Film - Think

The opening shot of Silent Light is one of those that will be talked about for a long time, earning a spot a special list out there among the critical canons that most often includes a sequence or two from 2001, the driving scene in Solaris, the first railway scene in Stalker, the balloon in Rublev, the beginning of Heart of Glass, the street scene in Werckmeister Harmonies, the rooftop in I am Cuba, the flying Jesus in La Dolce Vita, perhaps the telephone in Once Upon a Time in America. There are more out there, but this is essentially a list of lengthy establishing shots, unexpected passages of time during which we become acclimated to a mood, location, or rhythm of action. Often crossing wires with notions of pure cinema, these shots are painstaking, technically self-absorbed, verging on irrelevancy. But they are also the entire point. Pure image, properly exposed to a network of religious, political, or emotional ideas, is revelatory. The beginning of Silent Light is the reason I keep returning to cinema.

It is such a perfect introduction because it continues to shape and inform the film until it returns to conclude it. The second time around its intent is clear, and welcome. If it was mysterious at the start, now it is revealing, embracing the film in brackets of myth. In the beginning, there was a camera. It panned slowly from a starry sky, down to the horizon along which the dawn broke in real time. Trees and fields emerged. It cut to a family praying quietly in the early hours of the morning, a ticking clock in the background. It was a movement from darkness, to light, across nature, into the house of a family who go forth to labor after prayers - a clear cycle of creation as narrated in Genesis. This is an odd beginning for a film about a man conflicted by his love for his mistress and his duty towards his wife and children. It makes cultural sense in light of the Mennonite setting of the film, for which the Biblical narrative is formative. But it takes a while for the film to close this circuit of reference. Over the course of the film Johan talks about his problem with a friend, gets advice from his father, and tries to comfort his bereaved wife. The moments he does spend with his mistress are equally quiet, as profoundly unadorned as their lives shaped by Mennonite spirituality. We come to understand that Johan casts his conflict in theological terms. It may be that his feelings are “founded in something sacred.” It is either from God or the Devil. His mistress wants to stop seeing him because “peace is stronger than love.” This isn’t just a conflict between two women, but between theological ideas and human feelings. It has fractured Johan’s religious identity - which the rest of the film seems intent on restoring.

It does this in two ways:

1. The first way is by means of the storyline. Eventually, his wife dies after a massive coronary, her heart broken by all the tension. He clings to her in the rain on the side of the highway until someone pulls over to help. It is too late. Her body is prepared for burial, and we see various members of the community participating in the funereal rites. Johan’s mistress appears and asks to see her body. Alone in the room she kisses her, and Johan’s wife miraculously awakes. In this miracle Johan’s inner conflict is resolved by the way that the miracle dissolves the tension between his theological life and his emotional life. His wife has been divinely restored, contradicting all the mistaken theology he considered as possible explanations for his affair. Regardless of what he thought, God was present and vigilant. But through this miracle, their marriage relationship has also been restored, and now his conflicting identities have been brought into alignment.

2. The second way Johan is restored is by means of the biblical imagery in the film. If the opening scene is a Genesis reference, then it isn’t a stretch to see his wife’s death as a flood narrative. Her death place takes in a torrential downpour, her heart broken by sin for which she has no personal responsibility. Her death is a judgment of Johan’s affair, but it is the unfair kind of judgment that the flood narrative forces us to come to grips with. There isn’t a definitive Genesis equivalent to the miracle scene, but it circumvents the flood with biblical sense of grace nonetheless, Johan's mistress quietly approaching the corpse like Mary Magdelene. The conclusion bookends the film with the vitality of these allusions, and Johan emerges from them like Noah from the Ark, Abraham with a ram from the thicket, or Jacob with a limp and a new name.

This is a positive reading of Johan that isn’t clearly outlined in the film, but it takes its cues from the direction different allusions point us. Apart from solving his identity crisis, the final act is also more broadly about transcendence over nature. Johan is locked in a struggle that he considers to be natural, yet it is hopeless. The film toils over so much natural imagery, letting us watch Johan and others live through this crisis whether they are aware of it or not. And then in a turn of events, nature is overcome. That is where all the hope in the film lies. The whole Mennonite setting is not arbitrary, but rather provides the thought world in which miracles occur and make sense. Other than the prayer scenes, the most intensely religious scenes are those that occur during the funeral and death ritual. The film crescendos that direction, slowly lifting itself out of all the natural imagery, and then concludes with a very supernatural event. It seems that for Reygadas, religion is the language of faith and the narrative ground in which images of hope can be planted. Cycling image by image through the idea of things being revealed and unveiled, the dawn that sets the film in motion culminates in the eyes of Johan's wife fluttering awake - her resurrection an event that is consistent with the film’s almost theological preoccupation with images slowly growing in clarity. It is also an event that makes a MacGuffin out Johan's despair, an incarnation of the glimmering light that suffuses Reygadas' natural cinematography.

Additional notes:

Even though there are a great many intentional formal and thematic parallels, Ordet comes from a much different place than Silent Light. The person who made Ordet could not have made Reygadas' previous film, Battle in Heaven. But I can see how a person who made a film like Battle in Heaven, which is so invested in the desperate and regressive ways in which people physically relate, would be interested in crowning Johan's struggle with an Ordet-like resurrection moment. It is such a vigorous shorthand for the kind of redemption of physical reality that film is ultimately about. And I think this is what Reygadas is ultimately consumed by. I don't think the Ordet reference has such a fine point on it that we can say it is about resurrection in general. It is actually about resurrection in a specific narrative sense, one which has connections to the other biblical references in the film, but also to us as viewers that have long been steeped in Ordet's genius. It all gets pretty meta, almost too meta. But he pulls it off.

