Film Hierophany

FILM HIEROPHANY ANALYSING THE SACRED IN AVANT-GARDE FILMS FROM THE 1920S TO 1950S by Lalipa Nilubol TABLE OF CONTENTS Abstract 1 Introduction 3 Chapter 1: Eliade’s Hierophany and Its Application to Avant-garde Studies 46 Chapter 2: Artaud’s Film Theory and Theatrical Philosophy 99 Chapter 3: The Sacred in Film Poetry 135 Chapter 4: Mizoguchi’s Film Hierophany 193 Conclusion 264 Bibliography 288 1 ABSTRACT I am focusing my dissertation on the concept of ‗hierophany‘ as established by Mircea Eliade in order to formulate a theory of the ultimately cooperative relationship between the sacred and the avant-garde. On the outer surface, the relationship between the two seems intensely characterised by contention and conflict, due to the sacred being bound to the timeless, mythical dimension and the avant-garde being conventionally defined as a modern movement. However, I intend to re-theorise the avant-garde as being much more than a historically and culturally constrained phenomenon, that avant-garde — much like the sacred — is an inherent predisposition within the consciousness with transhistorical and transcultural qualities. And even though the sacred is normally associated with the archaic while the avant-garde is defined by a constant newness, I am setting out to establish that the archaic can indeed exhibit avant-garde aspects, and this is where my study of Antonin Artaud‘s theoretical material enters to help resolve such difficulties. Apart from upholding a dream cinema that detaches from (modern) conventions of aural narrative, Artaud proposes a revival of a mythical theatre, especially in his romantic idealisations of the Balinese theatre where the playing out of images and gestures is as he posits a process of transmutation channelled by the gods. Correspondingly, with a mechanical assemblage such as a work of cinema revealing mythical images and symbols, such an idea of radically mixed connotations goes to show that film may not be exclusively modern afterall. Film may in fact be essentially aligned with the primitive tendency to seek divine meaning and empowerment in everyday objects, places, and events — that through the cinematic medium, objects that are normally considered inanimate and even ordinary would come to possess sacred significance, acquiring a life force that magnifies the object‘s relationship with higher dimensions. Ultimately, 1 my attempt to show that film inherently possesses such animistic qualities would lead to a dismantling of the dichotomy between the sacred — which Eliade so insists is a separate dimension completely alien to this world — and the profane — which predominantly characterises modernity, of which both the avant-garde and the cinematic medium are considered by conventional standards to be two of the main components. The films I focus upon either express an idealisation of Eastern philosophy — regardless of whether or not such an idealisation is directly articulated — or provide an answer, or rather a replenishment, for a vision of higher fulfillment that the modern Western cultural attitude is severely missing. My original contribution is — not exactly to play one cultural attitude against another, as that would be the greatest fallacy — but to discern, by way of the intrinsic film form, the nature of those themes, images, and symbols that profoundly resonate with the mythical/sacred imagination, so much so that such operative patterns within the consciousness can be considered universal. In that connection, I set out to examine those aspects of the sacred that are inherently predisposed towards expanding creativity, which is that intense area of hybridity where the sacred and the avant-garde converge. Apart from analysing some interpretations of Germaine Dulac‘s The Seashell and the Clergyman (1928) in Chapter 2 — or more precisely, Artaud‘s ideas of this film that is based upon his original scenario — I discuss in detail specific scenes from the following films, all of which break open modern secular norms and enter completely uninhibited into the mythical realm where conventional definitions of reality become radically challenged: 1.) Maya Deren‘s Meshes of the Afternoon (1943) 2.) Jean Cocteau‘s Orpheus (1950) 3.) Kenji Mizoguchi‘s Sansho the Bailiff (1954), Ugetsu (1953), Utamaro and His Five Women (1946), and The Life of Oharu (1952) 2 INTRODUCTION Mircea Eliade (1907 – 1986) provides a foundational definition of hierophany: ‗From Greek hiero-, ―sacred‖, and phainein, ―to show‖, is a term designating the manifestation of the sacred.