that a “mystical” experience can be identified by two key elements: “ineffability” where “the subject of

[the experience] immediately says it defies expression” and a “noetic quality” in which the experience becomes a “state of knowledge” (329). To these elements, James adds two others that may or may not be present: “transiency” as “mystical states cannot be sustained for long” and “passivity” where the “mystic feels as if his own will were in abeyance” (329-30). While it will be important for us to eventually distinguish between general religious experience and mystical experience, for the moment, let’s consider how

James’ definition of mystical experience sets the stage for further interpretations and definitions of religious/mystical experience. James defines the mystical experience as intensely subjective, defined by the fact that it is undefinable, yet the knowledge gained from the mystical state becomes “authoritative” for the person who has had the experience, as “mystical experiences are as direct perceptions of fact for those who have

56 them as any sensations ever were for us” (366-67). In this manner, the religious experience becomes something difficult to analyze, given its subjective nature, but James sees that subjectivity as a vital part of the experience itself and pushes back against those who would use that subjectivity as criteria to reject religious experience. James’ thoughts are useful for undercutting rationalist arguments against religious experience, but he does not think about the body’s role in mediating these experiences and presumes, as do many after him, a kind of universal mystical experience that applies across religions and cultures.

Following in James’ wake, Rudolf Otto, a German theologian, attempts to explain the elements of religious/mystical experience in his well-known book The Idea of the

Holy. Of “this unnamed Something,” the Holy, Otto suggests that “there is no religion in which it does not live as the real innermost core, and without it no religion would be worthy of the name” (6). Rather than use “Holy,” given its other connotations, Otto provides a new term for this phenomenon that seems to go beyond normal experience:

“numinous” (7). He derives this term from Latin and claims that the numinous “mental state is perfectly sui generis and irreducible to any other,” thus setting the numinous apart from everyday life and everyday experience in the world (7). Otto lists some elements that make up numinous experience, but only after pointing out that the numinous can only be defined, shakily at that, through the experience itself: “The nature of the numinous can only be suggested by means of the special way in which it is reflected in the mind by way of feeling” (12). The religious experience, according to Otto, can be identified by the fact that it causes mysterium tremendum, or a trembling in the face of

57 the Wholly Other, marked by a sense of majesty, mystery, and fascination. For Otto, this experience finds its force primarily through emotional means and in the mind of the one who has the numinous experience. As a result, while Otto ends up being more essentialist than James, ascribing the same cause to all religious experiences, they both elide the role of the body in religious experience, preferring to think of it as a mental experience. While contextualist thought pushes back against the universality of James and Otto, it also tends to leave the body on the sideline of this debate.

For contextualists, even if a Wholly Other would be present in a mystical/religious experience, we can never rid ourselves of the mediation of language, culture, and society to experience that Other. Steven Katz espouses this position succinctly and forcefully in his essay, “Language, Epistemology, and Mysticism”: “There are NO pure (i.e. unmediated) experiences. Neither mystical experience nor more ordinary forms of experience give any indication, or any grounds for believing, that they are unmediated” (26). Katz goes on to argue that mediation shapes the mystical experience and that it “does not only take place in the post-experiential process of reporting and interpreting the experience itself: it is at work before, during, and after the experience” (27). Thus, while Katz makes no claims as to the veracity of any particular mystical experience, he does argue that these experiences are not transferable or common across cultures and time periods. As a result, the scholar should pay attention to the differences between these varying accounts, rather than the similarities, because often these similarities have been used to reduce the mystical experience into a common category that relies on “a priori assumptions about the nature of ultimate reality” (Katz

66). Katz’s caution and carefulness in attending to the varying accounts of mystical experience is to be commended, and the contextualist position has a lot to offer when considering how to think about and interpret religious and mystical experience.

By not ascribing a universal ground to the religious experience, the contextualist position would seem to undermine the subject’s role and subjective experience, but, in many ways, the contextualist approach considers an individual’s experience more than the perennialist approach, due to its focus on the specific context that gave rise to the experience. This shifts the locus of analysis from the experience itself to the complex set of beliefs, assumptions, and cultural contexts that formed the experience. As Wayne

Proudfoot explains, “Beliefs about the causes of one’s experience are themselves constitutive of the experience” and, as a result, “they define in advance what experiences are possible” (114, 121). As such, it becomes crucial to pay careful attention to what beliefs and attitudes the subject possesses before the religious experience, as those will construct what experiences are available to that individual and, importantly, how they describe and interpret their experience after it happens (e.g. a Christian might talk about experiencing the Holy Spirit, while a Buddhist would discuss nirvana). For Proudfoot and other contextualists, religious experience must be analyzed from a remove, suspending ontological questions about the “independent existence of the object” in the experience in favor of seeing the experience from “the subject’s point of view” (229-30). However, as

Proudfoot points out, this approach does not “exclude issues of explanation,” that is, the researcher does not need to explain the religious experience in theological or phenomenological ways, but can turn to other language and ideas to interpret and make

59 sense of the subject’s experience (230). The contextualist approach certainly lends itself well to ethnographic or social scientific research, where the scholar can set aside assumptions and ontological debates about the nature of reality and religious experience to focus on the subjects and how they interpret and construct their experiences. In this sense, the subject’s experience and point of view is the most important element of the religious experience, not what may have caused the experience, because, in fact, the subject herself has constituted the experience through her beliefs. Contextualist scholarship has done much to restore the significance of individual experience and highlight the differences between various mystical experiences, and its criticisms of perennialism are important, particularly its critique of the notion of unmediated experiences and a universal experience common to all mystics.12

While contextualism in its various forms remains the primary way that religious studies scholars consider religious experience, its reliance on the mental construction of the religious experience opens it up to criticism on those grounds. One of the most vocal critics of the constructivist approach, Robert Forman, believes that it stands on questionable philosophical foundations. The problem with contextualists, Forman argues, lies in the fact that they “have applied a model to the trophotropic states of mysticism that was developed to explain our ordinary, everyday experiences of speaking, perceiving,

12 Some of the problems with the perennialist approach as it relates to cinema can be seen in Paul Schrader’s Transcendental Style in Film, where he compares Ozu, Dreyer, and Bresson to argue for a certain style of film that brings viewers into contact with the Transcendent. In doing so, he elides the cultural, historical, and stylistic differences between these films, suggesting that “in a successful transcendental work of art the human forms of expression are transcended by a universal form of expression” (86). Schrader relies heavily on an auteuristic reading and, due to this, ends up creating an elitist theory in which only certain films, usually made by art-film directors, can express the Transcendent. 60 thinking, etc. Not mysticism” (34). Furthermore, Forman points out how contextualists assume “the truth and applicability” of their model of perceptual mediation “from the outset,” but have never “shown why it is appropriate to apply the constructivist model to another experiential mode” (34). Forman’s main critique comes from his view of mystical experience as a different type of experience than “ordinary experience,” a claim that he supports with biographical and autobiographical accounts of mystical experience, primarily a type that he calls a “Pure Consciousness Event (PCE)” (11). In a PCE, “there is no mental or sensory intentional object,” therefore, the model of intentional perception favored by contextualists cannot account for an experience without an intentional object, as those who undergo a PCE “are encountering consciousness itself” (95, 127). Similarly, in a dualistic mystical state (DMS), Forman argues that the mystic is in a state of being

“directly aware of consciousness itself,” as he/she/they “become cognizant of both the intentional world and the nonintentional consciousness simultaneously” (171, 167). By proposing these types of experiences and the philosophical framework with which to understand them, Forman provides a useful corrective to the overdetermined linguistic and cultural nature that contextualists ascribe to religious experience, but his framework has its own philosophical flaws that prevent it from explaining religious experience satisfactorily.13 Forman rightly critiques contextualists for not proving their own assumptions, yet, when we look at it on a deeper level, Forman founds his position on an

13 Forman’s critique of contextualist obsession with language comes up in the work of Manuel Vasquez as well, in a less trenchant and more helpful way: “Without denying the indisputable power of signs to disclose the world to us, a fuller yet humbler materialism must be open to (if never entirely certain of) a materiality not reducible to the discursive” (147). 61 assumption of human nature and our relation to the world that is just as problematic, if unchallenged, as the views he criticizes.

For Forman to assert that the mystic can experience “consciousness itself,” he must rely on a dualist conception of human nature, in which the mind and body are distinct from each other. This idea allows the human mind to transcend its body and have an experience of realizing itself as pure consciousness, removed from the shackles of the body and everyday experience. Forman claims that the contextualist position has no category for mystical experience, as it is a different type of experience of consciousness in which intentionality does not play its normal role. This would be true if we stop with

Bretano and Husserl, as Forman does, but Merleau-Ponty’s intentionality suggests another level of mediation that Forman bypasses—the body. Merleau-Ponty describes consciousness as such: “Consciousness is being toward the thing through the intermediary of the body” (Phenomenology 140). In this framework, one cannot separate consciousness from the body; in other words, there is no such thing as “pure” consciousness, and for Merleau-Ponty, experience is first and foremost mediated by the body, not language and culture.14 In every embodied action, we intend toward something, turning a PCE into a dualist fantasy in which the body ceases to hold sway over the mind.

Moreover, for Merleau-Ponty, our ability to be aware of our own consciousness is intimately tied to our relationship to the consciousness of others through “an internal relation [between phenomenal bodies] that makes the other person appear as the

14 Merleau-Ponty’s body, however, is not a transhistorical, universal body, but the lived-body, “a psychological and historical structure” (Phenomenology 482). Importantly, for Merleau-Ponty, this does not preclude the possibility of freedom or choice, rather the “particular signification of nature and history that I am” actually provides the “means of communication with [the world]” (Phenomenology 482). 62 completion of the system” (Phenomenology 368). Gary Brent Madison explains that this

“relation with the other is thus mediated by the world,” suggesting that “the self and the other are relational and that they exist only on the ground of a more vast generality,” a generality that Merleau-Ponty will eventually come to classify as the flesh (40, 41). In

Merleau-Ponty’s later thought on Being and the flesh of the world, we find an even more radical interconnectedness: “The flesh is the ‘irrelative’ which grounds and internally upholds the two ‘relativities’ of the subject and the world; it is the texture and source of their co-presence” (Madison 210). Forman’s brand of dualism eschews these embodied, relational connections, asserting that the mind can be ushered into a place where it is alone, faced only with itself in Cartesian solipsism. As I see it, it is not minds having religious experiences, but bodies; as result, I consider Forman’s dualism a rather weak retort to the contextualist position and an even weaker explanation for religious experience itself. I find Forman’s position (and, for similar reasons, many contextualists’ positions) untenable because of our presuppositional differences: I assume the primacy and irreducibility of the lived-body as the ground of intentional activity in the world, and our embodied relation with others and the world as the foundation of subjectivity.

Recently, the religious studies field has experienced what many are calling the

“material” turn, that is, a shift to focus on the materiality of religion: embodied practices, religious objects, and religious place and space. Within this turn, Manuel Vasquez has advocated for a non-reductive materialist approach to studying religion, where the scholar focuses on the material and embodied aspects of religious practice and practitioners without reducing these practices and practitioners to only their materiality. Vasquez

63 pursues this theory, on the phenomenological level, through Merleau-Ponty’s conception of the flesh and the chiasm between our bodies and the world: “Even though there is a gap (écart) between our body and the world, the fact that they are both flesh allows for a coiling over (enroulement) that makes the body and the world interdependent in the act of perception” (80). In this interdependence, Vasquez see the opportunity for a “non- reductive materialism or non-dualistic divergence” which pushes back against extreme social constructivism and universal Transcendence (80). Vasquez explains a “materialist phenomenology” of religion in this manner:

A materialist phenomenology would explore how religious meanings are created

and experienced by specific embodied individuals endowed with sensorimotor

and cognitive capacities and limits, as they encounter the world praxically, as they

shape and are shaped by the natural and social environments, and as they enter

into power relations with other individuals with whom they share spaces of

livelihood. (84)

Importantly, Vasquez notes that this Merleau-Pontian approach to religious phenomenology is not the same thing as the “phenomenology” of Otto or Mircea Eliade, which “appropriates phenomenology as onto-theology,” and is actually a “quest for homo religiosus’s deep mental structures, which are manifested most clearly in myths and symbols…which point to the irreducible reality of the sacred” (104). In pursuit of this materialist phenomenology, Vazquez purposely remains agnostic on the ontological issues of religious experience and reality, suggesting that the scholar should focus on

64 what can be gleaned from the material practices of religion and leave the questions of ontology aside.

Rather than provide a concrete position on the matter of religious experience, which, to be fair, is outside the scope of his book, Vasquez suggests that the scholar can look for transcendence in immanence, rather than appealing to some force, supernatural or otherwise, as the source of that transcendence. He helpfully defines this transcendence in immanence: “[It] is an essential feature of an immanent frame that is attentive to the complexities, contradictions, paradoxes, relations of reciprocal determination, multi- causal dynamics, and, more generally, the indeterminacies in the ways in which various materialities interact to constitute us in the world” (324). Vasquez does not close the door on the possibility of such a supernatural force existing, but instead argues that it “is not a question that religious studies can answer or should spend time contemplating,” as it leads to “getting entangled in…intractable metaphysical questions,” taking away from the study of actual people in actual time and space (324). The non-reductive materialism that

Vasquez proposes navigates the middle road between the extreme positions on either side, and, in doing so, provides the start of a helpful framework to ground my approach to questions of religious experience and materiality. From a social scientific point of view, I think bracketing aside questions of whether or not religious experiences are “real” makes sense and lets scholars do their work unimpeded by philosophical rabbit-trails. My project, however, is not strictly a “religious studies” project, and in claiming the film’s body has religious experiences, I must go deeper into the immanent frame to provide some sort of ontological basis for these experiences that does not assume the possibility

65 of unmediated perception or discount recent insights into religious experience. The body, human or filmic, opens up onto religious experience through the soul and the relationships it creates between bodies and Being.

The Material Soul

“It seems to me that this astonishing nexus of the self, so uniquely elegant and capable, merits a name that would indicate a difference in kind from the ontological run of things, and for my purposes ‘soul’ would do nicely.” — Marilynne Robinson

It should be clear by my focus on the body and its primacy in our perception that I do not believe in the “soul” as construed by Cartesian dualism and those who espouse dualistic philosophies and theologies. Given the intellectual history of “soul,” I must make a case for using the very word, as it comes with some baggage that may make it seem antithetical to my larger project. Even for some of those operating within an explicitly theological framework, the idea of the soul has become unnecessary, at least a conception of it that would divide the human into body and soul (Murphy, Bodies 1-37).

A quick perusal of the OED confirms the dualistic connotations of “soul,” as the majority of definitions refer to the soul as distinct from the body or immaterial, something which can be attributed to the lasting legacy of Platonic and Augustinian thought in Western conceptions of human nature (“soul, n.”; Murphy, Bodies 11-16). As a result, instead of simply rescuing “soul” from these connotations, I am speaking of redefining it in light of recent philosophical and theological developments. I prefer a redefinition, rather than a rejection, of “soul” due in large part to the lack of a suitable alternative word for the part

66 of the lived-body that captures the myriad dimensions of religious and spiritual experience. “Spirit” is more ephemeral than “soul,” while “consciousness” does not carry the same religious weight as “soul,” and, as we’ve seen, it can also be used to suggest the unimportance of the body. Furthermore, Merleau-Ponty often invokes the “soul,” an unusual move for such a staunch critic of Cartesian dualism, suggesting that there might be a place for the soul within Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology and ontology and within the body.

Merleau-Ponty’s thoughts on issues of the body and soul shifted throughout his life. Discussing Merleau-Ponty’s early work, Madison describes his ideas on the

“integration” of soul and body: “The integration of body and soul is in no way a fusion, and the bodily orders are not simply absorbed by the higher-level order…between body and soul there is, as it were, a tensional polarity” (12). In other words, both body and soul exist, but they are not divided as dualism would have, rather they are part of the same system, entangled with each other. Proclaiming the foundational role of the lived-body in our experience, Merleau-Ponty pushes back against Cartesian dualism throughout

Phenomenology of Perception, arguing that it is impossible to push through the mediation of the body to anything Transcendent: “But if our union with the body is substantial, how could we experience a pure soul in ourselves and, from there, accede to an absolute

Spirit?” (205) As Phenomenology continues, Merleau-Ponty does not seem to come to any larger conclusion regarding the body and the soul, and, if anything, he appears to be content to leave the question unresolved: “The problem of the relations between the soul and the body has nothing to do with the objective body, which has merely a conceptual

67 existence, but rather has to do with the phenomenal body” (Phenomenology 456). The

“phenomenal body” here is “the body such as we experience it,” not simply the assemblage of parts that construct the “objective body,” and it is in the experiential, lived-body that the problem of the relations between body and soul becomes important

(Phenomenology 456). Other than refuting the Cartesian position, early Merleau-Ponty does not present a strong position on the body and soul, focused instead on marking his territory within phenomenology and exploring embodied perception. His later work shifts from phenomenology towards ontology, and there we find more concrete ideas about the body and the soul, what they are, and how they interact.

The idea of the “flesh” in Merleau-Ponty’s later work comes to dominate his phenomenology and ontology and lays the groundwork for a reconsideration of the relationship between the body and the soul. In the concept of the flesh, Merleau-Ponty gives “ontological priority” to “Being,” the “common flesh, the single fabric of which

[subject and object] are differentiations,” rather than to either the subject or the object

(Madison 207). Merleau-Ponty’s schema situates Being “as the absolute source of the subject as well as the object,” and the flesh as chiastic relationship between subject and object that takes place within Being (Madison 208). Importantly, this Being is not above or beyond the world and the body, but “between man and being there is a relation which is Being itself” (Madison 209). The larger reversibility and intertwining between man and world that we find in the concept of flesh is mirrored on the level of the body as well of which the mind is its “other side”:

The body, inasmuch as it has this other side, is not describable in objective

terms...this other side is really the other side of the body, overflows into it

(Ueberschreiten), encroaches upon it, is hidden in it—and at the same time needs

it, terminates in it, is anchored in it. (Merleau-Ponty, Visible 259)

Thus, Merleau-Ponty describes the mind/body connection with this interconnectedness at the forefront: “There is a body of the mind, and a mind of the body, and a chiasm between them” (Visible 259). They are separate, but one, different, but the same, mutually informing one another through the flesh of Being. We see this same relationship at work in his ideas on the relation of the body and the soul.

Merleau-Ponty’s thought in The Visible and the Invisible relies on these concepts of reversibility and interconnectedness, radically intertwining the body with the world around it through the flesh that forms connections between them. The concept of

“invisible” as being the other side of the “visible,” yet not something immaterial or disconnected from Being, relates to the soul as well: “The soul is the hollow of the body, the body is the distention of the soul” (Visible 233). In other words, to re-employ

Merleau-Ponty’s take on the body and mind, “there is a body of the soul, and a soul of the body, and a chiasm between them,” and existing within this chiasm is a mutual reciprocity that rids us of the need to divorce the soul (or the mind) from the body. Thus,

Merleau-Ponty seems to have resolved the problem of the soul/body connection in this idea of the flesh: “The unicity of the visible world, and, by encroachment, the invisible world, such as it present itself in the rediscovery of the vertical Being, is the solution of the problem of the ‘relations between the soul and the body’” (Visible 233). Merleau-

Ponty solves this problem by asserting a lack of separation between soul and body, a concept that renders a certain idea of the soul irrelevant. Renaud Barbaras goes a step further, calling the soul “the body’s excess,” and arguing that the “duality” between them

“disappears before the dynamic unity of life” (Desire 127). Merleau-Ponty and Barbaras’ conceptions of the soul abolish the Cartesian soul, the one that inhabits the body like a ghost in a machine, and re-define it as an aspect of the body, the invisible to the body’s visible, or perhaps the (in)visible, something that manifests itself in the fleshly in- between of subject and object. Here, we find the basis for discussing the soul as something that resides on the “other side” of the body, but still remains a part of the body.

Merleau-Ponty and Barbaras have given me the opportunity to define the soul in relation to and intertwined with the body. The soul and the body are not opposites, but rather the soul emerges from the body in the production of embodied religious experience. Lenn Goodman and Gregory Caramenico describe the soul as being “made, not born,” our souls coming into being as we live and experience the world relationally through our contingent, embodied experiences (9). Adopting the language of spectatorship, the soul emerges when we decide to look at, to perceive, the world in a certain way, as Brent Plate argues: “[S]oul is produced when humans consciously engage the things and bodies of the world... [it] comes forth, is birthed, awakens when head and heart meet the world” (History 218-19). This production of soul (and religion), for Plate, is accomplished through the “relationship” between our bodies and the things of the world, where “soul [comes] alive in and through the material realities of life” (History

222, 221). George Lakoff and Mark Johnson describe this “fundamentally embodied” soul as “shaped in important ways by the body, located forever as part of the body, and dependent for its ongoing existence on the body” (Philosophy 563). An embedded, embodied soul does not flee from the world, but remains intimately connected to it. This soul arises from the body and its excess, and incarnates religious experience, experience facilitated by the soul through our connection to others and the world. Interestingly, the

nefesh) in English translations of the נֶֶ֫פֶׁש,) ”Hebrew word typically translated as “soul

Old Testament often refers to “breath” or “breathing,” a decidedly physical notion of something considered immaterial by a number of other philosophies and world religions

(Christianity, especially in its neo-Platonic leanings, included). In this Hebraic notion, we discover a soul dependent on the body, alive in its inhalation and exhalation, breathed into existence by the breath of God as described in the creation of the first man in

Genesis: “The Lord God formed the man from the dust of the ground and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life” (Gen. 2:7, ESV). In and out, we breathe, each breath weaving together our embodied souls with the world, as we change, grow, and live.

Immanence and Transcendence

“God dont lie. No, said the judge. He does not. And these are his words. He held up a chunk of rock. He speaks in stones and trees, the bones of things.” — Cormac McCarthy

Religious experience comes through the body, as the body forms the irreducible ground of experience and makes experience possible and intelligible. Taking the body as the foundation of experience, I adopt the contextualist position: there are no unmediated experiences. However, instead of being primarily mediated through language (as Katz claims), our experiences, first and foremost, are mediated by the body. Bodies are, of course, different and shaped by various linguistic, cultural, and historical forces, but all of that shaping proceeds from the body as the ground of experience. We are our bodies, thus any Transcendence would necessarily be transcendence in immanence, mediated by our bodies, and, even if there was Transcendence and we did experience it, we would be unable to recognize it as such—or so the argument goes. In an eloquent essay, Sobchack expands on this idea, claiming that “those existentially extreme and passionate moments in which we experience the question of the ‘limit between the body and the world’” do not require “metaphysics to explain,” but that these moments are “transcendent ‘in the flesh’,” that is, in the chiasm between body and world, being and Being (“Passion” 295).

To be clear, I agree with this argument up to a point, and I find the idea of transcendence being found in and among the world and others deeply compelling, but I do not think that the mediation of our bodies precludes the possibility of Transcendence. Removing

72 metaphysics and Transcendence from an immanent framework may make for an easier, perhaps more “logically” consistent argument, but not one that I find satisfying in regards to larger ontological questions. If one begins with a premise that closes off the possibility of Transcendence, God, and/or the supernatural, then it becomes easy to form a coherent argument that discounts metaphysical issues, as the argument never considered them in the first place. If, however, one starts from the premise that Transcendence, God, and/or the supernatural might exist, even if their definitions may need to be modified, an immanent, phenomenological framework can be theorized that allows for the

Transcendent to be a valid ontological category.15 Holding immanence and

Transcendence in tension challenges current reductive conceptions of religious experience and also pushes back against damaging strains of dualism, religious or otherwise, which devalue the body and world.

Merleau-Ponty’s ontology and his concept of flesh, the intertwining of being and

Being, forms the foundation of my immanent/Transcendent framework. Scholars like

Sobchack and Vasquez use “flesh” as a way of conceptualizing how transcendence is possible within an immanent frame, but I do not think that we need to stop short of considering Transcendence. At the core of the ontology of the “flesh” lies a relationship between Being and being, in which Being serves as “the diffuse and primordial generality” out of which the subject springs forth as a differentiation of that Being

(Madison 242). While Merleau-Ponty’s Being remains deeply connected to the material

15 It’s worthwhile noting that I do not think we can ever prove (whatever that means) that the Transcendent/God does or does not exist, but leaving the possibility of that existence opens allows for a broader, more expansive worldview that leaves us open to the mystery of the world in ways that are restricted by closing off that potential. 73 world and our bodies, Madison claims that Merleau-Ponty finally “arrive[s] at the notion of Being as teleology or transcendence” (249). This transcendence continues to reside within the immanent framework of the body and the world, which allows the human subject to encounter Being through the reversible, reciprocal flesh that brings Being and being together. In this schema, the human, then, “is, at the bottom of [its] being, an opening onto Being and a cipher of transcendence” (Madison 253). Madison continues, suggesting that, for Merleau-Ponty, if what we do “has a meaning,” it does not originate from “absolute freedom,” as Sartre would have it, “but rather because [we are] in the field of Being, a field whence come and wherein are inscribed all of [our] initiatives”

(253). Thus, Being lurks at the bottom of and surrounds bodily existence, and the lived- body interacts with this Being both in moments of intense reflection, but also in everyday interactions with other lived-bodies and with the world. Although Merleau-Ponty never capitalizes “transcendence,” I would argue that this capitalized “Being” can be thought of as “Transcendence,” and conceiving of it in this manner allows for Transcendence, not just transcendence, to be found in immanence.

Supported and surrounded by Being, Merleau-Ponty’s lived-body exists in a reciprocal relationship to the material world and cannot escape from its own immanence, which would seem to make any move toward Transcendence impossible, especially if one considers Transcendence and immanence to be binary options. Going back to its

Latin roots, “trans” and “scandĕre,” “transcend” means to climb over or beyond, and this meaning has evolved to usually suggest going beyond or rising above the physical world

(“transcend, v.”). If we take this connotation to heart, then Transcendence—big or little

“t”—stands irrevocably opposed to immanence. But to transcend, in the sense of going beyond or climbing over, does not have to consign the physical world to second-hand status and, in fact, the image of a mountain serves as a potent metaphor for reclaiming

Transcendence from this otherworldly domain. To climb over a mountain, one begins at the bottom of said mountain, climbs to the top, and then climbs back down the other side or where they started. Thus, to transcend in a literal sense, one starts at the base of the mountain, ascends to the top, but then returns to the base. In terms of Transcendence, if we think of the mountain top as Transcendence and the base of the mountain as immanence, we see that the only way to “transcend,” that is, to climb over the mountain, requires a return to immanence. If one stays on the top of the mountain, he/she/they have not truly transcended, but only climbed the mountain. Rather than seeing Transcendence as opposed to immanence, we see Transcendence supported by immanence, as the mountain top could not exist without its material foundation. Furthermore, and to perhaps stretch this metaphor to its breaking point, the mountain top itself is not immaterial, although it does provide a unique vantage point from which to see the world. Rather than a “transcendence of immanence in immanence,” as Sobchack puts it, I am positing an immanence of Transcendence in immanence (Address 295). Transcendence is not outside or above the material, but encased within it, and to find it, we need not escape the confines of the physical, but, to borrow a phrase from C.S. Lewis, rather move “further up” and “further in” to the world (Last 207). Wrapped in immanence, Transcendence equates to Merleau-Ponty’s Being, that broad generality from which individual, material lived-bodies spring forth.

If Transcendence is not opposed to immanence, why even use the term

“Transcendence”? Indeed, Orsi makes a good argument for abandoning the term, claiming that “[t]he idea of religion’s transcendence is a modern one” that was created to

“protect” religion “from the compromises and equivocations of social life and political power” and “keep the social sphere free of it” (68-69). In keeping with Orsi’s larger endeavor, however, I advocate for an understanding of the presence and power of the

Transcendent that comes from its entanglement with the world. If the Transcendent comes from within and through the immanent, then we can keep a non-reductive materialist framework and explore religious experience without having to abandon the possibility that something other than language and culture gives rise to these experiences, because, in fact, the Transcendent does not stand at a remove from the material. In this manner, we have arrived at a kind of universal, irreducible source of religious experience, but it is not the “sacred” floating above the material, but Being itself, embedded within and giving rise to the material world. As David Bentley Hart has pointed out, the majority of theistic traditions have long conceived of God not as an advanced being, but as the source of Being from which all other being derives (107-13). The further down we explore our contingent being, the closer we get to the source of that Being. An awareness of that source, whether we want to attribute the name “God” to it or not, gives rise to religious experience, putting us in touch with the Transcendent, the “something” that animates our being out of Being. The notion of Transcendence being at the bottom of our embodied experience and also inseparable from that experience finds surprising purchase

76 in a number of theological ideas that hold up immanence and Transcendence as two sides of the same material coin.

In the concept of the Sacraments, we find a potent example of Transcendence and immanence being contained within a material object, most commonly observed in the bread and wine of the Eucharistic ritual. In the Eucharist, a number of liturgical traditions believe that the bread and wine transform into the body and blood of Christ, even if there is some debate as to how that transformation is accomplished. Despite those differences in belief, these traditions maintain that the bread and wine have somehow changed, while retaining their material form. The Eucharist marks a moment where the supposed

“divide” between the Transcendent and the immanent collapses and they come together in a loaf of bread and a cup of wine, as a sacrament. Likewise, almost all these traditions—Catholicism, Eastern Orthodoxy, Anglicanism, etc.—hold that some sort of mysterious process sparks this transformation. From this specific example of the

Eucharist, I would like to extrapolate a more general sense of sacramentality, which Paul

Tillich describes as such: “No piece of reality is excluded from the possibility of becoming a bearer of the holy…Such a piece of reality has, as the traditional word says,

‘sacramental’ character” (58). For Tillich and these traditional understandings of the

Eucharist, reality becomes sacramental, its holiness activated through a ritual and/or faith

(58). Within the framework I have established, however, reality is always already sacramental—the “holiness” is not imparted from outside, but already present within the material world. Merleau-Ponty describes the Catholic practice of the Sacraments in a similar manner: “Sacramental words and gestures are not simply the embodiment of some

77 thought. Like tangible things, they are themselves the carriers of their meaning, which is inseparable from its material form” (Sense 175). Importantly, in the Eucharist, the bread and wine are not visibly changed, and in keeping their material form, they allow the

Transcendent to exist alongside the immanent. With this in mind, we might more properly speak of the Eucharist as an unveiling of the Transcendent within the immanent, rather than a transformation of the immanent into the Transcendent. In this manner, the

Eucharist serves as an example of the larger sacramental ground of the material world, in which the Transcendent and immanent reside together in tension.

The Transcendent and immanent also co-exist within another Christian concept: the Incarnation. In the Incarnation, God becomes human in the person of Jesus Christ, taking on a material lived-body, yet still, at the same time, being divine. Not interested in

God as an abstract, impersonal force, Merleau-Ponty nonetheless “was always intrigued by the notion of a God ‘underneath’ us, a God incarnated in the flesh of the world”

(Madison 235). Since the Council of Chalcedon in 451, Christian orthodoxy has maintained that Christ was fully God and fully man, a concept that has come to be known as the “hypostatic union.” In the hypostatic union, neither of Christ’s natures—divine or human—takes precedence, rather they both completely exist in one material lived-body.

In Christ, as orthodoxy would have it, Transcendence fully exists alongside immanence, yet is encased in immanence; significantly, as fully God, Christ must be eternal, meaning that “a human element became integral to the ongoing life of the Triune God” (Packer).

Merleau-Ponty describes that human element of God in this way in Signs: “Christ attests that God would not be fully God without becoming fully man” (71). For God to be God,

Merleau-Ponty asserts that God’s Transcendence must also be immanent. Thus, we find in Christianity not just the idea of a sacramental world, where the Transcendent and immanent are irreducibly interrelated, but also the notion of a God that eternally intertwines itself with the material world through the Incarnation.16 I have leaned heavily on Christian concepts here because, frankly, that is the tradition that I know the best; however, I hope that, like with sacramentality, this example of the Incarnation can give rise to a more general sense of incarnation that underlies the ontological framework I have laid out.17 Following Merleau-Ponty, this ontology proposes a radical incarnation as its foundation, where the deeper one goes into the world, the closer one moves toward

Transcendence.18 It is an ontology where Transcendence and immanence dance together at the core of everything, grounded in the mutual reciprocity and reversibility of Being.

Like the ideas of sacramentality and incarnation, this ontology rests on a paradox—after all, how can the Transcendent be immanent? Would it not then cease to be Transcendent? Merleau-Ponty finds this same kind of paradoxical relationship at work in our bodies which bring together subject and object, at the same time. This “paradox already lies in every visible,” such that whenever we look at the world, in an attempt to

“possess the visible,” we are aware that we are likewise “one of the visibles” (Visible

136, 134-35). For Merleau-Ponty, this paradox of the visible lies at the core of the body:

16 If we think of “God” as the source of all Being, then Being itself is also eternal, meaning that the immanent has always existed. 17 Jenny Chamarette draws on this notion of incarnation as it relates to the cinematic experience: “The cinematic is always present to and ‘incarnated’ with meaningfulness, a meaningfulness that surfaces from the encounter of the enworlded cinema with enworlded body-subjects” (240). 18 I am far from the first to notice the incarnational aspects of Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology and ontology, and Richard McCleary goes as far to call it a “phenomenology of incarnation” in his preface to Signs (xvi). 79

“My body as a visible thing is contained within the full spectacle. But my seeing body subtends this visible body, and all the visibles with it. There is a reciprocal insertion and intertwining of one in the other” (Visible 138). Throughout this portion of The Visible and the Invisible, this paradoxical notion slips and slides out of Merleau-Ponty’s grasp, as he constantly reminds himself and the reader that we must not think of these two aspects of the body as “layers” or “planes,” but rather as “two vortexes” or “two spheres” (Visible

138). In other words, the body is not composed of the fusion of two distinct layers, and

“is neither thing seen only nor seer only, [but] it is Visibility sometimes wandering and sometimes reassembled” (Visible 137-38). “This Visibility, this generality of the Sensible in itself, this anonymity innate to Myself” is another way that Merleau-Ponty describes the “flesh,” the “sort of incarnate principle” that is “an ‘element’ of Being” (Visible 139).

It is within this flesh, the generality of being that flows between all things, that the lived- body has its experiences and can connect with other beings and Being. Merleau-Ponty posits the flesh as the resolution of the paradox of the visible, yet the flesh itself is, in many ways, just as paradoxical and slippery as the body’s relation to visibility. Speaking of language, Merleau-Ponty closes his chapter on the flesh and chiasm with these words, which offer a helpful summation of the paradoxical nature of Transcendence in immanence: “They are two aspects of the reversibility which is the ultimate truth”

(Visible 155).

Within this ontological framework, religious experience takes on a character that blends elements of the various definitions and theories that I have laid out. Mediated through the body, religious experience is a moment when a body (being) comes into

80 contact with Being through the flesh. These experiences form the emergent soul, the material, undiscovered (and perhaps undiscoverable) aspect of the body that seeks out and interacts with Being. With immanence and Transcendence beneath everything, religious experience can take the form of a more intense, emotional connection to Being or a general, everyday experience. The former would be considered a “mystical” religious experience, and the latter simply an “ordinary” religious experience. As Transcendence is beneath being and inseparable from immanence, religious experiences do not come from above nor alter reality, but rather push up from below, exposing a deeper reality. As Hart puts it, “[W]hat is most mysterious and most exalted is also that which, strangely enough, turns out to be most ordinary and nearest to hand, and…what is most glorious in its transcendence is also that which is humblest in its wonderful immediacy” (84). Being, as the source of all being, is not a waterfall, pouring down from on high, but a wellspring, in which Transcendence bubbles up like crude oil from the dirt of our immanent existence, at times, forcefully, and, at others, imperceptibly. In this sense, religious experience should be thought of as a realization, sometimes epiphanic, but often not, of Being, the

Transcendence/immanence that forms the ground from which the lived-body and lived experience grows. If Being forms the primordial ground of our experiences, then religious experience can come at any time and in any place, as all it requires is an awareness of this Being, from which everything springs and to which everything is connected.19 Situating religious experience as such allows it to become democratized and

19 Here, a concept shared by Judaism, Christianity, and Sufi Islam, imago dei, serves as a helpful example. Imago dei states that humans were made in the image of God, thus they can connect to him and reflect his attributes. However, they are not and can never be God. Applying this to my framework, we can think of 81 de-territorialized, no longer the special privilege of a particular class of people or a specific religion, but available to everyone.

Recently, scholars have been placing more emphasis on the intersubjective relationships that create religious experience, rather than just seeing these experiences as formed after the fact by language and culture. Religious experience comes through relationships, and this “perspective shifts attention away from what is already always given socially, linguistically, and historically, to what may happen in the intersubjective worlds humans are born into, then make for themselves with the tools they find and craft”

(Orsi 7). Orsi goes as far as to say that “relationships are essential to understanding modern religious history at all levels,” and these relationships play out “in the thick of life’s circumstances, not only in distant grottoes or hillsides” (73). Religious experience breaks through in everyday circumstances, a result of the relationships we cultivate, not in spite of them. On a larger scale, John Polkinghorne asserts that the “increasing scientific recognition of the relational character of the physical universe” points to the idea that “reality is relational” (103). Created from our relationships with others and the world, religious experience, then, rather than being “otherworldly,” comes from the depths of reality and our experience of the world. “Experience,” Plate suggests, “is a two- way process, a mutual give and take,” wherein the things in the world reach out to us as we reach out to them (History 10). Beyond just opening up religious experience to everyone and shifting focus to the relational aspects of religious experience, the

humans (and animals, plants, etc.) as bearing the image of Being and reflecting its origins in that Being, but not being Being itself. 82 ontological framework I present has important consequences for the study of religious experience as a whole.

Rather than remaining agnostic about where religious experiences come from, the framework I have proposed here provides an ontological foundation for these experiences that does not stand outside of immanence or the body. While other scholars have done without this foundation, I believe that it offers a philosophically consistent position that navigates between extremes. From this foundation, I can say that religious experiences are “real” in a meaningful sense, that is, that they find their embodied intentionality in

Being, an aspect of existence that is Transcendent and immanent. Rather than being an experience of the irreducible ineffable (the Transcendent) or simply the firing of neurons

(the immanent), this framework holds these two categories in tension, suggesting that the reality of such experiences comes from the paradoxical, radically interconnected nature of Being itself. It may appear that I have simply re-located the sui generis idea of religious experience elsewhere, and that my argument is prone to the same problems as those of Kant, Otto, and Eliade. To a degree, this conception of Being does line up with perennialism in that it offers an ontological basis for religious experience, but it also differs from classical conceptions of perennialism in a few important ways. Here, Being does not reside in the noumenal world, the Holy, or the sacred, but rather in the destruction of the binaries that would set the immanent and the Transcendent at odds.

Being is both apart from and a part of the world at the same time, and is thus universal and relative. By moving deeper into immanence to discover Transcendence, this framework likewise eschews the transhistorical nature of perennialism, asserting that

83 universality can only be found by moving deeper into relativity—moving deeper into our contingent being, we come closer to Being.20 While religious experiences have a universal referent in Being, this universality is increased, not impoverished, by the relativity and diversity of those experiences. Religious experience, and every type of experience, has its ground in the universality of Being from which it springs, yet this

Being is expressed in diverse ways through the being of the lived-body, which is acted upon by culture, history, and language. As such, we no longer need to find commonalities between types of religious experience, as the primordial generality of Being forms their common ground, yet allows for different lived-bodies to have different experiences, mediated through their specific encultured embodiment—here lies a via media between contextualism and perennialism.

In this framework of the via media, however, there might be another objection, perhaps more significant than the issue of perennialism: why is it necessary to add the

Transcendent to a framework (non-reductive materialism) that seems to work fine without it? After all, Sobchack seems to be saying the same thing as I am in regards to religious experience:

Such passionate moments in the relationship between body and world are

transcendent ‘in the flesh’—emergent from the common ground of the world’s

physical incarnation and temporalized materiality and in the immanence of the

20 Barbaras explains this paradox: “[T]hat there are things, that is, individuals, engenders rather than excludes the possibility of universality. Because it is pre-individual, the thing is itself only in expressing the universality of the world into which it plunges. Universality and individuality are born together” (Being 188). 84

lived body’s primordially material sense-ability and response-ability. (“Passion”

295)

If this is the case, why add an unnecessary complication? First, much of this comes down to presuppositions, where I think it more intellectually honest to keep the possibility of

Transcendence open, while others, like Sobchack, find it more intellectually honest to leave that possibility closed from the start or, as Vasquez does, suspend it in favor of more empirical research. Second, while contextualism grew out of a desire to restore diversity to religious experience and subvert binaries, it has replaced perennialist absolutes with its own ironclad universalities, in which one must acquiesce to the absolute relativity of social constructivism. In some ways, I prefer the absolutes of social constructivism to those of perennialism, as they should make the scholar open to a wider variety of interpretations; however, in seeing one half of the equation as the whole, both of these viewpoints eschew holism in favor of an entrenched dichotomy that robs religious experience of its fullness. As a result, creating a via media that highlights the both/and rather than the either/or serves to balance the contextualist/perennialist scales.

