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Filming a miracle: Ordet , Silent Light , and the spirit of contemplative cinema

2015; Wiley; Volume: 57; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1111/criq.12196

1467-8705

Rick Warner,

Shakespeare, Adaptation, and Literary Criticism

Over the past few decades there has steadily progressed a certain tendency in global art cinema that both critics and cinephiles have referred to as ‘contemplative’. This term has had a much stronger currency in film-cultural discussions outside the academy.1 Encompassing such filmmakers as Pedro Costa (Portugal), Abbas Kiarostami (Iran), Aleksandr Sokurov (Russia), Lav Diaz (Philippines), Nuri Bilge Ceylan (Turkey), Béla Tarr (Hungary), Hirokazu Kore-eda (Japan), Hou Hsiao-hsien (Taiwan), Lisandro Alonso (Argentina), and Jia Zhang-ke (People's Republic of China), ‘contemplative cinema’ names a heterogeneous body of films that have been variously defined as ‘slow’, ‘pensive’, ‘minimal’, and in some cases even ‘anti-cinema’.2 These are feature films, often products of the international festival circuit, that diverge radically from the customary centres of dramatic action and operate more intensely in a non-narrative key. By and large they tend toward longer shot durations, assign greater emphasis to lags and lacunae in the plot, and give priority to the physical surroundings, which no longer serve as mere scenic ‘backdrops’. These films are often distinguished by a sparseness of mise en scène, a systematic reduction and rarefaction so that each element in play, down to the merest sound, the humblest object, and the subtlest gesture, can be charged with immense expressive force. At stake in this audiovisual process, I want to argue, is a certain kind of perceptual attunement. Although these films are ‘slow’ relative to popular cinema and even other varieties of art cinema, many of them work not to subdue or simply frustrate the spectator but rather to bring us into a heightened, more sensitive, and more thoughtful mode of engagement. There is no more emblematic expression of this tendency than the shot that begins Carlos Reygadas's Silent Light (2007). ‘Hypnotic’, ‘tranquil’, ‘meditative’, ‘virtuosic’: these are some of the terms critics have used to describe this opening, which captures a sunrise in a single take that lasts more than five minutes in the stark absence of human beings and intimations of story. The shot is stunning in a number of senses. Before we can make out anything definite, adrift as we are in a cavernous night sky, we hear the off-screen calls of animals, the pulse of insects. As the camera surveys the stars and clouds that come more sharply into view, it refuses to convey a firm spatial orientation until, after a series of acrobatic pans, it levels itself on thehorizon, just as the sunlight touches ground between two trees in a rolling field. Far from being a mere recording device, the camera seems caught up in this event, as an instigative factor. It pushes ahead slowly, between and past the two trees, its motion seeming to force the sun upward so as to spread its rays, as the sun, in return, increasingly gives the frame a fuller capacity to delimit and describe. The effect of this pictorial interplay is made all the more uncanny by two additional elements working in combination but not quite together: continuous sound (now a chorus of waking fauna) couples with a time-lapse image track, as the sky changes colour and brightness at a measured but still impossibly quick rate. Even as it observes an ordinary, cyclical event, this first shot pictures nothing short of a mysterious creation of a world, a cosmic environment at once natural and markedly cinematic. The gradual pace of its unfolding, combined with the kind of attention it gives to the physical landscape and the sense in which it asks us to consider the functioning of the film medium itself, makes it exemplary of the contemplative mode I want to explore. Already a number of specifications and disclaimers are in order, so before proceeding further, let me explain the ambitions that are motivating this essay and bring into better focus the path of investigation I am going to take. ‘Contemplative cinema’, it must be acknowledged, is a rather loose category that potentially creates more problems than it solves. Though its coinage is particular to contemporary art cinema, it could apply as fittingly to a wider span of audiovisual practices, including documentaries, avant-garde/experimental cinema, and screen-based gallery installations (indeed many filmmakers associated with contemplative poetics have made forays into the art world; for example, Isaac Julien, Chantal Akerman, Abbas Kiarostami, Victor Erice, and Apichatpong Weerasethakul, who more than any of these directors has enriched his feature films through expressive forms carried over from his installations). These categorical issues notwithstanding, my contention is that the term ‘contemplative’, if applied with care to the still evolving history of world art cinema, is of crucial value on both stylistic and conceptual grounds. More than just a label for a miscellany of films with a similar mood or temperament, it defines one of the most significant and enduring strands of innovation in the post-World War II modern cinema. As commentators who have sketched out a historical trajectory of this form's development have rightly suggested, it emerges and evolves in step with Gilles Deleuze's theorisation of the ‘time-image’.3 To be sure, several of the films and directors that Deleuze emphasises are instrumental in launching a contemplative tendency. One thinks of the work of Yasujiro Ozu, with its static and pensive long takes, its gentle pacing, its ‘still-life’ compositions, and its so-called ‘pillow shots’, which periodically suspend the narrative flow by cutting away to scenes of unpeopled surroundings and by reminding the viewer, as Noël Burch puts it, that ‘man is not the centre of the universe’.4 No doubt another signal instance would be the scene in Vittorio de Sica's Umberto D. (1952) where the young, pregnant maid gets out of bed, goes to the kitchen, and then performs a series of routine gestures, each of them