The Real Rendered More Precise: On the Theological Power of Film
On the opening page of The Theological Power of Film, James Lorenz explains that the work, an exercise in film-phenomenology, will unveil how, if film’s moving images prove capable of priming the viewer for all manner of spiritual experience, it is because the very medium itself can serve “as theology” (1). Lorenz accordingly trains his phenomenological gaze, not merely on film’s narrative or thematic features, but on the expressive, communicative, and experiential dimensions of its formal and stylistic properties, with an eye to showing that film does not just prime the viewer for attentiveness, contemplation, and even prayer, but sometimes performs these practices itself. As I shall summarize here in brief, Lorenz’s subtle and perceptive study more than delivers on that stated promise.
Central to the medium’s theological power are its embodiment and temporality. The body, says Lorenz, is essential for interpreting filmic perception and expression, for, as a recurring refrain from the work puts it, “cinematic art communicates from embodiment, to embodiment, and through embodiment” (4). Given the fact that cinema communicates from the embodied filmmaker, to the embodied viewer, and through the body of film itself, Lorenz’s investigation takes Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology of the body as its natural point of departure. This initial discussion of embodiment, which in most other studies would remain confined to Merleau-Ponty, quickly broadens by invoking the collective insights of other phenomenological thinkers, such as Emmanuel Levinas, Jean-Yves Lacoste, Richard Kearney, and Louis Marie Chauvet. As the work’s ensuing chapters will go on to show, the ultimate horizon of this embodied encounter with the other on and through the cinematic screen is theological. Appealing to Levinas and Lacoste’s analyses of the epiphany of the face and Kearney and Chauvet’s analyses of the sacramentality of flesh, Lorenz contends that film’s depiction of others and being-in-the-world is “epiphanic, sacramental in shape, and it represents the primal theological scene of encounter, the supreme expression of which is the incarnation” (33). This focus on embodiment in turn indicates the related importance of temporality.
Mediated in and through time, the motion picture, after all, depends on the time given for that motion (4). An appreciation of the “durational nature of film” (63) is bound to call to mind Paul Schrader’s famous notion of “transcendental style” in film. True to expectations, Lorenz himself initially looks to Schrader in order to begin clarifying how we might conceptualize the film experience as a spiritual one (38). The progression of transcendental style is a threefold process. As Lorenz notes, the foundational stage, according to Schrader, involves a focus on the realism of everyday living (46), which, emphasizing the mundane, lingers on the banal action, or dead time, between plot movement which conventional filmmaking would simply omit (46). (The example is not Lorenz’s own, but think here of the extended opening sequence of Robert Altman’s The Long Goodbye, in which the solitary protagonist, alone in a disheveled apartment, goes out late at night to the store to buy a can of food for his cat.) Next comes what Schrader himself terms the “decisive action” (37), a jarring event which, as Lorenz describes it, “precipitates a sudden paroxysm of emotion” (37), initiating in turn the third and final moment: stasis. By movement’s end, the viewer has been transformed from a detached state to one of stasis, the latter of which is said to be characterized by the “emotional perception and expression of the transcendent” (37). (Here Lorenz’s own example of such stasis is the ending jail scene of Bresson’s Pickpocket).
According to Schrader, as Lorenz notes, the spiritual experience, the experience of stasis, is one of rupture, intrusion, and disruption, one in which the banal and everyday tedium and drudgery of daily life is interrupted by the transcendent, as epitomized in Rudolf Otto’s notion of the divine as the feeling of the Holy, or the “Wholly Other.” For Schrader, following Otto, this intrusion of transcendence into the everyday is therefore an encounter with the noumenal, with something that remains fundamentally indeterminate. In addition to being essentially nameless, it involves a movement upwards. Lorenz parts company with Schrader’s conception of the transcendental. In line with Augustine and Michel Henry, Lorenz wishes to highlight a different form of transcendence, not one of an upwards movement to the beyond, but one exhibited in James Gray’s Ad Astra: namely, “a movement inwards, away from the infinite exteriority of the universe and towards the intimate reality of the human heart, manifest through the enduring love between father and son” (39-40). That is to say, “transcendence as something deeper, something interior. The characters and the viewer are redirected away from the infinite heavens, and drawn instead towards the infinite love within, into the innermost reality of human being” (40). In a word, transcendence, suggests Lorenz, not only is to be understood as a movement beyond (though it can sometimes be that), but as a movement within (108).
Unlike Schrader, for whom transcendence is relegated to something lying beyond the everyday or ordinary, Lorenz, for his part, proposes instead that “cinematic attention to the real can uncover the extraordinary within the ordinary” (40), and hence that it is “cinema’s capacity for realism which opens up the art form’s capacity to reveal a transcendent reality” (40). With reference again to Kearney, Lorenz accordingly insists that “God’s presence is mediated in and through the everyday phenomena of the corporeal world” (41), that is, “the sacramentality of existence through a theology of divine presence within everyday phenomena” (41). “While transcendental style suggests that the transcendent intrudes, bursts forth, or somehow spills into the immanence of everyday life,” says Lorenz, “the sacramental perspective provides a different understanding: the mundane, everyday reality of life is nothing less than the gift of creation, and so can participate in the transcendent reality of God” (63). And thus, a committed attention to the mundane elements of existence, an attention itself enacted through cinematic realism, unveils the presence of transcendence in and through the quotidian.