Finally, this immanent/Transcendent framework gives the scholar a middle ground built upon an incarnational ontology, offering him/her/them a robust embodied foundation from which to study the complicated and interconnected world of religion and religious experience. Within this ontology, immanent and Transcendent are one, meaning that when we study the immanent and the material, we also study the Transcendent and the religious. This radical interconnectivity, this sacramentality, creates a foundation from

85 which religious experience can be understood as an intertwining of the immanent and the

Transcendent at the bottom of Being.

With this framework for religious experience in place, we now return to the film’s body and the question that opened this chapter: does the film have soul? As I have argued, soul is not something immaterial or apart from the body, but is produced in the body through the complex web of relationships that connect us to each other and the world. Film, digital or celluloid, has a body, and although this body does not directly map onto the human body, it is comprised of both viewing subject and viewed object, which allows us, as Sobchack does, to place it within Merleau-Ponty’s idea of the visible/invisible and the flesh. In that relationship, the film’s body also comes into contact with Being as it perceives and expresses its experience—film has a soul. The film’s soul, like ours, is produced through its intersubjective relationship with us and the world. The film’s soul is not something to be “saved” or something that exists apart from its material body, rather it is an awareness of and an opening onto the world and Being created through the film’s relationships. Being, the universal ground of these experiences, gives rise to different lived-bodies and experiences, thus it should come as no surprise that the filmic body has myriad ways of opening up onto Being and, moreover, that different filmic bodies open onto Being in diverse manners. The cinematic world is thrown open to us and this reversibility forms a fleshly relationship that points us to the wonder and mystery of our own existence. In presenting us with this mystery, the film’s body makes its religious experience known at the level of perception, something one human body can never express to another. The film, like humans, never has a religious

86 experience on its own, apart from a relationship with the world and a viewer. I am creating the film’s religious experience even as it creates mine, our souls emerging together.

So, if filmic bodies have religious experiences, both of the mystical and ordinary type, how do we study them? Most religious studies scholars, regardless of their presuppositions, would agree that you study religious experience by listening to the subject who has had the experience and how the subject describes it. We should study filmic religious experience in the same manner. In studying the religious experience of film, I will adopt an ethnographic methodology, which begins with the experience of the film as described by the film, then considers broader cultural and historical influences that act upon the body of the film and shape its experience. Just as the ethnographer interviews a subject, I will “interview” the films I analyze here through rigorous formal analysis, as the film’s form, how it expresses its perceptions, gives us insight into the experiences it has. In interpreting a film’s religious experience, the scholar will inevitably be forced to incorporate his/her/their own subjective experience as the spectator into the larger interpretation of the film’s experience, as the scholar both observes and participates in the film’s experience. Yet, rather than clinging to an “objectivity” that can never be achieved, the inevitability of the scholar’s own subjectivity creates the opportunity for what Omar McRoberts calls an “aesthetic approach” to ethnography, where the ethnographer enters into the “aesthetic universe” of the subject and draws upon his/her/their own experiences to help interpret the experiences of the subject (200).

Within this framework, “the ethnographer of religion must necessarily study his own

87 experiences as well as the words people use to describe theirs” (McRoberts 201). In my case, this means examining and reporting on my own viewing experiences and the relationships that I have formed with the films I write about here. Rather than hide from this under the guise of disinterested objectivity, I have embraced my own subjectivity as a necessary component of my methodology and embark on an autoethnographic project, where I study my embodied experiences as text and subject, even as I interact with the films themselves as texts and subjects.

My religious experiences at the cinema, as I have asserted about religious experience as a whole, have been created by relationships that have been formed from my interactions with these films at specific times in my life, some of which occurred during the writing of this dissertation. As films and I interact, we create the “reality” of religious experience in “the movement between construction and connotation, that is, between the film’s material composition and presentation, and the viewer’s creative reception of them, a reception that always occurs via a social, historical, and therefore ethicopolitical terrain” (Hamner 19). This reality surfaces through the relationship between film and viewer, and derives its power from that relationship. Like our relationships with other people, the strength of our relationship with a specific film changes and deepens over time, and I often find that the films I know the best still reveal new things to me when I watch them. The films I discuss in this dissertation are the films I know best, the ones that I have watched over and over again, thought about, and studied. They have become part of my lived experience, integral to how I think about the world around me, and I hope to share what they have taught me with you.

Exploring the cinema in this autoethnographic way might be more properly thought of as a methodology of moments, as described by Murray Pomerance: “The moment, inevitably, is what we remember and retain, what we possess of the screen and incorporate into ourselves and our worlds” (6). These moments, as I will explore throughout this dissertation, can take on the character of what Taylor calls “moments of experienced fullness, of joy and fulfillment,” as they push their way through my secular surroundings and into my everyday experience (5). These subjective moments of filmic fullness are inexorably connected to my experience as a lived-body entering into an intersubjective relationship with the filmic body. In my encounter with the film’s body and these moments, I come into contact with perception itself, as the film gives me access to its perception. The film creates a world, through its perceptions, which we enter into as a viewer, and in creating its world, re-creates the world at large, as it “actively reshape[s] elements of the lived world and twist[s] them in new ways” (Plate, Religion 1).

Chamarette also points to this function of film: “Film has emphatically changed the world that we see, and consequently it has also changed the way we see the world and ourselves within it: film and cinema form a constitutive part of our world-making” (13). Film, and especially filmic religious experience, opens up a new world, one full of enchantment and possibility.

In what follows, I will, by no means, offer a compendium of all the different ways that film can have a religious experience, but rather a few broad categories that I have found useful in thinking about film’s religious experience as I have encountered them in my own religious experiences at the cinema. These religious experiences do not come

89 from the film’s attempts to transcend the material world, but from its deep connection to it. Although film relates to the world in representation, re-creation, and creation, film’s connection to our world and “reality” showcases yet another category: revelation. As I suggested of the Eucharist, film reveals the deeper reality of the world to us, at times more explicitly than at others, but it never strays from the world, even in its most

(im)material forms. Or, as Deleuze puts it: “Restoring our belief in the world—this is the power of modern cinema (when it stops being bad). Whether we are Christian or atheists, in our universal schizophrenia, we need reasons to believe in this world” (172). The cinema reveals the deep paradoxes of the body and the world, and can restore, through

“faith,” the link between the body and the world that Deleuze sees as severed by the modern condition, a link that I would call the flesh (172). And this faith is none other than our perceptual faith that the cinema lays bare in its own perceptions, in its illusions which “call out for more contact with the world” (Richmond 91). The cinema invites us see the world in this way, to explore the depths (not heights) of Being, to create our souls, through its religious experience. These moments often exist at the boundaries of the diegesis, marked by gaps and fissures in the filmic experience that point back to the primordial reversibility of being and Being. Mysterious and wonderful, they seek to embrace, not escape, immanence. They travel the borderlands of materiality, whispering of “a magic deeper still” that draws us ever further into the paradoxes of the world and life (Lewis, Lion 163). More than other art forms, film is uniquely suited to plumb the depths of paradox—after all, what is film, if not a paradox itself, still images brought to life?

Chapter 2. The Listening Body: Voice, Music, and Sound in Cinematic Religious Experience

“Had I come to myself out of a vision?—or lost myself by going back to one? Which was the real—what I now saw, or what I had just ceased to see? Could both be real, interpenetrating yet unmingling?” — George MacDonald

At the end of The Fits, a film about African-American children and teenagers at a community center in Cincinnati, the main character, eleven-year-old Toni (Royalty

Hightower), finally experiences a “fit,” a seizure-like epidemic that has afflicted most of the other female characters in the film. The film treats Toni’s fit, however, in a drastically different manner than it has treated the fits of the other girls, both sonically and visually.

The film keeps the cause of these fits, which only affect female characters, a secret, lending the film a mysterious air that undercuts its neo-realist aesthetics. When I taught

The Fits in a second-year writing course, I asked my students what they thought caused the fits and received a number of different answers. Some thought it was an illness spread by contaminated water, others thought they were collective hallucinations, and one student was very adamant that the characters were experiencing the effects of some illicit substance. Eventually, after one student inquired, I gave them my interpretation—the fits, especially Toni’s, were religious experiences. Needless to say, this interpretation did not convince the vast majority of my students, but I saw a few heads nod in agreement and

91 some thoughtful looks, which is about as much as I could expect when discussing a film as ambiguous as The Fits. This lack of agreement from my students, however, has not shaken my confidence in my interpretation of the conclusion of The Fits, and this scene serves as a valuable entry point into this chapter on the voice, music, and sound as it brings them together to demonstrate Toni and the film’s religious experience.

The Fits is a small independent production that primarily uses non-professional actors from the location where it was filmed in Cincinnati, placing it firmly within the neo-realist camp, at least at its beginning. As the film continues, this realism begins to crack, and the film begins to incorporate inexplicable and mysterious elements into its diegesis. These elements often include sound from Toni’s perspective or perhaps inside her head, although the film, like usual, makes it difficult to ascertain exactly where some of this sound comes from. The final scene of the film completely ruptures the film’s attempts at realism, both through its non-diegetic music and what we see on screen. A non-diegetic song with lyrics, the first of the film, enters the soundtrack as we see a medium close-up of Toni’s feet walking down a hallway. The song slowly builds as

Toni’s feet begin to levitate, walking through the air as the camera glides alongside them.

The lyrics to the song (“Aurora” by Kiah Victoria) comment on the scene unfolding:

“Must we choose to be slaves to gravity?”21 “Aurora” employs a number of electronic elements and moves at a slow tempo, adding an ethereal feel to this scene. Toni, caught in this fit, has been able to subvert gravity, a shocking moment given the film’s overall

21 This lyric seems significant in a film about an African-American community, and, given Toni’s freedom from gravity in this scene, suggests a kind of liberation. 92 feel and tone to this point. As the scene plays out, I find myself caught in the religious experience of Toni and the film, unsure where one ends and the other begins.

The film cuts to a medium shot behind Toni as she hangs in the air with the other girls at the community center out of focus in the background. A loud gasp comes from all of them, the first diegetic noise of the sequence, and this interplay between diegetic sound and non-diegetic sound will become more significant as this sequence continues. The film cuts to a medium close-up of Toni in the center of the frame, the fit jerking her body around. Her movement here and earlier is in slow-motion, and it’s difficult to tell whether or not the film subjectively perceives her moving in slow motion or if she is moving in slow motion within the diegesis. Along with the non-diegetic music, Toni’s breathing resounds, almost in time with the music. Hearing her breath grounds what is happening within the diegesis, yet also operates in the ways that Quinlivan calls “(in)visible” and

“(im)material”—the film is making every effort to elide the diegetic boundaries, even in its choice of sound effects. Eventually the film dissolves, accompanied by another gasp from the girls watching, to a familiar shot of Toni on a fence-lined bridge, one of her favorite spots to practice boxing/dancing throughout the film.22 The song continues to play, and this shot, at least initially, seems to suggest a return back to the realism of the film. Yet, as the shot continues, the other girls, arrayed in their dance outfits, come into the frame, surrounding Toni as they perform their dance routine on this bridge. As they perform, we hear their steps and more breathing, yet this “diegetic” sound occupies a part of the film’s world that is not “real,” at least in the traditional sense. This moment, I

22 The dissolve feels like a key transition here, clearly marking a departure into a different state or world. 93 would argue, takes place within the world of Toni’s religious experience, an experience that the film has entered into as well. While this experience may be within the film’s diegesis, it nonetheless stretches the term “diegesis” to its limits, as it has become increasingly difficult to determine which sounds are found within the film’s world and which are not.

The shots that follow the one on the bridge drift even further away from realism, refusing to preserve any kind of continuity between space and time. “Aurora” continues to play in the background, now without lyrics, as the film jumps from the girls performing on the bridge to them performing in the gymnasium, a boxing ring, and, finally, the drained pool near the community center. The music and Toni’s breathing tie the disparate locations together sonically, and seeing Toni happily dance in locations that are important to her suggest the significance of each of these shots for her religious experience; however, something still seems a little off kilter, even if one accepts that the jumping to various different scenes is representative of Toni’s religious experience. At various times throughout these final shots, Toni’s breathing seems to be out of sync with her body on screen or the shot is such that we can’t tell where the sound of breathing originates—these sounds further complicate the diegetic boundaries. The breathing I hear could be Toni’s breathing during her fit, thus diegetic in the sense that it comes from the world of the film, but now offscreen as I see her/the film’s vision rather than her in the

“real” world. However, it was unclear if the sound of breathing during the first few shots of this sequence was diegetic, and perhaps that breathing was the sound of this vision breaking through sonically before it did visually. To add one more layer to these diegetic

94 conundrums, I think it somewhat difficult to say with absolute certainty that the song we hear is non-diegetic, as it could easily be part of the sonic sphere of Toni’s vision. As

Michel Chion remarks, “We can never be certain that the characters do not hear the [non- diegetic] songs. Here we must enter into a magical logic—cine-magic” (Film 425). The

Fits offers me this cine-magic, interweaving the diegetic and the non-diegetic and affording me, and maybe some of my students, the possibility of seeing and responding to the religious experience of The Fits.

~*~

Popularly conceived of as ephemeral, sound is anything but, as it proceeds from material causes in the world and has a material effect upon the body. Created by a physical disturbance, soundwaves are vibrations that travel through air, water, etc., and enter into the ear, where they are transmitted to the brain through a process that translates those vibrations into neural signals as they pass through the outer, middle, and inner ear.

Although we cannot (usually) see soundwaves, they nonetheless are a material phenomenon, created by vibrations and force in the world. As Jonathan Sterne points out in The Audible Past, sound (as a concept) can only be understood in reference to humans hearing that sound: “As part of the larger physical phenomenon of vibration, sound is a product of human senses and not a thing in the world apart from humans” (Sterne 11).

After all, the world is full of vibrations and what we hear “is a little piece of the vibrating world,” as the vibrations that we do not hear do not count as sound if no one hears them

(Sterne 11). Rather than being interested in individual sonic experiences, Sterne desires to extricate sound from its ephemerality and ground it in material contexts, cultures, and

95 bodies, as he chooses to focus on what produces sound in certain cultural contexts, rather than on the sound itself or how people describe it. Sterne argues that “there is no ‘mere’ or innocent description of interior auditory experience,” and “the attempt to describe sound or the act of hearing in itself…strives for a false transcendence” (19). The “elusive inner world of sound,” as Sterne puts it, “emerges and becomes perceptible only through its exteriors,” and gains meaning only through what we can extract from historical particulars surrounding hearing (13). In this chapter, I will certainly be guilty of describing my own sonic experiences, but I will remain vigilant to avoid assuming that I am only hearing what is “natural,” and, when possible, offer some of the contexts that have shaped my material experience of hearing and listening. The importance of approaches like Sterne’s to the field and my project lie in their unwavering assertion of sound’s materiality and their demand that scholars take this to heart, as Leigh Eric

Schmidt suggests: “The very corporeality of hearing needs to be materialized, snatched out of an airy evanescence through the rituals, disciplines, performances, mechanisms, and commodities that make up the sounding body as well as the attentive ear” (35-36).

The filmic body, like mine, can produce and receive sound, and the film’s ability to perceive sound, which it then expresses to the spectator, varies from film to film, just as different human and non-human bodies hear things differently.

Hearing the religious sounds and voices of the film requires attending to them through a kind of close listening, a practice that takes time to cultivate. What I end up hearing when I watch a film often depends on how I choose to listen and what I am listening for when watching. To begin, one must push back against the “visualism” that

96 asserts that sight provides the best “understanding of our experience” to allow sound and hearing to take their place in how we conceive of our experience, something Don Ihde calls for in his work on the phenomenology of sound: “Experientially it is not at all obvious that eyes are more discriminating than ears” (Listening 6-7). For Ihde, “even the ordinary listener performs countless auditory tasks that call for great accuracy and discrimination,” and once “trained listening” is brought into the conversation, the ear becomes capable of incredibly delicate listening (Listening 7). Given that film has long been considered to be primarily a visual medium, cultivating an attention to filmic sound goes against traditional methods of spectatorship and has required me to direct my attention to something that while material, cannot be seen. In fact, whether in philosophy or film studies, deciding to listen instead of look “symbolizes a hope to find material for a recovery of the richness of primary experience that is now forgotten or covered over in the too tightly interpreted visualist traditions” (Ihde, Listening 13). Choosing to listen opens us up to sense data and experience that falls outside of experiential categories created by a visualist focus, and Ihde, in contrast to Sterne, has no issue with suggesting that the subjective, inner experiences of hearing are significant, especially in their ability to take us beyond the visible. The invisible, pace Merleau-Ponty, exists as the other side of the visible, revealed through the flesh which makes us aware of the realities that swirl around us. “An inquiry into the auditory is also an inquiry into the invisible,” offers Ihde, suggesting that “listening makes the invisible present,” bringing the invisible into my experience, paving the way for me to connect with Being (Listening 51). By listening, I

97 reclaim a facet of my embodied existence that allows me to more fully experience the world and realities around me.

Importantly, listening is not just attentive hearing, but a distinct, embodied activity that connects me to the world. In Listening, Jean-Luc Nancy begins to describe a kind of philosophical listening that is distinct from hearing: “If ‘to hear’ is to understand the sense…to listen is to be straining toward a possible meaning, and consequently one that is not immediately accessible” (6). By listening, Nancy suggests that “one is on the lookout for a subject, something (itself) that identifies itself by resonating from self to self,” that is, “a resonant subject, an intensive spacing of a rebound that does not end in any return to self without immediately relaunching, as an echo, a call to that same self”

(9, 21). Here, Nancy highlights an inherent tension and instability that comes from listening, a tension that I find expressed in the way that film sound plays with diegetic boundaries. One who listens, Nancy offers, “is perhaps no subject at all, except as the place of resonance, of its infinite tension and rebound, the amplitude of sonorous deployment and the slightness of its simultaneous redeployment” (22). Here, listening opens up the (perhaps no) subject to a space, where the back-and-forth of echoes call to that subject, whispering of infinities and realities that exist in this tension. Indeed, the call to listen places demands upon the one listening, a “summons” that transforms the listening experience into an intersubjective one, as Peter Szendy notes in Listen: “What summons us to listen, what makes us into two, one plus one, what makes us into this open addition, this sum that we are, is our desire for someone, always one more person, to hear us hearing” (143). Likewise, Charles Sanders Peirce describes sound, such as a “rap on

98 the door” or a shout, as an index, that is, “something meant to put [the hearer] in real connection with the object,” something that establishes a relationship between the listener’s body and that object in the world (108-9). As a witness to the sound of the world, I must listen attentively for the shout that desires to connect me with the material objects all around me, each of them a vital part of my experience—a shout that summons me to relationship.

Voice

“In actual movies, for real spectators, there are not all the sounds including the human voice. There are voices, and then everything else.” — Michel Chion

The human voice comes from the body, created by air pushed up from the lungs into the larynx, where the vocal folds vibrate and send those vibrations to the mouth, where language and sound can be articulated through the movement of the tongue and lips. Spoken language begins deep within the body, conjured, as if with magic, from the recesses of being. As such, the voice is deeply material, and derives its power from that materiality in conjunction with the fact that most voices are saying something, drawing our attention to their speech. Michel Chion describes this phenomenon in this way: “The ear attempts to analyze the sound in order to extract meaning from it...and always tries to localize and if possible identify the voice” (Voice 5). In this “vococentrist” paradigm, which Chion argues marks the sound film, “the presence of a human voice instantly sets up a hierarchy of perception,” drawing the spectator’s attention towards that voice,

99 frustrating expectations when its words cannot be understood and the source of the voice cannot be found (Voice 6, 5). The introduction of the voice, rather than synchronized sound or language, into the cinema “truly constituted the great revolution,” creating a

“problem” for early film theorists and filmmakers, its “material presence” seen “as a threat of loss and seduction for the cinema” (Chion, Voice 12). The early Soviet film theorists argued that the kind of “talking films” created by synchronous sound would

“destroy the culture of montage,” as filmmakers and viewers would be seduced by the realism offered by the voice and synchronous soundtrack (Eisenstein, Pudovkin, and

Alexandrov 84). In the decades since their statement, the Soviets’ fear of the

“commercial exploitation” of sound films has been realized, but the cinematic voice has proven to be far more than just a tool for inducing realism, as filmmakers have learned how to manipulate the voice to offer new possibilities for the spectator (Eisenstein,

Pudovkin, and Alexandrov 84). As we watch, we also listen, surprised by off-screen voices or thrilled when a favorite actor puts on an unfamiliar accent; at the cinema, we find the potential to “lose ourselves,” and, as Chion quips, “the voice, in this invitation to perdition, is perhaps the most seductive of ushers” (Voice 122).

Whispering from the off-screen space, the voices that pervade the films of

Terrence Malick invade the film’s body, rupturing its diegetic reality and constructing religious experience for film and viewer. These films contain a multiplicity of voices and voice-overs, and the filmic body materially expresses these voice-overs differently to mark the different registers of experience that these voices represent. From the very beginning of The Thin Red Line, a film that details the battle of Guadalcanal, we are left

100 to guess at the location and significance of these voices. The film opens on an ominous note—a crocodile slides into murky water, as low bass tones reverberate, a portent of tragedy to come. Soon after, shots of trees, light, and water slide into each other through dissolves (a transition the film uses frequently), signaling the permeable and porous boundaries between them, instead of clearly separating the shots through cutting. The images bleed into each other, suggesting that, as Witt (Jim Caviezel) later puts it, “maybe all men got one big soul.” The music brightens as a chorus begins to sing, and the film directs its gaze upward, looking to the sky. Into these shots, comes the voice-over, a much different kind of voice-over than the ones in conventional narrative film. This voice speaks not of plot and narrative, but of something else, something deeper, more mysterious, the struggle at the heart of nature—a voice full of possibilities. In this moment, it could be an unseen, all-knowing narrator, the main character of the film, a secondary character who narrates, or a haunting, disembodied moral voice, to just name a few possibilities. The power of this voice lies in its ability to be anything and be anywhere. It is, in other words, what Chion calls an “acousmêtre,” a voice that is heard, yet whose source is not seen (Voice 21).

Chion details the many powers and functions of the various forms of the acousmêtre throughout his work, but what stands out immediately the acousmêtre’s relation to the diegesis. For Chion, it’s “as if the voice were wandering along the surface, at once inside and outside, seeking a place to settle...neither inside nor outside: such is

101 the acousmêtre’s fate in the cinema” (Voice 23).23 The acousmêtre exists both inside and outside the diegesis at the same time. This curious relationship with the diegesis allows the acousmêtre to serve as a potent marker of a film’s religious experience. The acousmêtre could be a voice that speaks into the diegesis from outside the diegesis, or a voice that speaks to the non-diegetic from inside the diegesis. As such, the acousmêtre could represent a voice from another realm speaking into the film’s world, or a prayer sent out toward a being in a different or unseen reality. Part of the diegetic-blurring nature of the acousmêtre lies in the powers that Chion ascribes to it, powers which explicitly connect the acousmêtre with a kind of mystical experience. In occupying off- screen space in such an ambiguous way, the acousmêtre “becomes invested with magical powers as soon as it is involved, however slightly, in the image” (Voice 23). Chion outlines four powers of the complete acousmêtre (one that has not yet been visualized):

“the ability to be everywhere, to see all, to know all, and to have complete power” (Voice

24). These powers imbue the acousmêtre and my experience of it with a kind of mystical tinge, one that connects the acousmêtre to issues of religious experience, inasmuch as the complete acousmêtre speaks from a position outside of the film’s diegetic reality.

Importantly, even after an acousmêtre has been visualized (its voice connected to its source), it still “can acquire by contagion some of the powers of the complete acousmêtre” (Voice 21). Not only does the acousmêtre open up a liminal space in the

23 Chion’s claim here does partially rely on there being one single loudspeaker behind the screen, but I think the argument still holds, particularly if we think about how many films are now watched at home, not to mention on computer screen, tablets, and phones. 102 diegetic reality of the film, but it continues to exist in that space throughout the remainder of the film.

Returning to The Thin Red Line, the initial voice of the film speaks from the place of the complete acousmêtre, a voice invested with a kind of spiritual power. Furthermore, while we eventually see Pvt. Train (John Dee Smith), whose voice opens the film, his de- acousmatized voice, filled with the intonations of the rural United States, sounds almost nothing like the whispery, articulate voice that animates his voice-overs. Given the differences in sound between the voice-over and his voice in the film, Train’s acousmatic voice exists almost as its own entity. The film lets his acousmatic voice roam the borderlands of the diegesis, emblematic of the film’s religious experience, teetering between the world that it sees and the Being running beneath it. Even though other voice- overs in the film feature more easily identifiable voices, The Thin Red Line still often places them at a remove from the film’s diegetic world. Chion suggests that these voices that haunt the film are “strange,” and that they “speak outside space, giving [the] characters a different, more general personality, located between themselves and all other human beings” (Thin 8). In other words, these voices inhabit a space that is not purely diegetic, a space between the diegetic world of the film and the film’s non-diegetic perceptions—a liminal space, signified by how they sound, what they say, and where they are in relation to the screen.

Outside of characters like Witt and Welsh (Sean Penn), several of the film’s voice-overs sound relatively indistinct from each other, leading Chion to incorrectly identify characters speaking certain voice-overs and giving me a fit in the past when I

103 wrote about the film.24 Sometimes the film makes it clear who is speaking, by showing them on screen or connecting the voice-over to a letter or event, but at other moments, the voices materialize from nowhere, without any connection to the onscreen action. Chion notes that, for many of these voice-overs, “there is no identification between the voice and the viewpoint of the camera” (Thin 55). By not being tied to the camera’s viewpoint, this second category of voices can operate in the realm of religious experience, as they depart from the more conventional nature of filmic voice-over and push the film toward exploring a different part of its body and experience. In other films, the sonic differences between narrative voice-overs and more impressionistic ones is more obvious, while in

The Thin Red Line, what the voice-overs say mark them as belonging to this second category, not how they sound. Whether it is Witt musing on how we “lost the good” or

Train describing the world as “all things shining,” the acousmatic voices that float throughout The Thin Red Line often ask “the questions of childhood that we keep alive and hidden within us,” questions that resist easy answers (Chion, Thin 55). There is one question that pervades the film and comes up in Witt’s early voice-overs and in later conversations between him and Welsh: is there another world or is this world all there is?

Over the course of its narrative, the film tries to answer this question, as I tag along, participating in the film’s perceptions of this (and the other) world.

After its brief opening sequence, The Thin Red Line introduces us to a Melanesian village, full of color and liveliness, where children swim and play in idyllic waters—a

24 Chion mistakes several of the characters speaking in voice-over in his short book on The Thin Red Line, most notably claiming that Witt speaks the film’s final voice-over, not Train (Thin 86). To be fair, Train’s voice has a certain “everyman” quality to it, and Chion’s confusion about who is speaking during Train’s voice-overs points to the ambiguity of his voice and these voice-overs. 104 truly different world than the rest of the film will show us. Witt is here, AWOL, doing his best to fit in with the villagers and take part in their experience of life.25 Eventually a patrol boat discovers Witt and brings him back to the military world. As Welsh confronts

Witt about his absence from the company, the vibrant beach landscape and joyful singing of the villagers is replaced by a dark, harshly lit room and the mechanical hum of the ship’s engines. In their conversation, Witt speaks of “another world,” an idea that, while mentioned infrequently in the film, nevertheless structures much of its religious experience and makes itself evident in the film’s construction of meaning through voice- over. Welsh fires the opening salvo, demonstrating the Hobbesian stance that he tries to hold to throughout the film, “In this world, a man, himself, is nothing. And there ain’t no world but this one.” Witt replies, “You’re wrong…I seen another world. Sometimes, I think it was just my imagination.” But does the film “see” this other world? Do I see this other world? And, if so, how do we experience it? In the paradigm I have constructed,

25 Malick’s films have meant a lot to me, personally and academically, making it hard for me to distance myself from them and look at them critically. However, some of the troubling ways these films treat race have recently come into relief for me, and these issues surface in the films I consider in this chapter. While both The Thin Red Line and The Tree of Life illuminate the failure of the American Dream, they seem unaware of the fact that the luxury of this disillusionment exists only for those who had a chance to believe in the American Dream in the first place, namely white men. James Baldwin points to a moment in The Defiant Ones, a close-up of Sidney Poitier’s face, as an image of “the truth [the film] can neither face nor articulate,” given its complicity with white Hollywood (63). In Baldwin’s retelling of this moment, I am reminded of a moment in The Tree of Life in which the children and their father stop to buy barbeque from a group of African-Americans after church one Sunday. These are the only black people in the film and the film seems disturbed by their presence, unable to reckon with their presence in the white narrative it has been telling. On one hand, we might expect this given the film’s historical and geographical context in 1950s Texas, but, on the other hand, these images disturb the film precisely because they reveal its disillusionment with the American Dream as a white concern, something these black characters know, but are not allowed to express. They cannot be disillusioned with something that was never within their grasp, even as the film pretends they can attain it through selling barbeque. Moments like these help me remember that even though I have found solace in these films, they, like me, are not exempt from the troubled history and culture of the United States and its filmmaking industry.

105 religious experience comes from the revelation of another world already present in this world, something that Witt seems to recognize. Welsh clings to this world, but he fails to see the one that exists on the other side, in the hollow of this one, the enchanted world.

The Thin Red Line itself does not always seem to see the enchanted world, but it does hear it, as it routinely breaks into the diegesis at unexpected times.

Just the acousmatic nature of these voices would not be enough to posit them as speaking from another world, but the film also marks these voices as different, separate from the diegetic world in a way other voice-overs might not be. As Chion remarks, these voices come from “a timeless present,” abstracted from linear time, speaking of ideas and concepts rather than concrete events (Thin 53). The voices in these moments become what Ihde calls the “dramaturgical voice,” a voice that “amplifies the musical ‘effect’ of speech,” creating “an occasion of significance that is elevated above the ordinary”

(Listening 167). While Ihde discusses the dramaturgical voice primarily in terms of the stage, liturgy, and poetry, his comments about the role of the dramaturgical voice in stage acting can be carried over to film acting.26 While Chion describes the questions and thoughts voiced in these acousmatic moments as “simple, explicit, [and] direct,” they nonetheless employ elevated diction and poetic language, setting them apart from the non-acousmatic conversations in the film and placing them close enough to the

26 Ihde describes the dramaturgical voice as having an “auditory aura,” one that would seem to function differently than, say, Benjamin’s conception of the aura of art being lost in an age of mechanical reproduction (Listening 195). This auditory aura certainly shifts when brought from the stage to film, yet I would argue that the same “ability to project” and “dramatic presence” that Ihde attributes to the dramaturgical voice and the actor’s role in producing that voice can be re-created through the manipulation of sound and voice offered by the cinematic body (Listening 195). 106 dramaturgical voice to tap into its power (Thin 56). The acousmatic and dramaturgical voice speaks to the film and me, drastically affecting our experience.

The dramaturgical voice and the acousmatic voice contribute different elements to the voice-overs in The Thin Red Line and the film's experience of them. For a phenomenologist like Ihde, voice, sound, and language exist in embodied relationships between bodies-in-the-world and the world, making their experience irreducibly material and physical: “Listening begins by being bodily global in its effects” (Listening 45). In this manner, sound and language cannot be separated from the world and our embodied connection to it, and we experience a material relationship between sound and the world.

In reference to the external (or in this case, diegetic) world, the “dramaturgical voice does not display the difference between appearance and reality so much as it does the multiple possibilities of every voice transformed from ordinary to extraordinary” (Ihde, Listening

172). Moreover, in the act of speaking, “dramaturgical voice reveals a world,” or “a range of possible worlds, themselves multidimensional” (Ihde, Listening 196-97). In the voice- overs of Train, The Thin Red Line explicitly transforms a bumbling, inarticulate private into a dispenser of sage wisdom through the dramaturgical voice, a voice that transforms

Train “from ordinary to extraordinary” and allows him to reveal, and perhaps speak into existence, the enchanted realities running underneath the world the film depicts.

Furthermore, the acousmatic nature of these voice-overs allows Train (and others) to speak from a position inside/outside the film's diegesis, connecting the film’s experience of the dramaturgical voice to the ambiguous positioning of these voices in respect to the

“reality” of the film. This positioning does two things: first, it suggests that part of the

107 film’s religious experience comes through its material, embodied experience of a voice that potentially speaks from outside the diegesis; and second, the film’s experience posits that something ordinary, like a voice, can be transformed by various means to become something extraordinary, perhaps even something religious.

Three of Train’s voice-overs through the film demonstrate how the acousmatic, dramaturgical voice contributes to my and the film’s religious experience. Speaking in the present tense, these voice-overs sound like they come from another realm, and when compared with Train’s speech in the film’s diegesis, the difference between them is striking. A complete acousmêtre, Train speaks with all of the acousmêtre’s power in the film’s opening sequence, asking questions, but giving no answers: “What’s this war in the heart of nature? Why does nature vie with itself? The land contend with the sea? Is there an avenging power in nature? Not one power, but two?” Are these questions directed at me, a breaking of the fourth wall to make me think as I watch the film? Or does this mysterious, acousmatic voice pose these questions to the film, drawing the film into a religious experience of another world? I would suggest that these questions serve both these purposes, and other acousmatic questions that come up throughout the film follow a similar pattern; in doing so, the film allows me to participate in its religious experience by posing these questions to me as I experience the film. In this opening voice-over, the dramaturgical voice “reveals a world,” a different world than what we hear in Train’s normal diegetic conversation, perhaps the enchanted world lurking behind the disenchanted one (Ihde, Listening 196). Early on in the film, Train talks with Welsh, and the haunting, precise voice that inhabits the acousmatic space gives way to nervous

108 rambling: “I just can’t help how damn scared I am, Sarge…The only things that are permanent is dying and the Lord, that’s it. That’s all you gotta worry about. This war ain’t, this war ain’t gonna be the end of me. And it ain’t gonna be the end of you neither.”27 The striking difference between Train’s diegetic conversation and his voice- overs continues throughout the film, sequestering his acousmatic voice from his de- acousmatized voice, which allows his voice-overs to retain their acousmatic power.

Coming in the last third of the film, Train’s voice-over speaks again in the present tense, but addresses a moment earlier in the film, demonstrating the acousmêtre’s ubiquity and omniscience. Over shots of Welsh and some of the other soldiers at twilight,

Train’s voice enters, talking about “glory,” an important phrase in the film: “One man looks at a dying bird and thinks there’s nothing but unanswered pain. That death’s got the final word, it’s laughing at him. Another man sees that same bird—and feels the glory— feels something smiling through it.” In this voice-over, Train asks the film and us how we perceive the world: do we see pain and death or do we see the glory? With all the death and destruction that has occurred in the film, this unspoken question resonates within the filmic body and my own. The glory Train speaks of, the “something smiling through,” connects to Merleau-Ponty’s Being, as it undergirds the world and reveals the

Transcendent within the immanent. Furthermore, Train’s voice-over here offers a glimpse of how it functions elsewhere in the film as an “iconogenic” voice, that is, one that

“seems to conjure up” images in the act of speaking (Chion, Film 478). Yet, in this

27 The radical differences in sound between Train’s diegetic and acousmatic voice go a long way to explaining why scholars like Chion (and normal viewers like me the first time I watched the film) have a hard time connecting his voice-overs to his character. 109 sequence, Train’s voice does not conjure up images simultaneously, but reminds me of an image already seen, reframing that image from a new perspective. Earlier in the film, in the midst of an artillery barrage, the film suddenly cuts to a close-up of a baby bird, alone and injured, and dwells on this shot for several seconds.28 At that moment, this shot reads as another of the film’s frequent insert shots of nature, as the film attempts to take refuge from the violence and pain of war, but later, when brought forth by Train’s voice-over, this shot serves as a premonition, a foreshadowing of the film’s struggle to find the glory in the midst of the world.

In these moments, as Train’s voice-over speaks to the film, it calls and has called out to me to ask me how I look at the world. Watching The Thin Red Line as an undergraduate, I remember being stunned by its experience of the world and how its voice-overs forced me to interact with the world in a way that I was not expecting. I grew up attending an evangelical, fundamentalist Baptist church, where the world and the things in it were largely considered to be impediments to the spiritual life. This gnostic view privileged the spiritual—in the sense that the “spirit” lies closer to God—over the material, promising a future, immaterial state in heaven, where our bodies would no longer be needed. If one spoke of finding God in nature, it was usually a precursor to some kind of argument about creation versus evolution, rather than a sincere experience of religious revelation grounded in the material world. By the time I began college, my ideas were already shifting on this topic, and this voice-over in The Thin Red Line drove

28 Who’s to say Train didn't call that image into being earlier in the film, given the timeless present of the voice-over and the powers of the acousmêtre? 110 home the importance of finding God in the material world. My childhood church looked at the world and saw evil, pain, and death all around, despite a belief in the afterlife and

God’s power over death. In that mentality, only the ephemeral soul survives after God has destroyed the world with fire, so why should we see glory in the world? I no longer wanted to see the world in that way, as it de-valued my current bodily existence and those of the people, animals, and world around me. So, I made a choice to look at the world differently, motivated by a deep belief that what I see matters and what lives and breathes around me contains goodness and beauty, prompted down this path by a simple voice- over.

The religious journey of The Thin Red Line ends with another one of Train’s voice-overs, and in this voice-over, his iconogenic voice, calling forth the final images of the film, reveals the fleeting presence of the “other world.” Train appears in the diegesis at the end of the film, talking to another soldier on a boat as they leave the island, and his voice slowly fades out, giving way to a voice-over. Even here, with his voice explicitly leading into the voice-over, the voice-over sounds profoundly different from his conversation in the film, as if there were two different Trains, one a citizen of the film, the other existing in another realm—the one Train the hollow of the other, the paradox of the flesh symbolized in this overlapping dialogue. The first lines of this voice-over are accompanied by a lengthy shot of several nondescript soldiers, ones that, even if we have seen them previously, have not played a large role in the film’s narrative—we and the film do not know who they are. The camera roves around the landing craft, momentarily pausing on certain soldiers’ faces in an effort to connect them to Train’s comments:

111

“Where is it that we were together? Who were you that I lived with? Walked with? The brother, the friend.” Who is Train talking to here? The other soldiers? Himself? Me?

Certainly, Train speaks of a “we” that refers to himself in relation to the other soldiers, but, as the acousmatic voice exists outside of time and the diegesis, the “we” in this voice-over also addresses the two Trains, one deeply imbricated in the film’s real world and the other speaking from the invisible of that world. Train’s voice crosses the

“onscreen-nondiegetic border,” described by Chion as “the boundary between the here and now, visible as such, and a world that lies outside of space and time” (Film 260).

From a space of diegetic liminality, Train, speaking with the multidimensional possibilities of the dramaturgical voice, tries to understand who the other Train is and was, and the film responds inversely, searching for the invisible world in which Train’s acousmatic voice resides. Beyond just speaking to himself, Train reaches out and speaks to me, reminding me of the multiplicity of selves that have made up my existence and the fleeting moments of unity that occasionally burst through my haze of self-questioning.

The film moves from the anonymous soldiers to recognizable ones, Doll (Dash

Mihok) and Welsh, before Train’s voice begins to speak again. Train asks, “Darkness and light, strife and love, are they the workings of one mind? The features of the same face?”

By considering Welsh’s journey in this manner, Train’s voice-over points to the necessity of the film finding its own understanding of the relationship between dark and light. At the beginning of the film, Welsh rejects the possibility of another world, closing himself off to the kind of intertwining explored by Train in these voice-overs. Yet, over the course of the film, Welsh, like Doll, undergoes a metamorphosis, slight as it may be, and

112 arrives in a place where he begins to consider the kinds of questions that Witt brings up in the diegesis and the ones that Train asks from the acousmatic space. During Welsh and

Witt’s final conversation in the film, the camera never stops moving, signaling the searching spirit animating both Welsh and the filmic body. “Still believing in the beautiful light, are you?” Welsh asks of Witt, as the film cuts to a relatively stable medium shot of Welsh, the gravity of the question signified by the film’s decision to stop and focus on him. He continues, “How do you do that? You’re a magician to me.” The film cuts to Witt and the camera begins to move again, tracking back with Witt as he replies, “I still see a spark in you.” The film returns to a reaction shot of Welsh, taking in

Witt’s words, before cutting to night scene where Welsh walks through the tall grass of a field, the spark in him symbolized by the orange glow of the end of his cigarette. Despite his efforts to wall himself off and deny the light inside him, Welsh has not been able to extinguish his spark, something the film makes evident when he risks his life in an attempt to save a gravely injured young soldier. Significantly, the film gives Welsh the penultimate voice-over in the film, one that addresses an element of the film’s own religious experiences.

