Film - Think

(MHP Column 9.08)

It has been a long time since I have written here at MHP for to any number of reasons (including but not limited to: research, child-rearing, wandering, etc…). But the primary reason is that I have simply had little to write. I have been taking a break from culture and its intrigues, criticism and its vicissitudes. I even went so far as to fast from all written fiction for most of the recent season of Lent, which was very successful until I stumbled across a stash of sci-fi paperbacks in the basement that I haven’t seen since high school. A few months ago I broke down and read some Walker Percy, and last week my wife walked in on me furtively reading some Ellul, but otherwise I have been careful not to stray much farther into interesting writing than James Lee Burke or P.D. James. Just to keep it real, every now and then I have stuck my nose in an airport novel - time which I will never regain. Such reading is its own punishment.

And as far as film is concerned, I have seen little. I have kept up with some of the more talked about items from the past year’s worth of festivals, but otherwise I have contented myself with the occasional screening, reprint, or DVD. It has been a nice movement from one pace to another, once frantic like Gustav in Death in Venice, now more like Tati’s assuredly aloof Hulot.

I have always been fascinated by the possibility of applying concepts in historic Christian spirituality to our experience of contemporary culture. (People do talk about lectio divina and similar things in this context quite a bit, but I am thinking of less specific and isolated practices.) An example: My wife and I once took a terribly long and chilly trip to the Hermitage to see the Matisse Room, in which are installed his giant paintings “Dance” and “Music” opposite each other. If you stand in the right spot you can see both giant spaces of color and rhythm at the same time just at the edge of your field of vision - it is like watching modernity think about itself. We were sustained through this very long trip by a concept of pilgrimage, making our way through trial and tribulation to a destination that had informed my spiritual and aesthetic imagination for years. Pilgrimage by definition involves three things, a reasonable distance, a sacred location, and a penitential vibe. Modernizations of the concept have unfortunately limited the first two points such that one need not actually travel very far or with much difficulty to a place that has limited associations with the divine to be on a pilgrimage. We ritually visit shopping Meccas or gush about our last concert or festival. Much marketing has co-opted the pilgrimage concept, leaving us with people camped for days outside film premieres or Apple stores. And it is difficult to instill a penitential vibe into most traveling these days. I suppose one could leave the air conditioning off, stay in hostels, or submit oneself to public transportation when abroad. But in Russia, at least, we suffered. The cheapest seats on the overnight train to St. Petersburg in late December are unpleasant, if not downright scary (we dozed in shifts). We eventually made it through the ice and snow to that room high up in the Hermitage and reveled in the flat vista of Matisse’s two paintings there. When it was all over, we could officially check off all three boxes in the definition of pilgrimage, provided one would accept the Matisse Room theologically as a “sacred location.” This really isn’t that difficult to do.

So there must be something to this, reclaiming these pre-modern practices for the technological society, for the transparent society, enacted in the Junkspace. In a similar vein there have been overtones of monasticism – of the anchorite sort – to the past year or so of my life. One repeated theme in the broad narrative of the Bible is the positive effect of periods of withdrawal and solitude. Inasmuch as historic monastic practice shares in these important narratives, from Moses on Sinai to Jesus in the wilderness, there are precedents for temporarily disengaging oneself from the endless movement of culture and commerce. It is only in such a place we discover that: Man cannot live by the New Yorker alone. And when it comes to any monastic activity, motive is key. Such periods of isolation are never ends in themselves, but means to specific ethical, spiritual, or social intentions. And in my case, I have simply been seeking shelter from the tyranny of the new, or perhaps more finely put, trying to find ways in which I can become an appreciator of culture in ways that aren’t driven by the market. The tendency of the critic in our age is to feel that in order to comment on anything, one must have seen everything. But this sort of thinking often derives from the insistence by the marketplace that its cultural products are continually important, that each Oscar season represents a Michael Phelpsian advance over the last. In seeking alternatives to this sentiment, I have found the guiding metaphor of Nathaniel Dorsky’s essay in The Hidden God on “transcendental” or “devotional” cinema to be apt. In this essay he is interested in explaining why a certain sort of filmmaking, with slower pacing and broader compositions (think: Tarkovsky, Bresson, Dumont, etc…), tunes us into spiritual reflection. This is mostly because such films partake in the paces, cycles, and rhythms that characterize our own spiritual reflection; such films simply mimic the process of reflection that characterizes modern spirituality. I wonder if we can transpose this notion to film-watching in general, if Dorsky’s depiction of devotional cinema can lead to more devotional ways of participating in culture. This would be a fitting alternative to the cult of the new, one that would naturally require cycles and rhythms divorced from those guided by commerce and trend.

I am loathe to follow Dorsky with Bill Bryson, but it fits. I recently read his book on hiking the entire Appalachian Trail. As it turns out, he discovers it is too difficult and decides to skip his way up to Maine on selected segments of his own choice. At first he, like the reader, is disappointed in his failure to be a completist (one of our generation’s cardinal sins). But it slowly becomes okay, his appreciation of the trail no longer deriving from its tradition history of survival and endurance but from its grandeur unfolding across so many states. My recent time away from the madding crowd of culture in its increasingly hasty forms has had notes of both Dorsky and Bryson. I was happy to stumble across a cycle I hadn’t experienced, a reflective spirit of travelogue that deserves more practice. And I like how this periodic monasticism embeds my experience of culture in a narrative removed from pop culture, submerging it in a narrative of spirituality that has been part of the Christian experience for a very long time.