Of course, there will always be someone who at this juncture will predictably object that the analysis has taken an unjustified theological swerve. In response, Lorenz emphasizes that the sense of transcendence at issue is grounded in a phenomenological attentiveness to what in fact reveals itself. For what we see disclosed on the screen, and so too in the everyday life it depicts, is the result of “austere, unembellished camerawork” which itself strives to “present reality as it is, or at least as close to that as it is possible” (47). As Lorenz admits, this appeal to phenomenological evidence might answer the first objection from whoever thinks such transcendence is not grounded in experience, yet this appeal to affective experience will elicit a separate objection from theological quarters. “Transcendental style,” he notes, “is built on the theological assumption that the divine can be perceived in and through affective experience” (53). And in modern theology, at least, there has been plenty of pushback on that assumption which featured so prominently in Schleiermacher’s “feeling of absolute dependence.” Lorenz turns to the phenomenology of Jean-Yves Lacoste, a choice which will not be surprising to readers who are aware of the considerable work Lacoste has done on “the grammar of intuition and feeling” (43). Following Lacoste, Lorenz proposes that we strike a balance: theology must take seriously the possibility that the divine can be made manifest in our affective experience of the world, and yet it must also acknowledge the particular elusiveness of God’s appearing, the “intrinsic uncertainty which surrounds the perception of a God who is at once present and absent—a God who appears and transcends appearance at the same time” (60). As Lorenz will put it later on, with due caution, like Teresa of Avila, we can rightly claim to experience “the miraculous within the mundane” (109), that is, “the Word incarnate in mundane, worldly existence” (109).
This intrusion of the transcendent into the immanent, or better, the transfiguration of the immanent in light of it, primes the viewer for contemplation (63). Once again, temporality is essential to the film image’s theological power. For André Bazin, if “‘the image of things is likewise the image of their duration’” (73), this entails that film can “embalm” or “mummify” time (74). Time, quite literally, is incorporated into the image—a notion elaborated further by Deleuze’s conception of the “time-image,” a notion itself inspired by Bergson’s understanding of time.
Not only is film able to re-present the same changing phenomenon because the temporal mode of this change remains constant (75), the process of re-presentation through artistic attentiveness is one by which “everyday existence appears imbued with a sacramentality, revealing a transcendence within or beneath its finite surface” (110). To put it differently, the ephemerality and transience of life, itself captured through the timelessness of the image, invokes a sense of the eternal. And through the compression, extension, and sometimes repetition of time, both film-time and viewing-time affect and inform one another, generating in turn a spiritual experience wherein there is “a space for time” (79), which is to say, a time for introspection, attention, and contemplation. Lorenz’s preferred illustration of the phenomenon are the non-rational cuts of Ozu’s “pillow-shots” (80), which, through the interruption and expansion of time, constitute what can be termed, following Deleuze, “time-images,” in short, images of pure duration whereby time itself appears directly to consciousness (88). According to Andrei Tarkvosky, to whom Lorenz here alludes, the power of cinema is “to imprint time on film” (90), to “take an impression of time” (91), or as Bazin would say, to create “mummified change” (74).
“Rendered and appropriated in film,” time “invests cinematic art with a profound potential for attentiveness” (100). Cinematic realism’s “attentiveness to the mundane” (109) therefore issues a call eliciting our response: to attend, to contemplate, perhaps even to pray. As Lorenz puts it: “Out of the time-image, the attentive image” (104). For this reason, Lorenz does not hesitate to go so far as to say that such attentiveness to the real is a call to respond to creation. For cinematic attention to our being-in-the-world discloses that we are beings-before-God. But notice, again, that cinema does not just elicit or prime a spiritual response in us; it is in the condition of theology, that is, it itself is a spiritual practice.
Lorenz will thus ask whether cinema can be understood as a kind of prayer (101). Whether through the extension or compression of time either through spare or dead time (De Sica’s Umberto D) or the quick fluidity of montage (Terrence Malick’s The Tree of Life), cinema is imbued with the power to provoke our attentiveness. And in the hands of Tarkovsky and Malick, such attentiveness becomes a “contemplation of creation” (106), a spiritual exercise in which, as Chauvet had said, “the world is simply ‘here,’ unnecessarily, inexplicably, gratuitously, and graciously. As such, because it is an offer, a gift, it calls for a response” (110). Cinema, then, is an analogy to prayer, because the filmmaker (and the viewer too) recognizes that our human capacity to create originates in a form of inspiration rooted in the fact that we are created in the image and likeness of God (105).