With this voice-over, the film signals the transformation of Welsh’s initial philosophical position at the onset of the film, while simultaneously pointing to one of the major ways that the film itself has experienced religion. The voice-over begins as

Welsh and the men are lectured by their new captain, Bosche (George Clooney), his voice lowered in the mix, allowing Welsh’s cynical voice-over to undercut Bosche’s confident speech: “Everything a lie. Everything you hear, everything you see. So much to

113 spew out.” From here, as Bosche fades away, aurally and visually, the film turns to a long tracking shot of the company walking past a graveyard, white crosses adorning the graves in the background. Here, Welsh’s inner voice changes emotional tenor, this voice-over a microcosm of his trajectory over the course of the film: “Only one thing a man can do— find something that’s his, make an island for himself. If I never meet you in this life, let me feel the lack. A glance from your eyes and my life would be yours.” Welsh highlights his struggle to believe in something beneath this world in this voice-over, but leaves open the possibility that he might receive a glance from the eyes of that world, whether those eyes belong to God or something/someone else. I would frame this lack in the terms of

Merleau-Ponty’s écart, a gap that, for Welsh, opens up between what he believes about his place in the world and what he wants to believe about it. Similarly, The Thin Red Line itself has felt this lack, this gap, between the bloody conflict of war and the idyllic world of nature, and between its experience of the visible world and the invisible world as evidenced by the voice-overs. The main difference between Welsh and the film’s experience is that Welsh has not seen the other world, this other reality, but the film has encountered the other world from its onset and showed it to me; thus, every time the film falls back into its “real” world, I experience this lack along with the film, as I have received a glimpse of and from the invisible world. Train’s voice-over opens up the space of the other world, and, in the final moments of the film, it brings Welsh into focus to highlight the reciprocity of being and Being in the film’s religious experience.

Beyond this iconogenic move and the summative nature of Train’s voice-over, the final lines of his voice-over venture into mystical territory, as the film reveals a moment

114 of Transcendence in a visionary sequence. As Train begins these final lines, the film is looking straight down into the ocean water, as it churns with the wake of a patrol boat.

The film slowly tilts up as Train speaks, framing the island in an extreme long shot over the expanse of the sea. The film rocks with the boat, suggesting this could be a point-of- view shot from a soldier, but when connected to Train’s voice-over, this final moment takes on a different, more mystical tenor. “Oh my soul, let me be in you now. Look out through my eyes, look out at the things you made—all things shining,” whispers Train, expressing a desire to see with the eyes of his soul, to see the glory. In this shot, the film embodies his request, floating over the shimmering water, seemingly unmoored to person or place, looking out at the things that it has made. Here, Train’s iconogenic voice brings forth the film’s soul, produced through its relationship to the material world, and the film creates a religious experience for itself and me through this soul and its perceptions. For me, this experience that the film creates recalls the beginning of the Biblical creation narrative: “And the Spirit of God was hovering over the face of the waters” (Gen. 1:2

ESV). In hearing Train’s voice-over, the film has a religious experience, and, with that experience, it reveals its experience of Being, beginning by hovering over the waters and then calling forth the final images of film.

Hearkening back to The Thin Red Line’s opening sequence, a dissolve transitions into the final three shots of the film, pointing out the permeability of these diegetic borders as well as marking a move into the paradox of the immanent Transcendent. The first shot shows three indigenous children paddling canoes down the river, as the film observes them in a long shot, hovering over the river much in the way it was in the

115 previous shot. From here, the film cuts to a close-up of two, brightly colored parrots, before cutting to the final shot of the film, a green sprout poking its way out of a coconut on the beach. Train’s iconogenic voice has revealed the wellspring of Being beneath the world throughout the film, and the film responds with a vision of that world as seen through its soul—unmarred by war, full of unexpected beauty, and ready to grow and thrive. The sprout, pushing its way through the exterior of the coconut, serves as an apt visual metaphor for the film’s religious experiences, as the film has experienced them as ruptures and interruptions of the diegesis, new perspectives from the source of Being. It seems, at the end, that the film, more so than its characters, has experienced Being, and, importantly, found it through the immanence of the world. Through the film’s expression of this immanence, I gain access to the world that it sees and reveals to me. The film sees the Being of this world as a part of and apart from the world it has experienced over the course of the film, even as moments of the enchanted world slip in and out of the diegesis. That world, the one revealed by the dramaturgical voice, exists at the bottom of the film and its reality, breaking through most noticeably in these voice-overs and transforming an ordinary voice into an extraordinary one, and an ordinary world into an extraordinary one.

Rather than searching for Transcendence, the voice-overs in The Tree of Life take it for granted from the onset of the film. If The Thin Red Line’s religious experiences came from Being breaking into its diegesis, The Tree of Life’s are found through a mystical involvement with that Being, indicated by how the film positions itself and its spectators in relation to the film’s diegesis. As I have written elsewhere, the voice-overs

116 in The Tree of Life place spectators in the position of God, encouraging them to listen with God’s ears.29 The film allows viewers to access this type of religious experience, because it is having the experience of being embodied in the world as an all-knowing, all- powerful being. After an epigraph from the book of Job, the acousmatic whispers of Jack

O’Brien (Sean Penn) open The Tree of Life: “Brother…Mother…it was they who led me to your door.” As his voice speaks, a mysterious orange light dances in the middle of the black screen, and we hear, behind his voice, the sounds of wind, ocean, and seagulls— sounds that foreshadow the end of the film, a sequence that suggests heaven or an afterlife of sorts. Is Jack already speaking from that place, from beyond the world as we know it? Many of adult Jack’s voice-overs, along with several of his mother’s (Jessica

Chastain), operate from this ambiguous diegetic space, creating a vast web of interpretation for the images that are paired with these voice-overs. For example, what does this orange light signify? It might be the shimmer of Jack’s soul, a glimmer of pre- creation matter, or a flicker of apocalyptic fire—the voice-over offers us no interpretative help, and, in fact, only creates more possibilities. Similar images, with different colored lights and taking up different portions of the screen, return throughout the film; we can think of these shots as moments when the film enters into a mystical experience in which sound and image come together to reach beyond diegetic boundaries and explore spiritual possibilities that exist outside of the “real” world.

The very next sequence in The Tree of Life offers an initial glance at the film’s mysticism: Mrs. O’Brien’s voice-over enters, as we see shots of her as a young child,

29 See my article “What Does God Hear? Terrence Malick, Voice-Over, and The Tree of Life.” 117 interacting with animals and nature. Yet, she does not describe what is happening or begin a narrative, rather her voice-over lays out a central conflict of the film, one deeply related to the religious experiences of the film: “The nuns taught us there are two ways through life: the way of nature and the way of grace.” The film jumps ahead in time, showing us her and her family in Texas in the 1950s (where the majority of the film takes place), as her voice-over continues. Finally, the voice-over ends right before she receives the news that her second son, R.L. (Laramie Eppler), has died while serving in the military. What the film does visually and sonically during this voice-over sets the stage for how the film presents both its narrative and religious experience over the rest of its running-time. First, this sequence demonstrates the film’s approach to time, one that seemingly disregards narrative continuity and linear progression. Not only does the film jump forward (and eventually, back) in time, but it represents this fragile, fractured sense of time and narrative through numerous jump cuts and moments of overlapping sound.

The Tree of Life is a film obsessed with memory, and the filmic body expresses the fragile nature of memory through its disconnected narrative and fractured formal characteristics. Second, throughout this sequence, several shots appear that have no relevance to Mrs. O’Brien’s voice-over or to what has been shown thus far, and these moments of revelation, as I will call them, further serve to disrupt narrative continuity, just as they will continue to do over the course of the film.30 When we connect these formal choices to the content of the voice-over, the construction of the film’s religious experience begin to come into focus.

30 The fourth chapter explores these “moments of revelation” more fully. 118

In discussing the differences between the way of grace and the way of nature,

Mrs. O’Brien’s voice-over frames the tension that Jack and his father (Brad Pitt) struggle with throughout the film, and in this opening sequence, the images that accompany this voice-over affirm the way of grace and its specific manner of viewing the world. Early in the sequence, close-ups of a field of sunflowers interrupt other shots of a young Mrs.

O’Brien as she begins to describe grace: “Grace doesn’t try to please itself. It accepts being slighted, forgotten, disliked.” These images point to the beauty of the world, a kind of natural grace that seems disconnected from the voice-over or the narrative, similar to the kind of moments that pop up in The Thin Red Line. Similarly to Train’s voice, it is possible that Mrs. O’Brien’s voice is operating iconogenically, calling forth these images of natural beauty by the power of the acousmêtre, but I would argue that there is another option: these images are breaking upon the film’s perception and experience much like a vision, and her voice makes up a part of this mystical experience for the film. “They taught us that no one who loves the way of grace ever comes to a bad end,” she says, over a top-down shot of a waterfall, as the camera slowly tracks forward. Is this the film’s conception of a possible “bad end” or another reminder of the way of grace? While this shot is open for interpretation—as are many others in the film—it very clearly marks a mode of filmic, rather than human, perception, and coming at the end of a rather quotidian sequence (if there were such a thing in The Tree of Life) of the O’Brien family playing in their yard, it also signals the constant flood of memories and images that break into the film’s experiences and perceptions. The final line of this voice-over, “I will be true to you, whatever comes,” begins as the camera tracks up through the branches of a

119 tree, focused on the sun, highlighting one of the symbols of the film that frequently interrupts the diegesis. The final phrase of the voice-over (“whatever comes”) can be heard just after a fade to black cuts to a low to the ground tracking shot of a walkway before a quick tilt up brings the O’Brien’s door and the man delivering the letter about her son’s death into the frame. This jump ahead in time, while signaled conventionally throughout the fade-out, nevertheless is jarring due to the lack of a fade-in and the shaky forward track of the camera, almost as if the film knew what the letter contained and marked the anxiety and horror of the event in advance. Similarly, the addressee of Mrs.

O’Brien’s voice-over shifts in these final moments from a more general “you” to the

“you” that Jack addresses in the film’s first voice-over.

Like some of the voice-overs in The Thin Red Line, the voice-overs in The Tree of

Life speak from a timeless present, addressing their pleas and concerns to a “you” that exists elsewhere, outside or on the outskirts of the diegesis. In The Tree of Life, it quickly becomes clear to me that the “you” is God, and that the film perceives its characters’ conversation with this God, conversations that almost always occur in voice-over

(Laamanen 17). By hearing these conversations, the filmic body occupies, in some small way, a similar position as God, and these conversations lead to religious experiences that manifest themselves in the film as recursions into God’s memory. Speaking of God’s

“memory,” as it were, presents some philosophical problems, depending on how one conceives of God, but it also provides an interesting interpretive lens through which to view The Tree of Life and its experiences. Given the Christian and Catholic themes, motifs, and settings of The Tree of Life along with its non-linear narrative, it seems that

120 the film conceives of God’s relationship to time in a similar manner to other prominent

Christian thinkers. As C.S. Lewis puts it, “Almost certainly God is not in time. His life does not consist of moments following one another…[it] is always the Present for Him”

(Mere 167). While the filmic body, like the human body, experiences time and the progression of events, the filmic body of The Tree of Life strives to free itself from time through mystical experiences and moments that approximate what it might be like to be an entity that exists outside of the flow of time.

The starting point for these experiences are, of course, the voice-overs that speak in the “timeless present” and form a vital part of the film’s interaction with elements that are in an ambiguous relation to its diegesis/reality. In addition to hearing these voices, the film sees images that interrupt the narrative, dreamlike images of water, earth, and sky— to name just a few—that seem to appear and disappear randomly. Yet, if the film is hearing and seeing the world as God might, are these voices and images disrupting the film’s world or adding to it? Is this even a helpful distinction to attempt to parse out? The

Tree of Life eschews linearity precisely because, from its beginning, it is experiencing time as always present, unable to be reduced to a series of chronological moments.

Possibly even more so than the human body, the filmic body is immersed in and structured by time, and its attempts to experience time as God does come across as cracks and fissures in the foundation of conventional narrative time, threatening to break apart in a kind of mysterium tremendum in the face of the Holy. This experience of time is passed on to me, and I am left to make sense of the fractured images and sounds flowing past me. Will I give myself over to this experience or resist? Can I follow the film into this

121 mystical experience, suspending, ever briefly, my grip on temporality? The religious experience of The Tree of Life is notable precisely because it attempts the impossible, revealing the limits of the filmic body and my body in its religious experience.

Music

“Between hymns we drank from the bottle. Our voices were strong. It was a good night to sing and we sang for all we were worth, as if we’d been saved.” — Tobias Wolff

Of all the sonic elements of cinema (and, arguably, life), music lends itself most readily to explorations of religion and spirituality. A constant of religious ceremonies and rituals, music is routinely invoked as a means of accessing the divine, of reaching into an ineffable space beyond mundane reality. Film music is uniquely poised to take advantage of this facet of music thanks to its ability to easily transgress diegetic borders. Non- diegetic music, often unintentionally, calls attention to a reality outside of or beneath the film’s reality; more generally, all film music retains a tinge of the mystical through its often ambiguous relation to the diegesis. I will consider film music as a gateway to religious experience by looking at non-diegetic music and music that relates ambiguously to the diegesis. Often signaling the religious experience of the film, film music acts upon the audience in a similar manner, drawing them into the religious experience that the film undergoes. Kutter Callaway, in his book Scoring Transcendence, provides a powerful

122 argument for film music’s ability to provide “an occasion of revelation” or “an encounter” with religious experience; furthermore, he makes the more audacious point that this function might be one of film music’s primary roles (176). Following Callaway,

I also understand film music as a substantial force that can create a film and viewer’s religious experience, by allowing the viewer the opportunity to actively participate in this experience. Rather than seeing film music as manipulative, just another trick of the apparatus to suture the viewer into passive acceptance, I consider film music under the umbrella of the larger phenomenological paradigm I articulated in my first chapter, one in which the viewer and film enter into an active, embodied relationship with each other.

Analysis of music has tended to exist on the outskirts of film studies, and by the time scholars began to pay more attention to it, apparatus theory and psychoanalytic approaches to film were in vogue, leading to a pessimistic view of music’s function in film, particularly mainstream narrative film. Claudia Gorbman and her 1987 book,

Unheard Melodies, offers a prime example of how this branch of film studies considered film music: “Film music, participating as it does in a narrative, is more varied in its content and roles; but primary among its goals, nevertheless, is to render the individual an untroublesome viewing subject: less critical, less ‘awake’’’ (5). Elsewhere Gorbman compares music to “the hypnotist’s voice” and claims that it “greases the wheels of the cinematic pleasure machine,” suggesting that it operates upon the spectator to replace her subjectivity with that of the film—the implication being, of course, that the film’s subjectivity reinforces a dominant, oppressive ideology (6, 69). This view of the cinematic experience and of film music drastically impoverishes the spectator’s

123 relationship with the filmic body and restricts interpretation by insisting that the only analysis that understands the “reality” of the cinematic experience involves ideological arguments. Music forms an essential part of film’s emotional appeal and connection with viewers, and, furthermore, emotion and feeling forms an essential part of religious experience. Indeed, Callaway offers a compelling argument for the importance of emotion and film music in religious experience: “We may even suggest that film music does not simply excite or inspire our emotions; it in-Spirits them” (126).31 The emotions of the film’s body, often in-spired and/or in-Spirited through music, allow me to come alongside the film’s religious experience and experience it as my own.

A constant presence in The Tree of Life, non-diegetic music makes meaning and imbues magic into some sequences that might otherwise be unintelligible. For Chion, music is “a machine for manipulating space and time,” so much so that he calls it “the turntable of space and time, the place of places that transcends all material barriers” (Film

409-10). The now infamous “creation” sequence in The Tree of Life offers an example of non-diegetic music structuring a kaleidoscope of dizzyingly incoherent images and simultaneously transcending some of the “material barriers” that would stand in the way of the film or us having this experience. The piece of music that begins this sequence is

“Lacrimosa,” a track from Zbigniew Preisner’s Requiem for My Friend, which was originally intended to be a film score for a Krzysztof Kieślowski film before

Kieślowski’s unexpected death. While this song and its melancholic mood seems out of

31 Callaway here is referencing the Holy Spirit, the third member of the Trinity in orthodox Christian thought, a Spirit that dwells among the people, working in and through material objects and people to reveal God to them. Therefore, he sees film music as a place where that Spirit can imbue our emotions with spiritual/divine force and truly bring about a religious experience. 124 place for a sequence depicting the beginning of the world, remember that, earlier in the film, the family receives word that their middle child has died unexpectedly while serving in the military. Thus, the film responds to the tragedy in its diegesis with non-diegetic music, even as the music ushers the film into a mystical vision which, I would argue, we can consider as God's response to the questions from Job that begin the film—questions reiterated by various characters in voice-over during the film. I have argued elsewhere that while “God remains silent,” the film “poses creation itself as the answer” to these questions, doing so in a decidedly transcendent manner (18). Callaway picks up on the otherworldly, supernatural tone of this music and sequence as well, positing that “this music is intentionally ‘supradiegetic,’ for it issues from a location that transcends the world of the characters and the world of the audience” (187). In this manner, the entire sequence acts as a diegetic and non-diegetic response to the questions of pain and suffering that often mark people’s spiritual journeys.

Swirls of light and dancing smoke open this sequence: there is no form, no narrative here. As these evocative images flash by on screen, the volume of “Lacrimosa” slowly creeps up, its Latin lyrics (a language often associated with religion thanks to

Roman Catholicism) becoming audible.32 Interspersed with the music and images comes the Mother’s voice-over, asking questions that this sequence replies to in an oblique, abstract way. The images that flow past are locked in a constant battle between light and darkness, while reds and crimsons permeate the screen, indicators of primordial fire and

32 The language of Latin here speaks to this idea of a religious experience and another world. Latin is colloquially known as a “dead language,” one that is not spoken anymore, but in this instance it resonates from beyond the grave, giving life to the past, a past impossible for humans to access. 125 energy. Eventually, the universe is born, and an object discernable as a galaxy takes up the center of the frame, white light radiating outwards; during this moment, the vocals reach a high point, and they will rise higher still as the sequence continues. This shift in vocal register also signals the importance of this particular moment, working alongside the appearance of the universe and the brightness of the light to provide structure to this sequence. Yet, even while it provides structure, the vocal shift also invests the scene with an emotional power, one that strives to match the significance of this moment in time, or, should I say, the beginning of time. The Tree of Life’s depiction of this non-linearity might be more unusual and more mystical than other films, but it is worth noting that any film that contains something as simple as a flashback participates in this same desire to step outside the confines of time and be free. Likewise, the camera never stops moving during the first part of this sequence, dancing through the burgeoning cosmos like a lively sprite, ever curious and free of its restraints—not unlike some of the experiences one may have in a dream or vision. Eventually “Lacrimosa” fades and loud, deep sounds begin to thunder, as fire and lava come together to form the material Earth. By fading out

“Lacrimosa” at this point, the film strengthens its connection to the ethereal images and realm that we just experienced, but, even as that ethereal realm fades, the film replaces it with a vision of the world that connects the spiritual and the material through its editing and further non-diegetic music.

After “Lacrimosa” completely fades out, The Tree of Life, minus some sounds of nature and a few lines of voice-over, goes silent, musically speaking, for almost four minutes. The sounds of nature have taken over the sounds of the heavens, symbolized by

126

“Lacrimosa,” but the film continues its spiritual experience, accelerating through the formation of the earth, as land appears and water rushes across the land. The next non- diegetic music we hear comes as the film circles pools of bubbling water, as low ominous tones reverberate. The film then cuts to a series of shots that show cells beginning to divide, the basic building blocks of life coming together before our eyes. Slowly, the music changes tenor, the weightiness of the previous music lightened and transformed, as the film marks this as a significant moment. Again, the non-diegetic music performs a difficult task during this sequence: on one hand, it provides some measure of continuity and structure to the seemingly random images; on the other hand, it also imbues them with a sense of spirituality and transcendence in my experience, accustomed as I am to hearing this type of music in church connected to spirituality and the divine. In another striking moment, a meteor drifts towards earth, and the non-diegetic music of a chorus singing grants a tinge of beauty to an otherwise devastating moment. The non-diegetic music helps ground the film's narrative in the world while simultaneously encouraging me to participate in the religious experience of the film—an experience that can even see beauty in the destructive force of a gigantic rock smashing into the earth. The film beautifully elaborates on the intertwining of immanence and transcendence in the final section of the creation sequence, in which we see the formation of Jack’s family over a condensed period of time.

A voice-over from adult Jack leads into this sequence, asking a question, and in the same way that the creation sequence was a reply to his Mother’s questions, the sequence that follows responds to Jack’s question: “When did you first touch my heart?”

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The answer to this question is twofold, and to provide these answers, the film makes a number of complex linear and formal moves. The first answer to Jack’s question is suggested by the non-diegetic music (“Siciliana da Antiche Danza Ed Aria Suite III” by

Ottorino Respighi) that begins to play once his Mother and Father appear on screen, as the film shows their courtship. The joy and earthiness of this track, originally composed for the lute, suggests that Jack’s heart was first touched by God (or whomever he addresses) before he was born, in the loving embrace of his parents; in other words, he was known and loved before he existed. Again, the film subtly pushes against linearity here, encouraging the audience to view Jack as God might, in part because the film already sees him in this manner. In a stunning series of shots, we see the process of childbirth, symbolized abstractly by the film as a child leaving a small room and swimming up towards the world beyond the womb. While the stark white of the hospital room suggests a sanitized, abstract notion of childbirth, the film immediately plunges us back into materiality once Jack is born through a series of shots that puts touch front and center. We see his small foot, encased in the hands of his parents, and in a number of shots that follow, hands are everywhere, touching and being touched, as the film limits itself to the point-of-view of the newly born Jack and his experience of the world, primarily understood through touch. Still in the throes of its vision, the film gives us the opportunity to return to a state we do not remember, granting us access to the intimate, thrilling moments of childhood. The film stays low to the ground, eschewing conventional shot distances and framing, and often uses shallow focus to create its version of a baby’s experience. In all of this, a strong sense of joy is conveyed first by the

128 music, resounding from another realm, as it provides the first part of the answer to Jack’s questioning.

The second answer to Jack’s question comes from the manner in which The Tree of Life has ordered the creation sequence. The order in which the various elements of the universe appear on screen closely parallels the Genesis creation narrative, in which God creates different things on different days.33 If we follow the order of Genesis, God creates humans last, on the sixth day, and this sequence of Jack’s birth and early childhood comes at the end of the creation sequence. A curious series of shots in this sequence helps form this interpretation: an elderly man looks straight into the camera and says,

“Goodnight, we’ll see you in five years.” Several shots follow that show the children going to bed and lights being turned off, after which the film transitions into the larger, more temporally stable section of young Jack’s life. In this direct address to the audience,

The Tree of Life suggests that what the audience has just seen can be read as taking place over the span of one day, the sixth day of creation.34 This means that this sequence represents the creation of humanity, yet does so in a way that conflates time and space to suggest the malleability of time and space in God’s hands. The film places Jack’s birth and life into cosmic history, giving it a particular context, but also using it as a metaphor for the creation of humanity as a whole. In doing so, the film (perhaps acting as God) answers Jack’s question by saying, “When did I not touch your heart?” In the film’s

33 An exception to this might be the fourth day, when the sun and moon were created in the Genesis narrative, but the film doesn’t seem to show this in the same manner as the creation of the seas and animals. 34 By arguing that Jack’s early childhood constitutes a “day” of creation, The Tree of Life steps into debates about the whether or not the days in Genesis are literal 24 hour days, and firmly points toward a symbolic view of the days. 129 religious experience, time has ceased to flow linearly, and, outside of that flow, the film is able to see Jack’s place inside and outside of time—so much so, in fact, that the distance between the beginning of the universe and his birth have evaporated. In this infinite reservoir of Being, there was never a time when Jack’s heart was not touched, but, importantly, the film also shows us the immanent, material ways in which his life was touched with the non-diegetic music playing an important role in establishing those emotions.

Music is perfectly suited to reaching through diegetic borders to speak to the film’s diegetic world, but it can also reach the other way, moving out of the diegetic world to impact the film’s viewers, an ability of film music that Callaway calls

“revelatory,” in that “[it] has the potential for transforming us” (179). Music operates, then, in both spaces of “reality,” that of the film and that of the viewer, and occasionally it crosses these lines in moments that provide opportunities for film and viewer to experience Being. Even more radically, I return to Chion’s thoughts on non-diegetic music: “We can never be certain that the characters do not hear the [non-diegetic] songs.

Here we must enter into a magical logic—cine-magic” (Film 425). This “cine-magic” opens up the film’s world to a host of religious and spiritual experiences that are expressed through music. The films of Paul Thomas Anderson often open up the border between their non-diegetic music and the diegesis, making it seem like the music is commenting on or driving the action of the film. For me, the most striking example of this occurs in Magnolia (1999), a film that weaves together a number of storylines over the course of its narrative, playing with the idea of ensemble films.

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Even though Magnolia pokes some fun at the ensemble movie idea, it nonetheless uses that form to deliver a powerful, coherent plot about the nature of coincidence. The film’s opening sequence makes this message evident, as a voice-over narrator details some strange tales that seem to hinge on a number of bizarre coincidences. This sequence, never returned to or referenced again in the film, ends with the narrator uttering these lines: “And it is in the humble opinion of this narrator that this is not just something that happened. This cannot be one of those things…this was not just a matter of chance, hah. These strange things happen all the time.” This voice, who we never hear again, has set the stage for our experience of the film by insisting that the world does not run on chance or coincidence, but that some force binds people and events together in surprising, unexpected ways. The music in the film supports the narrator’s claims, as Callaway points out: “[The underscoring] indicates the presence of a structuring force that is inexplicably drawing these characters toward integration and, potentially, redemption”

(140). Later in the film, Magnolia uses a song by Aimee Mann, “Wise Up,” to link the characters in its diegesis, as the song plays during a montage of the characters; however, this sequence does not place “Wise Up” in the background, passively connecting the characters through the power of sound to unify image, but the characters sing along with the song, even though it has no apparent source in the diegesis. Here, Chion’s speculation becomes a reality: the characters do hear the non-diegetic music and, more shockingly, they sing along, truly blurring diegetic boundaries.

The music starts as Claudia (Melora Waters) sits on a couch in her apartment, a couple of lines of cocaine in front of her on the coffee table. When the music begins,

131 despite its low volume, it seems to be non-diegetic, but, after Claudia snorts the lines, she begins to cry and sing along with the song, which could suggest that the source of “Wise

Up” comes from off-screen. As she begins to sing, the camera slowly zooms in on her, before a cut to a hallway, during which the camera continues moving (this time a

Steadicam track and pan) to bring Jim (John C. Reilly) into the frame. Importantly, the music is still playing, and Jim picks up singing where Claudia left off, as both the camera movement and the (non)diegetic music join these two shots—and characters—together. If one has been following the narrative of Magnolia, it will come as no shock that the film is connecting Claudia and Jim, as they previously encountered each other and formed a romantic connection. What is surprising, however, is the fact that Jim is signing along with the music, calling into question its relationship to the diegesis in the previous shot.

Next, we cut to a long shot of Jimmy Gator (Philip Baker Hall) and the camera moves again as soon as it cuts, a zoom in on Jimmy. He, like the others, begins to sing, but this time “Wise Up” sounds a little louder in the mix, like one would expect for a non- diegetic track. The film cuts again, this time to Donnie (William H. Macy) singing, the camera continuing the slow zoom in from the previous shots. The next shot shows Phil

Parma (Philip Seymour Hoffman) and Earl Partridge (Jason Robards), and begins with

Phil singing in the foreground until the camera tracks past him and slightly cranes up to bring Earl into the center of the frame—despite being in a coma for most of the film, he also starts singing. An inverse camera movement, a track to the right instead of left, carries through the next shot, one of Earl’s wife, Linda (Julianne Moore), singing along in her car, framed by the driver’s side window. Another tracking shot follows this one,

132 the camera moving from behind Frank Mackey’s (Tom Cruise) car, before finally framing him through his car window, as it did with Linda in the previous shot. The final shot of the sequence reverses the pattern of camera movement, zooming out from a close- up of Stanley (Jeremy Blackman), as he sings the final words of the song. The music acts as a sound bridge into the next shot, and, in doing so, places itself squarely in the non- diegetic realm to open and end this sequence. Up until this point, Magnolia has been a relatively conventional film, and this sequence marks a turning point in how the film relates to its reality—in other words, the film undergoes a religious experience in this moment, shaping what occurs in the rest of the film.

While this sequence stands apart from the film in many ways, it also transitions the film from realism to what we might call magical realism—or, perhaps, following

Chion, cine-magical realism. Similar to the way magical realism incorporates otherworldly elements into largely realistic narratives, Magnolia messes with the usually clear-cut boundary between diegetic and non-diegetic music, lending an air of the fantastic to this sequence. The blurring of the boundary between diegetic and non- diegetic destabilizes the film, breaking down conventions and opening up a space for the non-diegetic to intrude on the diegesis; similarly, this diegetic transgression destabilizes the viewer, preparing her for what is to come in the film and forcing her into a moment of active contemplation. In Magnolia, this destabilization becomes clear after the “Wise

Up” sequence, as frogs begin to fall from the sky instead of rain, a bizarre turn of events

133 that combines Biblical imagery and cine-magical realism in fairytale fashion.35 The boundary between diegetic and non-diegetic fractured, the film’s diegesis now begins to blur the boundary between the natural and the supernatural and between reality and magic. Where do these frogs come from? The film never offers an answer to the intrusion of the unnatural into its realistic world, because, I would argue, the film has allowed this diegetic intrusion to take place with the “Wise Up” sequence, which signals the film's first steps into a magical, enchanted experience. The constant, restless camera movement of the sequence signals a search for meaning, for something that would make sense of all the “coincidences” that connect these disparate characters. In the end, the later rain of frogs and its effects only confirms what the “Wise Up” sequence has already demonstrated by joining the characters together in one song: they are connected by their shared humanity, a connection the film sees and hears through a religious experience of diegetic blurring.

I have used this sequence in my classes on film sound as an easy way to destabilize students’ expectations of how music in a film should operate. Most students are surprised, just as I was, when Claudia begins to sing along with the song, and without the context of the rest of the film, many of them dislike this sequence—they find it unrealistic, perhaps even gaudy. Maybe they don’t want this kind of surprise in their viewing experience, one that seems to materialize out of thin air, pushing back against a worldview that would cordon off the spiritual and magical from the material and real.

35 The Biblical imagery here belongs to the book of Exodus, where God sends ten plagues upon Egypt in order to convince the Pharaoh to let the Israelites go. Magnolia represents the second plague, a plague of frogs, described in Exodus 8:1-15. 134

Like the voice, music easily moves across a film’s diegetic border, erasing these distinctions in a flash and bringing to Magnolia the material effects of the frogs on the film’s world. Like literary magical realism, cine-magical realism relies on surprise and wonder to give its audience a chance to see the world from a new perspective that transforms the ordinary into the extraordinary. Tellingly, we learn of the frogs falling from the sky mostly through what we hear, as they drop behind Claudia, sounding larger and more solid than rain. The sound of dogs barking and frogs hitting different surfaces resounds in the next shot, as Phil stands, mouth agape, the film content to show us his expression and only let us listen for a few more moments, preparing us for a diegesis where everything has changed. Music has opened up the space for this event to happen and the film reminds us of that by easing us back into this new world with sound.

Sound

“Sound permeates and penetrates my bodily being.” — Don Ihde

Unlike music and the voice, sound has received scant attention in most scholarly works that consider film. I suspect that part of the reason for this connects to the difficulty of separating sound effects away from what Chion calls “synchresis,” that is,

“the spontaneous and irresistible weld produced between a particular auditory phenomenon and visual phenomenon when they occur at the same time” (Audio 63). In synchresis, the viewer perceives the two separate events as “a single phenomenon,” making sound effects, particularly synchronized ones, practically invisible to the viewer 135

(Film 492). Furthermore, most film sound effects attempt to provide “realistic” sound and, in this state, may pass by unnoticed as just another part of the diegesis. We usually only notice sound effects when they do not synch up with what we see on screen or they depart from our expectations of sonic “realism.” In the first case, most viewers would consider a lack of synchronization to be a mistake or error. In the second case, a filmmaker may abandon realistic sound effects to encourage humor, usually in animated films, or terror, like Bernard Herrmann’s famous use of violins to mimic screaming in

Psycho. Most sound effects in film are added in postproduction along with non-diegetic music and dialogue, often through “foley,” named after Jack Foley, a technique that finds a foley artist creating or adding sound effects to the film. As a result, almost all sound and dialogue in a film has no connection with what was filmed by the camera. Thus, in a very real sense, all of the film’s sound comes from a similarly ambiguous place as that of the acousmêtre. The film’s sonic reality is created at a different time than its visual reality, lending every sound effect a liminal quality, as the film patches together sources from different worlds into one unified experience.

Every footstep, every gust of wind, every sound that passes by unnoticed in a film is the product of a highly intentional process that bears a complex relationship to the filmic body and its perceptions. Moreover, these mundane effects add a layer of reality and materiality to the film that would not be present without them. Chion calls these

“aspects” of sound effects “materializing sound indices (MSI),” which “make palpable the materiality of [their] source and of the concrete conditions of [their] emission” to varying degrees (Film 480). In doing so, sound brings the diegetic world a sense of

136 reality, but that reality comes from outside the film’s world, and, occasionally, the sound has no connection whatsoever to the images seen on screen (e.g. the sound of a punch is actually a watermelon being smashed).36 Yet, even though sound does not issue forth from the image or the “original” recording, sound, synchresis operates within filmic perception to tie the sounds we hear to the images on screen. The filmic body creates its reality and perceptions of that reality, including its religious experience, through an immersion in and transformation of the quotidian, and sound effects play a large role in the film’s creation of the diegesis. Thus, I see no separation (other than how they grab viewers’ attention) between obvious, unrealistic sound effects and more subtle, realistic ones when it comes to considering the film’s religious experience.

The films of Andrei Tarkovsky are well known for their dream-like visuals and unique use of sound, where sound and music often seem to intrude upon the characters’ reality and directly impact their actions and mental states.37 Andrea Truppin describes the mystical nature of sound in Tarkovsky’s films: “Tarkovsky’s use of sound permits his film to travel smoothly through multiple and equally weighted layers of experience [that] flow simultaneously through one another without the rigid hierarchy that separates most filmic world into ‘reality’ and ‘fantasy’” (243). The ambiguous, liminal nature of sound in these films crosses diegetic boundaries with no regard for strict realism, routinely bringing the film into contact with an invisible reality, a reality that does not directly

36 As Chion points out in Film, A Sound Art: “Films rarely use the real sound (less loud and defined) of a punch, gunshot, or slamming door but instead translate the physical, psychological, even metaphysical impact of the action on the sender or receiver” (239). 37 I do not intend for this to be an auteuristic reading of these films, but most of the scholarship on them lies firmly in that camp, so I have had to adopt some of that language to incorporate these sources. 137 correlate with what we see on the screen. Some scholars see this use of sound as primarily psychological, revealing the inner thoughts and emotions of the film’s characters.38 While I do not dispute that reading of the sound in these films, I see this sound, particularly in its more “unrealistic” moments, as an expression of the film’s embodied experience—the film feels, just like the characters, and expresses its emotional and spiritual perceptions through these unusual sounds. Solaris and The Mirror, two of

Tarkovsky’s films that undergo religious experiences, express the liminal nature of these spiritual experiences in different, but connected ways through their soundscapes.

One such moment in Solaris comes in the first third of the film, before Kris

Kelvin (Donatas Banionis) leaves Earth for the Solaris station. Several shots of a busy highway lead into this scene, the sound of traffic quite loud in the mix, giving the shots a harsh, mechanical quality. The film cuts to a shot of the pond on Kelvin’s property, in black and white, and the sound of the traffic immediately ends with the cut. This jarring transition from loud traffic to peaceful night is mirrored by the change from color to black and white, a stark assertion of the differences between the city and technology and the country and nature. The filmic body, perhaps unlike our own, seems unfazed by this transition, sweeping a slow pan over the surface of the pond and taking in the solitude and sounds of the dusk. The low hum of insects murmurs throughout this sequence, a subtle reminder of the world that these characters exist within, and a foreshowing of the low sonic rumble of the Ocean that will become important once Kelvin takes up residence on the space station. As this sequence continues, Kelvin begins burning some

38 Smith and Žižek assert this about the sound in these films. 138 old documents and, interestingly, although we see them burn in close-up—these slow moving close-ups of objects show up in many Tarkovsky films—we don’t hear the crackle of fire or anything other than the low hum of nature. This continues inside his house, and while we hear his footsteps and some other sounds, the sounds of the exterior

(crickets chirping, for example) seem louder than those we can connect with the action on screen. The film’s perception of nature (perhaps the closest connection to the spiritual in the film) overrides conventional sonic perception here, creating an interesting effect that makes us wonder where “reality” exists for the film and how the film perceives this reality.

In this sequence, the film is listening to the “voices” of “material things,” voices that, according to Don Ihde, are “all too easy to miss” for us as humans (Listening 190).39

The film, here and elsewhere, elevates these voices through MSI that “immerse us in the here-and-now,” something Chion claims is a trademark of Tarkovsky’s films (Audio

116). The “reinforcement with materializing indices” (such as the constant hum of nature and the crickets chirping) that takes place in this sequence “contributes to the creation of a universe, and can take on metaphysical meaning” (Chion, Audio 116). This world- building is, of course, one of sound’s largest contributions to both filmic perception and our experiences as viewers: it gives us a sense of the space of the film and how the film will perceive and interact with that space.40 However, film sound is slippery, liable to

39 As Tarkovsky himself says, “Above all, I feel that the sounds of this world are so beautiful in themselves that if only we could learn to listen to them properly, cinema would have no need of music at all” (162). 40 A delightful example of how sound helps construct filmic perception of reality is the Japanese film Tampopo, where the unrealistic sound effects undergird the whimsical nature of the film, while the visceral sound of eating, drinking, etc. drives home the film’s pleasure in the act of eating and the materiality of food. 139 detach itself from the diegesis at any moment even as it functions to make us aware of what is happening within the film’s world. Stefan Smith points out this tendency of film sound, particularly in Tarkovsky’s films, suggesting that he “uses sound in order to define place, whether that be literal, psychological or existing as some kind of parallel reality” (41). In this sequence, both as a result of the sudden sonic shift and the visual shift from color to black and white, Solaris hints that it may already be inhabiting this parallel reality, as, at the very least, its aural perceptions point to a different facet of that world than we might expect. Slavoj Žižek, speaking of Solaris and other Tarkovsky films, claims that the “natural sounds” in these films function in an “ambiguous way,” making “their status...ontologically undecidable...as if they were still part of the

‘spontaneous’ texture of non-intentional natural sounds, and simultaneously already somehow ‘musical,’ displaying a deeper spiritual structuring principle” (“The Thing”). In contrast, Truppin argues that sound in these films takes on a distinctly spiritual tone: “All sounds of the world can have meaning; all sounds can be signs. By extension, learning to hear the world is akin to coming into contact with the spiritual realm” (237). Thus, even sounds that should concretize reality can call that reality into question, particularly in the case of cinematic perception, where that perception can reveal a different, possibly spiritual reality.

In creating a reality that moves alongside (or perhaps undergirds) conventional reality, the MSI in this sequence offer a more ordinary type of religious experience than the voices of The Thin Red Line and The Tree of Life. The religious experience highlighted by this sequence and its sound is deeply imbricated within the material, both

140 in its emphasis on the material world and its striving to transcend that world through, not in spite of, its embodied materiality. Žižek highlights the material and its connection to the spiritual in a similar reading of Tarkovsky’s films:

The ultimate Tarkovskian spiritual experience takes place when a subject is lying

stretched out on the earth's surface, half submerged in stale water; Tarkovsky’s

heroes do not pray on their knees, with their heads turned upwards, towards

heaven; instead they listen intensely to the silent palpitation of the humid earth.