It is actually a very carnal, obscene film that is channeled by easily recognizable biblical images, and then resolved in the king of all biblical cinematic images in the Ordet reference. If it weren't for all these biblical references, Silent Light would be tawdry and offensive (just like Battle in Heaven). All the language about forgiveness would have no ground in which to take root. But that last image is Reygadas' humble attempt at bringing this great biblical cycle to a close in a way consistent with the narrative/formal brilliance of the rest of the film without going so far as to re-invent the wheel. It is a gesture more faithful to cinema history than any biblical or theological impulse.

I have always had a hard time deciding whether or not I actually like Dark City. On the one hand, it closes with a ramshackle sense of hope, one that rides a tightrope between cartoonish versions of determinism and nihilism. I agree with Peter Chattaway that the director's cut of the film refocuses some of the philosophical questions raised by Dark City's mental messiah, making them even more problematic. On the other hand, the Metropolis eruptions and architectural apocalypses are mesmerizing. Dark City is a noir paradise, its palette, background noises, and uncrossable edges slowly rising in form to meet its sci-fi crescendo. It was passed off by many as style over substance, which I think is a misreading of its noir influences that prize style as version of substance. One of the first definitions of noir includes the word "oneiric," a fancy word for dreamlike, and this characteristic of the genre matches the thought world of the film, especially in its turn towards ambiguity at the end (cf. the Borde and Chaumeton book on Noir).

What I do like about Dark City, despite the fact that its deepest ideas are fairly shallow, is the way in which it consistently develops as a noir film in spite of its apocalyptic intentions. In his 1970s essay on noir, Schrader pinpoints hopelessness as the noir thematic sine qua non, which the Dark City director's cut has in spades (more establishing shots, more inner conflict ascribed to its protagonist). Similar to the mood of Bladerunner, the film is an exercise in urban anxiety, all of its sordid angles writ large. The story, as I hope you already know, is about how John Murdoch finds a way to overcome the aliens and release humanity from their big experiment. But it is also about an escape from the city as it is, a way out of its dominating form. The new city, complete with sun, sand, and sea is just as artificial as their old town, but the noir hopelessness has now been overcome at least in form. Regardless of the philosophical or moral problems raised by John's abilities, he has transformed an actual city, not an imaginary one. The preoccupation with the odd roots of the city at the end of the film seem to underscore that whatever John does, he is reorganizing things on an existing canvas. Since noir deals with archetypes, Dark City has its own character arc - it has been released from the same endless manipulation as its citizens. John's machinations are just as artificial as the alien's, but the end result is trading one city and communal memory for another, which isn't that removed from the processes of history as we know it. So it is ambiguous and stylized, but the formal movement from noir hopelessness to sci-fi apocalypse makes sense out of it all.

Other than the fact that Shotgun Stories is what Bottle Rocket would have looked like if directed by David Gordon Greene, it is appealing in the quiet way it ignores pretty much every storytelling device you would expect from a revenge film. The tale of two sets of half-brothers, one abandoned by their father and left to a life of rural poverty while he tended to the other, Shotgun Stories unfolds in vignettes of country living until the balance of these two families is upset at the father's funeral. Rolling along through effortless landscape shots and documentarian observations of tractor maintenance and fish-farms, the film only seems aware of its storyline every once and awhile. But this is okay, as the soundtrack and scenery serve to balance out the tension that explodes in violent conflict at several points, calmly dragging the viewer the length of the film's obsession with these families' aggression and loss. I enjoy southern gothic literature because it is seldom tidy or conclusive, often offering little more than impressions of a theme or an idea that haunts each character's presence. O'Connor, for example, doesn't always seem aware of what she is thinking or saying, in stories like Parker's Back building tension until it breaks and peters out in haunting descriptions. Likewise, Shotgun Stories seems less interested in resolution than it does in exploring the mood of revenge. It certainly comes to a surprising conclusion, but this is more an afterthought to the damage already done, the film moving in ripples from this center. I appreciated the naturalism here, as it is not nearly as pretentious as it sounds. It helps to think of it as a prequel to The Straight Story.

The Visitor opens with a glum professor going through the motions. Walter is taking piano lessons in an effort to sustain the memory of his dead piano teacher wife, grading papers in his east coast campus office, dryly delivering papers at a Manhattan conference. Even though he doesn’t admit it to anyone until later in the film, it is clear that he has given up, coasting through the remainder of his career in resignation. And then as the titular Visitor, in his own forsaken New York apartment he stumbles across an invisible class through which he encounters a deeper, more relevant form of sorrow. Apart from the loss of his wife and his poor piano skills, he has little to complain about: a house in Connecticut, an apartment in New York, a comfortable tenure in a university. He has achieved the American ideal in which a reasonable sadness, such as being widowed, can justify an entire lifestyle of seclusion, socially irrelevant self-reflection, and the sort of i-pod isolation that revels in listening to classical music while staring out of one's windows in the suburbs.