Where in prayer, says Lorenz, we wait on God, so in cinema we take a long look at the real (124). Following Tarksovky, thus, he will suggest that the “artist’s vocation is a spiritual vocation” (132), inasmuch as the doctrine of creation can be analogized to the medium of film itself (131), not because man is a demiurge, but again, because by exercising his own creative gifts, he thereby responds to the divine call that has called forth his own desire to create. On the basis of a careful and insightful reconstruction of Jean-Louis Chrétien’s analysis of the ars divina, Lorenz concludes that the artistic image, and hence the film image too, can participate in creation itself through the artist who recognizes this spiritual call as one issuing from God. In this way, the archetype of the artist is that of the gardener (a claim Lorenz explains with reference to Tarksovky’s garden imagery in Solaris). “Just as the vocation of the gardener is to tend and attend to the garden,” says Lorenz, “the vocation of the artist is to tend and attend to the gift of creation, through the gift of human creativity” (158).
Here again, Lorenz’s theological claims are grounded phenomenologically in experience. With Tarkovsky, for instance, as he notes, “the viewer is reoriented away from the mysteries of fantasy and the unknown, towards contemplation of the mysteries of the known and all that is given to us as the world” (137). What Tarkovsky seeks to capture is the mystery of this world; not the imaginative vision of some fictional one. And, of course, theologically speaking, the greatest source of wonder and mystery in this world is that God himself has entered into his own creation, which is to say, the artist has appeared in his own work. As Chrétien had concluded, via the doctrine of the incarnation, it is possible to understand a degree of unity between art and work that no purely human art can accomplish. God is, in that respect, the supreme artist.
This brings Lorenz to the matter of “last things.” “The film experience,” as he notes, “is shaped by the most familiar rhythms of promise, anticipation, and fulfilment, such that film art can, by virtue of the medium itself, uncover the eschatological dimensions of our being in the world” (191). “As a form of representation facilitated by haptic and somatic contact with the phenomena it witnesses,” film is an art-form through which “we can discern and respond to this call” (228). But as before when in the analysis of transcendental style he had acknowledged that God is certainly present, yet only elusively so, here too it must be said that, if the incarnation signifies that God has come to dwell with us, we nevertheless await the fullness of the Kingdom of Heaven in the eschaton. Lacoste, for one, has spoken of “local eschatologies,” namely, “those most ordinary and familiar cycles of anticipation and fulfilment which constitute our existence in the world” (213). The experience of watching film, Lorenz suggests, can be one such local eschatology. Experiencing a film spiritually is a “way of discerning and responding to the gift of creation, and to the incarnational task revealed in the life of faith” (231). The medium itself supports the idea, insofar as it is an inherently theological medium. Consider, for example, the cut. The cinematic cut, as Lorenz says,
corresponds with the existential and eschatological rhythms of promise, anticipation, and fulfilment, which is why it is used by filmmakers to facilitate expectation or tension, anticlimax or resolution. . . . The cinematic “cut,” then, is eschatological in that sense of a local eschatology, deriving its entire significance as an end from the overriding logic of the “End” (214).
The flesh of the cinematic image, owing to its haptic and somatic dimension, does not merely visually re-present theological truths. It makes tangible those spiritual realities. Still, the most palpable of such presences always involve an absence, or at least a deferral awaiting a fuller satisfaction. For this reason, Lorenz will insist that cinema is inherently Christological. The flesh of the cinematic image takes on its full transformative power only in light of the flesh of Christ and the promise of eternal life:
In the incarnation, Christ takes on these postures of the flesh, the reality of being in the world. In doing so, he becomes the paragon for embodied existence; an example and therefore a lesson in how to be and live in this corporeal world. Christ’s body, as living pedagogy, forms and transforms us as bodies, through our encounter with him. If the fulfilment of Christianity is for creatures to be transformed in the image of God then the incarnation can be understood in this way as a pedagogy of how to be a body; a pedagogy of being in and towards the world. . . . The incarnation, as a corporeal and somatic “touching” of Logos and creation, represents a call to live and love in the flesh of the world. Film, as an embodied, sensuous, and enfleshed mode of perceiving the world, can respond to this call” (169).
We have thus come full-circle by conclusion’s end. At the outset, Lorenz had stated that the goal of phenomenological philosophy, as Husserl understood it, is “to get back to the ‘pure phenomenon’—to display and perceive the essence of an object of experience as it is” (15). Whether in “slow cinema,” “transcendental film,” or realist cinema more generally, the goal is the same, to offer a view of things in which “the real [is] rendered more precise” (117). As Bresson, in a word, puts it: “the supernatural in film is only the real rendered more precise” (183). If, then, cinema proves capable of performing the redemptive function that Lorenz has shown that it can, it is because the viewer is put in question, called to respond to God’s call that has been issued through what has been disclosed. In order to do justice to the real, and so its own spiritual power, film must function as theology. And so too then must film phenomenology make a “theological turn.” For as Lorenz’s edifying study shows, a response to film that thinks what is given to be seen theologically is not an ideological imposition on the medium, but rather, in the full Husserlian spirit of the motto, a return to the things themselves.