(“The Thing”)

But more than just the heroes of these films, the films themselves lie face down on the ground, their eyes and ears buried in the earth, impossible to extract from the physicality of the world, and, in doing so, bring me along with them, plunging my own face into the dirt. For Žižek, this “materialist” reading as well as moments like the scene we just considered bring a “dilemma” of Tarkovsky’s cinema to the surface—a decision whether to read the films as supporting transcendence or immanence: “These magic moments, in which Nature itself seems to coincide with art, lend themselves, of course, to the obscurantist reading…but also to the opposite, materialist reading” (“The Thing”). While

Žižek poses no answer to this dilemma, he does seem to suggest that there is an irreconcilable abyss between these positions. Is there no middle way between this binary, one that integrates both the spiritual and the material? More importantly, what does

Solaris itself have to say about experiencing the spiritual (or Spirit) in and through the material?

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In many ways, this is the central question of Solaris’ narrative, especially once

Kelvin reaches the space station and his late wife Khari (Natalya Bondarchuk) appears to him in material form. Khari first shows up with a cut from a slow zoom in on a sleeping

Kelvin’s face to an extreme close-up of her lips and nose which takes up the left half of the frame; this cut also shifts the film from black and white to color. The film slowly zooms out from her face, mirroring the motion that led into the cut in the shot prior, while the insistent hum of the station—of space itself? Of Kelvin’s psyche?—continues in the background, a constant presence that exists at the edges of the film’s perception. Here, the shift from B&W to color along with the extreme close-up of Khari’s face signals the importance of this moment to the film’s pursuit of a via media that integrates the spiritual and the material. Khari, we will learn, is apparently a “visitor” sent to the station by the

Ocean, re-created from Kelvin’s memories. She exists as a real, material being, but not real in the same sense that the original Khari was, leading to a number of complications and philosophical debates as the film’s narrative continues. However, the film itself and its experience of her does not appear to be overly interested in whether or not Khari is

“real” in the latter sense, but it focuses its attention on her materiality and how that connects with the ineffable, metaphysical nature of her origin. The film lets us know that

Khari’s embodiment will be a focus with the very first shot of her, one that presents the tactile, haptic nature of the cinematic body to us as viewers. Jennifer Barker elaborates on this in her discussion of the “skin” of the filmic body: “The film’s skin is a complex amalgam of perceptive and expressive parts—including technical, stylistic, and thematic elements—coming together to present a specific and tactile mode of being in the world”

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(29). In this extreme close-up, the film draws attention to the tactile reality of Khari and its experience of that reality, almost as if it is caressing her, a soft light illuminating the right side of her face, the camera close enough to see the soft, fine hair of her face. This is an intimate shot, deeply connected to her bodily presence, one that establishes her materiality as paramount to her existence.

The film foregrounds Khari’s embodied nature, presenting its tactile experience of her through extreme close-ups of various parts of her body and of Kelvin’s hands in contact with her clothes and her skin. The most shocking and visceral example of both the film and Kelvin’s experience of Khari as a material, embodied being comes after

Kelvin thinks he has gotten rid of her by sending her off in a rocket; however, Khari returns that night, in a sepia sequence, which could suggest a dream state, as it does, occasionally, in another Tarkovsky film, Stalker. Yet, when Kelvin awakes in the harsh light of the morning, he finds her clothes, picks them up, and exits the room quickly—she is still there, as evidenced by what happens after Kelvin closes the door to his room. The camera slowly zooms in on his face, and a strange sound, like sheet metal blowing in the wind begins and the door behind him starts to shake. As the shot continues, the door vibrates more and more violently, and this metallic, electronic sound builds up, clearly not music, but also not a “realistic” sound effect. Similar to the violins that mimic screaming in Psycho, the electronic sound here rises to a shrill tone, the film expressing its emotion about Khari's actions. The sound reaches its peak as the film cuts to Khari bursting through the door, bloodied, as she has torn the metal apart with her own hands.

Here, although Khari only makes a few noises herself, the film suggests that this is a far

143 more trying ordeal through the non-diegetic (or is it?) sound. Likewise, her bloodied body further reinforces the tactile nature of Solaris, suggesting that even this being bleeds, and what follows these harrowing shots demonstrates how the film knits the material and spiritual together in the person of Khari.

Kelvin brings Khari back into the room and lays her on the bed, and it appears as if she is dead. The film lingers on a gruesome gash in her arm, zooming in to get even closer, emphasizing her embodiment and blood, the real leaking from her “unreal” body.

The camera tracks away from her arm to follow Kelvin into the dark bathroom, and as he enters and searches for something, we hear the sound of glass breaking, possibly from his frantic searching in the dark. Yet, the sound is conspicuous, perhaps even miraculous, and, as Kelvin leaves the bathroom and looks over at Khari, we see a sudden change in his demeanor, one that is revealed as the camera slowly tracks back over and zooms in on

Khari’s arm again—the cut has begun to mend, the bloody gash gone. Clearly, in the world of the film, this signals that Khari is something more than a human body, and the way this sequence has been presented emphasizes the significance of her body. But, for the film itself, is this not a miraculous moment, or at least a religious one? Since Kelvin brought Khari back into his room, there have been no cuts, so the filmic body has been present in the room with them, but the lingering close-ups on Khari’s injuries coupled with the slow tracks and zooms suggest that the film itself is having a hard time believing what it is seeing. The tracking shot to the right that brought Khari’s arm back into the frame hesitated briefly, almost unwilling to encounter the impossible. The glass breaking, the sound of which Kelvin does not register, resonates with the filmic body, a noise that

144 breaks into its consciousness. I cannot know whether the sound of glass breaking is diegetic or non-diegetic, and, once more, I am plunged into the ambiguity that breaks down the boundaries between the spiritual and the material. Here, the Transcendent makes its presence known through the immanence of Khari’s body, and does so in a way that affects the filmic body, both aurally and visually.

Widely considered one of Tarkovsky’s most symbolic and spiritual films, The

Mirror, like Khari’s body in Solaris, also steps into the nebulous, enchanted territory that exists between—or, if you will, connects—the spiritual and the material. One of the most interesting ways that The Mirror signals this complicated relationship is through sound and silence, evident in an early scene of the film where the sound of the wind signals this liminality. Barker addresses the power of the wind in this scene, and I want to build on her compelling analysis to bring out the spiritual experience present for the film in this moment. Barker takes this a step further and brings up the idea of “inspiration,” that is, how the film breathes and how, in its “literal, embodied act of inspiration,” it proceeds through the other three “dimensions” of touch—skin, musculature, and viscera—unifying that experience into something more than its constituent parts (146). Speaking of inspiration, both in a literal and metaphoric sense, Barker says, “It vacillates in the space between immanent and transcendent: it is embodied by a single subject, but at the same time it constitutes the bond between that subject and all others, as well as that subject's immersion in a world of materiality” (146). This vacillation should not be seen, I would argue, as a wishy-washy refusal to take a stance on the nature of reality and the world, but rather as an affirmation of the necessity of both the immanent and the transcendent to

145 the cinematic and human experience of the world, framed by Barker in the simple act of breathing. The Mirror uses sound to “in-spire,” to borrow again from Barker, a religious experience in itself and us as the audience.41

After the opening credits, the film cuts to a long shot of the Mother (Margarita

Terekhova), her back to the camera, sitting on a wooden fence that looks over a vast expanse of green fields in the distance. The film slowly tracks in on her, almost to the point where she no longer stays in the frame, and when it reaches that point, the track becomes a zoom, slowly zooming in on a man walking through the fields towards the

Mother, before stabilizing in an extreme long shot of the man. Along with the switch from a track to a zoom, the film’s focus shifts, as the Mother is now completely out of the frame. These shifts create an odd, distorting effect and, moreover, they happen when the man disappears behind a bush for a moment, an odd ripple in the film’s perceptions that signals the diegetic instability that will pervade the rest of The Mirror. Near the end of this shot, a male voice-over enters, recounting the events of his early childhood, adding another level to the various layers of memory and reality that the film presents.42 The film then cuts to a close-up of the Mother, her face in the bottom half of the frame, before panning right to bring the woods into view. This pan seems unmotivated, as we only see the woods when it stops, but it reveals something more subtle, almost evanescent—the

41 Barker describes her use of the word “in-spire” like so: “The hyphen may help to maintain both senses of the word as well as the reversibility of the act itself. When a film has captured our attention completely, we are drawn in (in-spired) by it. Its body opens onto ours and invites, even inhales, us; we might even feel its pulse and breath as our own” (147). 42 This play with reality and mediation appears before the credits as well, as a character turns on a television, and what appears on that screen takes over the entire frame of the film. The shift to the B&W of the television program will occur throughout The Mirror as well, as the constantly shifting nature of the film makes it difficult to pin down any sort of stable diegesis. 146 wind, its movement visible among the weeds and the soft sound of the breeze audible underneath the voice-over. Like the wind in this shot, the filmic body reveals itself through its movements, whether those are airy breezes or powerful gusts. Like film sound, wind cannot be seen, yet its effects prove its material presence—it is (in)visible, an apt metaphor for the integration of the Transcendent and immanent that occurs in The

Mirror.

Throughout the remainder of this sequence, the camera continues to move, rarely settling into a stable position, highlighting the restless nature of the film’s body that flits and floats around the characters in an effort to figure out what is real within the scope of the film’s world. After the Mother and this man conclude their conversation, he leaves, walking back through the field, and a series of four shots demonstrates the powerful effects of the wind upon the cinematic body. The first is an extreme long shot of the man walking away through the field, perhaps from the Mother’s point of view. The shot lingers on him walking for a long time before he stops, and as the wind picks up, we see it rippling through the grass. The ripple reaches the man and he turns around, looking back at the camera, while the wind rushes forward until it reaches the foreground of the frame, the sound of its force rustling through the grass and bushes. After the wind dies down, the film cuts back to a close-up of the Mother looking off-screen, the trees behind her moving with the wind. The camera pans slightly to the right as she moves, before the film cuts back to a shot of the man in the field that is very similar to the initial shot of him. This extreme long shot, however, is framed ever so slightly differently than the first, and, this time, the wind blowing through the field begins almost at the point where the

147 man is standing, rather than farther away in the distance. The final shot of this sequence is a return to the close-up of shot two, which eventually becomes a lengthy tracking shot that follows the Mother to her house. Gerard Loughlin points out that “the wind is both natural and unnatural,” and that “it invests the meeting…with an import beyond its seeming inconsequence,” claiming another type of liminality for the wind between the natural and the unnatural (291). Likewise, Barker discusses how the wind leaks between these shots, suggesting a “temporal fissure” that plays with the time between the shots by using the wind to both unify and disrupt the flow of narrative time (152). The film deliberately opens up perceptual fissures in these shots, introducing a diegetic ambiguity that the wind itself highlights.

In this series of shots, Barker sees the filmic body and the relationship formed between it and us, as it becomes evident through and in the spaces between the shots. Of the apparent mismatch between the wind ceasing in the first shot and its effects being seen behind the Mother in the second, Barker notes that the wind “lingers, apparently, circulating in the space around her and in the space between cuts” (152). Perhaps here lies a gap or elision in time, only made evident by close attention to the film’s perceptions of its reality, yet, like the wind, sound circulates in these gaps, its invisible presence unifying the diegesis, even as what we see on screen threatens to break apart that unity. In many ways, it is precisely this tension and ambiguity between the visible and invisible—between the seen and heard—that makes this moment in the film so

148 powerful.43 Yet, in the cut between the second and the third shot of this series, the inverse occurs, as the sound of the wind carries us to the next shot, where the wind is already blowing past the man, a sort of in media res version of the first shot. Barker points out that “[this breeze] seems to have been blown into existence by the previous shot,” or, as I would suggest, it has been ushered in by the sound of the wind in the previous shot, a call and response of sorts, an echo, a breath resounding through the film’s body (152). Breath and wind, even in the human body, bear a sonic resemblance, and, in The Mirror, Barker sees the wind as both a “breathtaking moment” and “also an act of breath-taking, in which we both take in and are taken in by something larger” (152). In this moment, the film brings us into its reality in the first two shots, through the wind (its act of inspiration), only to call that reality into question in the final two shots, complicating the film’s relationship to its own reality and demonstrating the potential for the wind to create a religious experience.

The final two shots of this sequence mirror the first two, with a few slight differences, but they are similar enough to each other that I would argue they exist as echoes of the first two, blurring the lines between fantasy and reality, as Tarkovsky’s films often do, and destabilizing the diegesis to allow for the possibility that the film and viewer will have a religious experience. An echo, sonically speaking, is a reflection of sound waves back to the listener that arrives after a short delay, fainter and less

43 Of these moments, Loughlin suggests that “the wind moving the grass is not symbolic of the god passing by, of a spirit drawing near, or anything at all. It is simply the movement of the wind. But that is the movement of the god, for the religious imagination; not a sign of the god, but the god passing” (296). The god, the spirit, is there in the wind, not merely symbolized by it. Certainly this appears to be the case for The Mirror’s religious experience. 149 pronounced than the sound that originally caused the echo. The third shot of this sequence is an echo of the first, as it is substantially shorter, recreating the second half, give or take, of the first shot.44 Likewise, the fourth shot acts as an echo of the second, with an important exception—it continues on, almost as if the film stumbled during the second shot, and the fourth shot is making up for that mistake. At the very end of the second shot, the camera begins to pan right as the Mother starts moving that direction, before the film cuts to the third shot, interrupting that movement. The fourth shot then returns to the same framing as the second shot, but, this time, when the Mother moves, the camera pans and follows her. Barker suggests that the wind “moves…between the shots themselves, and between film and viewer,” moving “in a time and space that are beyond and beneath but also within the time and space made visible in each shot and inhabited by our viewing bodies, by the camera, and by the characters” (152). Building on Barker’s analysis, I see the film’s body perceiving and occupying a different time and space than the characters, in which events and movements echo and reflect, intertwined in the various relationships between multiple layers of reality and unreality that ultimately make disentangling the immanent and the Transcendent—the material and the spiritual—impossible. Embodied in its movement and sound in the world, but not a visible part of it, the wind flows between these realities, perhaps on one occasion, bringing an echo of an alternate reality with it, and, on another, swirling through the gaps in the diegesis, closing them and opening them at the same time. In this manner, the wind

44 Also, it could be possible to conceive of this as the film stuttering, a theme brought up minutes earlier in the sequence before the credits. 150 in The Mirror brings us into contact with a “larger system,” Being “which brings us all into being,” granting us access to Transcendence through its immanence (Barker 152).

Wind, the breath of this world, breathes into our souls as it points to the unseen materialities that knit together our experience.

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Chapter 3. Standing in the Gap: The Écart and the Cinematic Thin Place

“The gaps are the things…they are the fissures between mountains and cells the wind lances through, the icy narrowing fjords splitting the cliffs of mystery. Go up into the gaps. If you can find them; they shift and vanish too.” — Annie Dillard

Near the conclusion of Stagecoach, one of classical Hollywood’s most well- known Westerns, Ringo (John Wayne) and Dallas (Claire Trevor) walk silently down a street in one of the more questionable areas of Lordsburg, tension mounting as the film nears its climatic showdown between Ringo and the Plummer brothers. The sequence begins with a tracking shot that moves backwards, keeping Ringo and Dallas in a medium shot as they walk down the street, as sounds of the town’s revelry play in the background. We then cut to a tracking shot left of a saloon that slowly pans to the right as it moves past this establishment, keeping it in the frame, before the film cuts back to the previous shot of Ringo and Dallas walking. The tracking shot sandwiched between the one of Ringo and Dallas appears to be a point-of-view shot from the characters’ perspective as they walk by the saloon, at least until the fourth shot of the sequence.

Here, we cut to another tracking shot, the camera to the left of the characters, tracking them in long shot as they walk down the street and pass by the same saloon that we just saw in the point-of-view shot. The music playing from the “point-of-view” shot fades out, replaced by a different tune in an effort to mask the fact that Ringo and Dallas have 152 walked past the same saloon with the same woman sitting on its steps. I’ve seen

Stagecoach many times, and I had not noticed this moment until I was paying very close attention to this clip in an Introduction to Film Studies lecture. This “goof” is almost imperceptible thanks to clever editing and the shift in music to suggest that Ringo and

Dallas are moving forward in space past one saloon to the next. In typical classical

Hollywood fashion, the film attempts to erase this discontinuity from the viewer’s perception by employing techniques designed to mask the construction of the film.

Indeed, at the most basic level, we could simply explain this moment as a break in continuity created by a small set and a lack of attention to detail. I think seeing it that way would be missing out on a larger significance of this moment as it relates to the classical

Hollywood mode and to my larger project. Investigating this on a deeper level, we can pursue two similar, yet different interpretations.

Initially, this moment reveals that the film’s body can destabilize the diegesis even in one of the most carefully constructed and regulated film industries in film history.

After realizing that Ringo and Dallas have walked past the same saloon twice, we are left with two options to attempt to rationalize how the film has constructed this sequence if we want to keep the film squarely within classical Hollywood conventions.45 First, we could choose to believe that Ringo and Dallas have, in fact, walked past two different saloons, and that the “point-of-view” shot was just that. While the filmmakers certainly want us to take this option, indicated by the music and sound effects that endeavor to

45 Here, I refer to the conventions set out by David Bordwell, Janet Staiger, and Kristin Thompson in The Classical Hollywood Cinema, particularly the ideas that classical Hollywood is “bound by rules” that make “telling a story…the basic formal concern” and “strive to conceal [the film’s ] artifice through techniques of continuity and ‘invisible’ storytelling” (3). 153 differentiate the two saloons, the lack of change in the characters in front of the saloon or the façade of that building make this position difficult to adopt. Secondly, one could interpret the “point-of-view” shot as something else, as perhaps the camera going ahead of Ringo and Dallas and providing the viewer with a better sense of the setting of

Lordsburg. This interpretation, however, seems to fly in the face of classical Hollywood conventions, not to mention the formal qualities of this particular shot. Within the classical Hollywood paradigm, this shot makes sense as a “point-of-view” shot from

Ringo’s perspective, as he begins to understand the darker parts of Dallas’ life. The slight pan to the right as the camera tracks left mimics the movement one would make with their eyes and head to see something as they walk past it. Moreover, the camera is also positioned at eye-level throughout the tracking shot. These thematic and formal elements add up to suggest that we should see this as a point-of-view shot, and, thus, we are left with a conundrum if this moment needs to fit into the classical Hollywood mode.

On the other hand, if we accept that this sequence has departed from classical

Hollywood conventions, we can see how it has created a break in the film’s diegesis.

Rather than flowing linearly, Stagecoach has stepped into the realm of repetition and temporal manipulation and/or it has allowed the film’s body to move independently of the narrative. Either of these interpretations opens up a fissure in the diegesis, and whether this fissure is temporal, spatial, or story related, it nonetheless persists. In this manner, Stagecoach steps into an ambiguous relationship in regards to the diegesis that allows for a religious experience. In what is one of the most important moments of the film, emotionally speaking, the film’s body cannot handle things straightforwardly and

154 breaks down, creating a repetition that highlights the intense emotional nature of this moment. The film’s body jumps back in time to either give us another perspective or to attempt to find the right perspective to offer us. This feeling is intensified by the fact that the two separate tracking shots of Ringo and Dallas, like the close-ups in The Mirror, are practically identical, almost as if the film decided to retry the sequence. We see two different ways the film attempts to perceive this situation, as the film’s body is not tied to linear time in the same ways our bodies are. In exercising its perceptions in this manner, the film creates a divergence between its perception and our own, made even more evident by the classical Hollywood form, which tries to hide the gap, but cannot erase it fully. This final break in the diegesis has been hinted at throughout the film, whether through other similarly unmotivated “point-of-view” shots or the breaking of the 180- degree rule during the climatic chase scene, but here the film steps into different territory.46 This moment, along with the one from The Mirror that closed the last chapter, reveals a diegetic thin place, a spot where the reality of Being springs forth and introduces a fissure into the “everyday” reality of the film’s diegesis.

I certainly did not expect to find a moment like this in Stagecoach, but maybe I should have, given my long history with Hollywood Westerns and Stagecoach in particular. Thanks to my father’s love for Westerns, I spent many hours growing up watching them, whether they were John Wayne and Jimmy Stewart films or television

46 One of these comes when our characters must ford the river, and a curious high angle camera shot from the back of the stagecoach begins with Ringo on the ground throwing stones at the horses, but quickly, after a few cuts, turns into a point-of-view shot from his perspective, once we see where he is on the stagecoach. Here the film preemptively assumes Ringo’s point-of-view, and while this does not introduce temporal discontinuity, it still stands out as a strange moment in the classical aesthetics of the film. 155 shows like Bonanza and The Rifleman. We watched some episodes so often that I could practically quote them. During my M.A. work, I took a class on the Western and one of the first films we watched was Stagecoach. I still remember that day’s discussion, as we spent about a half hour talking about the tracking shot that introduces us to the Ringo

Kid, including an in-depth conversation about it briefly going out of focus. As a result, I know the narrative of the film and tropes of the Western genre well enough to allow my eyes and ears to wander while watching it, an ideal way to see something unusual. Sitting in the front row of the lecture hall, I recall the flash of inspiration that struck me when I noticed this moment, reflexively turning around as if a student’s look or comment might confirm what I saw. We watched the clip again, the professor showing it to give students a chance to practice discussing film with the appropriate terminology, and I focused more closely this time—the crack in the film’s diegesis was still there, I had not imagined it. I would have never seen this fracture without the specific experiences that brought me to that realization in the front row of Hagerty Hall 180, the possibilities flooding through my body as I sat back in the dark, my chair squeaking, like all the others in that room.

Since then, this moment has lodged itself in my head, coming to symbolize the concepts that I cover in this chapter. Here, the non-diegetic world blinks into Stagecoach’s existence, breaking through despite efforts (very good ones at that) by the filmmakers to cover it up, just as we sense the Being that runs underneath our existence in brief, erratic pulses that beckon us to look past our reality to something deeper.

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~*~

The “thin place,” as typically understood, refers to a place where the material and spiritual come together, closing the gap that is presumed to exist between them. Peter

Gomes explains the thin place in this way:

These thin places were threshold places, from the Latin limen, which can mean a

border or frontier place where two worlds meet and where one has the possibility

of communicating with the other...the phrase can refer to places that stand at the

border between the spiritual and temporal realms. (215)

Thin places are usually conceived of as actual geographical locations, but in my framework, a thin place could be any place or moment where the ultimate reality, Being, makes itself known to/in/through being. From this perspective, a thin place is not a place where the high and low are brought together, but where the Transcendent reveals itself in the immanent, where it has been all along. It is not two separate realities coming together, but a place where the gap between Being and being folds in on itself, making us aware of how the two are constantly intertwined. This awareness may be momentary, fleeting even, but with that awareness comes the seed of a religious experience. In exploring these filmic thin places, I will employ the concept of the écart, Mearleau-Ponty’s divergence between the visible and the invisible that the flesh constantly bridges, but that we can never fully cross in our experiences. In doing so, I will argue that the écart becomes evident in the filmic thin place, as the film becomes aware of and expresses the écart to us, causing us to reflect upon our own experiences and perceptions of thin places. In this

157 manner, the film can both experience a thin place and serve as a thin place itself, just as our bodies do.

In exploring these thin places, I will be drawing upon my own training and expertise in film studies through an approach that foregrounds formal analysis, but does not lose sight of the cultures and histories that surround the films that I examine. As a responsible scholar of film, I must understand the film’s place in culture and history as this leads to more robust analysis and conclusions. As an ethnographer of my experience and the film’s, I must also consider how the film formally expresses its perceptions to me and how these formal decisions affect my experience as the spectator. In our viewing experience, the écart makes itself known, and turns us back upon ourselves as we encounter the world: “Vision is not a certain mode of thought or presence to self; it is the means given me for being absent from myself, for being present from the inside at the fission of Being only at the end of which do I close up into myself” (Merleau-Ponty,

“Eye” 374). Through the aesthetic experience of the world, we gain access to the fission of Being that makes embodied experience possible and see ourselves reflected in the energy that stems from this reaction. Mikel Dufrenne puts it this way: “The spectator discovers himself by discovering a world which is his own world” (555). In this new discovery of our world, we fold back on ourselves through the intermediaries of the flesh and our bodies, enabled to see and live differently. The écart, as a separation or divergence, makes this “coiling over” possible, existing as “a first institution” which makes possible the experience of the world, other, and self, but is unable to be grasped in of itself (Merleau-Ponty, Visible 140, 216). Merleau-Ponty explains the fullness of the

158 divergence that comes to us in embodied experience: “But this divergence is not a void, it is filled precisely by the flesh as the place of emergence of a vision, a passivity that bears an activity” (Visible 272). This écart, the separation and divergence that sets us apart and connects us to the world, underlies Merleau-Ponty’s ontology of the person and the self.

This écart, somehow filled by the flesh, occupies another paradoxical place within

Merleau-Ponty’s ontology, and, for him, it seems to be the paradox that animates human bodily existence. Merleau-Ponty describes the interaction between écart and body in “Eye and Mind,” one of the final essays he wrote before his death:

A human body is present when, between seeing and visible, between touching and

touched…a kind of crossover is made…when the fire starts to burn that will not

stop burning until some accident of the body unmakes what no accident would

have sufficed to make. (355)

This divergence between touching and being touched, necessitates some form of encroachment between the two, “a reciprocal insertion and intertwining of one in the other,” which the flesh, filling the écart, provides (Merleau-Ponty, Visible 138). The écart makes the self possible, as it “designates the fact that while I am constantly in contact with the world, I do not dissolve into it,” distinguishing the embodied self from the world

(Richmond 111). As such, the écart facilitates selfhood through a connection to both body and world and a separation that the self needs to realize itself as an individual entity, as Barbaras explains:

The self must make itself other in order to rediscover itself—that is, in order to be

for itself. The being of the world is nothing other than this distance into which the

159

self is thrown outside itself in order to conquer itself as what it is; there is

coincidence with the self only as divergence [écart] from the self, self-presence as

self-absence. (Being 160)

The being of the world, the flesh, forms the ground from which our contingent subjectivity springs forth and exists. Whether or not this ground is itself non-contingent remains a topic of debate among scholars of Merleau-Ponty and other phenomenological philosophers.

Returning to the notion of the écart as a divergence that nonetheless connects the things that diverge to form it, Merleau-Ponty seems to view Being as occupying a similar space to the écart, straddling the border between contingent and non-contingent, where the possibility of transcendence lies. Madison notes in Merleau-Ponty’s later work that

“whether he speaks of God or of Being, the question he is raising comes down in the end to the same thing, because it is that of subjectivity and what transcends it” (236). For

Merleau-Ponty’s contemporaries and those who would follow him, this liminality of

Being means that one can only ever get at the non-contingent through the contingent, as we can only have experience through our embodied subjectivity, which cannot fully comprehend non-contingency. Barbaras offers this explanation of how the contingent and non-contingent (absolute) interact:

It is a matter of understanding that the absolute, instead of being able to be

determinate itself as the transcendence of a transcendent, makes sense only as

human contingency. One has to understand that the absolute can have its advent

only as this contingency because it hides itself in this contingency. (Being 307)

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Hiding within human contingency, non-contingent reality comes to us in individual, subjective pieces as Czech phenomenologist Jan Patočka points out: “Reality is never revealed to us as a whole. In understanding the whole we encounter particulars but the understanding of the whole, of being, conceals itself in understanding particulars” (168).

The whole will always elude us, no matter how hard we pursue it, and “Merleau-Ponty’s ontology is in this way the realization of Being as that which is eternally sought after and is eternally the subject of our wonder, a transcendence which is eternally ungraspable in its immanence” (Madison 265). Our immanent, embodied existence encircles and envelops the transcendence we seek, made available to us even as it fades away with every step we take and every breath we breathe.

In their similarity to the écart, our bodies occupy this divergence between immanence and transcendence. In doing so, they create a space where thin places emerge from our embodied relationship to the world, drawing together the immanent and transcendent:

Because the world is made of this flesh, of these dimensions, of these axes of

which my body is the pivot, it is an incarnate—that is, transcendent—world.

One’s own body is truly the middle of the world; at once surrounded by it and the

very element in and according to which the world is born. (Barbaras, Being 203)

The world pivots around our bodies as our actions contribute to and impact the world around us, as we are simultaneously enveloped by the flesh even as we project it back into the world. We are part of “a single universal fabric where [we] and the world, things and others, are mingled, encroaching on each other in a confusion that is inextricable in

161 principle, like so many differentiations and exhibitions of one same sensible Being,” a confusion that finds its expression in the intersubjective space of the écart that lies between two embodied subjects (Barbaras, Being 265). Madison puts it this way: “An

‘intercorporeality’ exists between perceiving subjects, and they are all open to each other because they are all of the same flesh, are all dimensions of the same Being, because it is the same Being which expresses itself in them all” (260). Our subjectivity is made possible by our intersubjectivity which comes from the flesh, and our bodies mark this both/and stance toward the world:

In their corporeity, humans stand at the boundary between being, indifferent to

itself and to all else, and existence in the sense of a pure relation to the totality of

all there is…humans are not only the beings of distance but also the beings of

proximity, rooted beings, not only otherworldly beings but also beings in the

world. (Patočka 178)

In this, we move and act in the world as ones incarnate, who nonetheless gravitate towards a deeper incarnation, something that whispers that “[our] birth is therefore not an accident, an absolutely gratuitous and contingent fact, an incomprehensible chance event; it is rather the coming to light of Being itself” (Madison 231).

Our bodies, thin places themselves, exist between immanence and transcendence, subjectivity and objectivity, distance and proximity. Speaking of “betweenness,”

Chamarette describes what can happen when we pay attention to the spaces that lie between things: “Like montage or juxtaposition, a new idea emerges between two things, linking the two previous images or objects, and yet in itself newly productive and

162 different” (19). Connecting betweenness to film studies and philosophy, Chamarette continues by suggesting that “new intersections make it possible for film theory to take trajectories outside film itself, and for philosophy, or at least thought, to take a trajectory outside philosophy itself” (19). She highlights the multiplicity of these “intersections between subjectivity, phenomenology, philosophy and the cinematic” as they are

“political, historical, biographical, gendered, aesthetical, ethical, phenomenological, and of course, always in contact with my own subjective encounters with the film work and the bodily and conceptual intentionality through which these analyses emerged” (19). The concept of betweenness allows for new interpretive acts that take into account the complex, intermingled nature of human experience in all its facets and that are grounded in my own subjective encounters with these films. Taking this a step further, if we apply this notion of betweenness to the écart, it becomes a space full of potential and possibility, not just for new ideas and interpretations to surface, but for new experiences to appear as well. Liminal in nature, the thin place marks these experiences of this betweenness, making us aware of the state we are always already in as bodies-in-the- world. So stands the filmic body, between realities, a conduit through which we can see other worlds and ways of being, but also a reminder of our own ability to hope for, imagine, and create other realities that blossom from the Being underneath all realities.

The filmic bodies I will be interacting with in this chapter carry with them a few significant elements that make them uniquely suited to laying bare the écart and demonstrating the power of the filmic body to serve as a thin place. In thinking about filmic thin places, I will primarily be looking at situations in which diegetic borders are

163 being crossed or elided by the film’s perceptions. In the case of the post-revolution

Iranian films I will consider, these fractures in the films’ worlds are created intentionally by the filmmakers, making them easier to study, yet no less effective at affecting my experience of the film. While I will not be pursuing an auteurist reading of these films, I will draw attention to their directors, Abbas Kiarostami and Jafar Panahi, as they interject themselves into their films, creating situations where their embodied presences become prominent. When these filmmakers intrude into the film’s diegesis, they affect the trajectory of the filmic world, creating diegetic fractures. Rather than pointing to an outside world that the film is separate from, this disintegration of diegetic borders created by the filmmaker acting upon the body of the film demonstrates the connections between those worlds, suggesting that they are not distant from each other, but implicated within each other. Even when considering a filmmaker and his/her effect on the filmic world more deeply, Chamarette reminds me that my “locus and instantiation of reciprocal engagement” with the filmmaker and film continues to be “the body of the spectator—my body” (144). Keeping my embodied spectatorship at the forefront of my viewing gives me the opportunity to note and examine how my experience weaves together with these films and their directors’ experiences to produce thin places as I watch.

The intertwining produced by the various relationships that make up my experience of these films returns us to Merleau-Ponty’s notion of a reversibility that forms the ground of our experience and allows to contemplate and reflect upon the complexity of embodied interactions between us, others, and the world. The écart allows us to stand outside this reversibility, yet this reversibility means that as our experiences

164 permeate and traverse the écart they intertwine with other experiences, crossing over themselves in what Merleau-Ponty calls the “chiasm” (Visible 264). In this chiastic relationship one’s experience and personhood remain apart from other experiences and personhoods, even as the chiasm connects two bodies through their reversibility, as

Hansen remarks: “Just as the écart marks a failure of reversibility between the hand as touched and as toucher…it likewise opens an irreducible asymmetry in the reversibility between my body and the body of the other” (Bodies 84). The films I will examine make this asymmetry known as they show this failure of reversibility through formal decisions that turn the filmic body back on itself. In these moments, when the film tries to see or hear itself, the film’s perceptions falter or fail—it, like us, cannot truly turn back over onto itself. In this failure of reversibility, then, we experience the écart through the film’s body and come face to face, and body to body, with the asymmetries between our experiences and the film’s. Yet, we remain connected to the film’s body (and other human bodies) despite this asymmetry, crossing over and encroaching upon one another through the flesh, grounded in Being. The realities that we find ourselves exploring blink in and out of existence, sometimes in strange and inexplicable ways. I like to think of my own religious experiences as moments that break me away from the diegesis that I construct for myself, reminding me that a reality exists that I did not create. Being, that reality, bubbles up from below like crude oil, seeping between the cracks that appear in the film’s diegesis and in my own life.

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Post-Revolution Iranian Film and Cinematic Reality

“Suddenly he found himself speeding along an unfamiliar country highway, and as he looked back over his shoulder neither the tollbooth nor his room nor even the house was anywhere in sight. What had started as make-believe was now very real.” — Norton Juster

In high school years, my life was filled with moments of becoming and betweenness that revealed a number of tensions as I tried to figure out how to integrate new knowledge of the world with my religious upbringing. This narrative, on its own, is not uncommon, and many of my friends at the time and people I have met since share this story. My story takes a bit of an unusual turn when I fell in love with an Iranian after her family started attending the church where I grew up. Even though she did not initially reciprocate my feelings, we were part of the same friend group, and eventually we formed a close friendship. Through this friendship with her and her sisters, I came to realize that a lot of the cultural and political preconceptions I had about people from the

Middle East were extremely misguided, and a gap opened up between what I then thought to be true and what I had previously thought to be true. Becoming aware of these gaps is part and parcel of becoming an adult, but my high school realizations also came from something more, a combination of the wide variety of social, cultural, and technological shifts that were occurring in the late-90s through mid-2000s and a pushback against the Moral Majority style religion-cum-politics model that our church, like many conservative churches, followed. Our friend group started a Bible study, where we talked frankly about our burgeoning doubts and personal experiences of faith, church, and religion. The more we all talked, these gaps slowly and surely became irreplaceably 166 sacred, something that faith was meant to embrace, not chase away. The influence of my

Iranian friends has stayed with me to this day, and it is only fitting that the films I examine to talk about the power of these gaps, cinematic or otherwise, come from Iran.

Perhaps no other films illustrate the filmic body’s propensity to embody the betweenness of the écart more so than those made in post-revolution Iran, during what

Hamid Naficy calls the “postal” period, “a movement out of a closed doctrinal milieu toward more expansive thematic and stylistic horizons” (176). While this period persists, some of its prominent filmmakers have passed away (Abbas Kiarostami) and others are finding it more and more difficult to make films (Jafar Panahi), and, as a result, many of its most radical and diegetically complicated films come from its early period, the 1980s and 90s. Naficy points out a few key thematic and aesthetic elements of the postal period:

“a neorealist sort of realism, affirming a profilmic Iranian reality; a religiously inflected surrealism, offering a spiritual reality; and a self-reflexive metarealism, offering a fresh postmodern vision of cinema” (177). Lara Mulvey argues that the films of this period force the spectator to consider new ways of seeing that push back against certainty, as they break with conventional modes of representation: “To ask the spectator to think— and to think about the limits and possibilities of cinematic representation—is to create a form of questioning and interrogative spectatorship that must be at odds with the certainties of any dominant ideological conviction” (260). These elements combine to offer a cinema concerned with “rendering a truer, more nuanced, or more contingent take on reality,” meaning, I claim, that these films often plumb the depths of a reality contingent on a deeper reality—the film’s world being reliant on the non-diegetic world

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(Naficy 177). They go to the bottom of things, searching out a non-contingent reality to support the contingent one; usually, as in life, this non-contingent reality cannot be found or grasped for more than a moment. Furthermore, these Iranian films invert the common understanding of the diegesis being reliant on the profilmic event in order to argue that the non-diegetic, “real” world may also be dependent on the filmic world. In other words, the diegetic and non-diegetic, like Being and being, are interrelated in these films in ways that we normally do not consider, becoming evident in the betweenness that we discover in the liminal space between the diegetic and non-diegetic. The diegetic blurring of these films open up the experience of the écart, revealing the flesh that connects bodies and the world and makes intersubjectivity possible.

Famous for playing with filmic reality, Close-Up (1990) and The Mirror (1997)47 both illustrate how the filmic body, visually and aurally, can offer an experience of the

écart that we normally do not have, an experience uniquely created by the ability of the film’s body to communicate intersubjectively with our bodies. Both are representative examples of this period in Iranian filmmaking, and I will analyze them together, drawing connections between similar techniques and styles that allow these filmic bodies to express their diegetic thin places.48 Close-Up, one of Kiarostami’s most well-known films, tells the true story of Hossain Sabzian, a man who has been arrested for impersonating famous Iranian director Mohsen Makhmalbaf and accused of using that impersonation to attempt to defraud a wealthy family. By the very nature of its narrative

47 I would be remiss if I did not point out the “coincidence” of two films which routinely blur the lines of the diegesis for substantial effect both being titled The Mirror. 48 Naficy actually uses Close-Up as an extended metaphor for this cinematic period in his chapter on post- revolutionary art-film in A Social History of the Iranian Cinema, Vol. 4. 168 of impersonation, Close-Up cannot avoid asking questions about reality, and these questions are amplified by the fact that the people involved in this story play themselves in the film. Close-Up has been labeled a hybrid film that straddles the line between documentary and fiction, but the film itself resists this notion, as it becomes increasingly difficult to tell where the documentary ends and the fiction begins, and vice versa.

Similarly, The Mirror appears to be a film about a young girl, Mina (Mina Mohammad

Khani), trying to find her way home from school, but around the half way point of the film, Mina unexpectedly quits acting for the film and tries to find her way to her “real” home. This leads the production crew to follow her throughout the city, ostensibly now documenting the reality of a young girl trying to find her way through Tehran. This shift in The Mirror forces us to question our relationship to the reality of the film and the world, suggesting the line between the diegetic and non-diegetic is very thin indeed.

Knowing the predilection of many post-revolution Iranian films for blurring fiction and reality, the “documentary” aspects of these films are unlikely to be as accidental as they seem on the screen. While this is true, my phenomenological experience of watching the film remains the same, even if these moments are planned or scripted—these films still relentlessly interrogate their own reality, dragging me along for the ride. Furthermore, much as these films complicate their own realities, I will be complicating this common account of them in order to suggest a more complex relationship of the directors to their films and to the filmic realities they present. Both

Close-Up and The Mirror present one level of diegetic reality before undercutting that reality with a more “objective” or real level (which may in fact just be one level deeper in

169 the diegesis), in the case of The Mirror, and hopelessly intertwining the diegetic and non- diegetic, as Close-Up does. These films present multiple levels of the “real” to the spectator, leaving us to make the decision about what is or is not real. Both of these films feature numerous moments of technical or narrative “failure,” most of which seem unplanned, making us even more aware of the gap being opened up between the diegesis and the non-diegetic reality of its production outside the film. Yet, these moments are within each of these films and may be planned parts of the diegesis itself, the film subverting its own reality from the inside. These fissures in the diegesis, even if they are scripted, are presented to the viewer as if they are not, and in the immediate phenomenological experience of these films, these moments destabilize the foundational split between the diegetic world and the non-diegetic one, calling into question whether or not such a gap even exists.

In Close-Up, a shift in the film’s body and perception itself often marks a shift in the level of diegetic reality being presented to us. The most prominent of these shifts occur in the scenes that take place during Sabzian’s trial. The shot immediately preceding the first scene of the trial features Kiarostami conversing with the judge, asking for his permission to film in the court. After the judge gives his permission, multiple people walk in front of the camera before the shot concludes, obscuring the composition.