This is until Walter spends the night in his New York apartment while at a conference in the area and finds that two illegal immigrants have been staying there during his lengthy absence, tricked into thinking the rental arrangement is legal. Tarek and Zainab leave in a flurry of apologies, only to be very unexpectedly invited back in by Walter until they can get on their feet. The remainder of the film is spent tracking Walter’s response to these new friends, his passion for music rekindled as Tarek teaches him to play the drums, his confidence growing in forays outside his comfort zone. When Tarek is arrested, Walter becomes as impassioned as Walter can be in an attempt to free him from detention. Here the story turns towards tragedy, but unlike the sadness related to his wife, this grief is the kind that opens Walter to others, to the difficulties of people he has never noticed, and connects him to a world that opens his moral horizons. This would all be a bit hackneyed if it wasn’t for the understated direction of Richard Jenkins, Hiam Abbass, and the others. I rarely comment on actors, but McCarthy (an actor himself) seems acutely aware of gesture as a form of communication in his editing. Walter perfectly captures the bewildered, unsure, and awkward manners of an East Coast academic more confident in the classroom. Many of the memorable edits involve Walter holding a letter up to the prison partition glass and turning his head so Tarek can read it in privacy, leaning down to talk to the guards through a slot in their window, or kindly manning Zainab’s jewelry booth while she grabs a cup of tea. The Visitor is a character study with a social conscience, Walter a Moviegoer or Stranger awakened by a couple who haven’t been in America long enough to see the Twin Towers.

The ambiguity of the title, as there are any number of visitors in the film, comes to a head in the last scene. Walter has been practicing the drums with Tarek, even joining in the cultural panoply that is the drum circle in a local park, complete with dancers, whistles, and unidentifiable percussion instruments. The last scene has him in the subway with his drum, a long shot, Walter sitting on the bench in the middle of the screen. He sets the drum on the ground, a white balding man in a button down oxford, and begins to hammer out an exotic, mournful beat. It increases in intensity, Walter’s head lowering over the instrument, and the film closes in a lonely rush of trains and cracking drum beats. Godard’s Slow Motion and Haneke’s Code Unknown both end this way, in a flare of music and drums. Here, the end of The Visitor hits the same note. Walter has encountered otherness, and been shaped by it. The very fact that the other has a name, face, nationality, and address lends his grief a generosity and authenticity that his other life had not afforded him. Here in the subway he can enjoy his wife’s memory on a different instrument.

I was a bit surprised to see the drunk Jewish jazz musician of Taxi Blues wash up on the shore of Ostrov. In Lungin’s earlier film, Pyotor Mamonov plays the westernized odd-ball to an increasingly frustrated Muscovite taxi driver, his perestroika straight man. In Ostrov, Pyotor plays a similar sort of character as a monk who in the “holy fool” tradition rattles the cages of his cloistered fellows and heals the infirmities of those who have heard of his special gifts. The similarity between the jazz musician and the monk lies in their refusal to stay in one world or the other, occupying an in between space that rattles peoples convictions - as Lungin said, he is like “an exposed nerve, which connects to the pains of this world.” I like this description, a true Kierkegaard description, who asked and answered: “What is a poet? An unhappy person who conceals profound anguish in his heart but whose lips are so formed that as sighs and cries pass over them they sound like beautiful music.”

“Beautiful music” may be stretching it in reference to Father Anatoli, who lives in a coal chute and prefers his grating, disingenuous persona to the dignity expected from those holy enough to heal. But the film is interested in framing the rumpled Anatoli against the minimal splendor of this arctic island. He kneels along the rocky beaches, rows from shore to shore, penitentially lumbers coal across a ramshackle dock with Tarkovskian precision. The film roots his continual repentance in this picturesque space, turning his anguish into poetry. The island is cold and spare, but it is iconic, lending Anatoli's plight a measure of art. And this makes sense in light of his conversion, washed up on the island after Nazis exploded his coal barge and forced him to shoot his captain. All these little Kierkegaard ironies, living next to the remains of the barge, wailing along the beautiful coast, crudely tricking others into better conceptions of holiness, lead to a great concluding irony involving his dead captain. And though it wraps the film up a little bit too tidily (when is faith and repentance ever tidy?), the film retains its credibility as a fable of spirituality. He has played so many well-meaning jokes on the locals and other monks, but the grand joke is on him, tricked by God into a life of faithfulness and the healing of others. Ostrov is an excellent witness to ideas and conversations about faith that proceed along unfamiliar or unexpected lines.

Encounters at the End of the World has the merit of addressing two of my long held fascinations at the same time, Antarctica and Werner Herzog. The former has been a lifelong point of interest, having something to do with stark horizons, the personality of nature, and wayfaring to the edges of things – and exactly the same could be said for my interest in the latter. If there is any place fit for Herzog, it is a small town at the edge of an arctic wilderness where a rag tag bunch of professional wanderers and scientists wash dishes, solve the mysteries of science and nature, and hold talent shows. Here amid so many like-minded souls he is free in his voiceover to hear their stories and let his imagination make connections at will.

At times this essay film seems like an elementary school book report on Antarctica, easily distracted by ice cream, men with oddly shaped hands, a woman who can fit into hand luggage, and the possibility that penguins really are insane. (And of course, the real humdinger conundrum: why don’t chimpanzees ride less intelligent animals?) But the lightness in tone is deceptive, this last question seeming trivial until the next frame catches a penguin bolting from the migrating crowd towards the mountains, flippers psychotically outstretched. Apparently some penguins really do go nuts and end up waddling eighty miles in the wrong direction towards certain death. Herzog doesn’t explain the possible parallel here between deranged penguins and those who for whatever reason find themselves drawn magnetically to the end of the world; it may be that he was simply interested in deranged penguins for their own sake.

