My submission to the editor of an in-the-works collection of essays on the subject of "Film and Spirituality."
"The Limits of Traditional Narrative Cinema as a Medium for Spiritual Contemplation"
(A Witless and Obnoxiously Literal Working Title)
Implicit in much contemporary critical discussion of film and spirituality is a surprisingly uncritical acceptance of what filmmaker Peter Watkins calls the "monoform":
the internal language-form (editing, narrative structure, etc.) used by TV and the commercial cinema to present their messages. It is the densely packed and rapidly edited barrage of images and sounds, the 'seamless' yet fragmented modular structure which we all know so well.
So, while growing numbers of academic, popular, and amateur film critics are seriously addressing questions of religion and faith today -- and even within American evangelicalism itself there is a renewed mission to "redeem popular culture" -- the vast majority of those critics operate from the assumption that the cinema is primarily (even essentially) a narrative medium. That the formal conventions of standard narrative filmmaking have evolved in time, that those conventions have become invisible to the typical viewer by virtue of their ubiquity, and that the monoform functions in service of various ideologies, many of them directly opposed to the essential values of the world's major religions, have all gone without much serious notice or challenge.
In my essay I will explore this first as a problem of criticism (and will do so rigorously rather than simply blowing down the straw man I've constructed here) and will then argue that traditional narrative cinema is, in fact, severely handicapped in its usefulness as a medium for spiritual contemplation. In the second half of the essay I will attempt to model an alternative approach to "film and spirituality" criticism by offering formal analysis of specific films that deliberately throw off the conventions and ideological baggage of the monoform. I haven't yet decided which films to explore -- I'd prefer to hold off on that decision until I discover the specific trajectory of my argument -- but I am considering films by Andrei Tarkovsky (Mirror), Pedro Costa (Ossos and Colossal Youth), Stan Brakhage, and Nathanial Dorsky.
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