‘1 The universality of such a definition offers tremendous scope for analysing specific operative patterns within the human consciousness, as well as the ways in which such innate experiential capacities influence and inspire the most leading-edge examples of cinematic art. While the all- encompassing nature of universal structures allows for enormous latitude in making certain generalisations with less or even minimal susceptibility to being contradicted, I am using a phenomenological approach as I will later explain to show that in order to successfully analyse such an abstract concept as the sacred, there are some aspects to it (as presented by Eliade) that must be protected from being shredded apart by the disputing of every last component. However, because Eliade expressed minimal interest in cinema, it becomes essential to establish the concept of film hierophany2 through the works of filmmakers and film theorists (e.g. Antonin 1 Mircea Eliade and Lawrence E. Sullivan, ‗Hierophany‘, in Mircea Eliade: A Critical Reader, ed. by Bryan S. Rennie (London and Oakville: Equinox, 2006), pp. 116 – 127 (p. 87). Also published in Eliade and Sullivan, ―Hierophany‖, in Encyclopedia of Religion, vol. 6. 2 There are two previous studies directly concerning film hierophany: Paul Schrader‘s Transcendental Style in Film: Ozu, Bresson, Dreyer and Michael Bird‘s Religion in Film. I am not discussing Schrader‘s text at length because it only contains brief mentionings of hierophany here and there. I am providing two quotes from the text that give a clear indication of what the text concerns: ‗Yasujiro Ozu in Japan, Robert Bresson in France, to a lesser degree Carl Dreyer in Denmark, and other directors in various countries have forged a remarkably common film form. This common form was not 3 Artaud, Maya Deren, Jean Cocteau, Kenji Mizoguchi) who were extensively devoted to discussing the sacred as revealed through the intrinsic film form. Such masterpieces — whether cinematic or theoretical — demonstrated such innovativeness and originality, certainly during the time in which they were produced, earning those artists avant-garde status.3 To begin with, determined by the film-makers‘ personalities, culture, politics, economics, or morality. It is instead the result of two universal contingencies: the desire to express the Transcendent in art and the nature of the film medium. In the final result no other factors can give this style its universality.‘ (Transcendental Style in Film: Ozu, Bresson, Dreyer, p. 3) ‗The Transcendent is beyond normal sense experience, and that which it transcends is, by definition, the immanent. Beyond this truism there is little agreement about the nature of the transcendental in life and art…Part of the confusion is semantic; the term ―transcendental‖ can have different meanings for different writers. It can mean, directly or indirectly: (1) the Transcendent, the Holy or Ideal itself, or what Rudolf Otto called the ―Wholly Other‖, (2) the transcendental, human acts or artifacts which express something of the Transcendent, or what Mircea Eliade in his anthropological study of comparative religions calls ―hierophanies‖, (3) transcendence, the human religious experience which may be motivated by either a deep psychological need or neurosis (Freud), or by an external, ―Other‖ force (Jung).‘ (p. 3) 3 Nathaniel Dorsky provides one of the most direct interpretations of the sacred aspects of avant-garde cinema in his initial suggestion that cinema has the potential to portray the human condition as a revelation of higher meanings. According to Dorsky, the fact that one can be profoundly affected by the lighting shifting from image to image shows that inner transformation can be inspired by exposure to image sequences exhibiting seemingly subtle content: When I first encountered avant-garde films in the early 1960s, the works I found most interesting were those that were discovering a language unique to film, a language that enabled the viewer to have the experience of film itself and, at the same time, allowed film to be an evocation of something meaningfully human. I began to notice that moments of revelation or aliveness came to me from the way a filmmaker used film itself. Shifts of light from shot to shot, for instance, could be very visceral and affective. I observed that there was a concordance between film and our human metabolism, and that this concordance was a fertile ground for expression, a basis for exploring a language intrinsic to film. In fact, film‘s physical properties seemed so attuned to our 4 the concept of avant-garde4 must be understood in terms of the military metaphor which directly applies to the co-existence between the undesirable old and the more desirable new — and that is the phalanx, a formation constituted of a leading-edge vanguard and a supporting rearguard which remains a secondary yet essential background. In the Iliad where Ajax ‗broke a phalanx of the Trojans‘5, the purpose of the phalanx is to show

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