It is surprising not to hear more commentary in the voiceover on figures like Shackleton, who embody the kind of hubris we see in other classic Herzog characters. Instead, he gets lumped in with explorers like Amundsen and Scott, about which something “does not feel right.” As he explains about the race for the poles in the early 1900’s: “It may be a futile wish to keep a few white spots left on our map, but human adventure in its original sense lost its meaning, became an issue for the Guinness Book of World Records.” Herzog has a hard time thinking of a geography that inspires such a rich array of fundamental thoughts as a place that can be tamed. As a frontier, it humbles us, permits authentic encounter in ways nowhere else does. Only a place characterized by such bold oppositions, beauty and hostility, activity and austerity, volcanic magma and glacial ice, can live up to its own myth as the end of the world. One scientist tells us that when all the wind stops, Antarctica is so quiet that you can stand outside and hear your heart beating. Or the seals singing “like Pink Floyd.”

The technical bravery which led to the nature cinematography in Heart of Glass and Scream of Stone is absent in Encounters. There are a number of mesmerizing diving sequences that taper off in abstraction, but I was waiting for the hand-cranked time lapse or adventurous long take over crags of frozen steam, neither of which occurred. Herzog is into what he calls "ecstatic" truth, which can be encountered “through fabrication and imagination and stylization.” This mysterious process is the always the kind of thing I imagined happening in Antarctica, but the wilderness seems either resistant to such a reading, or Herzog failed to find a foothold any farther in than McMurdo. McMurdo and nearby camps are interesting enough however, and even though I am slightly bummed at not discovering an "ecstatic" Antarctica, I felt blessed by the attempt.

As a follow-up to a previous post on Interfilm and others, here is a list of all the Cannes Ecumenical Jury award winners, which coincidentally has many of my favorite films. It would be worth slacking off on all other film watching to put together even just short reviews of all these, as the list serves as such a rich resource of films "that stand out due to their artistic quality: that show human attitudes or expressions of the Gospel or prompt a discussion, and which sensitize viewers to spiritual and social questions and values." (And the Ecumenical Jury Prize is one of more than a dozen they give out every year at a wide array of different festivals, all of which can be perused at www.inter-film.org. There is an English version of the site, click the Britspeak flag in the upper right hand.)

1974 Angst essen Seel auf (Fear Eats the Soul) - Rainer Werner Fassbinder
1975 Jeder für sich und Gott gegen alle (Kaspar Hauser) - Werner Herzog
1976 The Ecumenical Jury did not give an award
1977 J.A. Martin, photographe - Jean Beaudin/La dentellière (The Lacemaker) - Claude Goretta
1978 L’albero degli zoccoli (The Tree with the Wooden Clogs) - Ermanno Olmi
1979 Bez znieczulenia (Without Anesthesia) - Andrzej Wajda
1980 Stalker - Andreï Tarkovski/Constans (Constancy) - Krzysztof Zanussi
1981 Czlowickz zelaza (Man of Iron) - Andrzej Wajda
1982 La Notte di San Lorenzo (The Night of San Lorenzo) - P. et V. Taviani
1983 Nostalghia - Andreï Tarkovski
1984 Paris Texas - Wim Wenders
1985 La historia oficial (The Official History) - Luis Puenzo
1986 Offret (The Sacrifice) - Andreï Tarkovski
1987 Pokayaniye (Repent) - Tenguiz Abouladze
1988 A World Apart - Chris Menges
1989 Jésus de Montréal - Denys Arcand
1990 Stanno tutti bene (Everybody's Fine) - Guiseppe Tornatore
1991 La double vie de Véronique (The Double Life of Veronique) - Krzysztof Kieslowski
1992 Il ladro di bambini (The Stolen Children) - Gianni Amelio
1993 Libera me - Alain Cavalier
1994 Huo Zhe (To Live) - Zhang Yimou/Outlomlionnye Solntsem (Burnt by the Sun) - Nikita Mikhalkov
1995 Land and Freedom - Ken Loach
1996 Secrets and Lies - Mike Leigh
1997 The Sweet Hereafter - Atom Egoyan
1998 Mia eoniotita ke mia mera (Eternity and one Day) - Theo Angelopoulos
1999 Todo sobre mi madre (All about my Mother) - Pedro Almodovar
2000 Eureka - Aoyama Shinji
2001 Safar e Gandehar (Kandahar) - Mohsen Makhmalbaf
2002 Mies vailla menneeisyyttä (The Man without a Past) - Aki Kaurismäki
2003 Panj é Asr (At Five in the Afternoon) - Samira Makhmalbaf
2004 Diarios de motocicleta (Motorcycle Diaries) - Walter Salles
2005 Caché (Hidden) - Michael Haneke
2006 Babel - Alejandro González Iñárritu
2007 The Edge of Heaven - Fatih Akin
2008 Adoration - Adam Egoyan

I desperately wanted to like Henry Poole is Here, as all the ideas in the film are so worth considering. I also wanted to really like it because it is a film of my favorite genre, one which I have been covering for years in obscurity, that being Non-Canonical Jesus Films. These are films in which a Christological theme, image, or reference is central to the form or narrative structure of a film, but the film itself has little interest in addressing the Jesus of the four gospels. And Henry Poole is Here is an excellent example, as it is centered around a possibly miraculous appearance of the face of Christ in the stained plaster of Henry’s house. But it is unfortunate that the film is so flawed at points, often sidetracked by music video-like divergences in a sloppy effort to grant depth to its characters. The director, whose previous career was in music video direction, often lets the soundtrack take control of the film, alternating between indie-pop hits and ethereal rushes of mood music that cripple otherwise good scenes with heavy-handedness. Yet it is worth getting these criticisms out of the way, as Henry Poole’s heart is in the right place and almost weathers even these lapses in creativity.