Obstructed views and frustrated expectations seem to be a hallmark of this period in

Iranian film, and for this to happen right before the trial scene plays at some sort of political commentary, a visual metaphor about obstructed justice or a judge who cannot see everything clearly. Beyond that, this odd composition also helps establish the film’s

170 documentary aesthetics and, even though it is no accident, also seems to confirm that the film is exploring a “real” and “true” story. This shot is followed, cleverly, by one of a clapboard, letting us know that the next scene will be in the courtroom. Immediately after this, we cut to the interior of the courtroom and the film has undergone a visual and aural change. The film stock has become grainer, its colors muted, and the clear, precise sound gives way to background static and increased ambient noise—there are even some lens flares once Sabzian enters. Upon closer inspection, the shot of the clapboard has not been shot with the same camera as the one in the court room, meaning this clapboard shot was not filmed in the courtroom. Has it been incorporated for continuity’s sake or to further complicate the diegesis? The shift in camera and film stock already signals to us that the film steps into “reality,” but the shot of the clapboard seems to suggest a pre-meditated, scripted scene to be shot in the courtroom. Has this whole courtroom scene, including

Kiarostami asking for permission, been staged or is it real? The film seems to be saying two things at the same time, that this moment is both real and scripted, both diegetic and non-diegetic, both a part of and apart from the film’s world. Clearly, the film’s perception has shifted and this shift marks an important moment in the film, as it complicates the film’s status as documentary or fiction. Prior to this, Close-Up could easily fall into the category of a film like The Thin Blue Line, which tells its true story through re- enactments and interviews, even if, in Close-Up, the real people in the story are playing themselves in the re-enactments. Yet, if the camera is truly in the courtroom during

Sabzian’s trial, what then is the status of these scenes? Are they documenting the real trial? Are the real people being themselves or playing the character versions of

171 themselves? Here, the various realities crisscross and intersect in multiple direction until they have created a knot that may be impossible to untie.

Considering more of the courtroom scene does nothing to help untie this knot, and may only make its constriction on the diegesis tighter. Kiarostami has placed two cameras in the courtroom, one focused on Sabzian in a close-up, which occasionally moves to frame other principle characters in the film when they speak, and another that frames the judge on his podium in a long shot. The sequence begins normally enough, with Kiarostami’s off-screen voice asking Sabzian if they can film the trial, as the camera slowly zooms in on Sabzian. Yet, this incursion into the most “realistic” moment of the film by the film’s director produces a ripple in this reality that the film’s body cannot handle. Kiarostami’s voice continues unabated, yet the film flickers, a jump cut of sorts that destabilizes the continuity of this moment. Like the example from Stagecoach that opened this chapter, Close-Up uses continuous audio to smooth over this break in the temporal continuity of the visual, but follows that with Sabzian’s response to

Kiarostami’s request for permission: “Yes, because you’re my audience.” Who is the audience? Kiarostami? Or us, the actual audience, who Sabzian is looking at when he says this?

The film, even as it tries to keep up a façade of continuity through sound editing, immediately undermines this façade by first having Kiarostami explain the different types of lenses being used in the courtroom and then having Sabzian deliver a near monologue about art and representation to Kiarostami/the audience, making the film’s status as a constructed object obvious and calling into question its ability to function as a

172 documentary. Furthermore, this momentary break in continuity throws the “reality” of the remainder of this sequence into doubt, yet the film seems unconcerned about that doubt, and, in fact, may want that tension to run throughout the proceedings.49 On multiple levels, Close-Up complicates the audience’s relationship to the event being filmed. On one hand, those viewing the film are being asked to consider their role as the audience of a constructed artifact in what appears to be the least staged and rehearsed moment of the film—after all, this is a real court and a real trial. Michael Fischer suggests that “the camera here is literally posed as an alternative court,” bringing the spectator to a place where he/she can pass “filmic judgment” on the proceedings (230). On the other hand, this sequence suggests that the director, the person largely responsible for creating the filmic object, is also the audience to the drama of “real” life that he has helped create, but also, in a more radical sense, to the filmic meanings and realities that spiral out from his creation, that lie outside of his control. The film’s perception of these events, mediated and controlled as they are by the production crew of the film, take on a life of their own as the film’s body enters into a relationship with our bodies, and, in Close-Up, it is a very complicated relationship indeed, one that forces us to question the nature of filmic and non-filmic reality.

The Mirror, directed by Kiarostami’s former associate, Jafar Panahi, uses some of the same visual and aural tactics as Close-Up to drive its interrogation of cinematic reality. Roughly forty minutes into the film, the main character, a young girl named

49 Naficy says this about the camera and Kiarostami’s role in the court scene: “The court proceedings begin when the camera rolls; Kiarostami interacts with Sabzian, the judge, and the plaintiffs, as well as directing and retaking actual court scenes” (202). 173

Mina, looks defiantly at the camera and shouts, “I’m not acting anymore!” Upon this declaration, Panahi utters “cut” from off-screen, and the stable medium shot of Mina is replaced by a shaky, handheld camera and characters moving in and out of the frame. Just like the shift to the courtroom scene in Close-Up, the visual and aural qualities of The

Mirror have drastically changed. The diegesis of the film has been thrown off-kilter by

Mina breaking the fourth wall, and this fissure in the diegesis is mirrored by the shift to the handheld camera and the frantic attempts of the film crew to appease the young actress. The film signals this jump from a diegetic world to a non-diegetic one by appealing to documentary aesthetics and, indeed, in what follows, it appears that we have left the diegetic world behind and are now watching the real Mina trying to find her way home. The handheld camera shot that begins when Mina stops acting continues for almost five minutes, and contains a number of remarkable moments that highlight the constructed nature of cinematic reality while, at the same time, working to convince us that what we are seeing now is real. Similar to the moment the begins this sequence, after

Mina has gotten off the bus, one of the members of the film crew tries to figure out what is wrong, and the camera follows her as she gets off the bus and starts taking to Mina.

The camera mimics the movement of the female assistant, getting close to the ground to be on the same level as Mina and the assistant, who are sitting on a curb in front of a store. As they talk, Mina becomes aware of the camera, looks right at it, and yells, “I don’t want to be filmed anymore!” Not only is she done acting, but she no longer wishes to be subject to the camera’s gaze, even as herself, and once again, the mediating role of the film’s body on our perceptions has been foregrounded by Mina’s gaze and

174 awareness of the camera. This act of revealing the construction of the diegetic world through a reflexive gaze back at the means of cinematic production continues throughout this sequence. The Mirror mobilizes this self-reflexivity not to call into question the act of filmmaking as a whole, but to replace the original diegesis with another diegesis, one that attests to the “reality” of the profilmic event by pulling back the curtain and saying, with a wink, “What you are seeing now is real, how could it not be now that we’ve shown you how it’s made?” But, having been made aware of the construction of cinematic reality and the differences in perception between the film’s body and ours, how can we trust any depiction of reality that The Mirror offers? As a result, The Mirror, much like placing one mirror across from another, has become a sort of infinite reflection of itself, leaving us no way to know what is real or what is a reflection, a thin place where the diegesis fades away.

The film continues this relentless dance of reflections and reversibility over the rest of this sequence, both through foregrounding the means of its own production and by changing how it presents its perceptions.50 After the film assistant talks to Mina, she comes back on to the bus to explain the situation to the crew. As she speaks, the handheld camera does not even attempt to frame her, but rather drifts downward to bring the camera that had been used for the previous shot into the center of the frame, as one of the boom mikes becomes visible on the left side of the screen. The film crew continues to speak, and eventually the camera moves to the left to place the director, Panahi, in the

50 Turning back on itself is something that is far easier for the filmic body to do than the human body, which may account for some of the fascination and confusion that accompanies the viewing of a film like The Mirror. Here, the gap between what a film is and how it is made fills the screen, yet is never fully traversed, just like the écart. 175 center of the frame, as he tries to find a way to convince Mina to keep filming. Here, the film, through one organ of its perception (the handheld camera) shows its other organs of perception (the mounted camera and sound equipment), briefly giving these precedence over the filmmaker himself, as it tends to do during this sequence. In a particularly clear instance of this, another female assistant speaks to Panahi, and the handheld camera never even attempts to bring her face into the center of the frame, but remains squarely focused on the mounted camera in the bus, the assistant’s head cut off by the top of the frame. The unpredictable movement and framing of the camera in this sequence advances the fiction that the real world is unfolding before the camera, but the repeated framing of the mounted camera by the handheld one points to the constructed quality of this sequence, even as its construction strives to conceal its artifice under the guise of spontaneity and authenticity Near the end of the sequence, the camera’s focus on its own technology becomes more explicit, as the crew decides to let Mina leave, but continues to film her and record her audio.

Centered in the frame, Panahi moves the mounted camera, looks through the viewfinder, and asks the various crew members if they are ready. Then he moves away from the camera, and we are left with a remarkable frame, where he sits in the foreground on the right side, and the camera takes up the middle ground on the left side, a two-shot of director and camera. During this moment, the cinematographer mentions setting the “f- stop,” and proceeds to adjust the aperture of the camera as we look on, a moment akin to

Kiarostami explaining camera lenses to Sabzian. With the f-stop set and the sound ready,

Panahi gives the go ahead and we return to the stability of the mounted camera and the

176 clarity of miked audio, as the filmic body shifts back to its “original” perceptions. Yet, with this shift back, we have not returned to the original diegesis…or have we? Through foregrounding the film’s perception and production, The Mirror undercuts itself, in a move that calls into question the reality of the diegesis and the profilmic event. If we cannot trust what appears to be the spontaneous, messy reality of the profilmic event, and it is just another level of the diegesis, then what about the reality of everyday life? Is it as equally tenuous as The Mirror’s diegesis? Or are the distinctions we create and uphold between these various levels of reality unnecessary? To further explore these questions of reality, let’s look more closely at Panahi’s “role” in this sequence, as well as the ways that The Mirror persists in one of Panahi’s later films.

As The Mirror’s original plot begins to unravel with Mina’s rebellion, the film shows Panahi trying to adapt and come up with a solution to the problem. He tries to calm Mina down, he sends his assistant to tell her that it is the last shot of the day, and he ultimately decides to continue shooting Mina as she finds her way home. In other words, he does exactly what we might expect a director to do when faced with this kind of a situation, adding to the “realism” of the breakdown in the film’s diegesis. As the viewer, we are now faced with two different, but similar possibilities regarding Panahi’s appearance in the film, neither of which let us create a clear distinction between reality and the film’s diegesis. If the film has shifted into documentary mode with Mina’s declaration, and this is the real Panahi, then we must remember that, even in a documentary, we are not dealing with people as they truly are, but “social actors,” adapting their self-presentation for the camera (Nichols 8-10). If this is but another level

177 of the film’s diegesis, however, then Panahi is performing, playing himself, acting out the role of the director of The Mirror. Yet, despite the theoretical differences between these two options, at the level of immediate, phenomenological experience of this sequence, I believe in the reality of Panahi’s portrayal, because, whether or not he is a social actor or an actual actor, he remains the director of the film in both cases. In either case, Panahi represents himself as himself, performing the role in front of the camera that he performs behind the camera (while simultaneously being behind the camera), a dizzying mise en abyme of representation and reality.

Looking at Panahi’s appearance in The Mirror alongside some other appearances of directors in their own films, we can see how Panahi’s representation asks different questions about film than those appearances do. Famously, Alfred Hitchcock frequently appeared in brief, non-speaking cameos in a majority of his films, something for his fans to discover while watching the film. In keeping with Hitchcock’s persona, his cameos wink at the audience, playfully reminding the audience of his connection to the diegesis.

However, rather than foregrounding the director and means of production as a way of interrogating filmic reality, Hitchcock appears in his films primarily to remind the audience that they are watching a Hitchcock film, to further imprint his name in moviegoers’ minds. Slightly more self-reflexive than Hitchcock, Francis Ford Coppola briefly appears in Apocalypse Now, filming the soldiers as part of a documentary and/or newsreel about the Vietnam War. Here, Coppola’s cameo calls attention to the constructed nature of the film as well as pointing out how filming and covering a war changes our relationship to the conflict, but it only lasts for a few seconds and, more

178 importantly, he plays a fictional filmmaker. We can only pause for a moment to consider the implications of this cameo, before the film’s action sweeps us away again. In stark contrast to these cameos, The Mirror places Panahi front and center, forcing us to confront the diegetic instability caused by the constant reflections of the film’s hall of mirrors.

Panahi’s relationship to himself and The Mirror becomes even more complex when considered in light of one of his later films, This is Not a Film. As a result of the politics present in his films, the Iranian government arrested Panahi in early 2010 and charged him with conspiring against the Islamic Republic, banning him from filmmaking for twenty years. During the appeal process, Panahi produced This is Not a Film, which documents his struggles and frustration during this period. Even before the film starts rolling, the title has already brought up questions of filmic reality by claiming that what we are about to watch is not, strictly speaking, a film. At its most basic level, the film’s title intentionally subverts the filmmaking ban imposed on Panahi by declaring that this is not a film, but it also allows for a multiplicity of other meanings (Griffiths 35). Does the title serve to, as Trent Griffiths points out, demonstrate that the film “lies somewhere between a documentary, a video diary and an experimental film,” giving the viewer a sense of its unconventional nature (34)? Or, does the deliberate rejection of the word

“film” mean that Panahi wants us to see this as reality, not a film? Is it possible that the title signals Panahi’s own frustration that This is Not a Film is not the film that he wanted to make? It seems to me that all of these interpretations are valid, but, for our purposes, the diegetic and generic blurring suggested by This is Not a Film’s title stand out as the

179 most interesting and relevant. Griffiths’ use of the term “(not)film,” much like

Quinlivan’s term (im)material, makes a lot of sense when considering the film’s relationship to reality—it is both a film and not a film at the same time (29). In The

Mirror, Mina prompts the film to question its own reality, whereas in This is Not a Film,

Panahi, through his performance as himself, asks us to consider where filmic reality starts and stops and, indeed, if we can even draw clear distinctions between what happens on screen and in the real world.

When it comes to narrative fiction films, the diegesis can be blurred, as we saw in

The Mirror, by the intrusion of the real world into the film’s diegesis. In contrast, the profilmic event/reality of a documentary, the ostensible genre of This is Not a Film, comes into question when we suspect that events have been staged or manufactured for the camera. These types of events reveal the documentary as a constructed artifact, one that shows a piece of reality, but never the entirety of the profilmic event. This is Not a

Film is filled with moments that appear to be spontaneous and realistic, but upon closer analysis, these moments reveal the “ambiguities of form” that make up the film’s interplay of “performance and observation” which complicate its relationship to reality

(Griffiths 35). Early in This is Not a Film, Panahi gets out of bed in the morning and listens to his voicemails, seemingly unaware of being recorded by a camera in the corner of the room. On the voicemail, Panahi’s son tells him that he left a camera recording in the room, which prompts Panahi to eventually walk over to the camera and stop the recording. Griffiths suggests that “this seemingly unexceptional moment becomes infused with dramatic irony through the recognition that this is a performance” (36). This

180 moment is not observational filmmaking or an accident, but a concerted effort by Panahi to make a film without “making” a film—or, at the very least, without appearing to have made a film. Here, perhaps, lies Panahi’s biggest performance, in which he must act as if he is not the director of the film documenting his life as one banned from directing films.

If this was all not confusing enough, we now come to a scene in This is Not a Film that encapsulates this complicated web between profilmic reality and diegesis, where Panahi watches the sequence from The Mirror that I considered above.

This sequence begins with Panahi explaining the plot of The Mirror to his friend,

Mojtaba Mirtahmasb, who films most of This is Not a Film. Panahi details the plot of The

Mirror, often looking directly into the camera, before we cut to the scene that he is describing. Importantly, the images from The Mirror are not inserted into the film, but are seen on Panahi’s television. We are watching The Mirror on another screen, with

Panahi’s voice narrating the action that we see, as if he called this scene from The Mirror into being. Again, we are caught in a reflection of a reflection, a film of a film, but one that might seem oddly familiar if we pay attention to how the film’s body acts during the next few minutes of This is Not a Film. First, The Mirror’s diegesis—a word that seems to have lost its meaning right about now—suggests that Mina’s decision and its aftermath are part of a continuous timeline, and this temporal manipulation forms part of the film’s ability to appear to be documenting what really happened. Mimicking The Mirror, This is

Not a Film cuts when The Mirror cuts, revealing The Mirror’s fictional continuity, through the act of cutting, but also through a small detail near the bottom right of the frame: the time. In This is Not a Film’s first shot of The Mirror, the shot frames the

181 television screen allowing us to see the time of 1:47 PM in the bottom right of the screen.

Upon the cut in The Mirror when Mina decides to stop acting, This is Not a Film also cuts and now the time on the television reads 2:32 PM. Suddenly, I am left with a myriad of questions: what happened to that forty-five minutes? What part of reality has been elided? Was this even filmed on the same day? This is Not a Film has laid bare the fiction of continuity promised by the profilmic event, but also hid this revelation through conventional filmmaking tactics. I watched this moment several times before I noticed this gap in time, as the continuity of the sequence from The Mirror led me to assume the temporal continuity of This is Not a Film.

Later in this sequence, another cut disguises the removal of a section of the scene from The Mirror by using Panahi’s audio from the end of that scene to bridge the gap created by the cut in the version of The Mirror we see in This is Not a Film. After this cut, the clock comes back into view in the lower right part of the frame, and this time it reads 2:34 PM. As I mentioned previously, the sequence in The Mirror that follows

Mina’s decision to quit acting takes place over a continuous take that lasts for almost five minutes. Taking that into consideration, what I have just seen on screen is almost incomprehensible. I could account for this, if I want to believe in the continuity of the television’s clock, by saying that this shot in The Mirror must have been censored in Iran; therefore, I am watching the version available to Panahi and other Iranians. While this provides a satisfactory answer to preserve temporal continuity, the film has just flaunted the notion of cinematic continuity a scant two minutes earlier, and the apparent continuity here, at least for me, cannot be entirely explained away by censorship. This strange

182 moment inverts the previous one—here, the film uses the time on the television screen to preserve continuity, masking the removal of a section of The Mirror, even as it has just used the continuity of The Mirror to mask the temporal gap revealed by the time on the television. This moment also throws my own experience of these two films into further disarray—Do I have the “right” copy of The Mirror? What am I missing?—revealing how much I still depend on cinematic continuity. In these moments, This is Not a Film uses foundational ideas of continuity editing (cut on action and a sound bridge) to reveal

Panahi’s earlier cinematic sleight of hand and expose the “profilmic” event of The Mirror as simply another level of that film’s diegesis. To complicate this situation further, This is

Not a Film reveals the levels of Panahi’s performance(s) in these films, further destabilizing the now paper-thin boundary between the diegesis and the real world.

In The Mirror, Panahi plays himself, and we see this performance on the television in This is Not a Film as he watches himself in The Mirror. We are watching him watch himself directing, perhaps the closest thing to filmmaking that he can do while banned from filmmaking. However, through the filmic body’s perceptions, This is Not a

Film makes us aware that Panahi is performing the role of not being a director as he watches himself performing the role of a director. In both of these instances, Panahi performs as his current “self”: in The Mirror, as the director of the film, and in This is

Not a Film, as a non-director. Just as This is Not a Film revealed the façade of continuity in The Mirror, it also reveals Panahi’s performance(s) of self in these films. The initial shot of the television is fairly stable, mimicking the camera in that portion of The Mirror, but as soon as we hear Panahi utter “cut” in The Mirror and it cuts to the handheld

183 camera, This is Not a Film cuts to an askew angle and the framing of the television becomes shaky—This is Not a Film mirrors The Mirror. The Panahi of This is Not a Film has not said a word, yet his performance in The Mirror has acted upon the body of This is

Not a Film, directing it via his performance in The Mirror. The diegetic Panahi of The

Mirror has, fourteen years later, impacted the filmic perceptions of This is Not a Film and revealed that (not)director Panahi still directs This is Not a Film. This is made all the more evident as the scene from The Mirror draws to a close and Panahi, via the television, gives the go ahead to start filming the “real” Mina. As he does, the

(not)director Panahi pauses The Mirror as the camera pans right to bring him into the frame, and he begins to speak, prompted by himself as the director to act. For a brief moment, in a composition that recalls the composition from The Mirror with Panahi and the camera in frame (which we just watched on the television!), both Panahis are in the frame, bridging these fourteen years through some sort of mystical connection.

To add one more layer of complication to the (not)film’s representation of

(not)director Panahi, as Panahi analyzes the plot of The Mirror, he connects his current situation to Mina’s situation, drawing an analogy between himself and the actress playing a role as herself. Discussing This is Not a Film, Panahi says that his role in the film

“seems like pretending,” “is turning out to be a lie,” and “is somehow not me.” Is this confession of performance and deceit meant to validate the authenticity of what follows in This is Not a Film? Is it an admission of what the film has already demonstrated? Or is it simply a statement of fact, a declaration of what film and reality are, a series of performances that we only become aware of once they fail? By introducing these

184 questions into the film, Panahi encourages us to look for moments of performance and the breakdown of those performances, because those moments bring us face to face with the contingency of our being—they are thin places.51 A moment later, Panahi turns to the camera and asks Mirtahmasb about a film that he said he was going to make about the

“problems” of performance and capturing reality through film. We hear Mirtahmasb quip from behind the camera that the film Panahi was going to make goes “behind the scenes of Iranian filmmakers not making films,” which, of course, is what this (not)film is about.

Here, the act of not making a film becomes a film, just as Panahi’s attempts to not perform become a performance. Reality and film double over on themselves, each influencing the other until the boundaries that exist between them break down and we are left, like Panahi, to try to figure out whether or not we need to re-establish them. As This is Not a Film draws to its conclusion, we encounter the (not)film’s most audacious interrogation of cinematic reflexivity and authenticity.

As the day draws to a close, fireworks begin to light up the night sky and Panahi pulls out his iPhone to start taking some video, much to the chagrin of Mirtahmasb. The two sit down and begin to have a conversation, Panahi’s phone centered in the frame, obscuring his mouth, as he discusses his boredom and frustration due to his filmmaking ban and house arrest. Interesting in itself, this shot foregrounds the filmmaking technology of the phone and begins to re-assert Panahi as a filmmaker, making the device in his hands the focus of the shot. As Panahi goes to stop his recording, Mirtahmasb tells

51 These are also moments, as other scholars have noted, that launch a critique against the Iranian government by bringing to light the gap between what is said and done, and between perception and reality (Naficy 195; Griffiths). 185 him not to cut. Here, the film uses Mirtahmasb’s off-screen voice to direct the

(not)director Panahi to continue documenting this moment, and the film cuts to Panahi’s iPhone recording. This marks a drastic shift in the film’s body and perceptions, as the aspect ratio and quality of the footage both change dramatically. Significantly, this also marks the film’s first explicit acknowledgement of Panahi as director, and it does so through a clear example of self-reflexivity as Panahi films Mirtahmasb filming him. The composition of the iPhone footage mimics the composition of the previous shot, with

Mirtahmab’s camera centered in the frame, again making the means of production the focal point of this composition. Here, the (not)film of the cellphone footage—commonly thought of as video, not film—intersects with the filmed footage of the metaphorical

(not)film, and the two cut from one to another over the remainder of This is Not a Film, hopelessly intertwining the two (not)films until metaphor and actuality coalesce into one.

As the film’s body shifts to accommodate these separate, but connected perceptions of

“reality,” we are made aware of the gap that exists between the two human beings producing this (not)film through the changes in the film’s perception. The film explicitly shows us the disparity in these perceptions, but also brings them together in its own body through editing—the film’s body brings us, and itself, face to face (literally!) with the

écart. Furthermore, in the act of turning the cameras and (not)filmmakers back upon themselves, This is Not a Film foregrounds the perceptions of its digital technologies, technologies which “help personal consciousness intervene creatively and substantively in the production of presencing that constitutes…lived reality itself, including the lived reality of (constituting) consciousness” (Hansen, “Media” 304). In other words, the

186 radical act of self-reflexivity we witness here does not just have an impact on This is Not a Film, but affects the lived reality of Panahi and Mirtahmasb as well as those of us watching this (not)film. The film has blurred its diegesis with the reality it is documenting because it sees no difference between the two. The gap between the reality

(Being) that gave birth to the film (being) has collapsed—left in its wake, a thin place.

Unlike the Panahi who takes center stage in The Mirror and This is Not a Film,

Kiarostami, at least in Close-Up, haunts the borders of the film, rarely appearing on screen, but nonetheless impacting the diegesis through his sonic intrusions. Kiarostami’s performances in Close-Up are of a more subtle variety than Panahi’s, but they entangle themselves in the same diegetic conundrums, forcing the viewer to decide for herself the

“reality” of what appears on screen at any given moment. In another major difference between these director’s performances, Kiarostami remains almost a complete acousmêtre throughout Close-Up, as we only see his voice matched up with his mouth once, making his performance seem more mysterious than Panahi’s. Even when

Kiarostami appears on screen visiting Sabzian in prison, the composition of the shot prevents us from seeing his face as he talks to Sabzian, keeping his voice in the acousmatic space until the end of the scene. A useful entry point to Kiarostami’s performance in Close-Up, this scene runs roughly three and a half minutes, composed of three shots that attempt to advance the realist aesthetics of the “documentary,” even in a scene that appears to be a re-enactment. The first shot of this scene begins by framing

Sabzian in a long shot as he comes through a door on the right side of the frame; interestingly, he is also framed by a window frame and a metal bar that runs vertically

187 through the window pane, trapped on the right side of the frame. Here, the film signals his incarceration both through its setting, but also through its shot composition.

Significantly, this shot also demonstrates three other important aspects of the film’s relationship to its diegesis and reality. First, we have a frame within a frame in this shot, as Close-Up highlights the constructed nature of what we see on screen through this formal device. Second, the film, at the same time, obfuscates its construction through the realist aesthetics of the documentary, suggesting that the camera had to be placed outside of the visitor’s room and can only film through the window. Finally, the vertical bars of metal and the window frame obscure our view into the room, pointing to the inability of the camera to capture reality. The complex interplay of these three differing, yet connected concepts—the constructed nature of film, its ability to make us forget its constructed nature, and whether or not film can capture reality or truth—lies at the heart of Close-Up and continues over the duration of this sequence, as the film’s body moves, shifting our original perceptions as it plays with its diegesis and, perhaps, our reality.

As the first shot of the scene continues, the camera slowly zooms in on Sabzian as he sits down next to Kiarostami and begins to talk about his situation. This zoom operates both as an attempt to lessen the visual distractions taking place in the room and as a way for the film to symbolize getting closer to Sabzian, the enigma at the center of its narrative. However, while the zoom does direct our focus to Sabzian and Kiarostami, the sound mix remains cluttered with other conversations and noise, continuing to stay true to documentary conventions. Without the subtitles spelling out the conversation between

Sabzian and Kiarostami, I am not sure I would have been able to pick out their words

188 among the other sounds, and this creates a strange sense of eavesdropping that goes hand in hand with the camera’s position outside of the visiting room, almost as if we are privy to a private conversation. Yet, given the conceit of the film, we also know that this moment is likely a re-enactment of this meeting, meaning that Kiarostami and Sabzian are not only acting, playing themselves, but that this scene has been constructed to appear spontaneous. To further complicate this scene, the setting appears to be a real prison, and we know that Sabzian is in prison awaiting his trial, which the film will document later; therefore, the meeting between the two, even if it is a re-enactment, does find Kiarostami, as actor/director, meeting with Sabzian, actor/prisoner, at the prison where he is being held. In other words, this meeting falls somewhere between fiction and reality, as it may be scripted and re-enacted, but it remains, nonetheless, Kiarostami meeting Sabzian at a real prison and having a conversation with him, while both men play roles that they currently inhabit in reality. Even as this reality encroaches upon the fiction, however, we are reminded that this meeting is not spontaneous and unscripted by the content of the men’s conversation and the transition to the second shot of this scene.

As the two talk, Kiarostami asks if there is anything he can do to help Sabzian in this current situation. Sabzian replies, “You could make a film about my suffering.” This statement tips the film’s hand, as we are watching the film about Sabzian’s suffering, thus this scene must be a re-enactment of the original conversation between Kiarostami and

Sabzian. Even though we know this on an intellectual level, the formal elements of this sequence try to convince us, on an embodied level, that this a documentation of reality, as the camera never enters the room where the two men are talking, the sound mix remains

189 cluttered, and Kiarostami stays out of focus for the entire sequence. Other re-enactment sequences throughout the film are not as insistent in following documentary conventions as this one and make their status as fiction obvious. For example, the sequence that opens the film, where the reporter goes along with the police to arrest Sabzian at the

Ahankhah’s house, features a thirty second shot of an aerosol can rolling down the street, kicked by the driver who, along with us as the audience, waits outside while the arrest of

Sabzian occurs off-screen in the house. Documentary convention would seem to entail that the camera should be making every effort to get close to the “action” of the story

(Sabzian’s arrest), yet this sequence deliberately shies away from that “action,” content to document a different sort of reality. By turning our attention to other re-enactment sequences in Close-Up, then, the conversation between Kiarostami and Sabzian takes on a more ambiguous relationship to reality, somewhere between the constructed nature of a re-enactment like the opening sequence and the “reality” of the courtroom scenes. By working on these different level of reality and the diegesis, Close-Up constantly modulates our perception of reality and fiction. The little details and inconsistencies add up to advance the film’s central questions surrounding identity and reality, as the film strives to keep our relationship to its reality off-balance. Rather than use overt diegetic disruptions like The Mirror, Close-Up disrupts its “reality” through small, subtle moments, often done through editing.

The conversation between Kiarostami and Sabzian only contains two cuts, and the first cut functions within this sequence as a powerful marker of the nature of the film as constructed artifact. Much like the moment I discussed earlier in the first courtroom

190 scene, the film attempts to preserve its continuity by having the conversation between the two men continue as if no time had passed in the space of the cut. However, the difference between the two shots on either side of the cut ruptures the careful “realism” that the film has been careful to maintain throughout the initial shot of this sequence.

While the camera angle stays constant, the cut stops the slow zoom-in of the camera and replaces it with a stable, close-up of Sabzian. With the motion of the camera stopped and the shot distance changed, this cut is quite jarring, even though the conversation appears to have continued unabated. We are left to consider what has happened in this gap clearly signaled by the cut, a gap that the film seems to want us to both think about and not think about in a tension that the film seems keen on keeping. Was there an awkward phrase or moment that needed to be cut out of an otherwise continuous shot? Was this portion of the sequence filmed on another day or after a break? These are questions, like the ones raised by the film’s narrative, which can never be answered satisfactorily with the information from the film itself, itself playing a perpetual shell game with us. Reality slips in and out of focus, the fleeting glimpses of it symbolized by the final moments of this conversation between Kiarostami and Sabzian and, on a larger scale, by Kiarostami’s performance throughout the film.

As the sequence’s second shot continues, the camera begins to slowly zoom in again, and the sequence’s third shot inverts the relationship between the first and the second shot by cutting to further away from Sabzian’s face instead of closer as it did between the first and second shot. This cut stands out even more than the sequence’s first cut, as that cut continued the momentum of the camera’s zoom, while the second cut goes

191 against the movement of the camera and its zoom. The film maintains continuity over this cut through sound editing and conversational flow, much as it did for the first cut, causing this cut to prompt the same questions as the first did. In addition to this, however, the second cut reframes the third shot in such a way that allows us to see Kiarostami’s mouth when he turns to an officer and tells him that he is ready to leave. In every other instance of Kiarostami speaking in Close-Up, we do not see his mouth matched up with his voice, placing his voice squarely in the acousmatic realm. As I discussed in the previous chapter, the acousmatic realm often operates in the shadowy space between the diegetic and non-diegetic, which is exactly where Kiarostami’s performance fits in regards to Close-Up’s levels of reality. He is the director, acting upon the film from outside its diegesis, but he also exists within the film world as well, both in the re- enactments like this sequence and in “real” moments in the courtroom. The liminal nature of Kiarostami in Close-Up is further highlighted by the way he appears in this shot— blurry, out of focus, with his face obscured by a bar of the window. Here, the film, like us as the audience, sees Kiarostami’s connection to the diegesis as untenable and difficult to see clearly. We might ask, if this is Kiarostami’s role in this film, why show his mouth matching up with his voice at all? Even though he appears out of focus, it is vital that

Kiarostami becomes de-acousmatized, otherwise he would only exist, for sure, outside of the film’s diegesis. In other words, if he was always a complete acousmêtre, we could never prove that he exists as a real part of the film’s world, thus robbing his performance of its ability to transgress the borders between reality and the diegesis. Yet, unlike

Panahi’s de-acousmatization in The Mirror, by de-acousmatizing Kiarostami in this brief,

192 vague manner, Close-Up still allows him the acousmatic power to speak from a place outside the diegesis and affect the diegesis and, even more radically, to speak from within the diegesis and affect outside reality.

Returning to the first courtroom scene, we can see how Kiarostami affects the real world from within the film’s diegesis. If the courtroom scene shows Sabzian’s actual trial, then Kiarostami has directly impacted that reality by asking the judge to move the date of the hearing and by filming the proceedings. Furthermore, Kiarostami does not only observe the trial, but actively participates, prompting Sabzian to address the camera,

Kiarostami's voice speaking, or should I say, directing, from off-screen. Naficy goes as far as to suggest that Kiarostami “provokes reality”: “The court proceedings begin when the camera rolls; Kiarostami interacts with Sabzian, the judge, and the plaintiffs, as well as directing and retaking actual court scenes” (202). Speaking from the acousmatic realm,

Kiarostami’s voice orchestrates the real trial of Sabzian, even as it molds Sabzian into the character that Kiarostami desires for the film’s diegesis. Furthermore, without the intrusion of Kiarostami into Sabzian’s life, there’s a chance that the judge reaches a different verdict—indeed, Godfrey Cheshire points out that Kiraostami “coaxed the judge into his verdict”—and his life is irrevocably altered. These scenes serve as striking examples of the acousmêtre’s powers to bridge the gap between the non-diegetic and diegetic world and vice-versa. Much like the conclusion of This is Not a Film, these moments in Close-Up offer a thin place that commingles reality and diegesis, although

Close-Up relies on the power of the acousmatic space to highlight this intertwining, while

This is Not a Film relies on a radical visual self-reflexivity. As much as these two

193 directors use their films to bring up these questions of cinematic reality, the films also use the presence of the directors in their diegesis to break down diegetic walls and open themselves up to the real world. Kiarostami lurks on the outskirts of Close-Up, using his powers as the acousmêtre to subtly influence and impact diegesis and reality, whereas

Panahi puts himself and the filmmaking technology in the center of the frame, forcing us to confront questions of cinematic production and reality. As both Close-Up and The

Mirror draw to a close, these differences between the films give way to a common technique that serves as one final example of the breakdown of the diegesis and these films’ exploration of differing levels of reality.

Upon Sabzian’s release from prison, Kiarostami arranges for Makhmalbaf to meet him and bring him to the Ahankhah’s house to apologize for his attempted fraud. In this penultimate sequence, the film continues its blend of reality and fiction, manipulating image and sound to complicate the viewer’s relationship to what she sees on screen. For starters, the conceit of having Sabzian meet Makhmalbaf, the man who he impersonated, sets up a tension between reality and acting, as the viewer sees both men occupying the frame at the same time, the impersonator and the real. Before Sabzian enters the scene, the camera appears to lose track of Makhmalbaf, and we hear Kiraostami conversing with his assistant, who asks if they should stop filming. Kiarostami replies, “we can’t redo this shot,” implying that this meeting can only happen once—in other words, they are filming reality. This first complication is quickly followed by another as the sound from

Makhmalbaf’s mike cuts out, and the assistant remarks, “It’s old equipment…it’s 15 years old.” The sound will cut in and out for the rest of the sequence, obfuscating

194

Makhmalbaf and Sabzian’s conversation while drawing attention to the constructed nature of the film’s reality. This failure of technology adds to the realistic, documentary feel of this scene, as surely no film telling a fictional narrative would include technical failure in the finished product…or would it? Even though we might experience these sound issues as real technical failures while watching, Cheshire informs us that “most of them were created during postproduction to serve the final scene’s emotional punch.”

The nature of this technical (not)failure relates to the film’s larger ontological status, confronting us with questions of cinematic reality at the same moment as it brings the impersonator face to face with the impersonated, the fake meeting the real, acting meeting being.52 This blurring of fiction and reality has been the film’s constant motif, as it simultaneously reveals the process of its fictional construction while trying to convince the audience of its connection to reality. Close-Up, like Sabzian, impersonates reality for its audience, which makes this scene act as a commentary on the film itself.

Upon reflection, it’s hard to believe, given Close-Up’s various incursions into fiction, that this meeting between Makhmalbaf and Sabzian is entirely (or even mostly) unscripted, despite Kiarostami’s voice-over telling us that this scene cannot be done again and his decision to keep filming despite technical “difficulties.” Yet, I find it equally as hard to believe that there is not some measure of spontaneity in this scene, both on a practical and phenomenological level. This scene, like the film, is a hybrid, where reality and fiction exist alongside each other, interpenetrating and informing each

52 On a more concrete level, Naficy sees Close-Up asking what it means to be Iranian: “Indeed, Close-Up is entirely about the lie at the heart of cinema, whereby actors pretend to be others, producing a sustained and complex treatise on the morality of the Iranian dichotomy between being and acting” (195). 195 other. Upon seeing Makhmalbaf, Sabzian seems to have a real emotional reaction, as he is almost unable to speak or look Makhmalbaf in the eyes. Is this another moment of acting, of impersonating, or is it real? While this meeting was obviously planned, as

Sabzian has presumably already been released from prison and he would probably not be waiting randomly outside the jail, the very way it is filmed (from a distance in a car) undercuts any sense that what follows has been carefully rehearsed. As the scene continues and we follow Makhmalbaf and Sabzian on the road, our sight is obstructed by the spontaneous passing of vehicles and our hearing is frustrated by sonic failures created in postproduction: reality and fiction, serving the same purpose of obfuscation. The film even makes its refusal to clarify reality and fiction into a kind of visual joke in this sequence by framing Makhmalbaf and Sabzian on Makhmalbaf’s motorcycle first through a broken windshield and then in a side mirror. The first shot reveals the cracks in the film’s reality and diegesis, while the second suggests the self-reflexive nature of the film and this meeting between the impersonator and the impersonated. In its framing of these (non)actors, combined with the fractured editing and intermittent sound, the film seems to mock any of our attempts to uncover the profilmic event, obscuring that event

(if it ever existed) through sonic disruption and visual play. The failure of the mike, the apparently spontaneous composition of the frame, and the damaged windshield aesthetically and experientially point to the reality of this moment, but they also undercut that reality, foregrounding the filmmaking equipment and highlighting the frame’s role in mediating what the viewer sees. In doing so, the film strives to make us aware of the

196 both/and occurring here through its technical (not)failure, a failure that acts as a symbol for the larger ideas I have been exploring in this chapter.

In making us aware of the gap that exists between profilmic reality and the film’s reality, Close-Up foregrounds the écart that exists in our everyday perception, as we open onto the world and the world opens onto us. The écart often resides outside of our awareness, as it is a “condition of embodiment,” and without this gap between us and the world, we would be unable to have any notion of subjectivity (Hansen, Bodies 84).

Richmond offers this explanation, riffing off of Hansen: “[M]y ability to have and to act in a world arises, paradoxically, out of a separation from the world while I nevertheless remain in contact with the world across that separation” (111). We become aware of this separation when the ease of our perception breaks down, illuminating the flesh that constantly bridges the gap between us and the world. It is this “failure” of the flesh, this breakdown of perception, which paradoxically brings us face to face with our connection to and reliance on Being, creating the possibility of a thin place where our “reality” comes into contact with another reality. Close-Up ushers us into its thin place through its use of non-diegetic music in this sequence, the only instance of non-diegetic music in the film. Sonically, this sequence begins with the (not)failure of Makhmalbaf’s mike, creating the opportunity for us and the film to become aware of the écart, which allows another sonic reality to appear later in the sequence. As I discussed in the previous chapter, music, especially non-diegetic music, often comes along with a film’s religious experience, as non-diegetic music can blur diegetic boundaries. In Close-Up, the film itself has already done the work of blurring diegesis and reality, creating the space for

197 this non-diegetic music to appear and signal the film’s larger interactions with multiple layers of reality. To make matters even more interesting, the non-diegetic music that we hear comes from the score to Kiarostami’s 1974 film, The Traveler, drawing a connection between the “reality” of Close-Up and the diegetic world of one of Kiarostami’s other films (Elena 90). This intertextuality speaks to yet another reality (or fiction) outside of the one we currently see on screen, demonstrating the ability of the film to reach into different realities and incorporate those into its experience; likewise, the use of the score to The Traveler (as well as Sabzian’s invocation of this film earlier in Close-Up) highlights the manner in which the diegesis (and non-diegetic music) of another movie directly impacts the reality of Close-Up. In the gap opened by the (not)failure of

Makhmalbaf’s mic, Close-Up dissolves the borders between realities and lets music knit them together in an acknowledgment of their interconnected nature.