shown in unsparing detail. According to André Bazin's famous description, which Deleuze takes up in his own account of the post-war modern cinema,5 the poignancy of this scene derives from its ‘succession of concrete instants of life’.6 For Bazin, each gesture is granted equal importance apart from any narrative telos, and is divided still further into little micro-events, as though to push us, as viewers, ‘to the extreme limits of our capacity to perceive them in time’.7 From these and similar moments we could construct a genealogy leading up to preferred practices in today's contemplative art cinema. The films in question would be too varied in style, subject, and generic affiliation for us to establish a rigid scheme of classification, but they would share an underlying aim of testing and refining the perceptual and mental aptitudes of the viewer through minimalist patterns of emphasis and through orders of time that are no longer beholden to the action-oriented rhythms of popular cinema. In the face of such variation, there has been a tendency among critics to fall back on a negative definition whereby ‘contemplative cinema’ is distinguished mainly by virtue of what it is not. But I want to venture a positive account of this kind of cinema by examining how it works on its own terms, how it generates its own forms and principles instead of merely opposing the mainstream. Adrian Martin, one of the few film scholars to have made inroads into defining this type of art cinema beyond its reaction against popular cinema, has instructively observed that several of the works in question share a ‘slow burn’ logic of progression according to which mundane everyday events suddenly give way to a violent act, a ‘big bang’ of sorts that has been prepared for throughout. As a case in point, Martin singles out Bruno Dumont's 29 Palms (2003), which he traces back along these lines to Chantal Akerman's Jeanne Dielman, 23 quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles (1975) and to Rainer Werner Fassbinder's Why Does Herr R. Run Amok? (1970).8 We can expand on Martin's argument by acknowledging that this ‘slow burn’ development, which indeed marks much of recent contemplative cinema, doesn't necessarily hinge on violence. There are other examples that build toward a less cataclysmic but no less striking turn of events. Consider the unrushed, meandering lead-up to the all-important gift of a keychain from a father to his estranged daughter in Alonso's Liverpool (2008), which surprisingly instils a quiet gesture and quotidian object with great emotional resonance. The two contemplative films I am going to examine in this essay – Silent Light and the film that it loosely remakes, Carl Theodor Dreyer's Ordet (1955) – offer still another variation on this principle, as their pivotal events are supernatural: both films structurally revolve around the raising of a woman from the dead. As with the other films noted above, this form of climax extends from and modifies cinematic tradition. Silent Light not only patterns itself after Dreyer's film in particular; it also invokes a broader direction in the post-World War II modern cinema that explores the trope of the miracle. With cases ranging from the work of Robert Bresson to that of Roberto Rossellini (two filmmakers whom Reygadas has claimed as antecedents9), an aesthetics of the miraculous comprises a dynamic and enduring thread of experiment that links up in significant ways with what might be called an inclination toward the ‘spiritual’ in today's contemplative cinema.10 Certainly a number of contemplative films can be seen as responses to a question Eric Rohmer raised at the time of the post-war modern cinema's inception: ‘Is it the task of the cinema to bring into art a notion whose great riches the whole of human genius had not yet known how to uncover: the notion of the miracle?’11 That a pronounced spiritual aspect runs through the history of contemplative cinema is undeniable, but in order to grasp the stylistic and perceptual nuances of the films I am going to take up, we need to be careful to avoid the interpretive snares that come with the territory. The religious, theological, or otherwise metaphysical undercurrents that imbue modern cinema and the sensibilities of some of its most esteemed directors have been extensively recognised. From Paul Schrader's monograph on the transcendental styles of Bresson, Dreyer, and Ozu,12 to most of the articles assembled for a more recent anthology that accompanies a MoMA retrospective, The Hidden God: Film and Faith,13 there is a pervasive tendency among critics and theorists to turn away from the material texture of the film and to consider metaphysical concepts that – so goes the argument – may be referred to but that ultimately escape cinematic expression. André Bazin's reading of Bresson's Diary of a Country Priest (1951) is perhaps the inadvertent urtext of this protocol. Though Bazin attends closely to Bresson's ‘stylistics’, he imputes to the film a system by which meagre surfaces evoke spiritual concepts. The film's closing shot of the shadow of a cross against a blank white background indicates, for Bazin, what the film, confined as it is to the physical, cannot show us: spiritual grace. ‘The spectator has been led, step by step, to that night of the senses the only expression of which is a light on a blank screen.’14 Neither Silent Light nor Ordet enlists this strategy of minimalist evocation. The miracle, as it surfaces across these films, is a spectacular and profoundly material happening, a strange irruption that, in the course of narrative events, brings about intense wonder. It impresses itself on the senses and presents us with a mystery insofar as it refuses to offer any reliable cause-and-effect mechanism by which it is to be explained. What we are given to see and hear is never clarified through recourse to a divine, transcendent force that necessarily escapes audiovisual depiction: there is no tacit ‘beyond’ from which the film's substances and its audience are excluded. Even as these two endeavours reflectively confront the limits of film as an expressive medium, there is, in the miracle's unfolding, no point at which the metaphysical