Henry Poole has returned to his childhood neighborhood with a terminal illness. He sits in his empty house drinking vodka, eating pizza, sometimes crashing in the lawn chair in his backyard, wanting to die in peace. To his great annoyance, his extroverted neighbor discovers a likeness to Jesus’ face in a patch of stained stucco on his house while delivering some welcome to the neighborhood tamales. Esperanza quickly invites the parish priest to validate the miracle, emboldened by a drop of blood that continually reappears on the visage. Watching all this from afar, and often recording Henry’s conversations on a tape deck, is 6 year old Millie, whose mother, Dawn, will later take a interest in Henry’s personal life. Henry is insistent that Esperanza and the stain’s growing fan club are absurd, often losing his temper in cynical outbursts. All attempts to wash the image clean, or rid it from a persistent tear of blood, are ineffective. Despite several miracles happing in connection with Christ’s face, Henry persists in his disbelief, morosely ignoring any flickers of hope or restoration happening in his own backyard. Eventually, after Henry reveals his illness to Dawn we find him weeping in the backyard, hand outstretched to the possibly divine stain. The grief, the weight of his own cynicism, in this scene is overwhelming. All he has to do is touch this face. Not to enact some sort of mystical healing voodoo, but simply to validate the possibility of being connected to others, of sharing in their hope. At this point, despite the somewhat cloyed nature of the rest of the film, Henry’s character rings true. The director endured a real life tragedy on par with Henry’s pending doom (the film being his response to this tragedy), and this particular scene seems imbued with the pathos of someone who really has felt Henry’s feelings and shared in his fears.

This really is a Jesus film, in the roundabout way characteristic of the non-canonical genre. The film monopolizes on Jesus’ cultural presence in the world as a polarizing sign. To some he refers to hope, to others he is simply a foil to their cynicism, by his sustained and inexplicable presence referring to their anxieties. Henry’s final act of taking an axe to the miracle is a theological act, an attempt to deal with this inexplicable presence by casting it in his own terms, rendering it inert, bringing it down to his level. Henry Poole’s transition in the film is not from just from cynicism to hope or faith, but from self-imposed exile to health and relationship. In this way the presence of the divine indicated by a stain in his backyard ultimately duplicates itself in Henry’s new life. His final outburst in chopping through Christ’s face with an axe is his first actual interaction with the image. And even as the house tumbles down around him, knocked from its moorings from the blows of Henry’s incredulity, he is healed – an exquisite picture of those who like Jacob wrestling with the angel, come to faith in conflict.

Hollywood can’t really produce films about faith, because faith never provides the kind of closure we turn to Hollywood for. Fortunately, much in Henry Poole is left unresolved by the conclusion. Sure we see Henry’s life changed and all that, and the film is tidily wrapped up from that angle. But left lingering is the question of Jesus’ appearance in the film. At no point are we given a clear view of the stain, at times we get a decent glimpse from various angles that imply a good likeness of Jesus. But we are never given a chance to observe the phenomenon for ourselves and decide either with or against Henry concerning its veracity. The miracles, the drops of blood, and Henry’s ultimate restoration imply that indeed, Jesus was in his backyard. But when the walls collapse, and the roof falls on Henry, Jesus leaves the film in the same air of evaporating wonder by which he entered it. The closest we get to identifying what really is on Henry’s wall occurs in first person point of view camera angles when people are looking at the visage, emotional close-ups of them beseeching the wall-Jesus for healing. (At first these are confusing, my first thought was: Am I supposed to be Jesus?) At the very end of the film, Henry Poole stares directly into the camera in reversal of the point of view of Jesus’ face, and seems to suggest not just that Henry has in his own way stared Jesus in the face, but that the appearance of Jesus in the film is means of contact between people, hope, and the divine. As the audience, we are invited to participate. A bit cheesy, but it clues us into what Jesus actually refers to in the film. Again, it is unfortunate that the film is flawed by several matters of form, as more effectively directed it could have been an excellent Jesus film.

(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.

Spike Lee’s dolly shots in 25th Hour may be the best post-9/11 commentary on film - shocked minds drifting to and fro among aftermath. At first, pulling Anna Paquin and Philip Seymour Hoffman through a Manhattan nightclub on dollies seems contrived, not out of sync with New York nightlife. But these shots are invariably a key part of the rhythm of Spike Lee’s films, punctuating them like visual and theatrical asides, seeming to emerge at his direction like a musical refrain. Employed in this nightclub, minor characters being tugged through Monty’s cloud of despair (one easily referring to a culture dominated by terror alerts), the dolly shot becomes a means of empathy – a way to measure the insecurity of these otherwise flattened personalities.