The Mirror plays with a similar sound malfunction at its conclusion, as Mina gets rid of her mike by giving it to a local shopkeeper down the street from her home. We see her talking to the shopkeeper in a long shot that cleverly points to the various levels of narrative reality present in the film. In this shot, Mina’s head is barely visible in the center of the frame, and we see her through the window of the shop, the shelves around her filled with stuffed animals. Along with this, the frame is broken up into thirds by the presence of four trees that partition off various pieces of the frame from each other. Each of the thirds contains its own slice of action: the center features Mina talking to the shopkeeper, the left shows a young boy huddling by what appears to be a fire in a metal can, and the right highlights a man exiting his car and entering the shop. While these

198 three tableaus remain relatively constant, other characters cross over the boundaries established by these trees, demonstrating the film’s willingness to weave in and out of other realities and stories. Eventually Mina leaves the store after giving the owner her mike, and the camera pans left to follow her, but we still hear the conversation in the store, picked up by the mike that Mina left. We hear the chatter of the shopkeeper and his customer while we watch Mina reach her home; thus, we see the climax of the film, but are unable to hear it. The camera remains focused on the door to Mina’s “home,” and before long we hear one of the assistants on the film talking to the shopkeeper, asking him to bring the mike back to Mina. We have here two separate tracks of obfuscation running in parallel to each other, one visual and one aural, as the film continues to uphold its status as a spontaneous, authentic production, riddled with the unexpected. We hear the shopkeeper fumbling with the mike as we watch Mina interact with a man on a motorcycle outside her door, and then the sound disappears completely. As the shopkeeper walks towards Mina’s house, the assistant runs out and turns the mike back on, which the shopkeeper had apparently turned off. As she does this, she turns back and looks at the camera while asking if the mike is picking up her voice. This (not)failure of the mike allows the film one more chance to remind the viewer of the mediation of the camera even in what seems to be an entirely unplanned moment. With the mike turned on, the shopkeeper makes his way to Mina’s door, and we hear the first few lines of their conversation before he “accidentally” turns the mike off again, and we are left frustrated as they end their conversation and he brings the mike back to the film crew. Much like

Close-Up, The Mirror opens up a gap in its perception through the (not)failure of the

199 mike at the end of its narrative. Close-Up blames old equipment and The Mirror suggests an older man’s incompetence for these technical failures, both films posit “realistic” reasons for the failure of film to record the profilmic event in its entirety in order to support the fiction that they are recording reality. However, the (not)failure that animates the end of The Mirror contrasts with the one at the end of Close-Up, resulting in a different outcome for the viewer.

In Close-Up, the (not)failure of the mike and visual fracturing of Sabzian’s meeting with Makhmalbaf frustrate expectations of continuity, but ultimately the final scene of the film resolves this frustration by bringing sound and image back together as

Sabzian and Makhmalbaf visit the Ahankhah’s home, restoring the continuity of the film’s final moments. In contrast, The Mirror never gives its viewers the satisfaction of bringing the visual and sonic together to close the film, content to simply let the two realms exist side by side as the credits roll. How can we account for the differences between very similar techniques used at the end of these films? Why does The Mirror refuse us the resolution that Close-Up provides? Simply put, these films are exploring two different ways that the cinema can interact with reality, and while they end up putting forth similar notions about that relationship, they take different approaches in doing so.

As I mentioned above, the non-diegetic music in Close-Up’s penultimate scene ends up doing the work of bringing these two levels of reality (the diegetic and the non- diegetic/the visual and the sonic) together, allowing the film to re-establish continuity in its final scene. Rather than bringing these levels of reality together at its conclusion, The

Mirror allows them to stay separate, doing so for the same reason that Close-Up re-

200 connects them: to foreground the multiple levels of reality that have existed throughout the film and to force the audience to consider how these levels of reality play out not only in the cinema, but in everyday life. Sometimes, in moments of religious experience like we see in Close-Up, the écart fades and Being briefly comes into focus in a swatch of light or a note of a song. Yet, there are other moments, no less religious and probably more frequent, like we see in The Mirror, where we are only aware of Being through its absence, through a quiet sense that something lurks just outside of our reality waiting to make itself known. Both these films, through the way that they play with reality and the diegesis, make us confront the moments in our own lives where we have had similar experiences, asking us to look for the other, perhaps deeper realties that surround us.

~*~

Whether a wrinkle in the cloth of classical Hollywood continuity or an Iranian excursion into cinematic reality, the filmic thin place can appear anywhere and at any time. In the case of a film becoming a thin place for a viewer, those moments are intensely personal and subjective and it is not for me to circumscribe them, as they can take on a number of different forms, some of which I will consider in the next chapter.

However, the film’s body expresses its religious experience and its perception of a thin place in clear, formal ways connected to how the film’s body relates to its diegesis or profilmic event. First, as we saw most noticeably in Close-Up and This is Not a Film, a thin place opens up when the filmic body noticeably shifts and transforms in order to express different perceptions, presenting two different instances of its reality to the viewer. In these moments, the filmic body experiences two different realities, as it

201 attempts to reconcile these perceptions under the umbrella of a larger reality or diegesis, while the very act of showing two different perceptions makes the audience aware of the possibility of multiple levels of reality. Second, as these Iranian films demonstrate, the filmic body encounters a thin place when it turns its gaze back upon its means of production, whether technical or directorial, rupturing the diegesis to consider the profilmic reality that gave rise to its diegetic reality. By becoming aware of a reality outside its diegesis that gave rise to its own expression and perception, the filmic body breaks down its diegesis to show the deeper reality that undergirds it. Finally, as Close-

Up and The Mirror illustrate, the filmic thin place appears when audiovisual elements work against each other to crack open the diegesis, splitting it apart through technical

(not)failure and aural or visual obfuscation. Whether the film eventually reconciles the aural and visual, as Close-Up does, or refuses to, like The Mirror, the gap produced by their discontinuity functions as a thin place for the filmic body. In this experience of thin places, the film’s body seeks to draw us into its perceptions, encouraging us to see the world as a place where reality is never what it seems at first glance.

When the filmic body encounters a thin place, our experience and expectations as the viewer may be frustrated, as the film seems to have lost its grip on a singular reality, its diegesis shot through with another reality. These frustrated expectations, at least in my case, often give way to an unexpected joy that comes from finding out that the filmic body experiences the world in a manner not unlike my own, as I see on the screen the same gaps and fissures that illuminate the underside of my embodied experience. For the filmic body does not call its reality into question to undermine reality writ large, but in

202 order to open us up to the possibility of another, deeper Reality running below the ones that we construct, perform, and inhabit. In showing us the contingency of its diegesis, reliant as it is on technology, actors, and filmmakers, the filmic body reveals that this contingency lies at the heart of every reality. In the light of these filmic thin places, the distinctions between reality and fiction fade away and we are left with different levels of reality, all dependent on Being and none of them more or less real than the others.

Clearly, a film like Stagecoach is not about “real” people, but this does not mean that the film does not have or constitute a reality: it inhabits reality in the same way we all do, as a body in the world contingent on other realities, bodies, and forces to support it.

Furthermore, the filmic body can and does influence other realities, as we saw in Close-

Up and This is Not a Film, making the borders between “fiction” and “reality” quite porous indeed. Radically incarnated and embodied, we and film share in these religious experiences of thin places, as they reveal a multiplicity of realities, each one erupting from Being and granting us access, ever so fleeting, to another facet of the ever-shifting, ever-surprising world.

203

Chapter 4. For the Love of Film: The Cinephiliac Moment and Religious Experience

“The cinema thus may be regarded (potentially at any rate) as a mystery, in the absence of religion. It is cosmic in the deepest sense of the word, for if the theater is an incantation whose purely verbal magic represents Man’s dialogue with God, the cinema provides a platform to observe the magic of reality.” — Jean Mitry

In The Circus, the 1928 Chaplin film, an unlikely “actor” steals the show midway through the film, right after the Tramp has escaped from an excursion into a lion’s cage.

Chaplin speaks to the ring-master’s step daughter (Merna Kennedy), his love interest, in a fairly conventional medium shot of the two of them, although they are strangely positioned to the left, rather than in the center, of the frame. The reason for this framing soon becomes apparent as a small black kitten leaps into the frame from off-screen right, scaring Chaplin in a brief moment of comedy. We cut to a long shot of the two characters, as another circus worker enters the scene from the left and Chaplin picks up the kitten and hands it to Merna’s character. An argument ensues between Chaplin and the other male character, which eventually gets resolved. Chaplin sits back down beside

Merna’s character, who has been holding the kitten in her lap during this argument, and we return to a medium shot of the two. Innocuously, the kitten remains, doing kitten things, until Merna’s character puts it behind the two of them in a heated moment of conversation. Eventually, the ring-master breaks up their conversation, causing them to

204 both leave the hay bales they are sitting on; when they stand up, the kitten is gone, just like that.

The kitten exists in the liminal spaces of the film, appearing from off-screen and disappearing just as easily, as if conjured out of thin air. The film makes this liminality even clearer when the kitten sits in Merna’s lap, its black fur blending into her dark colored skirt, as it disappears into the literal fabric of the film’s construction until its eyes light up her skirt, starry pinpricks of white in the night of her lap. Even as this kitten flickers in and out of existence, it remains the most real thing about this scene, especially compared to the vaudevillian acting style of Chaplin and the constant interruption of the intertitles that disrupt the flow of images. Even more significantly, this kitten establishes the real for me, a twenty-first century viewer, used to synchronous sound films, whose eyes tend to wander around the screen when presented with silent film.53 Furthermore, I first watched The Circus as a third year Ph.D. student, preparing to lead my discussion sections as a TA in an Introduction to Film Studies course, thus already watching the film with more focus than I might normally watch a film. For another viewer, with different expectations and different expertise, this kitten might be easily forgotten, simply a cute visual joke, but for this viewer, the kitten and its starry eyes open up a universe of vast interpretation.

53 This wandering is due, in large part, to silent film’s lack of what Chion calls “synch points,” “salient moment[s] of an audiovisual sequence during which a sound event and visual event meet in synchrony” (Audio 58). Without these synch points directing our attention to specific visual events, it becomes much easier for the eyes to wander, especially when we know that an intertitle will alert us to relevant dialogue and important narrative information. 205

The cat has a long and storied history, revered in some cultures and times as divine, while seen as a symbol of the demonic in others. First domesticated more than

9,000 years ago in the Fertile Crescent, the wild cat (Felis silvestris) “probably began its association with humans as a commensal, feeding on the rodent pests that infested the grain stores of the first farmers” (Driscoll et al. 519). Several millennia later, the ancient

Egyptians domesticated another forerunner of current domestic cat species, and the

Egyptian cat would eventually acquire an elevated status in Egyptian culture thanks to its association with various feline goddesses (Ottoni et al. 5). Like other animals associated with gods and goddesses, the ancient Egyptians often embalmed and mummified cats for worship or offering throughout the first millennium в.ᴄ. (Schorsch and Frantz 16-17;

Armitage and Clutton-Brock 195-96). This Egyptian breed of cats spread across the

Mediterranean and into Europe due to its “usefulness on ships infested with rodents and other pests,” but the Egyptian reverence for the cat did not make the journey to medieval

Europe (Ottoni et al. 5). Due to its independent nature, the cat, especially black cats, became associated with Satan and heretics in medieval Christian Europe (Metzler 27-29).

The cat’s reputation fared much better in the medieval Middle East, where Islamic culture prized the cat for its cleanliness and ability to keep mice at bay in homes and mosques.54

In Western culture, however, the cat has been unable to shake the negative connotations of the medieval period, associated with witchcraft and the occult throughout the

Renaissance, and the black cat remains a harbinger of bad luck to this day. In

54 This outlook on cats has persisted in Islamic culture, as a 2016 documentary about the cats of Istanbul, Kedi, demonstrates, following street cats and those who have special connections to them. Many of the people interviewed see these cats in a spiritual light, including one man who discusses how Allah has sent cats to him in moments of need. 206 contemporary culture, one finds this negative conception of the cat in the continued depiction of cats as villains in countless animated films, where they are soundly defeated by loveable dogs or, in a very strange turn of events given the history of disease in

Europe, adorable mice. In his famous graphic novel about the Holocaust, Maus, Art

Spiegelman chose to depict the Nazis as cats, connecting the feline form to one of the worst atrocities of the modern era. The idea of the cat contains within it a number of opposing and conflicting signifiers that have accumulated over its vast history, and this actual cat, the kitten that sits on Merna Kennedy’s lap, contains all those cats and their history in the nebulae of its eyes.

While this kitten may be an exemplar of the cat in my imagination, I must be careful not to forget that this is an actual cat, one bound to its time and place in history, just as I am bound to my own time and place by my body. However, by exploring the social, cultural, and historical dimensions of the cat, I can return to this specific kitten with renewed vigor and insight. To suggest an intriguing metaphor, The Circus, like the

Egyptians before it, has embalmed this kitten, wrapping it in celluloid instead of linen, and the filmic sarcophagus of the frame gives me access to this kitten’s movement and existence in the world, not just the static body of a mummified cat.55 In this kitten, I find a reason to believe in my body, something which Gilles Deleuze describes as vitally important, also invoking the embalming process as a metaphor: “We must believe in the

55 Andre Bazin would probably take offense at my use of embalming as a metaphor for cinema, as he draws on the process in his discussion of the ontology of the photographic image, arguing that embalming and its concerns lie at the heart of the “plastic arts,” and at their “origin...lies a mummy complex” (“Ontology” 9). Bazin claims that photography and the cinema mark a break from these desires that animated the “plastic arts,” replacing them with a desire to create “an ideal world in the likeness of the real” (“Ontology” 10). 207 body, but as the germ of life…which has been preserved and lives on in the holy shroud or the mummy’s bandages, and which bears witness to life, in this world as it is” (173).

This kitten returns from the afterlife each time I watch The Circus, its celluloid bandages unwrapping before my eyes to reveal the body beneath and the life it represents.

Continuing this metaphor, we can move from the kitten to Charlie Chaplin and Merna

Kennedy, preserved more perfectly than any mummy, occupying their own sort of glorious afterlife in the film’s diegesis, a world exempt from the struggles of the film’s production and its star’s rocky personal life (Vance 192-94). Going further, what about silent film itself as a mummy, unable to speak but put on display for us to see the riches of a previous generation? What of those who restore these films, patching and filling gaps in the celluloid like expert embalmers? How about those who have discovered prints of films long thought lost, these cinematic archeologists, rooting around in archives, basements, and attics? All of these ideas burst forth from this kitten and, importantly, they remind me of the materiality at the core of the cinema, even in this digital age. In this manner, it is vital that a specific kitten looks out upon the audience, reminding us of our material connections to the histories and cultures that have come before us, even as we remain situated in our worlds, just as this kitten was, its eyes darting to and fro, inviting us to look along with it.

Yet, even as this kitten encourages us to share in its gaze, its eyes remind us that the cat perceives the world differently than we do, as a result of anatomical differences between human and cat eyes. In contrast to circular human pupils, the domestic cat’s pupils are vertical, a physical trait common in shorter “ambush predators,” as the vertical

208 pupil helps them “estimate the distance to potential prey accurately,” “enabl[ing] a relatively large vertical baseline for depth from blur” (Banks et al. 3-4). Considering these perceptual differences in light of this kitten in The Circus, I am reminded that the filmic body also has eyes (or an eye) that, like the cat’s eyes, perceives the world differently than mine. In a literal sense, both the eyes of the camera and the cat do things that my eyes cannot, shifting focus and re-calibrating their sight to frame the world according to their needs and instincts. This kitten’s eyes beckon to me as the viewer, asking me to learn from the differences between my perception and the film’s, as, unlike the kitten, the filmic body presents its way of looking at the world to me in a way that makes its perception intelligible. We may be able to imagine what a cat (or another human) sees, but we are not granted access to that perception in the same way that we are granted access to the perception of the camera eye through our intersubjective, embodied relationship to the cinema. Scott Richmond describes our access to this perception in this way: “Cinematic perception is not my perception, belonging to me, nor does it belong to the cinema, somehow a result of its manipulation of my body. Rather, it arises in an ongoing encounter” (169). Like religious experience and the soul, cinematic perception is created by our encounters with the material bodies of film and their view of and existence in the world. Along with this, the eyes of this specific kitten remind me that perception, while abstract to an extent, evolves and shifts throughout history and resists easy universalization, as each perceiver has a unique vantage point on the world—no two bodies perceive the world in the same way. Thus, each film and each viewer bring their own position to the cinematic encounter, allowing for a multiplicity of new perceptions

209 and insights to blossom from the interaction between film and viewer. Often, these insights come from a specific, personal moment of connection between film and viewer, a moment that could be easily dismissed or missed by a different viewer. For me and The

Circus, this kitten and its eyes lie at the center of the film’s galaxy, everything else orbiting around them in the starry space of interpretation.

~*~

What use can the scholar find in the type of film analysis I just presented? What am I trying to get at by allowing myself to be overwhelmed by these mystical and joyful moments of cinema? Is any of this rambling useful, a concept foisted on the humanities by those who think the end goal of knowledge is to make money? I wonder if the “use” of this type of film analysis lies in the fact that it is demonstratively not useful, presenting instead a view of the world that cannot be easily commodified, a view that only requires the willingness to look out on the world in wonder. In Cinephilia and History, Christian

Keathley explores the wonder that animated early film critics, suggesting that we can still learn from those like Andre Bazin and Siegfried Kracauer and their love for cinema.

Writing in the early 2000s, Keathley suggests that the film theory of the 1980s and 90s

“[had] been preoccupied with articulating and exposing the means by which dominant narrative cinema creates a world of drama, adventure, and enchantment that we can step into and lose ourselves in” (152). In doing so, this theory transformed the cinema into another tool of the hegemony (which it certainly can be) that needed to be undercut and the spectator became an unwitting fool, tricked into capitulating to dominant, destructive ideologies by pretty lights flashing in the dark. As important as these ideas are, they

210 replaced love for the cinema with a detached cynicism, a symptom of prevailing cultural and academic attitudes of the 1980s and 90s that found their way into academic discourse. Keathley argues for a return to earlier modes of film criticism by way of the

“cinephiliac anecdote,” which “seeks to illuminate the ways in which movies—especially moments from movies—displace themselves out of their original contexts and step into our lives” (152). Invoking the same ideas as Keathley, Murray Pomerance expounds upon these moments in his book The Horse Who Drank the Sky, arguing that film is “built not of shots but of moments,” and these moments are “what we remember and retain, what we possess of the screen and incorporate into ourselves and our worlds” (6). Pomerance sees a reliance on following the film’s narrative and deriving some “message” from it as a “failure of the viewing experience,” in which we have been convinced that “the story is what counts, that anything vital is told as such, that the sequentiality of events is what we should pay attention to” (34). In this approach to the film experience, the narrative entirety of the film becomes less important than the individual moments that leave an impression on us, and, indeed, these moments become the film for us, leaving their impact in our everyday lives.

Far from just a piece of trivia or a fleeting memory, the cinephiliac moment forms the foundation for filmic analysis based on its ability to draw us into an embodied relationship with the film and to strike at the core of our individualized experiences at the cinema. Building on a Bazinian ontology of film, Keathley sees the cinephiliac moment as “the sudden eruption of the real (or the indexical) in a text dominated by iconic and symbolic properties,” an experience that necessarily spills over the representational and

211 narrative borders of the film and its diegesis (38).56 In this notion of the cinephiliac moment, I find the beginning of an explanation as to why it is often the mundane and quotidian moments from a film that spark my reverie—these are the eruptions of the real breaking through the narrative, the flowing lava that hardens into the islands of interpretation. Keathley draws a distinction between cinephiliac moments and

“memorable filmic moments,” that is, ones that were “precisely designed to be memorable,” suggesting that one finds the cinephiliac moment in the ordinary and the understated (33). In that, the cinephiliac moment runs parallel to moments of everyday religious experience of Being running below and around our embodied experiences, even at times we may least expect it. Yet, I find no reason why a “memorable” cinematic moment cannot open up a viewer to a religious experience as well, as Keathley’s notion seems to privilege moments that only an elite audience can grasp and that are mostly found in a specific style of filmmaking. By seeing religious experience in other cinematic moments, even those in the gaudiest of blockbusters, we can democratize the idea of religious experience at the cinema, providing an entry point for the non-cinephile to have these types of experiences.57 Religious experience does not only come in the quotidian

56 Keathley, even as he discusses indexicality and cinema, never addresses the ontology of digital cinema, but, as I suggested earlier, I believe that this “eruption of real” can occur in digital playback just as much as in analogical playback (38). 57 When I’m back in the Northeast, I routinely go to an IMAX theater with friends to see whatever big, flashy movie happens to be out. In the summer of 2018, we went and saw The Meg (Turteltaub, 2018), an admittedly self-aware movie—you don’t cast Jason Statham unknowingly—about a gigantic shark that humanity awakes by exploring too deep in the ocean depths. Even given the impressive scope and sound of the film in IMAX, I wouldn’t say that I had a religious experience during The Meg, but as I walked out of the theater, I remember hearing a ten year-old (or so) boy chattering excitedly about the film to his parents. Clearly, his visceral experience of the film, not filtered through years of academic study and carefully cultivated “taste,” eclipsed mine. He left the theater, perhaps forever changed by the memorable moments of The Meg, maybe a future marine biologist or filmmaker, but, even if these fanciful projections never 212 and mundane, but can also overwhelm with swells of emotion and power, even if those are not the type of religious experiences I will be addressing in the remainder of this chapter. Given my training, background, and temperament, I am more likely to see cinephiliac moments of the sort that Keathley proposes, but my experience as a cinephile cannot and should not be forced upon all viewers.

Significantly, both Keathley and Pomerance argue that these cinephiliac moments, rather than the narrative of the film, constitute the film’s meaning for the viewer that encounters them. Pomerance puts the question this way: “Could not the entire narrative of the film also be understood as a ligature or scaffold for the suspension and illumination of a single particular moment? Could cinema itself not be a moment?” (126)

For me, The Circus orbits around that little, black kitten and when I think of The Circus, I think about the moment that contains this kitten and the kitten that contains this moment.

Your moments will be different than mine, just as mine are different from Keathley’s and

Pomerance’s. But the moments that we remember, often flashes of light or snippets of sound, overflow the film’s narrative, as they come to mark that film for us, to represent that film in our experience and memory. What exactly happens in a moment like this, where the film crystallizes into something more and less than its narrative, bringing the viewer into a different kind of cinematic experience? Paul Willemen suggests that the cinephiliac moment does more than just subvert convention and narrative, but highlights something that is “produced en plus, in excess or addition, almost involuntarily” (237).

come to fruition, this kid and his enthusiasm briefly made me a little less cynical about the world—in this day and age, if that’s not a religious experience, I don’t know what is. 213

Here, I think Willemen uses “excess” in a different way than the word has been used in film theory, particularly in the neo-structuralist theory of David Bordwell and Kristin

Thompson, where “excess” signals a moment that is “counternarrative” and “counter- unity,” as it undermines the film’s attempt to impose its narrative upon the viewer

(Thompson 57). Indeed, the cinephiliac moment arrests the viewer, shifting their attention from the film’s narrative, not through an awareness of excessive style or a departure from conventions, however, but through joy, surprise, and excitement. The moment steps out of the film and into the viewer’s life—it is, in short, a moment of revelation.

To search out these moments of revelation, the viewer must activate a different mode of perception, a mode that searches the borders of the film, looking for the strange, the mysterious, and the extant. Keathley terms this type of perception “panoramic,” drawing on the terminology coined by Wolfgang Schivelbusch in his seminal work on the transformation of perception inaugurated by the rise of the railroad. Keathley argues that other film scholars have missed Schivelbusch’s main claim that “the defining feature of panoramic perception” is “the inclination to fix on marginalia in the images or landscapes that pass before the viewers’ eyes” (44). Given that most films, especially mainstream narrative ones, are arranged to promote continuity and present their “images [as] related and thus legible,” Keathley argues that “the ordinary film viewer” does not employ

“‘panoramic’ perception,” but rather that it is a “select viewer...best exemplified by the cinephile,” who makes use of this mode of perception (44).58 As a viewer used to the

58 As with early train travelers, the cinephile has to learn how to perceive the cinema this way. Schivelbusch discusses how the first travelers via the railroad did not know how to make sense of what they saw from the train: “Dullness and boredom result from attempts to carry the perceptual apparatus of traditional travel, with an intense appreciation of the landscape, over to the railway” (61). Eventually, the 214 rhythms of the film form, much like the train traveler who became accustomed to the movement of the train, “the cinephile is able to ‘read’,” through panoramic perception,

“what is on [screen] with comparatively little effort and thus has a certain amount of perceptual energy left over” (44). With this extra energy, the cinephiliac viewer can turn her attention to discovering what exists on the outskirts of the screen and in the borderlands of the diegesis. Keathley also uses “excess” to describe these cinephiliac moments: “[T]he cinephiliac moment—an excess of exchange between a film’s makers and its viewers—reanimates the repressed materiality of the film image” (Keathley 53).

With this turn of phrase, Keathley seems to be situating the cinephiliac moment within a framework that would hearken back to Bordwell and Thompson, and I think he overemphasizes the role of the filmmaker in the viewing process (much as Bordwell and

Thompson do with the Hollywood institution), whereas I see the film/viewer relationship as far more important that the relationship between filmmaker and viewer.59 The revelation of the cinephiliac moment can make itself known through senses in addition to sight—I can almost feel the soft fur of the kitten in The Circus—and emphasizes our embodied, material experience at the cinema, while, at the same time, reminding us that the film has its own material body that experiences the world like ours, its repressed materiality coming to the surface. We become what Sobchack calls a “cinesthetic subject,” a play of words on synesthesia, as “our fingers, our skin and nose and lips and

traveler gains a new way of looking at the world as “the machine and the motion it creates become integrated into his visual perception,” thus creating a new way of perception where “evanescent reality has become the new reality” (66). 59 Of course, a deep and abiding interest in filmmakers and their bodies of work has been a hallmark of cinephilia since Cahiers du Cinema, and even I have been at odds to completely resist the pull of the auteur throughout this dissertation. 215 tongue and stomach and all the other parts of us understand what we see in the film experience” and make that known through our other senses (“What” 84). Thus, the cinephiliac moment returns the viewer to the foundation of materiality that undergirds our existence in the world while simultaneously drawing us deeper into the embodied relationship between us and the film.

Taking the cinephiliac moment a step further, Keathley expands upon it, suggesting that these moments and the experiences that they inspire can form the basis for what he calls the cinephiliac anecdote. Keathley envisions the cinephiliac anecdote as a way that scholars can unify both their study of the film as an object and their subjective experience of the film: “[T]he two methods must be reconciled so that the resulting discourse simultaneously achieves the goals of both approaches: the production of knowledge along with (or via) an extending of the registering of effect” (135). Drawing upon new historicist ideas of the “anecdote,” Keathley discusses how the form of those anecdotes can serve as the basis for cinephiliac anecdotes, which “begin with the cinephiliac moment and expand outward into a variety of related contexts—personal, historical, critical” (140). Keathley goes on to suggest three ways of beginning to generate these anecdotes from cinephiliac moments—metonymy, personal memory, and the uncanny. In metonymy, “intuition” helps fashion the cinephiliac anecdote as one image leads to another and another, down a chain of signification that helps “bring our interest in (or our intuition about) a particular filmic moment to the point where we can learn from it, or with it” (145). As with many forms of anecdotes, personal memory plays an important role in the cinephiliac anecdote, as “cinephiliac moments are themselves

216 intensely subjective, bound up perhaps with a personal value of some unrecoverable meaning, [and] writing about such moments will often mobilize personal information”

(145). Finally, the notion of the uncanny illuminates those unsettling moments that we feel compelled to consider further and to share with those around us, and whether they come from the cinema or everyday life, these moments connect deeply to the idea of religious experience, where a moment of connection to a deeper reality is produced through relationships that we have between other bodies and objects in the world (150-

51). The cinephiliac anecdote seeks to provide insight into a film through the act of interpretation while not losing the revelatory, mysterious quality of the moment that first sparked the cinephile’s interest.

To see a film as a cinephile, then, means learning how to see it anew, drawing on historical modes of spectatorship practiced by a specific group of spectators and critics.

In returning to these critics, Keathley draws them back into current discourse, and he argues, and I would agree, that they still speak to our contemporary viewing practices, even as they remain a product of their own historical moment. Bazin acts as Keathley’s touchstone, and he traces Bazin’s connection to Surrealism in order to argue that Bazin sees film as a cinephile, even though his “critical, rigorous logic and breadth and depth of interest outside of film…place [him] outside the official circle of cinephilia” (56). Yet, through Bazin’s essays and thought, especially as it relates to issues of realism, we see him develop a theory that makes essential the little details that mark cinephiliac perception. Keathley reminds us that Bazin’s argument about cinematic realism is both one of “psychological experience” and “aesthetics”: “Bazin proposed that a cinematic

217 aesthetic of realism is one that would mobilize the unique psychological effect of film images—one that would increase the viewer’s sense of the film as an objective, automatically produced, indexical mark” (73). From this aesthetic, then, Bazin gravitates towards films that embrace this type of realism, “via a visual and narrative style that does not compose things completely…leaving room for the appearance of the irreplaceable concrete element, the marker of the film’s privileged relationship to the reality it records”

(Keathley 78). If we approach Bazin’s work with these ideas in mind, viewing him as a cinephile as Keathley does, his cinephiliac perception becomes evident. In his discussion of Italian neorealism and realism, Bazin draws attention to those films’ use of what he calls “image facts,” “a fragment of concrete reality in itself multiple and full of ambiguity” (“Aesthetic” 37). The weight of these moments, these fragments, surface in

Bazin’s essays on neorealist films, such as when he describes events that take place in the films, like a sudden downpour in Bicycle Thieves: “The events are not necessarily signs of something, of a truth of which we are to be convinced, they all carry their own weight, their complete uniqueness, that ambiguity that characterizes any fact” (“Bicycle” 52). In these events on screen, the multiplicity of the “fact” shines in all its glorious reality, and this ambiguity creates a scenario where different types of perception are available to the viewer, as Bazin notes: “So, if you do not have the eyes to see, you are free to attribute what happens to bad luck or chance” (“Bicycle” 52). In this phrase, Bazin’s words resound with a religious tenor, suggesting a different way—perhaps a better way—to see

218 the cinema, a perception activated by a certain kind of faith in the world presented on screen.60

Kracauer, one of Bazin’s contemporaries, also writes with a kind of religious fervor in his 1960 book, Theory of Film: The Redemption of Physical Reality, where he outlines a theory of film that remains both frustrating and compelling. As Miriam Hansen points out, Theory of Film did not fare well in the academy during the 1970s and 80s,

“enjoy[ing] a long and varied history of critical rejection,” which Hansen pushes back against by “historicizing” the text, suggesting there is something to be gained from “the tension between the early drafts and the later book” as well as in the book’s seeming multiplicity of viewpoints (“With” 437). Hansen demonstrates that the early versions of

Theory of Film differed radically from the final version, especially in its treatment of the spectator; in the final version of the text, “the material dimension of [the subject] has congealed into an alienated object, a ‘physical reality’ whose shared root with physis and physiology has been supplanted with vague references to modern physics” (Hansen,

“With” 466). In the published text, Kracauer’s thoughts on the spectator vacillate between a clear understanding of the intersubjective, embodied relationship between spectator and film (“film images affect primarily the spectator’s senses”) and the notion that the spectator loses her agency at the cinema (“the moviegoer is much in the position of a hypnotized person”) (158, 160). Hansen sees these types of contradictions throughout Theory of Film and reads them as the effect of the Holocaust on Kracauer:

60 For Biblical examples of “have eyes to see,” consider Isaiah 6:9-10, Jeremiah 5:21, and Matthew 13:9- 16. 219

“The historical break of the Holocaust irrevocably changed the conditions under which film could still be constructed as a publicly available medium for experiencing and reflecting on the problematics of death” (“With” 468). Within the erasures taking place in the final version of Theory of Film, however, Hansen finds “traces” of the earlier work, and boldly claims that “recovering those traces…means not only restoring a historical dimension to the text but also rereading it in ways that make it part of our own history”

(“With” 469). Here, the “our” takes on its own multiplicity of meaning, as Hansen not only implicates the film scholar and historian in the history of spectatorship, but also calls to us as people who watch movies to become aware of these histories, suggesting a project of recovery that takes history and our place in it seriously—put another way,

Hansen encourages a cinephiliac reading of Kracauer, drawing us to the hidden corners of the text.

Lurking at the edge of the frame, the epilogue to Theory of Film departs from the systematic approach of the rest of the book, suddenly switching from a granular view of the various elements of cinema to a bird’s-eye view of cinema’s relevance to the plight of the modern subject. Kracauer wends his way through a variety of thinkers that bemoan the loss of spirituality, values, and ideological unity, arguing that “abstractness,” not the loss of these things, lies at the core of the modern situation (291). Abstractness, for

Kracauer, consists of “the abstract manner in which people of all walks of life perceive the world and themselves,” in a kind of “shadowy awareness of things in their fullness”

(291). In a passage that might be more relevant in today’s disenchanted society, Kracauer blames science for the rise of this abstractness, as “most sciences do not deal with the

220 objects of ordinary experience but abstract from them certain elements which they then process in various ways” (292). The “challenge” of the modern situation, then, lies in fighting against this abstraction, in order to find “something we did not look for, something tremendously important in its own right—the world that is ours” (296). With this phrase, “the world that is ours,” Kracauer has turned from the structuralism of the rest of Theory of Film to a phenomenological theory of film, in which film delivers “the experience of things in their concreteness” to its viewers, restoring a connection to the world that has been severed by the forces of modernity (296). Read in this way, the epilogue of Theory of Film comes alive with meaning, speaking to the power of an embodied, cinephiliac mode of perception that can begin to provide a “remedy” for one plunged into abstraction (296). While the rest of Theory of Film reads like a product of its time, Kracauer’s thought in the epilogue, at least in terms of film theory, seems to be ahead of its time, foreshadowing later film theory. Twenty-five years after Theory of

Film, Deleuze offers a diagnosis of the modern condition that could have been taken straight from Kracauer: “The modern fact is that we no longer believe in the world. We do not even believe in the events which happen to us…as if they only half concerned us”

(171).61 Paola Marrati explains what Deleuze means by this “belief”: “What we lack is an immanent belief in this world: not a belief in its existence, which no one doubts, but in the possibility of creating new forms of life in it” (5). Even in Deleuze’s notoriously difficult theory, traces of Kracauer appear, as Deleuze suggests a similar solution to

61 Here, we see Deleuze describe a self akin to Taylor’s “buffered self,” the self “aware of the possibility of disengagement” from the world that accompanied the rise of modernity (42). 221

Kracauer—film must reconnect us to the world by “restoring our belief in the world,” and this belief “is simply believing in the body” (172). Through a way of perceiving that the cinema grants, a return to concrete things and being-in-the-world, we find the tools to pull ourselves out of abstraction into reality.

To see as a cinephile means to see the world expressed by and in film with a radical vision and to remain open to new ways of seeing and being a spectator. My scholarship and my own viewing has been influenced by this cinephiliac sight, and this approach to the cinema has encouraged me to search out new ways of seeing the screen, informed by the past, but not chained to it. These new perceptions and ways of seeing, born out of the cinematic encounter, destabilize my usual, comfortable ways of looking at the world and open up new possibilities to relate to the world and those in it. As humans, especially modern and postmodern ones, we often forget the world’s hold on us, reducing its reality and subjectivity to a level of abstraction and objectivity, allowing it to be exploited and explained away, but the cinema calls us back to the world and its objects.

For Bazin, cinephiliac perception allows “objects [to be] both themselves and something new, living and not living, real and magical,” grounding them in the material world while allowing us to see how they mysteriously exist within the flesh of this world (Keathley

71). “Film renders visible what we did not, or perhaps could not, see before its advent,” suggests Kracauer, before audaciously claiming that “we literally redeem this world from its dormant state, its state of virtual nonexistence, by endeavoring to experience it through the camera” (300). Along with letting us see the world afresh (or even redeem it!) through its perceptions, the cinema also creates totally new ways of seeing the world

222 and, by extension, being-in-the-world, as we relate to it intersubjectively. Here, we arrive at a Deleuzian concept of cinema, as Christopher Vitale explains: “Cinema is the practice of world dividing and redividing…It rearticulates the world, and in doing so, shows us potentially new ways to live life. For life and cinema are two sides of the same. Cinema is life, and life is cinema” (“Final”). Equating the world and cinema, Deleuze asks this question: “[I]f the world has become a bad cinema, in which we no longer believe, surely a true cinema can contribute to giving us back reasons to believe in the world and vanished bodies?” (201) While it’s difficult to pinpoint exactly what Deleuze considers to be “true” cinema, it seems to me to be both an aesthetic, present in the film’s body, and a mode of perceiving, present in the viewer’s body, which allows the relationship created by the cinematic experience to reveal the possibilities of the world to the viewer. It is, as

Deleuze offers elsewhere, “an ethic or faith,” a stance toward the cinema that trusts it, as it breaks us free from our abstraction in order to “believe in this world” (173). This faith comes from choosing to look at the world religiously, that is, in a way that allows the real and concrete to surface in the sea of abstraction that buffets us with its ever-present waves.

The reality that comes from this Deleuzian way of viewing leads me to depart from Bazinian realism (as typically understood), in that, while I do believe that the cinema can and does reveal realities, it also has the power to create (per Deleuze and

Plate) new realities, provided we approach it with this belief. In discussing belief and reality, Marrati draws a clear distinction between Bazin and Deleuze:

223

Belief concerns our possibilities for life in this world, the only world we have,

thus exposing yet another reason that Deleuze, despite his admiration of—and

debt to—Bazin, never espoused the theme of the realist vocation of cinema. What

is at stake in cinema—and in our modern condition—is not “reality.” (86)

The cinematic experience provides us with an opportunity to exercise faith, to make “a choice for the world,” to pursue “a conversion from the model of knowledge to that of belief” (Marrati 87-88). With that being said, the approach I take is not exactly

Deleuze’s, which would appear to privilege the cinema acting on the viewer more than the reciprocal action between the two. Similarly, Chamarette draws connections between her approach to film phenomenology and these film theorists, offering that Bazin and

Kracaeur’s work paid “attention to the sensory qualities of film,” while Deleuze “shared” an “interest in presence and duration…and embodied indexicality,” before citing some important differences between the two approaches (66-67). Keeping “embodiment and sensory cinematics” in the forefront requires, according to Chamarette, “intimate attention to the materiality of the film encounter: the film itself, its material relation to its creator and its viewers, the conditions of its viewing and the modes of engagement it instigates” (66-67). This material encounter with the cinema, I argue, produces religious experience grounded in our subjectivities, “slippery [and] unfixed” as they may be

(Chamarette 63). Our material subjectivities coagulate with the cinema’s in our shared embodied experience, expressed in the cinematic moments that speak to us.

These moments, when they strike us, are equal parts exhilarating, clarifying, and befuddling. Over the course of this dissertation, I have been at pains to not lose the

224 excitement, vigor, and mystery of the moments and films that I have discussed, pursuing this approach both as a result of my larger methodology and inspired by the work of

Keathley and Pomerance. Keathley suggests that this love for cinema has been missing from scholarship since the inauguration of film studies as an academic discipline: “Films were ‘decoded’ such that all pleasures could be explained away and the film experience could be captured and contained. With these critical moves, academic cinephiles gained a world…but they lost their cinephiliac souls” (135). This chapter pushes back against this overly objective approach to film studies by offering a series of cinephiliac moments and anecdotes, highlighting the moments that have marked my relationships with one film and its religious experiences that have served as entry points into my own everyday religious experiences. Paul Willemen calls the cinephiliac moment a “moment of revelation” in which “what is being revealed is subjective, fleeting, variable, depending on a set of desires and the subjective constitution that is involved in a specific encounter with a specific film” (236). Willemen also notes, however, that “subjectivities and networks are themselves social [and] historically variable,” meaning that our cultures and relationships also shape how we interact with these moments and their effects on us

(236). Thus, while the cinephiliac moment remains resolutely subjective, it, like our bodies, cannot be abstracted from the world and society around it. My moments of revelation have come in the relationships formed between myself as a specific, situated viewer and the films that have touched and shaped me. Interestingly enough, many of the moments that I hold dear in my film watching experience coalesce around a few visual motifs that recur in some of my favorite films: cats, trains, and rain. In this chapter, I will

225 provide some cinephiliac anecdotes, examining how my relationship with one specific film, Pather Panchali, has shaped how I watch film and changed how I look at the world.

