Faith And Spirituality In Masters Of World Cinema
Sunday, December 14, 2008
I'm proud to announce the publication of Faith And Spirituality in Masters of World Cinema, edited by my friend Kenneth Morefield. Cambridge Scholar's Publishing has posted the table of contents, Mike Hertenstein's introduction, and the first chapter, "Bergman's Trilogy of Faith, Persona, and Faith in Narrative" by Bill Scalia (download PDF). As a further tease, here's the introduction to the chapter I contributed, "Pedro Costa’s 'Vanda Trilogy' and the Limits of Narrative Cinema as a Contemplative Art":
The main problem with narrative in film is that when you become emotionally involved, it becomes difficult to see the picture as picture. Of course, the laughing and crying and suspense can be a positive element, but it’s oddly nonvisual and gradually destroys your capacity to see.
-- Michael Snow (Snow, 67)
The same moment that we are looking, we forget.
-- Jean-Luc Godard (Walsh)
For experimental filmmaker Michael Snow, a viewer’s ability, literally, “to see” is of first importance. Snow came to film relatively late in life, having explored first the fields of music, painting, sculpture, and photography, and cinema for him has never been primarily a storytelling medium. Rather, he treats the foundations of film—mechanically produced light and sound moving in time—as just more artistic material. Snow’s most famous film, Wavelength (1967), for example, is essentially a 45-minute, continuous forward zoom through a New York loft, accompanied by an electronic sine wave that over the course of the film modulates gradually from its lowest frequency (50 cycles per second) to its highest (12,000 cycles per second). Wavelength deliberately rejects the traditions of narrative cinema and foregrounds, instead, the structure and mechanics of film. For Snow, then, a comparison might be made between the typical movie viewer and an impatient museum-goer, who rushes from portrait to portrait noting only the names of the historical figures represented there while overlooking completely all that distinguishes one artist’s brush or canvas from another. Artistic form vanishes amid the simpler pleasures of narrative.
Placed within the context of a discussion of faith and spirituality, Snow’s warning about the dangers of narrative cinema takes on an obvious metaphorical meaning as well. Religion is, to borrow the Evangelical parlance of the day, a “worldview,” a lens through which people of faith examine every issue before claiming a moral position, forming judgments, and acting (or choosing not to act). Snow’s demand that we see “the picture as picture” implies an attentive, active observer as opposed to a passive consumer of images. He is warning against what theologian P. T. Forsyth, in his writings on aesthetics, calls “the monopoly of the feelings,” whose aim is to move men rather than change them. For Forsyth, hardly an iconoclast himself, the error “is the submersion of the ethical element, of the centrality of the conscience, and the authority of the holy” (qtd. in De Gruchy, 74). Narrative cinema, with its seamless cutting, heroic faces, and manipulative musical cues, is particularly well-equipped to monopolize one’s feelings and co-opt one’s imagination, thus rendering the passive religious viewer pliable to anti-religious ideologies. The Soviet filmmaker Andrei Tarkovsky calls this tendency "tragic": "if art can stimulate emotions and ideas, mass-appeal cinema, because of its easy, irresistible effect, extinguishes all traces of thought and feeling irrevocably. People cease to feel any need for the beautiful or the spiritual, and consume films like bottles of Coca-Cola" (179).
The work of Portuguese filmmaker Pedro Costa is a useful test case for a discussion of the limits of narrative cinema as a contemplative art. Without abandoning narrative altogether, Costa has over the past two decades moved progressively toward abstraction and, in the process, has discovered his own brand of what avant-garde filmmaker Nathanial Dorsky calls “devotional cinema”: “a way of approaching and manifesting the ineffable” (Dorsky, 27). In particular, Costa’s trilogy of feature films set in and around Fontainhas, an immigrant slum in Lisbon, demonstrates an increasing dissatisfaction with the tropes and traps of conventional cinematic storytelling. In the “Vanda Trilogy,” as it has become known—Bones (Ossos, 1997), In Vanda’s Room (No Quarto da Vanda, 2000), and Colossal Youth (Juventude Em Marcha, 2006)—Costa pays homage to other spiritually-minded filmmakers such as Tarkovsky, Robert Bresson, Carl Dreyer, and Yasujiro Ozu, while also borrowing from the formal and explicitly political legacies of Jean-Luc Godard, Jean-Marie Straub, and Daniele Huillet, the latter two of whom are the subject of Costa’s 2001 documentary, Where Does Your Hidden Smile Lie? (Où gît votre sourire enfoui?). Costa’s films are infected with the same nostalgia for Modernism that characterizes so much of today’s art cinema, where the rigor of Bresson and the alienating camera of Michelangelo Antonioni threaten to inspire a new “Tradition of Quality” characterized by expressionless faces, glacial pacing, and calculated stabs at transcendence. But what distinguishes Costa from his contemporaries is his uncynical commitment to form and ethics, which are bound in his films not by transcendence but by imminence—that is, by the sacred dignity of the material, human world.
5 Comments:
I'm sure the other members at Unspoken Cinema would like to hear about this secret of yours. ;)
Excellent Darren. And nice Forsyth reference, he is one of the most obscure but rewarding of the great unread conservatives. (And has some personalist links to Bazin to boot.)
Thanks, Mike. Honestly, what very little I know about Forsyth was scavenged from John De Gruchy's great book, Christianity, Art and Transformation: Theological Aesthetics in the Struggle for Justice (Cambridge UP, 2001). Sounds like he's a guy I should look into more seriously.
Very nice. Congrats. Have a great Christmas--say hi to your sister for me.
Thanks so much for your contribution to this anthology, Darren. Your writing is always well crafted and a pleasure to read, your arguments well informed and carefully thought out, and your ideas thought provoking.
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