Crooklyn is much different from the rest of Lee’s films, in that most racial or political commentary is largely traded for a chance to bring his old neighborhood back to life. Told through the eyes of the youngest daughter (Troy), the story loosely follows the various financial troubles and quarrels of a family inspired by Lee’s own. The struggling musician father, overworked mother, and extended neighborhood family are all terrifically played, supported by a soundtrack ripped directly from 70’s turntables.Crooklynis more a collection of coming-of-age vignettes than a straightforward story, notable interludes such as Troy’s extended visit with a suburban aunt shot entirely with an anamorphic lens. Characters and ideas drift in and out of scenes like the soundtrack, often giving over to impromptu family sing-a-longs or snippets of their father’s piano.

Two frequent visitors to the story line, often in the form of tracking/dolly shots, are the neighborhood glue-sniffers (one played by Lee) who terrorize the children periodically. In one dream-like sequence Troy escapes the pair by floating away. In others, they enter the frame drifting upside down or at odd angles to the lens. In a moment of bravery Troy and her brother attack Lee with a broomstick, shot in a tight frame from behind as they dolly resolutely towards him. What were probably pretty scary people at the time have now through memory been granted a fabled quality, either easily defeated or sloping through history on a parallel track. In Crooklyn, Lee’s dolly shots are still visual and theatrical asides, parentheses in longer sentences of film, but here he uses these spaces to play with the joy of remembering. In a much later New York (25th Hour) these same shots will have a more sinister edge, the quality of memory then far more strained. The surrealism of Troy’s childlike vision of the glue-sniffers is a construct of an easier, safer Brooklyn, when she felt safe with her struggling family and neighbors. Crooklyn is a lyrical reminder of a different age, the moral reference point for most of Lee’s other films and maybe even the theoretical ground of all his dolly shots.

“According to a new gospel of ugliness, there is already more Junkspace under construction in the 21st century than survived from the 20th..."

"God is dead, the author is dead, history is dead, only the architect is left standing.”

- Rem Koolhaas

Junkspace, a term coined by architect Rem Koolhaas, is the keyword for a rambling set of descriptions of the way public institutions, architecture, and postmodernism relate. It is a handy way to think about globalism, suburban sprawl, gentrification, and a host of issues characteristic of our age within one confined metaphor. It is “what remains after modernization has run its course or, more precisely, what coagulates while modernization is in progress, its fall-out.” Ultimately, Junkspace is not limited to architecture and urban planning. It is post-modernism dreaming itself into commercial and communal forms, erasing the neat little metaphors that have developed around post-modernism such as "web," "network," "community," or "matrix" and setting something much uglier in their place. In an age when the cultural critic is expected to traverse numerous genres, mediums, and "isms" in the course of one review, no less an unsightly metaphor will suffice. It seems that Koolhaas has a lot to say to the critic interested in thinking theologically about culture and/or film. Here are a few interesting connections that can be made:

1. “When we think about space, we have only looked at its containers. Junkspace is the body-double of space… A fuzzy empire of blur, it fuses high and low, public and private, straight and bent, bloated and starved to offer a seamless patchwork of the permanently disjointed.”

This description of our increasingly homogenized cultural space eerily resembles C. S. Lewis’ depiction of purgatory/hell in The Great Divorce. Over time, this only slightly real “grey town” has sprawled out in endless rows of phantom houses on a cosmic scale. It is an unsettling picture. In the same way, most culture is the sprawling “body double” of the authentic artifacts that should be flooding the public square. The first task of the critic is to find and engage films that are worth our attention, to wade through all the “body doubles” and find stories with an actual pulse. Critics can break down the momentum of mediocrity in culture, giving voice to the important moral and social distinctions that are so often glossed over in the “empire of blur.” And in response to Koolhaas’ cynicism regarding the permanently disjointed, criticism can give clearer voice to films that are thinking about reconciliation, making proposals about how greater coherency can be achieved in life.

2. "Junkspace pretends to unite, but it actually splinters. It creates communities not of shared interest or free association, but of identical statistics and unavoidable demographics, an opportunistic weave of vested interests."

If Christianity is to achieve its place as an active culture among others, it must be able to unite disparate demographics on the basis of something other than some reorganizing social principle. For Koolhaas, this social principle is the failed project of modernism. Criticism can have a formative influence on this process by drawing attention to the cinema of marginalized, oppressed, or misunderstood people groups. Increased attention to the Iranian New Wave in the 90’s renovated our understanding of the Middle East, documentaries like Heavy Load expose misconceptions about developmentally disabled adults, Rosetta led to actual immigration reform in Europe. Christian criticism has the ability to counter-act the splintering tendency of Junkspace culture, selectively engaging with films like these that dialogue with the theological tasks of reconciliation, social justice, and the grounding of diversity in true community.

3. "Inevitably, the death of God (and the author) has spawned orphaned space; Junkspace is authorless, yet surprisingly authoritarian... at the moment of its greatest emancipation, humankind is subjected to the most dictatorial scripts... from the pushy oration of the waiter, to the answering gulags on the other end of the telephone, the safety instructions on the airplane, more and more insistent perfumes, mankind is browbeaten to submit to the most harshly engineered plotline."