Cats

“If man could be crossed with the cat it would improve man, but it would deteriorate the cat.” — Mark Twain

As was probably evident from the anecdote that opened this chapter, I am a cat person. I’m sure there are a number of reasons for this disposition, probably related to my introversion and dating back to some less than pleasant childhood experiences with dogs.

Whatever the reasons, I have always gotten along with cats, and they seem to have always gotten along with me, even some of my friends’ notoriously shy cats. This connection to cats owes just as much to the media I interacted with growing up as my personality. My childhood memories are filled with stories and movies that feature anthropomorphized animals, whether animated Disney’s films, Massachusetts native

Thorton W. Burgess’ children stories, or Brian Jacques’ Redwall series. In many ways, I never grew out of these stories and their insistence that the animals around us carry on their own mysterious inner lives. In these tales, the animals take center stage and we become invested in their experiences, and many contemporary movies, most of them directed towards children, use animals as characters to drive forward their narrative. In contrast to these clearly defined animal characters, I am more interested here in the animals that exist on the borders of the frame, blips in the film’s narrative that add to its

226 realism, like the kitten in The Circus. These animals confront us similarly to the animals we encounter in our everyday lives, who tend to pass by unnoticed, unremarkable in their ordinariness. We often forget that when we look at the animal, the animal can look back at us. This reciprocity of looking signals a relationship between us and the animal, a relationship not unlike the one between viewer and film. Reminding us that we perceive differently than film and animal, the reciprocal gaze opens us up to consider a number of intriguing implications related to our experience in and perception of the world. In these on-screen moments, the animal and its gaze probe to the depths of our identities and position in the world, asking us what it means to be human, a religious question if there ever was one.

Taking the look of his cat as a starting point, Jacques Derrida considers what this gaze tells him about our relationship to the animal world in his essay, “The Animal that

Therefore I Am.” Derrida begins by providing an example of his reaction to becoming aware of his cat looking at him naked: “It is as if I were ashamed, therefore, naked in front of this cat, but also ashamed for being ashamed. A reflected shame, the mirror of a shame ashamed of itself, a shame that is at the same time specular, unjustifiable, and unable to be admitted to” (372-73). Prompted by this shame, Derrida works his way through some philosophical questions before arriving at the conclusion that his cat’s gaze affects him because the look of this cat (and animals more generally) calls us to consider its point of view:

[The animal] has its point of view regarding me. The point of view of the absolute

other, and nothing will have ever done more to make me think through this

227

absolute alterity of the neighbor than these moments when I see myself seen

naked under the gaze of a cat. (380)

Throughout this initial discussion, Derrida has been careful to remind the reader that the cat and its look are not abstract metaphors, but rather a real cat who really looked at him in the bathroom: “[T]he cat I am talking about is a real cat, truly, believe me, a little cat.

It isn’t the figure of a cat” (374). He then continues, drawing on a number of examples of cats from literature and history, all the while insisting that this cat, the “little cat,” remains distinct from those cats of “myths and religions, literature and fables” (374).

Here, Derrida seems to have his cake and eat it too by keeping his cat grounded in its real, singular historicity, while affording it some of the metaphorical qualities of the abstract, figurative cat by telling us, in great detail, exactly what his cat does not represent.62 In doing so, Derrida retains the subjectivity and uniqueness of his cat’s look, even as this look catapults him into a more general discussion of the look of the animal, grounded in the looks of cats throughout history, all of which are (not)contained in his cat’s look. While this cultural and historical knowledge affects our everyday, embodied interactions with animals (and people), Derrida calls us to not lose sight of the specific look of a specific animal, because the abstract notion of a look (or the general idea of the

Animal) has none of the intersubjective, embodied power and responsibility of the look exchanged between two living subjects.

62 He also does not provide the name of his cat, which would seem like a surefire way to truly set it apart as a singular animal entity. 228

The look, or gaze, of the Other, in this case, the cat, implicates us in an ethical relationship with the world around us. While other philosophers, most notably Emmanuel

Levinas, have argued that only the human look and face draw us into this relation,

Derrida takes this a step further by asserting that the look of an animal compels us similarly to that of the human look.63 To do so, Derrida must give the animal its subjectivity back by forcefully condemning the notion of the universalized animal: “The confusion of all nonhuman living creatures within the general and common category of the animal is not simply a sin against rigorous thinking, vigilance, lucidity, or empirical authority; it is also a crime” (416). By mobilizing such powerful language, Derrida asks us “to consider (or maybe discover for the first time) the animal that looks at us (and so makes a claim on us)” (Bruns 414). For Levinas, the ethical claim demanded of our will in this face-to-face relation with the Other is nigh irresistible: “The will is free to assume this responsibility in whatever sense it likes; it is not free to refuse this responsibility itself; it is not free to ignore the meaningful world into which the face of the Other has introduced it” (218-19). In the look of the animal, the face of the Other calls us to respond to the embodied world and take responsibility for the Other and our treatment of it. In short, the gaze of an animal—another living body—places a demand on us, inscribing an ethical relation on us when we meet it face-to-face. The powerful, intersubjective connection initiated by the face-to-face relationship, “a relation of

63 Levinas’ ideas have some overlap with early film theorist Béla Balázs and his notion of the close-up revealing something about humanity that film can uncover in a different way than other art forms: “When we see the face of things, we do what the ancients did in creating gods in man's image and breathing a human soul into them. The close-ups of the film are the creative instruments of this mighty visual anthropomorphism” (60). 229 touching and being touched,” reminds us of the flesh that surrounds us and the animals we interact with daily, whether we literally touch them or not (Bruns 409).64 The cinema taps into the gaze of animals to address similar questions to Derrida, but also uses this gaze to raise a number of uniquely cinematic questions about reality.

Considering the look of the animal in the cinema, Pomerance examines the role of the Brody family’s dog in Jaws, bringing to light a number of themes and concerns of the film from the off-screen look of this dog, lurking in the corner of the frame early in the film. Pomerance works his way through a number of possible reasons why this dog might be in the frame and why the viewer should care, ranging from quickly dismissed notion of its presence as an accident to the suggestion that the reality of the dog helps convince the audience of the “reality” of the shark that will appear later in the film (172-78). The examination of this dog and its look, however, does not stop there, as Pomerance uses its presence to lead into a discussion of film authorship and what we do when we “read” a film. Rather than “the filmmaker’s will or intent,” Pomerance argues that what “we see onscreen” is “the filmmaker’s act,” “what has been accomplished...not what has been planned or imagined” (183). The film represents this action and accomplishment; thus,

“the presence of the auteur does not materially affect our ability to watch the film,” as regardless of the auteur’s intent or skill, the film presents itself to us without these trappings on the screen (184). In “reading” the film, the viewer need not worry about authorial intent, and Pomerance argues for a way of looking that makes the marginal dog

64 In Marilynne Robinson’s Gilead, the protagonist relates a memory of baptizing a kitten, describing the act in a way that resonates with my discussion so far: “The sensation is of really knowing a creature, I mean really feeling its mysterious life and your own mysterious life at the same time” (23). 230 central, setting up this reading as “a creative perceptive act,” even if this reading would appear “indistinct, bizarre, or willful” when held up to the normative reading (184, 186).

To suggest a reading outside the bounds of normalcy, a reading that takes a marginal moment and makes it central, the viewer must fight against “being shaped and influenced by” the dominant reading of the film insinuated through “publicity materials,”

“commentary in reviews and mediated interviews,” and “the tradition of Western narrative conventions which posits that some characters are more central than others”

(186). If the viewer is able to “penetrate” through these layers of distraction, she “may arrive, finally, joyfully, at the screen, where our experience of the film is actually focused,” where the marginal can become the central (186). These marginal moments take on significance through the presence that they contribute to the film, as this presence, this being-in-the-world, lies at the heart of our experience, religious or otherwise.

Within the context of a fictional film like Jaws or The Circus, the presence of an animal, especially one not obviously performing a role in the film, can break through the diegesis, ushering in the “real” in a different, yet similar way to the diegetic play of the

Iranian films that I considered in the last chapter. Describing the dog, Pomerance explains the significance of these moments in this way: “Actually invoked onscreen as we watch this shot, then, and very briefly, is unperformed presence, thus, action out of control” (175). Prompted by the presence of the animal, the diegesis has lost control of its narrative for a brief, exciting moment, and the animal and its look invites us to share in this abandonment to the pleasures of cinema and the gaze. Indeed, this unperformed and

231 uncontrollable presence brings us back to Robert Orsi and his notion of presence, where the presence of the gods entails an “excess of intersubjectivity” that “is rarely good or bad” and may lead to “painful and unexpected consequences” (62, 5). In this dog’s presence, I can find a resonance with this uncontrollable sacred presence. Whether or not the viewer experiences that presence, of course, lies in how the viewer looks at the world and in what perception they bring to the relationship opened up by this presence and look.

But, as Orsi explains, this presence still exists and has a real effect on the world: “There is something more going on in the grotto at Lourdes or its replica in the Bronx than can be accounted for by ‘social construction’ or ‘discourse’” (63). As a result, it is up to the viewer to cultivate a different way of looking at the world, one that “requires an empiricism of the visible and invisible real” if, in fact, she desires to experience that wild presence of the gods that brings forth the uncontrollable animal presence (Orsi 65). As individual, situated viewers interact with this presence, they will bring their own subjectivity to bear on the moment, leading to a proliferation of the kinds of readings that

Pomerance describes, ones that bypass the “correct” ones to speak about their embodied, intersubjective relationship with the presence that animates these encounters. In the wild look of the animal, we may just find the visible and invisible of Being waiting to disrupt and subvert our conventional notions of film, narrative, and life.

One of these looks that I remember clearly comes from the first film in Satyajit

Ray’s Apu trilogy. I had not seen Pather Panchali until I was a first year Ph.D. student, when I watched it for a History of World Cinema class. Upon seeing it for the first time, I realized that a number of the films that have impacted me the most have many of the

232 same qualities as Pather Panchali: slow, contemplative pacing; a focus on animals, plants, and events that animate nature; and a willingness to search out beauty in the quotidian details of everyday life. I would return to the film a couple years later, when the

Wexner Center for the Arts on campus showed the newly restored Apu Trilogy. Seeing

Pather Panchali restored and in the context of the other two films cemented the film and several of its moments in my memory. These moments stand out with surprisingly clarity in my mind, evoking a number of emotional reactions. The majority of the moments that strike me from the films are quite ordinary in the grand scheme of things, and while some are made extraordinary through the films’ presentation of them, others find their power through the everyday relationships and events that connect us to the world. Even though I will be focusing on Pather Panchali, animals are a ubiquitous presence in all three films of the trilogy, often appearing in the background or at the side of the frame, and like the dog in Jaws and the kitten in The Circus, these animals and their looks help fashion a new way of seeing for me.

In the opening minutes of Pather Panchali, the main protagonist of the trilogy,

Apu (Subir Banerjee), has not yet been born, and we follow his older sister, Durga (Runki

Banerjee), as she scampers around the jungle, getting into mischief by stealing fruit from the neighbor’s orchard. She returns home and stashes the fruit in a basket before filling a bowl with what appears to be milk, carrying it over to a pot nestled in the corner of the home’s courtyard, where she sets down the bowl and takes the lid off the pot. Up until this point, Durga has been framed in medium-long/long shots, as the camera has largely maintained a wider view of her during the opening moments of the film. When she takes

233 the lid off the pot, however, the camera’s relationship to Durga shifts drastically, as we cut to a close-up of Durga from inside the pot, her face encircled by the pot’s opening.

The camera replaces its objective, “realist” view with a radically subjective one in the blink of an eye. A moment before, I was watching Durga, but now she looks right at me, face-to-face, the fourth wall shattered as she stares through the pot’s opening, as if removing its lid had opened up a portal to me, the twenty-first century viewer. A bright smile crosses Durga’s face, as she reaches her hand into the depths of the pot, into the depths of the screen itself, her hand disappearing beneath the bottom edge of the frame, before the camera cuts back to the previous long shot of Durga in the courtyard, pulling a kitten from the pot, like a magician pulling a rabbit out of her hat. For me, this sequence is magical, a moment of pure joy sparked by Durga’s smile and her hand reaching through the screen, inviting me to take hold of it and be pulled across the diegetic borders that try to separate my different, “real” reality from Durga’s.

In this moment, while we must remember that Durga pulls a specific, little kitten from the pot, this kitten is not the only thing pulled up from below the frame into the world of Pather Panchali—indeed, Durga pulls my reality into the diegesis of the film. In the shot that follows the close-up of Durga, she sets the kitten down next to the bowl of milk, which she clearly brought for the kitten. She places the kitten down next to the bowl, and rather than drink, the kitten walks away, shakes itself, and scratches behind its ear. Durga then pulls another kitten from the jar, places this one next to the bowl, and shoves its face into the milk in an attempt to get it to drink. This kitten appears equally nonplussed as the first when it comes to drinking from the bowl, and sits next to it,

234 licking its whiskers. These two kittens, even more so than the dog from Jaws, clearly act as real kittens, unable to be forced into the fictional representation that Durga, if not the film itself, wants them to portray. They are simply not interested in drinking the milk, and they go about their merry way, enriching the film through their unperformed and uncontrollable presence. The unperformed presence of animals is a constant throughout the film, given its historical setting and location in rural India, and these kittens serve as the first indication of the wildness and unpredictability of nature and life that becomes of the film’s main themes.65 Beyond that, however, this “wavering” between fiction and reality in the kittens’ unperformed presence highlights another significant aspect of this sequence (Pomerance 175). By breaching the diegetic border and pulling these kittens through to the other side, Durga’s act materializes the intersubjective relationship between viewer and film through the reality of the kittens inhabiting the film’s diegesis, offering an awareness of how my reality and the film’s intersect. This moment is offered to me, like all religious experiences, through a complex web of relationships (as Orsi puts it, “densities of intimacies”), in this case, my relationship with the film, my face-to-face connection to Durga, Durga’s fictional relationship to the kitten, the kitten’s relationship to the world, and many more (73). These relationships construct our experience of the world and point us to reality: “The Real, the life force, is not a thing, but a relationship”

(Plate, History 222). In this instance, I am connected to the Real, to Being, through the relationship that Durga’s look initiates.

65 The film connects Durga and these kittens, which makes sense, given that Durga is the character most beset by the unpredictable nature of life, dying near the end of the film from what seems to be a fairly mild cold that never gets better. 235

The film wants me to participate in the intersubjective look shared between Durga and the kitten, and, if I do, I open myself up to the perspective of the Other, looking with the kitten at Durga. The intersubjectivity of this look points to a different aspect of presence, one explored by Gabriel Marcel. Marcel first outlines his notion of presence by contrasting it with an interaction with another person in which I do not experience this presence, and despite our ability to communicate with each other, I leave feeling as if the other person has “interpos[ed] himself between me and my own reality, he makes me in some sense also a stranger to myself” (205). Marcel continues, setting up a “presence” in opposition to an “object”: “[T]he very act by which we incline ourselves towards a presence is essentially different from that through which we grasp at an object; in the case of a presence, the very possibility of grasping at, of seizing, is excluded in principle”

(207-8). Presence eludes this grasp and its desire to make use of or claim for oneself the object, deriving its power and mystery from the intersubjective connection between two selves. As such, presence cannot be fully defined, rather “it lies beyond the grasp of any possible prehension [and] also in some sense lies beyond the grasp of any possible comprehension,” forcing us to approach it sideways (208). In a phrase that fits my experience of this kitten, Marcel suggests that “presence can…only be invoked or evoked, the evocation being fundamentally and essentially magical” (208). Similar to

Orsi’s notion of presence, Marcel’s presence is created within relationships where “the self is ‘given’ to the other, and that givenness is responsively received or reciprocated”

(Hernandez). A gift and a mystery, then, presence comes when we cease objectifying the

236 world and the beings that inhabit it, choosing instead to return their sparkling gaze and give ourselves over to them, and they to us, eyes locked.

We often forget that when we gaze at the cinema, the cinema gazes back, evoking a presence of its own. In this sequence, Durga’s eyes pierce through the façade of the screen and ask me to acknowledge her presence and the film’s presence through the intersubjective look shared between human and cat. As Durga peers through the jar’s opening, I become the kitten looking out of the jar, as the film places me in the kitten’s position and gives me access to the kitten’s point of view. Importantly, this point of view is not the kitten’s perception, but the film mimicking the kitten’s perception to affect my own—the film engages in a transformation of the animal’s perception, making it legible for me. As it does this, the film places me in the relationship created by the animal/human face-to-face, giving me the opportunity to experience the connection forged between this look from the animal’s side in a new spectatorial perspective. It’s quite easy, as a human, to view an animal as an object, a cat as something that catches mice. Does the cat view me the same way or are we always present to the animal’s gaze? Is it part of the animal’s nature to reflect a presence back to us, when we finally decide to look for it? In this shot, from the kitten’s point of view, I am acutely aware of Durga’s presence, even as she reaches down to grasp me, and, for an instant, I am able to reflect on my interactions with animals, my own grasping and objectifying of them, and see that as an obstacle to experiencing their presence. As a cinephiliac moment, however, this moment also reminds me that sometimes I objectify cinema, considering it as a means of escape or as a way to get across an agenda, and, when I see it in this way, I have lost the magic of its

237 presence, no longer giving myself over to the film as it does to me. Just like people can be objectified and abused by other people, so can the cinema be used and abused, whether in the service of profit or an insidious ideology. In seeing Durga face-to-face, I am drawn back to my ethical responsibility to these Others—whether person, animal, or

There is a dreamer film—and called to embrace their presence by giving all good conductors myself over to them, allowing them to pull me into know to look for when the last stop is made their reality, as Durga does, where I will see them

and the train is ticking cool, anew. some lover, loner, or fool

who has lived so hard he jerks awake Trains

in the graveyard, where he sees The lights go down in the exhibition tent; the coming down the aisle a beam of light projector begins to whir. On the screen, a train

whose end he is, appears, and it starts moving. The audience screams and what he thinks are chains in terror, maybe in exhilaration, and some of them becoming keys. even dive to the floor, convinced of the reality of the — Christian Wiman train coming at them. This is a common story, told in

introduction to film classrooms and immortalized in

2010’s Hugo, but as Tom Gunning and others have discovered, this story is largely a myth (736).66 Regardless of the veracity of this tale and

66 Part of the reason this tale has survived through the years, I think, comes from its ability to massage the egos of us, more contemporary spectators, who see the early film viewers as “naïve,” fools who “confuse the image for its reality,” enabling us to feel, as we look disdainfully back on the past, more evolved and intellectual than those who came before us (Gunning 738). 238 what it suggests about early film viewers, the train has been a part of cinema ever since that Lumière Brothers film, The Arrival of a Train at La Ciotat Station, supposedly scattered its viewers to the floor. A few years later, the train would feature prominently in one of the medium’s early narrative films, 1903’s The Great Train Robbery. Both the train and cinema are powerful examples of modernity’s technological innovation, and their roughly contemporaneous invention and refinement placed them side by side during the late 1800s and early 1900s in Europe and the United States. In her book, Parallel

Tracks, Lynne Kirby outlines some of the various ways that the early history of the cinema and railroad intertwined, suggesting that both technologies “brought forth a range of responses that included celebratory embrace and critical hostility, as well as sheer ambivalence” (24). These reactions and the ensuing history of the railroad’s adoption in the United States, Kirby argues, “prepared a path for the institutionalization of a certain kind of subject or spectator that cinema would claim as its own, a subject molded in relation to new forms of perception, leisure, temporality, and modern technology” (24).

The connections between the railroad and cinema—or more precisely, the train passenger and the cinematic spectator—form a backdrop for me to consider why the train, in certain moments, powerfully evokes the senses and emotions of another era. Through the slow rhythm of wheels on the track, the hissing of steam, and the conductor’s call, the train draws me into this other time, even as it chugs ahead at full speed.

The railroad, like early cinema, “revolutionized the ways in which people perceived their world,” as both technologies enabled new modes of perception (Kirby

36). The railroad and cinema also literally re-shaped the world that people were

239 perceiving through their contributions to the rapid rise of industrialization and the spread of modernism across Europe and North America. In doing so, the railroad and cinema

“created a new kind of subject,” a specific spectator, that Kirby contends was shaped by three overlapping categories: “Tourism and Photography, Panoramic Perception, and

Time and the Railroad” (36). Kirby traces a clear line between the subject of “touristic” photography and that of the cinema, claiming they are both subjects “conditioned to desire the token possession of an inaccessible place and experience through vision— through the imaginary” (41). Kirby and Mary Ann Doane connect the panoramic perception created by the railroad to the cinema as they both create a subject who “no longer belongs to the same space as perceived objects; the traveler sees the objects, landscapes, etc., through the apparatus which moves him through the world”

(Schivelbusch 66). In doing so, the railroad and cinema offered a particularly modern way of perceiving that “posited an essentially arbitrary relation between sensations and referents,” and, as Jonathan Crary argues, “the eventual triumph” of this modern mode of perception “depends on the denial of the body…as the ground of vision,” replacing the subjective body with the objective apparatus, whether that be the camera or something else (Kirby 48; 136). Finally, “the railroad and the cinema wiped out preexisting ideas and experiences of time and space and substituted their own as new sociocultural norms,” in what early discourses surrounding the railroad call the “annihilation of space and time”

(Kirby 49; Schivelbusch 41-50). Kirby also argues that the railroad’s annihilation of space and time gave rise to the idea of “simultaneity,” of being able to be in two places at once, an idea that we see as early narrative film began to tell its stories through editing

240 techniques like parallel editing (Kirby 54-57). Reflecting on the early cinema and railroad’s ability to shape perception, I am reminded of the power that still exists in the relationship between the viewer and the cinema, the power for these relationships to create new ways of seeing and being-in-the-world. Despite the helpful historical insights offered by these scholars, they have created a viewer to fit seamlessly into their narrative of the increasing control exerted over the traveler and spectator by the railroad and cinema, a narrative shaped by their own theoretical presuppositions.

Viewed through a paradigm of spectatorship that devalues spectator agency and individuality, the early film spectator—and those that would follow, for that matter—is treated in a number of unflattering ways in academic scholarship. Kirby’s subjects, like those in a laboratory, have been “conditioned” into consumers, as she suggests that “both the train and the cinema were designed to seduce the public, the patron, the consumer”

(41, 36). Here, viewers come across as unwitting buffoons, unaware of the malevolent, capitalist pillow-talk being whispered in their ears as they lounge in the theater or train compartment. Similarly passive, Doane’s viewing subject fares little better: “The railway passenger, like the cinema spectator, is subjected to a succession of images mediated by a frame” (42). Carried along by the apparatus, the spectator cannot fight the flow of images, subjected to the camera’s view and ideology of its creators. However useful it may be to theorize or posit “the spectator” (of early or contemporary cinema) as a category or ideal subject constructed by the film, this is not and has never been the reality of individual cinematic experience, as Judith Mayne argues: “It is one thing to assume that…the various institutions of the cinema do project an ideal viewer, and another thing

241 to assume that those projections work” (80). Speaking of early cinema, Miriam Hansen describes the complex interplay that exists, to this day, in the cinematic experience of real spectators:

Neither a primeval paradise of viewer participation nor merely a site for the

consumption of standardized products, the cinema rehearsed new, specifically

modern forms of subjectivity and intersubjectivity at the same time that it

addressed older needs and more recent experiences of displacement and

deprivation. (Babel 105)

Each spectator sees the film from a different position, and no two film viewing experiences can be the same. By assuming the totalizing power of the apparatus, apparatus theory and its influence has led to a neglect of how the early cinematic spectator’s experience joined with the experience of the train passenger can contribute to our contemporary understanding of spectatorship.

The train, when I see it on the screen, carries with it the vestiges of the early film viewer and her culture, just as I carry the vestiges of my culture(s) to the cinema.

Gunning gives the term “the cinema of attractions” to the earliest cinema, a cinema which

“solicits a highly conscious awareness of the film image engaging the viewer’s curiosity”

(742-43). In the act of viewing, then, “the spectator does not get lost in a fictional world and its drama, but remains aware of the act of looking, the excitement of curiosity and its fulfillment” (Gunning 743). Importantly, Gunning reminds us that early spectators were also shaped by their relationship to the exhibitioner of the film, who helped drive the excitement and encourage a specific way of viewing (740-42). In the viewing habits of

242 the cinephile, we witness a return to the active nature of the earliest film viewers. The early spectator’s active, searching gaze overlaps with Keathley’s take on panoramic perception, as they both suggest ways in which the spectator brings her agency to bear on the screen, shaping her cinematic experience based on her position as a cultural, historical, and embodied being.67 While Kirby and Doane seem to view panoramic perception as an insidious shift in perception, foisted on a passive subject by the railroad,

Schivelbusch himself remains far more objective, almost optimistic, about the shift, offering this commentary on an anecdote of a passenger: “That is not a picturesque landscape destroyed by the railroad; on the contrary, it is an intrinsically monotonous landscape brought into an esthetically pleasing perspective by the railroad” (62). In fact, while Schivelbusch remarks that “the railroad creates a new landscape,” I would argue that this passenger, by virtue of his relationship to the train and the landscape outside, through his active viewing of it, is the one who has, in fact, created the new landscape, aided by the new vantage point offered to him by the train (62). Like the earliest film spectators, the cinephile creates a new “landscape” through active spectatorship, formed by the intersubjective relationship between her and the film, the film aiding in this process by providing a unique perspective on the world. The cinephile, thus, partakes in the legacy of the cinema of attractions and the train passenger, searching for thrill and inspiration in the image of the oncoming train, while also actively reshaping those images to create a new perceptual viewpoint.

67 Nico Baumbach points out that the cinephilia of today has become “a cinephilia of…the active spectator (or ‘user’) in a participatory culture.” Coming to age in this participatory culture, I am not surprised that I gravitate towards this idea of spectatorship—it is part of my cultural and societal shaping. 243

In the early film spectators’ reaction to the train, we find not just excitement, but also terror, according to Gunning. This terror before the image, as Gunning explains, was not born from ignorance or naiveté, but rather “these screams of terror and delight were well prepared for by both showmen and audience,” as that was part of the draw of the cinema of attractions (750). Gunning takes these screams and turns them into an allegory of modernity: “The audience’s reaction was the antipode to the primitive one: it was an encounter with modernity” (750). Using this allegory, Gunning drives home his final point: “From the start, the terror of that image uncovered a lack, and promised only a phantom embrace. The train collided with no one” (750). For Gunning, then, the terror this story inspires resides in its ability to undo “any naïve belief in the reality of the image”; in other words, the real terror of the cinema comes from it revealing the

“illusion” of the photographic image (this is not a real train), thus destabilizing its indexical claims (750). This notion of the illusion as opposed to reality, however, is not a notion that I share, preferring to see the cinematic illusion as something that can deepen our connection to reality or even shape new ways of thinking about reality. Schivelbusch says much of the same regarding panoramic perception: “This vision no longer experiences evanescence: evanescent reality has become the new reality” (66). Rather than hearing the early spectators’ screams as screams of terror at the destruction of the reality of the image, I would argue that, avoiding both allegory and myth, we should think of them as they probably were: screams of astonishment and excitement at a new way of seeing, screams that still echo today whenever a train rumbles by on screen.

244

The rumblings of the train are regularly heard throughout the Apu trilogy, speaking to the importance of the railroad in India’s history. By early twentieth-century

India, the historical period of the trilogy, an extensive network of railways had been established by colonial British powers, “facilitating the deployment of officials and military resources, and, of course, the transport of goods, including raw materials and produce destined for export” (Banerjee). By the time of Pather Panchali’s production in the early 1950s, India had gained its independence, and the railroad was now owned and operated by Indians, yet “the close connection between the railway and the British colonial state, fostered by the economic conditions of its construction, forever marked the official rhetoric of the railway” (Aguiar 6). Due to this connection, Marian Aguiar notes that “the colonial discourse that represented the train as a sign of transformation continued to have a powerful legacy,” and “by 1947, the train symbolized for many the journey into modern nationhood” (84). Yet, during the Partition of India, the train “was also the site of some of the most intense religious violence in modern history,” and, as such, it both “represented in material form the promises of secular modernity—and showcased the failures of these ideals of security and freedom” (Aguiar 72, 85). Like the historical railroad in India, the railroad in the Apu trilogy occupies a liminal space, both colonial and post-colonial, set in the colonial past, but produced in post-colonial India.

Taking this a step further, I would suggest that we can consider the railroad in these films as a metaphor for the spectator herself, existing in a different, yet similar kind of liminality in respect to the cinematic experience. Just as the railroad in India in the Apu trilogy existed in complex relationship to the institution of colonialism, Mayne argues

245 that “spectatorship is defined by the competing yet simultaneous claims of the cinematic institution and what exceeds or problematizes it” (38). In the moments I will consider, I become both a passenger and a spectator, as the train calls me back to the experience of the earliest film viewers and towards a new way of looking, speaking to a spectatorship that exceeds and problematizes my contemporary viewing habits and what they owe to the cultural institution of Western cinema.

Roaring down the rails in the liminal space between the cinematic institution and its excess, the train carries its passengers/spectators ever onward, sometimes in service of the cinematic institution and, at other times, to destabilize that institution. Occupying such a space, the train plays an important role throughout the Apu trilogy, marking shifts in the lives of the characters and the history of India as it rumbles through the frame.

While the sound of the train can be heard earlier in the film, it makes its visual appearance about two-thirds of the way through Pather Panchali in a well-known scene where Apu accompanies Durga (Uma Das Gupta) to railroad tracks that cut through a field of grain. A testament to black and white cinematography, this scene uses the dynamic range of whites, blacks, and greys to create a compelling sequence that highlights the thrill of the oncoming train and its connection to modernity, as it slices through the countryside of rural India. Durga and Apu’s sojourn through the field sets the stage for the almost mystical nature of the train’s arrival, as they weave in and out of the tall stalks of grain, the white grain incandescent against the greys of the ground and sky.

In one shot, as Apu looks for his sister, the grain towers over him, nature enveloping him just technology will soon do, the film emphasizing the struggle between the rural and

246 urban, a tension felt throughout the trilogy (Aguiar 111). Eventually Apu finds his sister, as she sits underneath a cluster of the grain, framed in the lower-middle of the screen in a long shot, as the wind blows through the frame. Visible above Durga on the right side of the frame are the trappings of modernity, utility poles stretching into the distance, a sharp contrast in color and movement to the grain blowing in the wind. The two children begin to talk, but Durga quickly silences Apu, as she hears something in the distance. They hear the faint rumblings of the train and run towards it, as it enters from the right side of the frame and bustles across the top of the screen, black smoke billowing from the engine.

We then cut to a closer shot of the train, from a lower angle, as it continues its movement from right to left, its wheels obscured by the grain in the foreground. A swish pan to the left mimics the train’s swift movement, as the camera locates Apu at the end of the pan in what appears to be a separate shot, masked by a dissolve which incorporates the blurred motion of the swish pan to return the next shot to clarity as Apu takes off running after the train. The film then cuts to a long shot of Apu running from left to right, now on the other side of the train tracks, as the train flies by in the foreground, creating an abstract crisscrossing of black shapes that hides Apu until it roars past, dust settling around him as he stares, in awe, at the train’s passing. As suddenly as it arrived, the train disappears, a puff of black smoke, dissipating over the field in the final shot of the sequence.

In many ways, this train appears as a vision, an apparition, delivering a moment of revelation and terror, before it retreats into the distance. While a powerful symbol of the technology and mobility of modernity, to be sure, this train takes on different symbolism if I choose to focus on Apu’s relationship to this train. Through the structure

247 and composition of this sequence, the film encourages me to connect Apu’s response to this train to the response of the earliest film spectators to the cinema and the train that they saw on the screen. Consider the parallels: the train confronts Apu with a striking symbol of modernity in the same way that the cinema did for the early spectator; Apu hears the train before he sees it and the early spectators heard the projector before they saw the film; for spectators of The Arrival of a Train as well as for Apu, the train moves from right to left; and Apu’s train vanishes just as quickly as the early spectators’ filmic train, both ephemeral, almost magical objects. While this sequence does not contain any overt point-of-view shots, I have, by this point in the film, identified with Apu and his childlike wonder, thus, when the train appears on screen, the film draws me into his frame of reference, enabling me to see the train as he does and take part in his embodied reaction and emotions. As I see Apu experience the train and follow along with how the film presents this encounter, I become aware of the sheer power of the train and the excitement that comes from seeing one for the first time. Along with Apu, I am left quivering by the tracks, body shaking as the ground vibrates underneath my feet, mouth agape in astonishment, and, as such, I recapture some piece of the early spectators’ experience at the cinema, energized by the spectacle of the train. In considering Apu as a metaphorical spectator that draws me into an early mode of spectatorship, I also become aware of his position in regards to the train, as one who sees it from the outside.

Apu’s experience of the train, as much as it offers intriguing parallels with early film spectatorship, fails in one important sense: Apu, at this point in the trilogy, is not a passenger on the train. Film spectatorship and its new mode of perception, as I’ve

248 outlined, has often been connected to the experience of riding on the train as a passenger, looking out at the passing landscape. As a non-passenger, however, Apu still acts as a partial metaphor for the spectator in this sequence; after all, he is still looking at the train like the first viewers to see The Arrival of a Train, and he partakes in a similar sense of astonishment to those viewers. Yet, by virtue of being outside of the train, Apu takes on a different relationship to spectatorship and the modern cinematic institution. Speaking of the train as it relates to modernity in India, Aguiar argues that “to those who view the passing train, the vehicle appears as a concrete sign of that abstract collective identity; to the passengers inside, the train represents the nation moving along toward its imagined realization” (84). For Aguiar, the train represents different, yet similar ideas about modernity, depending on one’s relationship to it; thus, the train takes on a double meaning, especially in the context of Pather Panchali, where the train simultaneously represents colonial and post-colonial India. The dual meaning in the train’s representation can be transposed onto my experience as a spectator, pointing to kinds of double vision that can bring out new facets of the cinematic experience. For Doane, “[t]he railway passenger, like the cinema spectator, is subjected to a succession of images mediated by a frame,” and “classical cinema, through regularization of vision and the subject’s relation to the screen, reasserts and institutionalizes the despatialization of subjectivity” (42, 44).

Through the perception that they offer the spectator and passenger, Doane argues that the cinema and the train “contribute to the detachment or dissociation of the subject from the space of perception” in “a despatialization of subjectivity effected by modern technology,” a fate that modernity and mechanization has forced upon the spectator and

249 train passenger (44). Certainly, modernity and its technology has affected the way that we perceive the world around us and changed our notions of subjectivity, as Doane and others point out, but in ascribing this much power to the institutions of modernity, Doane locks her spectators and passengers inside the train car, confining them to only one way of seeing. But what if, like Apu, I look at the train from the outside, acknowledging the institutions that have shaped it and me, and choose to see it differently, to see the way it exceeds and complicates these notions? What if I claim the double meaning of the train for myself as a spectator, and both look at and out from it at the same time? In what new

(and old) ways can this inform my viewing experience?

The kind of seeing cultivated by this double stance toward the cinematic experience creates a tension that I, as the passenger and one who stands outside the train, must enter into willingly, a tension that marks cinephiliac perception. Using the idea of the flâneur, Keathley explains that “the cinephile does not simply forsake the primary, attentive viewing mode…for its alternative, the panoramic,” but “engages in both modes simultaneously” (44). In seeing the film this way, the cinephile both attends to the narrative and looks for the moments that exceed it, finding pleasure in the tension created by activating both modes of perception. While my/Apu’s experience of the train in this sequence illuminates this aspect of cinephiliac perception, it also goes beyond this cinephiliac tension, speaking to other tensions involved in my spectatorial experience, primarily those of the film scholar. As a scholar, I still share many viewing habits with the cinephile, but I have found myself growing increasingly distant from what I see on screen, this distance a necessary component (or so I’ve heard) of academic criticism. As a

250 scholar, I am skeptical, demanding even, of the films that I watch, as every trip to the movie theater could be the start of a new research project, whether I want it to be or not. I often ask myself the same question that Mark Twain asked himself in Life on the

Mississippi, as he reflects on how his career as a steamboat captain changed his relationship to the river: “And doesn’t he sometimes wonder whether he has gained most or lost most by learning his trade?” (72) If I all I can do is encounter the cinema from a scholarly distance, then I have, in fact, “lost most,” as I now see the cinema from one perspective—the inverse of Doane’s passenger, I can only stand outside the train, having lost the tension that comes from also being a passenger. Even though Twain and I may lament the loss of “the romance and the beauty” of our pre-critical encounters, I think that it is possible, maybe even necessary, to recapture some of that sense of wonder and restore the tension between criticism and wonder to the film viewing experience (71). In its framing of Apu and the train in this sequence, Pather Panchali offers me some help, depicting what a productive scholarly tension might look like.

In identifying with Apu, as I noted a few paragraphs ago, I am drawn into the experience of the earliest film spectators, and this does re-inscribe some wonder into my cinematic experience, but I can only give myself over to that form of spectatorship briefly, as it quickly fades, never intended to last for more than a few moments. Perhaps these brief instances of breaking into another mode of perception are the best I can hope for, entrenched as I am in scholarly mode of perception. However, vacillating back and forth between these modes of perception, while better than being locked into one, still does not produce the tension that I am trying to find in this both/and type of

251 spectatorship. Fortunately, the film instructs me how to see in this way through this sequence’s composition. Instead of putting me in Apu’s position through a point of view shot, which would encourage me to identify with the astonished viewer of early cinema,

Pather Panchali lets me see Apu run after the train, placing some critical distance between my perspective and Apu’s. In the next shot, the film closes the critical distance between us by placing me on the other side of the tracks from Apu, and we watch the train roar past us, our perceptions mirrored, but not identical. Here I am, confronted by the power of the train, drawn into wonder and awe, but the film does not let me abandon myself entirely to this astonishment. As the last car of the train flies off screen, Apu’s head turns to follow it, his eyes locked onto the object of his wonder, but the camera continues to look ahead, which enables me to reflect on Apu and his relationship to the train from a position outside of his experience even as I am still reeling from the force of the train’s passage. In this moment, I become an astonished scholar, trying to incorporate my wonder and joy into my critical work, as I exist within this tension. So, what can I learn from reflecting on Apu as a spectator in this sequence? First, his exhilarated run after the train reminds me that if I am to find wonder at the cinema, I need to chase it down when I experience it, seeking to get as close to it as possible and savor its presence.

Second, Apu’s bodily reaction to the train highlights the embodied nature of his relationship to that technology, foregrounding my own embodied relationship to the cinema and encouraging me to seek out wonder not just in what I see at the movies, but also what I feel. Finally, as the smoke floats upward in the final shot of this sequence, the film signals the evanescent quality of these moments of wonder and revelation, moments

252 that exist in another kind of tension, one reality impinging upon another, asking me to take a step of faith and let them wash over me for one impossible second.

Rain & Ripples

“Into each life some rain must fall, Some days must be dark and dreary.” — Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

The sky darkens. Grey clouds move across the sky, propelled by the wind. Soon, the rain begins, at first slowly, but then picking up in intensity. In the distance, thunder rumbles, briefly drowning out the soft patter of rain on the roof. A breeze blows through a slightly open window, carrying with it that unmistakable odor of wet earth and fleeing humidity, the smell of summer rain. Growing up in New England, my summers were filled with moments just like this, as well as ones far more intense, where I would hunker down next to my dad as he listened to his police scanner for the weather reports. He taught me how to count the time between the clap of thunder and the flash of lightning— five seconds meant that the lightning was a mile away. We would often turn off the lights in the house, the storm raging, as we waited for it to subside, flashes of lightning casting sharp-edged shadows across the living room. As a child, thunderstorms both enthralled and terrified me, beauty and power commingled in a powerful example of natural sublimity. When the rain was unaccompanied by thunder and lightning, I loved to go outside and play in it, and, as I grew older, I still sometimes would go outside in a downpour, letting the rain wash over me in a kind of heavenly baptism. It was pouring 253 the night my first girlfriend and I broke up, the distance too much to handle, and I walked around my college campus, sad and soaked to the bone, unsure where the rain stopped and the tears began. A constant companion to my joy and sorrow, the rain continues to fall, each storm a reminder that the rain falls where it will, unable to be directed or changed by human hand, ineffable to its core. Rain, a powerful force in my life, has long shaped cultures and communities as well.

