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Between Time and Eternity: Reimagining Spiritual Complexity Through Musical Meaning and the Cinematic Human Figure

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Between Time and Eternity: Reimagining Spiritual Complexity Through Musical Meaning and the Cinematic Human Figure Between Time and Eternity: Reimagining Spiritual Complexity through Musical Meaning and the Cinematic Human Figure A dissertation submitted to the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences University of Sydney to fulfil requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy by Angelee Joy Contini Sydney, Australia February 2018 i Statement of originality This is to certify that to the best of my knowledge, the content of this thesis is my own work. This thesis has not been submitted for any degree or other purposes. Angelee Joy Contini ii Table of Contents Acknowledgements…………………………………………………………………………. vii Abstract……………………………………………………………………………………...viii Introduction: Music, Cinema and Spiritual Complexity………………………………………1 Methodology for Theorising Spiritual Complexity……………………………………5 1. Presence and absence, anthropomorphism and anthropocentrism, mythos and logos……………………………………....9 2. Cobussen’s concept of the threshold……………………………………..15 3. Ontological-symbolic elements: the spirit-matter spectrum……………..18 4. Liminal modes of existence: the cinematic human figure and musical meaning.........................................................................................21 5. Human-cosmos unity: anthropomorphism, cosmomorphism, transformation……………………………………………………………22 6. Aesthetic modes: absurd feeling, utopian desire, the ineffable, the uncanny………………………………………………………………26 working definitions of aesthetic modes………………………………….26 7. Mythos-logos: an appropriate language for a method of complexity………………………………………………..………………30 Choices in Literature…………………………………………………………………33 Summation of Chapters………………………………………………………………35 Chapter One: The Uncanny Spectre, Ineffable Music and the Problem of the Soul…………40 Gorky’s Kingdom of Shadows: A Beginning for Theory……………………………40 Affirming Liminal Existence: Archaic Film Theory…………………………………42 André Bazin: Between Heaven and Earth……………………………………44 Indexicality…………………………………………………………...45 Bazin’s Ambiguous Presence………………………………………...47 Sacred Realism and Ancient Spirituality……………………………..48 iii Edgar Morin: The Fluid Universe……………………………………………50 Presence-Absence and the Archaic Double………………………….53 The Morinian Soul…………………………………………………...56 Alan Cholodenko: The Animatic Spectre……………………………………60 On Derrida and The Metaphysics of Presence ………………………61 The Soul and the Spectre……………………………………………. 63 Cinema, Death, Time and Eternity…………………………………………...67 Gorky’s Legacy in Musicology: The Argument for Presence……………………….69 Music, Silence and the Ineffable: Eliminating Spectrality…………………………...71 Silence: The Malady of Absence and the Musical Cure……………………..72 Vladimir Jankélévitch: Music, the Ineffable and Plato’s Sickness…………..78 Schopenhauer’s Quintessence………………………………………..83 Marcel Cobussen: Music, Spirituality and Catholicism……………………...88 Conclusion: Cinema, Music and Death……………………………………………....93 Chapter Two: Unmasking the Musical Uncanny: Making a Friend for the Spectre………....96 Nietzsche’s Hermit: The Friend with Two Faces………………………………..….. 97 Music, a Friend for Thought, Speaks a Sorrow……………………………. 102 Deleuze’s Reading of the Mask(s)……………………………………….....104 Plato: The Friend of Wisdom and the Mask of Apollo..……………………………108 The Dream of Apollonian Shining………………………………………….108 Plato and the Shining of Music……………………………………………..114 The Ancient Wisdom of Absurdity…………………………………………118 The Mask of Apollo: My Shining Friend…………………………………...120 Nietzsche: The Friend of Feeling and the Mask of Dionysus………………………122 Dionysus, The River of Lethe and the Myth of Er………………………… 123 The Night Spirit of Music: Love’s Body………………………………….. 126 iv Conclusion: A Weeping Song, The Belonging of Death, A Friend for the Spectre.. 129 Chapter Three: Rethinking Music’s Utopian Desire through the Cinematic Body of Light………………………………………………………………………………………. 134 Between Heaven and Earth: A Spiritual Nowhere……………………………….. 134 The Body of Light: An Obstacle for Thought……………………………………. 138 The Language of the Negative Divine…………………………………………….. 145 The Mystic as Ecstatic Wanderer in the Spiritual Nowhere………………………. 148 A Transcendental Relapse: The Imaginary Cosmological Cartography…………... 156 Conclusion: A Totemic Purpose for the Body of Light…………………………… 158 Chapter Four: Burlesquing the Spirit in the Cinema of the Absurd(s)……………………...163 ‘Give me a body then’: Kierkegaardian Borrowings and the Spirit of Immanence………………………………………………………………………… 163 Deleuze’s Orators of the Body: Infinite Bodies and Spiritual Landmines………….165 Kierkegaard: Despair and the Spirit of Immanence……………………….. 168 Kierkegaard’s Stages on Life’s Way………………………………………. 173 Kierkegaard’s Presence in the Cinema Books…………………………….. 