It is intriguing to think that the death of the A/author is the reason it often takes so long to get my check at a restaurant. It is even more intriguing to trace the prolific and "authoritarian" blandness of pop cinema, fiction, and art to the lack of a living God or author to grant its scripts any legitimate clout. We submit to the scripts of culture not for lack of imagination, but for lack of alternative. Criticism is all about standing up to dictatorial scripts and opposing them with authentic and articulate alternatives, by providing authors to reclaim orphaned space. And this notion of orphaned space is one that appeals specifically to Christian criticism, which is inspired by so much theological imagery of Fathers, Sons, and children.

4. "Globalization turns language into Junkspace. We are stuck in a speech-doldrums. The ubiquity of English is Pyrric: now that we all speak it, nobody remembers its use."

This is to say that Umberto Eco writing about the wax museums that dot America’s landscape was cultural criticism’s finest hour (see: Travels in Hyperreality). Slightly more provocative than the famous portrait of Kramer in a popular Seinfeld episode, Eco strikes at the heart of the habit of imitation (imitivity?) that has dulled creativity in modern culture. In a "speech-doldrum" the only available activity is the rehearsal of past communication events, making it no surprise to see the recent trend in Hollywood of remaking so many older films, or Tarantino's influential fascination with b-grade cinemas. Theology is the continual exploration of language in finding clearer and richer ways to talk about God's activity in the world. As a way of communicating, in form it is characterized by the newness it is attempting to translate into contemporary terms. Christian thought redeems the use of words worn by repetition in Junkspace, putting wind back in their sails to continue Koolhaas' metaphor. Criticism and theology have this in common, celebrating creativity and thoughtful innovation, giving us a fresh vocabulary to think more clearly about ourselves and the world.

5. "Narrative reflexes that have enabled us from the beginning of time to connect dots, fill in blanks, are now turned against us: we cannot stop noticing: no sequence too absurd, trivial, meaningless, insulting."

My favorite book as a child was Harold and the Purple Crayon. In it a little boy draws himself into a variety of circumstances with his purple crayon, literally filling in future narrative blanks as they are occurring. At times his own craftiness thwarts him, forcing Harold to quickly draw himself to safety within the context of his imagination. Criticism works like this purple crayon, writing creatively on the blank pages between a film and its audience. But how do we prevent cultural criticism from getting caught in the echo chamber of a culture whose "narrative reflexes" have been corrupted? How can we be sure that the right connections are being made, or the proper blanks are being filled? We could be unwittingly signing off on Mad Libs. The contemporary interest in narrative and theology is rife with implications for this issue. Criticism can exercise the narrative reflexes of readers, stretching and working out muscles that have atrophied due to misuse. The drama of redemption as a comparative narrative offers a space in which to explore the stories of others, grounding all the connections that can be made in films and ideas that are far from trivial, meaningless, or insulting.

There are several European/Scandinavian organizations involved with film, criticism, and theology that I like to keep tabs on.

1. The Media and Theology Project, primarily helmed by Jolyon Mitchell, is an active research community hosting conferences, inviting weekly papers, and generally just digging into global media culture on a consistent basis. The recently published Religion and Film Reader (Mitchell and Plate) is an indication of the caliber of their output, and at this point is the best textbook on the topic available.

2. Deus X Cinema in Iceland is an up and coming organizer of events, conferences, and published material (having already published books on Tarkovsky and others). They are plugged into the Scandinavian film scene particularly well, a rich resource for discussion. They provide an excellent template for developing local communities of interest in theology and film.

3. The Centre for the Study of the Bible in Theology and Culture in Denmark hosted a successful conference in 2007 for European scholars of theology and culture. From that conference report:

"Within theology and biblical studies it is often felt that the Bible has vanished from modern society. As a consequence of the ongoing secularisation a fatal loss of tradition has occurred and knowledge of the Bible has diminished or even disappeared completely from the consciousness of modern man. In this situation the biblical scholar stands in front of an enormous didactical task. He or she is to re-establish the necessary knowledge of the Bible. This is not primarily seen as a theological or religious task, but as a cultural necessity since most of the European culture will be a closed country if you are without understanding of the biblical references. However, the very preliminary studies of the reception of the Bible in contemporary art and culture conducted by the Centre, does not confirm this gloomy picture.

We find that the Bible is alive and well – out there. I would even maintain that there is a growing interest in the Bible among contemporary artists. And in popular culture biblical references form parts of the vast reservoir of cultural identity markers and figures of recognition that facilitate communication with the public. We also find that the Bible is received and understood in ways quite distant from the orthodoxies of the scholarly world and the Church. The Bible is not first and foremost seen as a historical document or an authoritative canon, it is part of the cultural intertext where it appears together with popular figures from the cartoons and the ‘classics’ of literature and film. Or it is seen as referring to deep religious experiences that might inspire modern artists in their search for authentic spirituality.

At the Centre we think that it is paramount for biblical scholars to get in touch with these‘unauthorized’ ways of understanding and making use of the Bible."

This resonates very strongly with the way I have been looking through cinema for "unauthorized" uses of Jesus imagery (what I think of as non-canonical Jesus films), and represents an advanced pattern of thinking about the use of the Bible in film and culture that hasn't yet begun to gain traction in the US. Over time it will, especially as theology becomes more savvy at using criticism to access images in culture that have been passed over as too abstract or antagonistic (such as the appearance of Christ in Bad Lieutenant).