For most of recorded history, rain, in dearth or excess, has been a determining factor in the strength and survival of various civilizations. Early civilizations, like those of the Harappan people in the Indus Valley and the Sumerians in ancient Mesopotamia, were wiped out by droughts that lasted for hundreds of years, forcing their inhabitants to leave for (literally) greener pastures (Barnett 34-36). An overabundance of rain can be just as damaging, causing floods, drowning plants, and leading to a proliferation of disease, as the constant rains that fell during the 1300s contributed to the spread of the

Black Death across Europe (Barnett 41-44). Given the life-giving and life-taking power of rain as well as its fickleness, it’s no wonder that religious practices and rituals often revolve around making it rain or stopping its fall. After a three-year drought, the prophet

Elijah brings rain back to Israel by defeating 450 prophets of Baal in an explosive contest of prayer, where Yahweh proves himself supreme: “Then the fire of the Lord fell and consumed the burnt offering and the wood and the stones and the dust, and licked up the water that was in the trench” (1 Kings 18:38 ESV). After this display, King Ahab turns back to Yahweh “and in a little while the heavens grew black with clouds and wind, and there was a great rain” (1 Kings 18:45 ESV). In this biblical narrative, rain either falls or

254 doesn’t based on divine prerogative, a notion present in other religious traditions as well.

In her book Rain, Cynthia Barnett charts rain prayers and rain deities across history, offering this observation: “Indeed, in a host of religious traditions, from Allah fracturing clouds into raindrops to Buddhist rain-cloud kings, rain is among the most important blessings possible” (59). Across the globe and throughout history, rain continues to fall or not to fall, and while always important, its significance is amplified in certain cultures and times—India being one of those places.

The rain in Pather Panchali’s India carries a cultural significance that my New

England rain does not and will never hold, given the different meteorological patterns of the two regions. The vast majority of rainfall in the Bengal region of India comes between the months of June and September from the monsoon that sweeps up from the

Bay of Bengal into north-east India. The monsoon inaugurates the rainy season, with most days marked by at least a few hours of rain, the rainfall and clouds providing some relief from the summer’s heat. Given the substantial presence of agriculture in India’s economy, the monsoon takes on even more significance, as the amount of rain that falls during monsoon season directly impacts the cultures and economies dependent on it:

“[F]ew disasters have been worse than the intermittent failure of the Asian monsoon, source of some of history’s most grievous famines” (Barnett 24-25). While famine may not be as much of a concern today, Barnett reminds us that “because crops and water supply of entire nations” rely on the Asian monsoon, “failure of the monsoon can crash markets, spike food prices, provoke suicides, trigger energy shortages, and swing national elections” (25). Along with these economic realities, Barnett points to religious

255 significance of the monsoon’s contribution to the Ganges River, a holy site for the

Hindus who make up the majority of religious practitioners in India (60). For India, the rain of the monsoon brings celebration, something Pather Panchali memorably depicts in a scene near the end of the film that shows the beginning of the monsoon season.

Durga rushes through her prayers and Apu sprints back home from school; they both understand what is happening. We see the dark clouds gathering in the sky—the rain is coming. Before the rain begins, however, the wind ripples across the surface of the lake in a series of shots of the water of the local pond, lily pads fluttering from the wind’s power. In a medium shot, Sarabojaya (Karuna Bannerjee), the children’s mother, calls out to them, but the next shot shows us that they are far from her voice, running across an open field, awaiting the rain. The extreme long shot of the children, tracking to the left, dissolves into a close-up of a man’s head, seen from above, as one drop of rain, then another, falls onto his balding head, causing him to wake up from his nap by the side of the pond. Upon this realization, the film cuts and shows him in a long shot from a high angle, as he opens up his umbrella, the rain now descending more forcefully, the drops peppering the pond’s surface in front of the man, creating a constellation of ripples.

These ripples are foregrounded in the next shot, which shows a section of the pond filled with ripples beginning, breaking apart, and intersecting as the rain intensifies, and they continue as a constant visual refrain throughout the remainder of the sequence, present in the backdrop of the pond and puddles. The film returns to Durga and Apu, as he huddles underneath a large tree, shivering from the cold rain, while Durga lets the deluge cascade

256 over her, face aglow, eyes shut in a close-up that prompts liquid memories to wash over me, conjured by the rain.

As the film draws me back to the past, I not only “think” about the childhood experience of running in the pouring rain or jumping in puddles in the driveway, but I experience it, to varying degrees, with all my senses. My interaction with the past entails far more than getting lost in the wispy clouds of thought—it takes concrete shape in the feel of rain on my skin, the blurring of sight caused by wet glasses, the soft intonations of rain on the leaves, and the smell of humidity giving way to an earthy dampness. Yet, unless I am watching Pather Panchali outdoors during a rainstorm, none of these things are happening to me in the present, even though I may feel some aspects of my past experiences in the rain. Laura Marks describes how the cinema can activate senses other than sight: “We salivate or become aroused on verbal and visual cue. Beyond this, it is common for cinema to evoke sense experience through intersensory links: sounds may evoke textures; sights may evoke smells” (213). In this rainstorm, I am experiencing the past and present coming together in something similar to nostalgia, a powerful emotion in of itself, while also experiencing both past and present as their own discrete entities at the same time. I know that while I am currently watching this scene from Pather Panchali in a Starbucks in Western Massachusetts and it did just rain quite heavily, I am not standing in the rain as I did twenty years ago—the film has brought me into a past/present tension, another way of seeing and experiencing the cinema that can be intentionally cultivated.

Rain serves as an apt metaphor for this way of seeing at the cinema, as it embodies this tension between the past and the present in its very materiality.

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Cyclical in nature, rain comes from the processes that make up the hydrologic cycle. At its most basic, the cycle consists of evaporation, condensation, and precipitation, Earth’s water constantly renewed through evaporation from the oceans, which condenses into clouds, before being drawn back to the ground by the effects of gravity. Interestingly, this means that the same rain that soaked me twenty years ago could have just flooded someone’s basement yesterday or been the very rain that falls during the monsoon sequence in Pather Panchali. Recently, scientists have suggested that some of Earth’s water dates back to the “protosolar nebula” which formed our solar system, a cool 4.6 billion years ago (Hallis et al. 795). Even if some of the Earth’s water doesn’t go back that far, it has still been around for a lot longer than I have, evaporating, condensing, and precipitating for eons, a vital, yet silent actor in the history of the universe. Every rainstorm tells the tale of millennia, each raindrop a vast and storied history, intertwining and colliding with each other, splashing down on my umbrella as I walk unaware of the past that falls all around me. Yet, in those times I do become aware of the rain and its history, whether from walking in it or seeing it on film, my own past falls with it, bringing those experiences into the present. Film, through foregrounding its own kind of past/present sight, can help us cultivate an awareness of the past and its constant presence that continues to shape our present experiences. Perhaps our experience is like rain, the past evaporating, condensing, and falling on us afresh, this precipitation drawn back to earth by a favorite song, a sideways glance, or a moment in a film.

In addition to this form of past/present tension brought on by the rain, any time I watch a film I am implicated in a past/present tension by the fact that I am watching, in

258 the present, something that was filmed in the past. Regardless of how one conceives of the profilmic event and its relationship to the diegesis, when I watch Pather Panchali today, I am catapulted sixty years into the past, watching something that is a product of a different time, different technologies, and a different culture. My distance from the film I watch, both in time and culture, informs my experience of it, and, as I watch, I am drawn into the past as shown by the film, even as I remain aware of my present existence and cultural experience. This effect is amplified further if I am watching a film that I have watched previously, as, if I choose, I can become aware of the film’s past and my own past experiences of the film, holding the two in tension in my current viewing experience.

Indeed, Merleau-Ponty points outs that our experience of the “world is…inseparable from the subjectivity and from the intersubjectivity which find their unity through the taking up of my past experiences in my present experiences, the taking up of the other’s experience in my own” (“What” 67). Informed by the film’s past embodied experience and my own, the new viewing experience builds upon those past experiences, constructing new meanings for me and the film. Opening myself up to this temporal, embodied experience offers the potential of a richly subjective film analysis that draws multiple levels of time, space, and experience together into something that verges on the religious as memory and present intertwine. As Gail Hamner suggests, religion and nostalgia form a close bond in postmodern experience:

[B]oth religion and nostalgia mark the yearning for a social, worldly place that is

currently lost to us because the door to that place opens through the fragile

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conduits of transcendence, whose sway we can desire and enact, but no longer

acknowledge or claim to possess. (25)

In the rainstorm, I feel this yearning, while, in a later shot of the sequence, Durga shifts my attention to an effect of the rain, the ripple, by mimicking its circular motion, as she spins in the rain, the pond behind her. The rain may offer a past/present sight, but the ripples that unceasingly spread across the pond’s surface suggest a different sight, one that calls stable temporality into question entirely.

As with any wave phenomenon, like those of sound or light, the ripples that populate the pond’s surface during a rainstorm entail their own past/present sight, speaking to the event that caused them, even after that event has ended. One of the more striking examples of ripples’ past/present nature comes from the first recorded gravitational wave, discovered in September of 2015 by a joint effort of scientists across the United States and Europe (Schilling 186-205). The brief ripple (less than tenth of a second!) that washed over the Earth was caused by a gravitational wave created by the collision of two black holes, one 36 times the mass of our Sun, the other 29 times the

Sun’s mass (Schilling 207). According to calculations, this merger occurred roughly 1.3 billion light years away from Earth, meaning that this gravitational wave detected in 2015 hearkens back to an event that happened 1.3 billion years earlier, leaving only the faintest ripples in spacetime to sweep over the Earth (Schilling 2). While not quite as impressive as 4.6 billion-year old rain, this 1.3 billion-year old gravitational wave nonetheless speaks to the ability of ripples of all shapes and sizes to return us to the past event that created them. Different than the two-dimensional waves that constitute ripples in water,

260 gravitational waves spread through three-dimensional space, “not very different from density ripples propagating through a bowl of Jell-O that’s being tapped on, where the

Jell-O represents empty space” (Schilling 66). Even more importantly, gravitational waves spread through spacetime, the Einsteinian joining of three-dimensional space with the dimension of time, meaning that their ripples bend space and time, usually to an imperceptible degree, given the stiffness of spacetime, which Govert Schilling compares to “concrete” rather than the “Jell-O” that he offered as help of conceptualizing three- dimensional waves (67). While we are still a long way away from time travel or extra dimensions promised by science-fiction films, the very fact that gravitational waves ripple through spacetime means that time and space are never as stable as we might think.

Acknowledging this when faced with Pather Panchali’s ripples allows for some interesting metaphorical overlaps between them and temporality, film, and my spectatorial experience.

Foreshadowing the impending rain, an earlier sequence of Pather Panchali lingers over the pond near the family’s house for several shots, close-ups of water striders dancing on the water, their delicate movements sending ripples across the glassy surface of the pond. As the ripples radiate outward, each movement of a strider creating four more concentric circles, they intersect with each other, creating a complex pattern of circles and half-circles on the water. A reminder of the cycle that constantly refreshes the water of the pond, these circular ripples, when imagined as gravitational waves, also suggest a different, less linear conception of time. Other elements of film, the acousmêtre and the voice-over, as I have argued previously, break down a linear notion of time,

261 speaking into the present of the film and my experience from a place that seems to be outside time, while they are still a part of the film. In these moments, does the film possess some power, some ability, to bend spacetime and put me in touch with the past and the future? The film’s body certainly seems to be able to tell its own future, often foreshadowing future events through a camera angle, fortuitous shot, or voice-over phrase. This future orientation, however, remains entrenched in the embodied present of the filmic body, even as the film projects itself in the future. Here, the film demonstrates a present/future sight, holding those two categories in tension to facilitate its specific way of perceiving and experiencing the world. In its position towards me, the filmic body looks at me with this present/future sight, just as I see it with a past/present one. When

Durga peers into that jar to look at the kitten, she looks at me, in the present, from the past, seeing into the future through a ripple in spacetime created by the film’s body, as I look into the past through the same ripple.

Through this cinematic wormhole, the film collapses spacetime, advocating another way of seeing by drawing me into the future. The film offers its present/future sight to me, asking me to look forward with it and see things that are yet to exist, as

Einstein did with gravitational waves, predicting them nearly one hundred years before they were discovered. In this present/future tension, the film offers me an opportunity to project my sight and self forward with imagination and creativity, even as the struggles and concerns of the present rage around me. Cultivating this type of sight, especially at certain moments in history, requires effort, discipline, and a willingness to boldly venture ahead—doing this on my own would be nigh impossible. Fortunately, I can think of

262 several films that have walked before me, clearing a path so that I can imagine what might come next. These films have shown me new ways of being in and looking at the world: I remember the glory of the world coming alive after I watched The Thin Red Line and the heightened awareness of my body that re-surfaced after I saw The Diving Bell and the Butterfly. I still seek those experiences at the cinema, as I constantly need to recalibrate my present/future sight, my eyes blurring with the weight of the past and present. I need to be reminded that I can choose to see the world differently, as these films do, believing that they speak to a reality yet to come, one that I can help bring into being. Eventually, imagination will solidify, and I will see empathy in the cat’s eyes, wonder in the train’s passage, and beauty in the rain shower.

~*~

How do religion and religious experience factor into the cinephiliac anecdotes that I have presented here? These moments mostly fall short of epiphanic revelation, instead drawing me closer to the world and its materiality through the ordinary, which, in its own way, serves as religious experience, albeit in a less “exciting” manner than miracles and visions. For me, these cinephiliac moments often prompt an avalanche of associations, spreading from an object or idea to an awareness of the materialities and relationships that connect me to the world. To demonstrate this process, I return to the train from a different perspective, a more personal one, for one last cinephiliac anecdote.

Near the end of Aparajito, the second film in the Apu trilogy, the train appears again, a harbinger of death for Apu’s mother, Sarbojaya. She hears the train in the distance, a sound that has now come to be associated with Apu, given his studies in the distant city,

263 and she begins to call out to him, stumbling out into the night, delirious. Reaching the door of their home’s courtyard, she looks out on the pond in front of the house, as fireflies begin to light up above it, their flashes dotting the screen and surface of the pond.

During this sequence, the train’s ghostly presence persists in the background, calling

Sarbojaya out of her house to witness the gathering fireflies. Before long, the pond fades to black, but, stunningly, the fireflies remain, pinpricks of white in the blackness of the screen—I have come full circle, back to the starry eyes of the kitten and gravitational waves hurtling through space. Another wormhole bending spacetime, full with the vastness of interpretation, the fireflies return me to a specific moment, each blink of light stoking the fire of memory.

April 2013. I am sitting in a chair in Scott’s office, on the verge of finishing my

Master’s degree. At this point, my hopes of beginning a Ph.D. program in the fall are gone, and I am frantically beginning to search for a job for the upcoming year. Scott and I are talking about what lies ahead for me, and he says, “Things will work out, and that’s as comfortable as I am talking about faith in this office.” In the years that have followed, I have returned to this moment and this phrase, as innocuous and cliché as it may appear, and it has never failed to sustain me. The sustaining power of this phrase did not come from the words, but from the relationship that birthed them and the belief that Scott invested in me through speaking this into existence. In this same conversation, Scott told me that during his Ph.D. work, he lived in a place with a back porch that overlooked a large field, and he would often sit out there in the summer and watch the fireflies dance over the field. Something about that story struck me, and, from that point onward, I have

264 seen faith materialized in the spark of the firefly. Still jobless, I went home to

Massachusetts that summer, and when I felt the despair creep in, I would walk outside at night and watch the fireflies, faithfully flashing away. Many find faith a constant presence, even a “shield,” to borrow St. Paul’s metaphor, but I have always found it more slippery than that—there one second, gone the next, in a blink of a lightning bug. Yet, this wavering can create its own constancy, like the flash of the lighthouse and the blip of the sonar, technologies that have long guided us through the dark. This is my faith, erratic firefly fireworks in the night that, every once in a while, flicker through the dark in a different pattern—24 frames per second.

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Conclusion. Watching Faithfully

“Now faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen.” — Hebrews 11:1 (KJV)

Growing up in a Baptist church, we only used the King James Version of the

Bible, and if you asked about faith, it wouldn’t take very long before someone brought up

Hebrews 11:1, the quintessential definition of faith. Despite the weighty language of

“substance” and “evidence” provided by the KJV, I heard this verse used, time and time again, in an attempt to turn my attention away from the material world around me towards the “things not seen,” things presumed to be holier based on their apparent immateriality—real faith sought after those things. Turning to this definition of faith in this verse with fresh eyes, however, I find that it points in a different direction, one far more anchored to the world, if we consider the words “substance” and “evidence” in the

Greek. The word that the KJV translates as “substance,” the Greek word ὑπόστασις

(hypostasis) has made its way into English and figured prominently into early Church debates about the Trinity and person of Christ.68 From the Greek words for “under” and

68 In the first chapter, I discussed the theological concept of the hypostatic union of Christ, in which Christian orthodoxy asserts that Christ was both fully human and fully divine. Taylor mentions that the shift in meaning of “hypostasis” from “substance” to “person” in the work of “Athanasius and the Cappadocian Fathers” goes as far as to affects our conception of personhood: “The notion of the person was correlative to that of communion; the person is the kind of being which can partake in communion” (278). 266

“support,” ὑπόστασις literally means an underlying support that props something else up, and in current day philosophical and theological use, “hypostasis” refers to an underlying reality or being, placing it squarely within the realm of ontology. While some newer translations render hypostasis as “assurance” (NRSV) and others as “confidence” (NIV), the idea that hypostasis would refer to the ontological reality of the world means that faith persuades us of and guarantees (other meanings of the Greek word pistis, translated as faith here) the material reality of things to come. Can faith do more than just act as a guarantee or “title-deed” (as some translate hypostasis) of the things done in faith? More exegesis of this verse sheds additional light: the Greek word for “things,” pragmaton, suggests an accomplished act, a deed or action done, these deeds brought into existence and completed through the action and foundation of faith. Is it not possible, considering hypostasis as the reality that supports everything else, that faith shapes the world, the reality of things hoped for, through imagination and belief?

What about the second half of the verse, the evidence of things unseen? Surely, unseen things belong to the abstract, immaterial realm, and therefore one needs faith to believe in them. Returning to the Greek, I again want to suggest a more material, embodied interpretation of this half of the verse, starting with the Greek word translated as “evidence” by the KJV: ἔλεγχος (elegchos). Other translations treat elegchos as

“assurance” (NIV) or “conviction” (ESV), English words that, to me, suggest a radically different meaning than the definition of elegchos in Strong’s Concordance as “proof” or

“test.” In assuring or convicting of things not seen, faith becomes a private, mental state, in which the individual becomes assured of the reality of things they cannot see. In this

267 way, faith takes on the modern, secular notion of protecting and buffering the individual self from the world outside. If faith proves or tests the things or actions (pragmaton, again) unseen, however, it calls one to act and put these unseen things to the test, searching for their effects in the world, claiming, boldly, that the things unseen will make themselves evident through means other than sight. Faith, as a test, becomes a reaching out to the external world and its unseen things in trust, rather than a retreat to an interior, undisturbed state where those things only affect an individual’s mind. In reaching out to the world around us, faith encompasses the entire body, reminding us that our mode of being in the world frequently encounters and understands things that we cannot see. Faith reclaims the role of the body in comprehending the world, a comprehension that modernity eroded through a myopic focus on vision, by, as Jonathan Crary argues, forming “a notion of visual experience as instrumental, modifiable, and essentially abstract, and that never allowed a real world to acquire solidity or permanence” (24). Put more succinctly, Walker Percy, riffing off Kierkegaard, offers this definition of faith:

“Faith is the organ which confirms that an existing thing has come into existence”

(Message 145). Faith affirms the material reality of the invisible, and makes it evident through our embodied testing and proving of this reality.

In this verse, this translation of my past, I did not expect to find a definition that lined up with the “faith” that Merleau-Ponty invokes to describe the ground of our everyday perceptions of and interactions with the world. He opens The Visible and the

Invisible with a declaration of this faith: “We see the things themselves, the world is what we see: formulae of this kind express a faith common to the natural man and the

268 philosopher—the moment he opens his eyes” (Visible 3). “But what is strange about this faith,” he continues, “is that if we seek to articulate it into theses or statements…we enter into a labyrinth of difficulties and contradictions” (Visible 3). Faith, especially the kind we exercise daily in our interactions with the world, absents itself from logical, rational examination—it just is. Richmond suggests that this faith “is more closely related to the sense of being faithful to somebody or doing something in good faith than it is to theological faith,” our perceptions of the world made possible by the world’s faithfulness to us and ours to it (89-90). Our “perception…operates in a space of faith, with all its attendant mystery and obscurity,” an embodied mystery that marks “my inherence in the world” through which I perceive and experience (Richmond 90, 89). In this explanation of faith, Richmond draws from a note left on the manuscript by Merleau-Ponty: “It is not faith in the sense of decision, but what is before any position, animal, and [?] faith”

(Visible 3, n.1). I would submit that, while Richmond does accurately portray Merleau-

Ponty’s thought on the subject of faith, the faith Merleau-Ponty defines here is, in fact, deeply theological, steeped in an ancient, enchanted understanding of faith, rather than a modern, disenchanted one.

In the enchanted world, faith was not a mental, personal decision to believe in

God, spirits, or other unseen things, but an embodied acceptance of the world and those things as already given and full of their own meaning. In contrast to the notion that

“meaning as it were only comes into existence as the world impinges on the mind/organism,” Taylor argues that “in the enchanted world, the meaning is already there in the object/agent…it would be there even if we didn’t exist” (34, 33). Significantly, this

269 means that the objects/agents around us have power to shape us, whether we want them to or not: “The meaning can no longer be placed simply within; but nor can it be located exclusively without…[as] the boundary [between world and self] is, in an image I want to use here, porous” (Taylor 35). If, for the porous self, the world and the things in it existed and affected us regardless of our stance toward them, then faith, as substance and evidence of things hoped for and unseen, was a pre-condition of experience in that world, a world from which we could not absent ourselves. Christian Wiman, poet and former editor of Poetry magazine, affirms this enchanted faith that he discovered during his battle with cancer:

To have faith is to acknowledge the absolute materiality of existence while

acknowledging at the same time the compulsion toward transfiguring order that

seems not outside of things but within them, and within you—not an idea imposed

upon the world, but a vital, answering instinct. (77)

This faith, as Wiman describes it here, already exists prior to our acknowledgment of it, as the world calls it forth from us, from below, this reality that we did not and cannot create, asking us to participate in its creative endeavor. In other words, faith is not the intellectual assent of a singular decision made by a sovereign individual, but the foundation of an ongoing position before and together with the world that shapes our relation to the things that surround us daily.69

69 Taylor points to the Reformation as being a catalyst for an understanding of faith as individual, rather than corporate, as “the new buffered identity, with its insistence on personal devotion and discipline, increased the distance…to the older forms of collective ritual and belonging; while the drive to Reform came to envisage their abolition” (156). 270

In many ways, the faith that I am trying to make my way back to, trying to fight towards, seems to be very similar to what Merleau-Ponty finds in his concept of the

“flesh.” The flesh, like faith, joins us to the world as “the concrete emblem of a general manner of being,” making connections to others possible (Visible 147). The two concepts, flesh and faith, overlap in a symbiotic relationship, intertwining like we do with the world. Flesh contains the possible realities that exist, waiting to be created as humans and world interact; it is, as Merleau-Ponty puts it, “a pregnancy of possibles,

Weltmoglichkeit (the possible worlds variant of this world, the world beneath the singular and plural)” (Visible 250). Faith substantiates these possible worlds of the flesh, as mystery, reality, and potentiality converge. At this point, one may wonder if I am still talking about “faith” as commonly understood, a question I wholeheartedly ask myself alongside you—indeed, I may not be. But, like Merleau-Ponty, I am struggling to carve a new idea from old words, words that, as Percy puts it, “are worn smooth as poker chips and a certain devaluation has occurred, like a poker chip after it has been cashed in”

(Message 116). Perhaps the value of a word like “faith” has been used up, but I am, as I have been elsewhere in this dissertation, reluctant to let go of the old words, even if their meaning has been transformed by centuries of use (and misuse)—I want to reclaim them, imbue them once again with the power they have lost, because they have exercised power in my life. Faith, in its multiplicity of meanings, has been a constant subject of my thoughts, research, and life, the reality that has kept me going, pushing and pulling me towards hope. As I near the end of this portion of my journey, one that has presented its own struggles and moments of despair, I am beginning to understand that it is not I who

271 has risen above my difficulties through faith, but faith that has risen beneath me, keeping my head above the quicksand.

The kind of faith that I am trying to define here, acts upon me, not I upon it, its meaning and existence independent of my vain attempts to confine it. This faith is not won through a hard-fought battle or arrived at through a herculean intellectual effort—it is, quite simply, a gift, given without expectation of anything in return. When faced with a freely given gift like this faith, we have three main options with which to respond: refusal, conditional acceptance, or unconditional acceptance. A refusal of this gift manifests itself in atrocities big and small, all perpetuated from a common desire to re- make the world into something it is not, something exclusive and small. Refusal of the perceptual faith drove the horrors of Nazi eugenics and concentration camps and speaks today in the insidious nationalistic whispers that deny personhood to those waiting at

U.S. borders. Choosing to accept this gift conditionally, a favorite option of religion, leads to its restriction, where one cannot obtain it until permissions have been granted and rules been followed, usually set up by those who want to harness freely given faith for profit or power. Those in power manipulate and oppress by deceiving those under them about the unconditional nature of faith—they place conditions on it to force others to do what they want, as recent sexual abuse scandals in the Catholic Church and

Hollywood have demonstrated. More often than not, in my life, the conditionality applied to this gift surfaced in subtle ways that frequently bore the name “faith” themselves: believe this or you’ll go to hell, don’t do this or God will be disappointed in you, don’t think about that too deeply or you might lose your faith…as if I was the one who found it

272 in the first place. I watched as friends around me decided that these conditions were too much, that this way of looking at the world could not benefit them, and they were right.

Imposing conditions on this faith that connects us to the world and others transforms its gift to a burden, its peace treaty to a declaration of war, and its pardon to a jail sentence.

Yet, minute after minute, day after day, and year after year, this faith remains, despite being twisted and perverted by all manners of abuse, and, like all unconditional gifts, it keeps asking one simple question: will you receive it? Will you accept this thing that you cannot buy, earn, or create, that truly comes with no strings attached? The existence of this faith does not depend on your Say yes to sun! Say yes to pain! Say yes to sticking with a city answer, nor will it ever cease to offer itself to you through a thousand days of rain! unconditionally. The only decision you and I get to Say yes to grace! Say no to spite! make is whether to say “yes,” “yes, but,” or “no.” Say yes to this! Say yes to you! Say yes to me! Say yes to love! To answer “yes” is, returning to Merleau-Ponty, to Say yes to life! — trust “what is before” us when we step out into the Gang of Youths world, to accept this world in all its glory and revel in the mystery of our interactions with it. “Phenomenology has long spoken of this mystery,” Richmond adds, “and has long held that wonder is the only appropriate posture when faced with it” (127). This posture of wonder stands ever before us, in the thousand million little moments that comprise the day, calling us, ever so quietly, to surrender to what faith and flesh reveal to us, asking us to “say yes to life.” The cacophony of modern life and its abstractions can drown out the still, small voice of faith, but I hear it, often, when I watch a movie.

273

The cinema, like faith and the world, asks us to receive it in a similar fashion, as it gives its world to us freely (despite how much it might cost to go to the movies nowadays). Mikel Dufrenne says this of the aesthetic object and its relation to the world:

“There is nothing but the world, and yet the aesthetic object is pregnant with a world of its own” (149). The cinema, as an aesthetic object, presents a myriad of possible worlds, worlds we can choose to accept or reject. In this acceptance or rejection, we isolate and re-enact the question that faith poses to us every day as we enter into the viewing experience. For Richmond, the cinema produces, through “the illusion of bodily movement,” “a single experience that has, so to speak, two sides,” resulting in a double cohesion of us to the world and a world of the film, “this cohesion…another name for my perceptual faith” (90). Richmond attributes to the cinema much of what I have attributed to the freely given perceptual faith: “The cinema does not give us a world because it represents a world but because it makes the invisible appear” (93). The cinema asks us to say “yes” to its world instead of submitting it to “the aesthetic declension of skepticism” of modernist criticism, just as the perceptual faith asks us to accept and embrace the invisible connections of the world instead of dissecting them into mechanical abstractions

(Richmond 95). Richmond argues that our “encounters” with the cinema can “never become totally clear, completely transparent,” and that “this nontransparency…is the condition of such an encounter, the condition of our perception, of our cinema, of our bodies, and of the world” (95). This nontransparency comes from the intertwining of the perceptual faith and the flesh, the very elements that freely give the world and all its eccentricities to us, as “we encounter our faith” in the cinematic experience (Richmond

274

95). In saying “yes” to the summons of this faith, we open our eyes, ears, and bodies onto something that goes before us and grounds us in the world—we watch faithfully.

Watching faithfully takes place in the space before representation, in the very act of opening oneself up to a film. As such, the faith in a world we exercise when we watch a film precedes questions of indexicality and intentionality: “[O]ne cannot intend the world or the appearance of a world. A world is not an object; it cannot be adumbrated”

(Richmond 93). From this position, the cinema gives us a world through faith before we turn our critical eye to how it represents the world: “This faith and this world do not stem from an indexical bond with an intended profilmic object” (Richmond 93). Herein lies a reason why I find the Iranian films of chapter three so compelling, as they radically tear down the notion of a cinema dependent on profilmic reality and objects as they create their own realities through the power of the cinema acting upon the world. In this cinema of appearance that Richmond describes, we move past debates about digital versus analog film, as the faith and world given to us in the cinema do not depend on “the likeness

(photographic or otherwise) of objects onscreen to objects in the world,” meaning that even “blatantly counterfactual special effects, digitally rendered cinema, and animation” can give us a world onscreen (93). As the cinematic religious experience stems from the ability of the cinema to place a world and faith in front of us through the relationship we forge with the film’s body, Richmond’s claim allows for religious experience at the cinema to arise from a wide range of films. I may not have found my religious experiences in special-effects laden blockbusters, but that does not mean that someone else cannot. It is not my goal to limit cinematic religious experiences to a specific genre

275 or style of film, although I do want to offer a few brief words on the idea of “bad” film, which Deleuze brings up when talking about cinematic faith.

I am well acquainted with bad movies, as my friend Chris and I make it point to find bad movies and watch when we get a chance to see each other, carrying on a critical, sarcastic conversation in a Mystery Science Theater 3000 mode as we watch. The movies that Chris and I watch are not exactly what I think Deleuze has in mind when he calls

“modern cinema” “bad” (172). By “bad” cinema, I find it unlikely that Deleuze just means poorly constructed films, though poor technical skill can certainly contribute to bad cinema, but rather films that do not accept the gift of the perceptual faith and thus fail to deliver a concrete world to their viewers. These are films that distort their world to present a single agenda to the viewer, films that subject their viewer to untold horrors in the name of “realism,” and films that are hastily and transparently made to capitalize on the latest trend—I would call these films “soulless.” They are not part of the “cinema of perceptual faith” that “offers a world onscreen with all its indeterminacy, incompleteness, and opacity” (Richmond 94). Rather than calling us to participate in the world and their worlds, bad films do not give us agency to collaborate in the world-making process, instead they treat us like simpletons to be duped, paying lip service to the gift of faith as they corrupt and conditionalize it. While bad films are not totally bereft of the perceptual faith, they do not have the same power as good films to restore our belief in the freely given perceptual faith and the world it places before us. Good cinema, in other words, makes its world easily accessible, and gives its viewers the possibility of seeing that world manifested in the world, whereas bad cinema obfuscates its world, leading its

276 viewer to either reject the perceptual faith or have to work very hard to find it. What we watch matters, then, but not as much as how we watch, and if we open ourselves up to the cinema in faith as it does to us, we may find something truly religious.

As a religious way of seeing, icons have long been a locus of theological and artistic debate about their ability to reveal the divine world to their viewers. Philosopher and theologian Ivan Illich speaks of the icon as a “threshold,” through which “the worshipper not only touches, with his eyes, what is beyond the threshold represented by the icon, but he also brings back the mingling of his gaze with the flesh of the resurrected” (114-15). For John Baggley, the “icon forms a door into the divine realm, a meeting point of divine grace and human need,” where the worshipper only need but knock to be granted entrance (4). The worshipper, through the icon, engages in a fleshly, intersubjective look with other bodies, as the iconic image “reflects the real flesh of those who have already been incorporated into the body of Christ” (Illich 114). The worshipper considers the icon with the eyes of faith, taking up the position of faith before the icon, believing that it can and will provide a gateway to something real beyond it, perhaps something more real, the substance and evidence that define faith. If film scholars have connected icons to film, their efforts have been largely to prescribe what kind of film might partake in the tradition of iconography.70 I would suggest that the position we take before the film, like the position the worshipper takes before an icon, proves far more important in accessing another reality than what the film looks like. For the “devout” film

70 For example, Paul Schrader suggests that some of the films he analyzes act as icons, but they do so as a result of their director’s style or how they employ elements of “stasis,” such as in Bresson’s Joan of Arc (83). 277 viewer, the filmic icon grants access to other realities, realities that the film viewer can bring into their reality, much like the worshipper finds divine reality to bring into their reality through the religious icon. Coming to film as an icon involves a deliberate act of faith and imagination, made possible by film’s connection to the world and our embodied relationship with it. Furthermore, by seeing the iconic possibilities within film, the whole world and those in it come alive with this same possibility.

As seems to be a theme in this conclusion, I depart from the traditional definition or understanding of an icon to suggest something else, as icons are usually seen as deriving their spiritual power from what they depict and how they depict it. Yet, icons, as

I have claimed about film, operate through embodied relationships, and, thus, any relationship with another body (in whatever form it takes) can be iconic. Richard Kearney speaks of “the other as an icon for the passage of the infinite,” where we see “the divine in and through that person...as trace, icon, visage, passage” (17-18). The infinite givenness of the world appears to us in our relationships, because our being and world are relational: “Even in the structures derived from analyzing our corporeity and our sensibility we already find that primordial structure of a being dealing with things, surrounded by things in perceptual contact—all that points to our being together with an other” (Patočka 55). Without the other, Illich argues that we lose the possibility of the good life, “the possibility that a beautiful and good life is primarily a life of gratuity, and that gratuity is not something which can flow out of me unless it is opened and challenged through you” (227). If we adopt a position of gratuity before the world, where everyone and everything around us necessarily implicates us in a matrix of relationships,

278 we arrive, again, at the enchanted world. Looking out on this relational world, perhaps we can admit that our ancestors were not as ignorant as we often like to assume, but that we, like them, are swept up in a gratuitous, generous life.

I hear their voices even now, thrumming through the gaps between my atoms, singing an ancient song, a refrain that I instinctually know. This chorus reminds me of my exhaustion at our attempts to tear things down, smashing the old into rubble as we cackle, having finally, we are sure, loosed the chains of yore. Along the way, the casting aside of these ancient fetters (which I am not convinced were ever locked in the first place) has somehow become the end goal of serious intellectual pursuit. In a moment of trenchant critique, Marilynne Robinson claims that this destructive impulse has infected modern scholarship:

The degree to which debunking is pursued as if it were an urgent crusade, at

whatever cost to the wealth of insight into human nature that might come from

attending to the record humankind has left...may well be the most remarkable

feature of the modern period in intellectual history. (Absence 29)

This pursuit of destruction, regardless of its original necessity, has become easy, seducing us, massaging our egos to convince us that we are brave and bold as we swing the wrecking ball of challenge at old ideas and institutions. To be bold now, I would argue, does not reside in continuing this crusade of debunking, but in sifting through the rubble to begin the long, laborious process of rebuilding. In this rebuilding, we will fashion something new, but it will, inevitably, be forged from the remnants of what has come before, things presumed lost to the inexorable march of time and progress. I have done

279 my best to build something in this project, something that looks back to old ideas and old words and uses them to explore new ways of seeing and experiencing the world—new ways, which are, in fact, old ways, reborn each day as the world gives itself to us.

In this constant giving of itself, the world lays bare the faithful reality from which all other realities spring. This reality lies beneath our lives and experiences, and it speaks, not through fuzzy ineffabilities, but through the very real world, people, and things around us. In our secular age, many of us have lost the vocabulary to describe this reality or remain unconvinced of its existence, awash in a sea of options that present competing ideas about how to flourish as a human being. The cinema puts us in touch with this reality through embodied relationships and knowledge given to us freely. Seeing the world as enchanted, contrary to what scientists, philosophers, and corporate executives have told us, is still an option. I cannot turn back time nor can I rid myself of the boundaries and trappings of my cultural and social context, but I can make a choice to see the substance, the reality, of the world as containing far greater meaning than others tell me it has, seeing it in a new light. “Whether it is a question of things or of historical situations,” Merleau-Ponty offers, “philosophy has no other function than to teach us to see them anew” (Phenomenology 483). Philosophy, religion, and the movies have taught me that I can decide to see the glory and the power in the wind’s rush, the snow’s fall, and the sunset’s glow. I can hold out my hands to the world as a willing partner, knowing full well that in its presence I may encounter things that exceed my capacity to comprehend. In its embrace, I just might find a fullness that does not depend on me and

280 my actions to bring it about, but pulls me deeper into its inexhaustible, incomprehensible waltz, as we imagine a new world together in faith.

~*~

Here my microphone cuts in and out and my editing becomes erratic, as academic forms begin to fail in my attempt to describe this world and its fullness.

Saline-infused, the air drips blood, drawn from the times when I strode these beaches as another person, dimly aware, even then, of this other transfused life.

It falls, then, to poetry and metaphor to say anything about this unmappable country that hangs between the backlit sky and paperthin moon, this hidden, fossilized universe, static-charged and bursting.

I taste dusky wings, musky things

in the overwhelming rain.

I have long desired a vision from on high, as validation and proof of the things I cannot see, but lately I have realized that I have had these visions my whole life. They come only when I wake, mercurial and quicksilvered, dreaming dreams in the light of day.

Lightning bugs blinking in my backyard, shape-shifting constellations of phosphorescence,

281 incandescent afterimages, remade with every blink. Luminous continents submerged in the sea of shadows, re-surface in a brilliant flashbulb blast.

My life has been blessed with immeasurable beauty and joy—I have deserved none of it and I cannot explain it. I have lost love, but the miracle is that I ever found it to begin with. I have stumbled through the dark, more times that I would like to admit, but the light still appears, unbidden, chasing away the shadows.

The violent mental contortions do not stop,

and I wearily rise, turning my palms heavenward,

to receive the benediction of restless inquiry,

and I trace an unseen cross over my body,

an emblem of something I do not always feel.

I have fallen backwards into waiting arms, enveloped in a warm embrace whose provenance I cannot trace. I have felt peace etched into my soul by some unseen calligrapher, glowing cursive that I cannot duplicate.

You don’t know what to make of the glow that bubbles from the bellies of the semis, transforming them into iridescent gods, incarnated for a millisecond of eternity.

282

These things are true, in the only sense of that word that means anything—I feel them and know them bodily, viscerally, as they overwhelm and encompass me, leading me ever onward.

~*~

Jason Bivens has delightfully quipped that “to write about religion is ineluctably to make things up” (27). Never have I felt that more strongly than now, as I compose this conclusion, trying to capture these musings and turn them into something solid. Yet, I know that my struggle comes not only from imagining a new message, but also from repeating an old one, one that beats slowly underneath everything I write. I have called it the perceptual faith, but it’s perhaps more accurate to call it by its other name: grace.

Grace, scandalous in its profligacy, always offered, never taken back.

Grace, overflowing and without end, proclaimed by General Loewenhielm (Jarl

Kulle) in Babette’s Feast: “See! That which we have chosen is given us, and that which we have refused is, also and at the same time, granted us.”

Grace, little Tommy (Jimmy Hawkins) in It’s a Wonderful Life, pulling on

George’s (Jimmy Stewart) coat, just to tell him that he burped.

Grace, sparking a fire from the world’s flint and our steely experiences, illuminating an existence freely given and impossibly undeserved—flame-licked, heat- struck, we stumble through these lives.

And, like these sparks, I tumble through the night sky of the cinema, my faithful eyes adjusting to the dark, hoping to find something similar to Will Barrett, the protagonist of Percy’s The Last Gentlemen, who, in an act of absurd, scandalous faith,

283 spends all his savings on a telescope, sets it up, and looks at the brick facade of a building:

It was as he had hoped. Not only were the bricks seen as if they were ten

feet away; they were better than that. It was better than having the bricks there

before him. They gained in value. Every grain and crack and excrescence became

available. Beyond any doubt, he said to himself, this proves that bricks, as well as

other things, are not as accessible as they used to be. Special measures were need

to recover them.

The telescope recovered them. (Last 31)

The bricks became as Will hoped, their very substance changed, made more, not less, real. His telescope, my cinema, recovers the things of this world, things that have been lost to abstraction, disenchanted. The world and its grace are always there, hiding in plain sight, just waiting for me to put my eye up to the telescope and look.

284

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