178 The Subtle Way Out and the Spiritual Automaton: Esoteric Landmines for Atheistic Thought………………………………………………………….. 182 The Body of Absence: Not Yet a Body, Not Yet a Self……………………………. 186 The Body without Organs…………………………………………………. 187 Presence and Absence in the Cinema of Spiritual Paralysis………………. 191 Bergson’s Gaseous Body as the ‘not yet’: A Crossing between Ontology and Ethics……………………………………………………….. 200 Kierkegaard and Nietzsche: Leaping and Dancing in the Theatre of Repetition………………………………………………………………………….. 211 Conclusion: From Humour to Faith……………………………………………….. 219 v Conclusion: Spiritual Complexity…………………………………………………………. 222 Bibliography……………………………………………………………………………….. 227 Filmography……………………………………………………………………………….. 238 vi Acknowledgements I would like to extend my sincere appreciation to my supervisor Dr Richard Smith and auxiliary supervisor Professor Anne Boyd for their time, patience, insight, advice and support, without which the completion of this thesis would not be possible. I thank Laleen Jayamanne for her encouragement to pursue postgraduate research, Alan Cholodenko for early discussions which helped shape the trajectory of the thesis, and Bruce Isaacs’ ongoing support throughout my candidature. I am also grateful to have attended/participated in the following seminars and conferences, the experience of which has been instrumental to the progressive development of this thesis: the 2015 Cinematic Thinking Workshop at Macquarie University, the 2015 ASCAP Conference at UNSW, the 2016 Film Forum at the University of Sydney, and the 2017 Film-Philosophy Conference at Lancaster University. I also thank those undergraduate students I was fortunate to tutor, and to learn from, throughout my candidature, especially Sarah, Poppy, Sam, Sonia, James, Lindsay, Geneva and Jones. I am deeply indebted to the following dear friends, colleagues and loved ones for their generosity, wisdom, honesty, laughter, time and patience: Joan, Paul, Fiona, Martin, my sister Sharin, my partner Marty, his family, and our beautiful creatures Lucy, Billie and Mr Jinxie Maestro Blancmange. I dedicate this research to the loving memory of Rach, Starlia, Willow, Sage and Lucy. vii Abstract In a time defined as both an age of abundant atheism which triumphs in the wake of the death of God, and an age of post-secularism which returns to religion, the discrete forms of music and cinema remain germane sites for theorising the relation between belief and the nature of existence. Taking up the particular relation between the cinematic human figure and musical meaning, how might Marcel Cobussen’s musical-spiritual concept of “the threshold” problematise the difference between Christian and atheistic belief, so as to reimagine the boundaries of spiritual identity, faith, truth, ethics, choice and possibility? As an original contribution to knowledge, this thesis engages a series of liminal aesthetic modes—the ineffable, the uncanny, utopian desire and absurd feeling—to bring spiritual theories of music and film philosophy into a dynamic dialogue with one another, not only to develop a circuit of reciprocity between the two disciplines that affirms the significance of one to the other, but to work toward a more complex understanding of the spiritual significance of the cinematic human figure and musical meaning than discrete theories of cinema, music or film music have traditionally accommodated alone. Drawing from a range of continental thinkers such as Friedrich Nietzsche, Søren Kierkegaard, Vladimir Jankélévitch, Edgar Morin, Gilles Deleuze and Marcel Cobussen, this thesis argues that liminal modes of musical meaning and the cinematic human figure inhabit a dynamic, indeterminate space between a belief in eternity and a belief in time, becoming conduits and catalysts for a mode of possibility I call spiritual complexity. Spiritual complexity affirms the paradox, ambiguity and irony of liminal modes of existence in our post-religious and post- secular time, where the ontological and ethical possibilities of human identity may be reimagined in the thresholds of archaic, Platonic, Christian and atheistic belief. viii Introduction: Music, Cinema and Spiritual Complexity At the end of the twentieth century, Dennis Schmidt takes up the problem of “an ethics for these times”, emphasising the plural significance of what it means to live and die in this particular time that is “ours”.1 Our times means “these times of the triumph of a technological world-order, these times after Auschwitz, these times in which “the Judeo-Christian tradition…of ethics…is of diminishing efficacy.” ”2 Following Nietzsche, Schmidt writes that an ethics for these times can no longer be determined by the absolute categories of good and evil, but would somehow speak to “our shared life in time after thinking has been released from the timeless assumptions of metaphysics, that is, after we no longer presume to think from the vantage
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