4. INTERFILM has been around for ages, discovering and celebrating spirituality in international cinema for decades. (Here is a survey of its border-crossing and ideology-transcending history, which in the mid-90's turned its attention back to European cinema.) In an address during the 2003 award ceremony, INTERFILM's then president offered the rich expository comments on The Man Without a Past, truly sermonic in their appeal:

"After a while, you ask yourself if it is not even a question of your own tired and desolate perspective that you tend to see so many things rather as a heap of rubbish instead of as a fertile garden, as a garden full of flowers even? This film offers signs of a world of resurrection. A world that I sometimes dream of and where I sometimes am. The miracle of the other life that begins already when the one who has been declared dead undoes his bandages and has to get some good sleep at first. Thus, the thoughts wander to and fro between the stories of the film and the stories that the Christian faith lives of."

At the end of this address, he offered what is one of the best apologies for the study of theology and film I have encountered, speaking prophetically to the potential laziness of each culture:

"And one thing will remain the same: if film is really a work of art and church stays with what it should, then film and church will never be identical. Film participates in the specific character of the arts that is determined by structural openness and polyvalence. Esthetical experience is – at the core of its understanding of itself – much more interested in stimulating questions than in answering them, in confusing rather than in calming, in the search for meaning rather than in the teaching of meaning. Yet thus, the esthetical experience – in films too – creates a tension with regard to the position of the church that I also think is not to be given up. Church and theology are and will be related to a revelation of history, they have to tend to a certain non-opposition at least, to a unity of world and the experience of God, to the answers. Thus, there remains a border between the two different horizons of experience. But just as the acceptance of borders is a part of man's life, so is the crossing of borders. And thus, the vivid crossing of borders between film and theology may save the film from the banality of cinema and festival business, and it may also save the church from the deep sleep of the habitual and the always known."

If there are some EU/Scandinavian resources that I should be watching, but am not, please let me know so that I can add them to the list. I find it helpful to venture out of the American scene while I can, seeing movements and ideas in action that haven't stirred the waters in North America yet.

There is a great quote from Marinetti at the end of Walter Benjamin’s essay "The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technical Reproducibility":

"For twenty-seven years we Futurists have rebelled against the branding of war as anti-aesthetic ... Accordingly we state:... War is beautiful because it establishes man’s dominion over the subjugated machinery by means of gas masks, terrifying megaphones, flame throwers, and small tanks. War is beautiful because it initiates the dreamt-of metalization of the human body. War is beautiful because it enriches a flowering meadow with the fiery orchids of machine guns. War is beautiful because it combines the gunfire, the cannonades, the cease-fire, the scents, and the stench of putrefaction into a symphony. War is beautiful because it creates new architecture, like that of the big tanks, the geometrical formation flights, the smoke spirals from burning villages, and many others ... Poets and artists of Futurism! ... remember these principles of an aesthetics of war so that your struggle for a new literature and a new graphic art ... may be illumined by them!"

This is a handy description of the new cinema that has developed around comic book films, arguably culminating in the celebration of Nolan's two Batman installments as art films rather than typical Hollywood cinema. I couldn't help but think of the serene images of Batman soaring across Hong Kong or brooding across Gotham’s heights in terms of Marinetti's "metal-man." Throughout the essay, Benjamin describes the way in which fascism had hijacked the ritualistic functions of art in society for the purpose of social control (n.b. this is a massive oversimplification, don’t trust it). Batman as a "metal-man" created by violent conflict has a similar relationship to the social problems of Gotham City, standing outside the common rituals of court and jurisprudence. I am not sure how far to go with so many reviews reading Batman’s crime-fighting and privacy invading tactics as a sort of fascist critique of current American policy, but it does seem that Batman leaves himself open to interesting criticism.

There is an incoherency at the center of the film that develops between the Batman and Harvey Dent responses to the Joker. The story sets up Harvey Dent as the white knight, using normative social structures to save the people of Gotham as opposed to Batman’s use of torture, privacy invasion, and large amounts of collateral damage. But the actual production of the film, monopolizing on the "beauty" of Batman and his technology, maintains his heroic status regardless. There are competing concepts of heroism at play in the film, Dent’s moralism and Batman's sheer technological and aesthetic prowess. To be sure, Batman’s entire mythos is built on combating the sort of passive victimization that happens when people don’t have the power to enact justice (born in having to watch his parents' senseless murder). But the form in which his response takes place is the futurism that Benjamin despises. This incoherency leaks into other parts of the film as well - notice how quickly Lucius Fox capitulates to the "privacy invasion" issue. His decision has similarities to the ease with which shows like 24 pander to the fashion of fear-mongering that is now part of our daily routine (...it is okay if I break just this one guy's arm because I really need the phone number of that terrorist). The Dark Knight tries to be critical of this sort of "fascism" by making Fox hesitant to let Bruce Wayne use this incredible computer echo thing, but then spends a great deal of narrative capital on the cool special effects the entire scenario was intended to bracket anyway. In which do we participate more fully, the implicit criticism or well-executed action sequence?

The first installment wasn't this convoluted, so perhaps in a third film there will be some resolution to some of these niggling issues of violence and aesthetic. Maybe Batman will come to terms with his hero/anarchist dialectic, or simply resign himself to it like William Munny in Unforgiven. I am willing to follow the story arc on this one and see where it goes. I never bought the Joker's continual diatribe (he is about as profound as The Matrix), but from a narrative standpoint, the Joker really is the source of the incoherency of Batman and Dent - perhaps he unwittingly serves his destabilizing purpose after all?