cleanly separates from the physical, from the corporeal, or from the earthly. My contention is that these two innovative films work to attune the viewer to a certain manner of seeing the world, a contemplative form of thought and vision, and that they undertake this project through an aesthetics of the miraculous that is radically immanent in its effects and implications. Ultimately, I will turn to the philosophy of Deleuze in order to conceptualise the term ‘contemplation’ in a sense proper to these cinematic experiments, but first I want to give sufficient attention to the films themselves – the stylistic gestures they perform and the particular kind of viewing experience they invite. In Ordet, though the miracle is conspicuous and immediately recognised as such by the characters, its function within the film as a whole is difficult to pin down. It enables a resolution by pulling together separate threads of the narrative and settling conflicts between both major and minor characters, but it also emerges as something of a paradox, in that it contradicts the themes and sentiments that have prevailed so far. Indeed the first two hours of the film militate against a religious worldview by suggesting despair and dogmatism as its inevitable conditions. At the dramatic core of the film are four intertwined problems, all of which show little possibility of being resolved until the miracle comes about. The first problem is that Johannes (Preben Lerdorff Rye), one of three sons in the Borgen family of Jutland farmers, has seemingly become insane from – as another character puts it – reading too much Kierkegaard. He moves and speaks in a trance-like manner and thinks himself to be the resurrected Christ. His older brother, Mikkel (Emil Hass Christensen), has no religious faith at all, and the youngest brother, Anders (Cay Kristiansen), is kept from marrying the young woman he loves because her family belongs to a rival wing of the Danish Church. A fourth problem, bound up with these others, is the strain on the Borgen patriarch (Henrik Malberg) and the crisis of faith he undergoes in the wake of his ineffectual prayers. The one member of the Borgen household who is undaunted by these issues and who seems most capable of handling them, is Mikkel's wife, Inger (Birgitte Federspiel), but when she dies in childbirth (her baby dies first and has to be removed surgically), the situation turns rather grim. With her passing, the film changes from a pastoral comedy to something much more anguished and horrific. The miracle transpires in the last scene of the film when Johannes, having fled the farmhouse through a window a few days earlier, returns and calls Inger back to the living. He does this not alone but with the assistance of Inger's young daughter, Maren (Ann Elisabeth Groth), the only character besides Johannes who has the kind of faith the resuscitation requires. Seen in strict narrative terms, this event achieves closure. Johannes's affect has altered, suggesting that his madness has left him. As Mikkel embraces the risen Inger, he declares that he now believes as she does. Just before the miracle, Anders's marriage to the girl from the rival Christian faction is approved, but the miracle assures that their union won't come at the cost of a disproportionate tragedy. The two patriarchs appear to see the pettiness of their dispute, and the more peripheral characters of the doctor and parson also reconcile their views. The very style of the film changes to evoke a feeling of balance and accord: continuity editing makes an appearance after long being suppressed; the camera, which is frequently in motion in earlier scenes, is now stationary and more committed to its focal points; and the shots involving Inger's casket are even more simplified and marked by meticulous symmetries. However tempting it is to view the miracle as a culmination, it does not explain away all that precedes it in the film's complex weave of elements. In his otherwise shrewd account of the film, David Bordwell attributes to Ordet an ‘obvious’ progression geared to narrative causality,15 but such a reading ignores the residual strangeness of this film, the enduring impression that not everything fastens into place. It's true that the miracle retrospectively casts in a different light the first part of the film where the viewer is inclined, along with the Borgen family, to dismiss the prophecies of Johannes as pathetic ravings. Even without taking Johannes into account, the recurring discussion of miracles among the characters renders the very notion prosaic. Yet the raising of Inger doesn't simply effect a reversal whereby what we initially rejected takes on decisive import. As I see it, the miracle does more to deepen and intensify the film's mysteries than it does to elucidate them. We are prompted to rethink the overall shape and tectonics of Dreyer's experiment, but to resort to either a narrative or a theological set of determinations is, I believe, to impose a reading onto a work that is pointedly doing something else. My take on Ordet complies in spirit with Jonathan Rosenbaum's claim, over and against the impulse to interpret Dreyer's films as religious parables, that Dreyer is actually a ‘filmmaker of doubt’, a figure who poses challenges to belief and who, like others in this eccentric category (Rosenbaum also lists Rossellini, Jean-Luc Godard, and Jacques Rivette), presents each shot as ‘a question rather than an answer, a hypothesis rather than a fact’.16 With an eye to preserving this aspect of Dreyer's work as it informs Ordet, I want to inspect three interrelated operations that condition the miracle as well as our response to it. Not coincidentally these are all stylistic procedures that Reygadas is careful to retain and refashion in Silent Light.17 Through a diligent consideration of how they figure in both films, we can start to sketch in the contours of what can precisely be called a contemplative mode. The first of these operations is a generalised dispersion of the miraculous event. By this I mean to say that the miracle, instead of being lodged in a specific moment, assumes a scattered, diachronic, and profoundly ambiguous structure of development. Emerging as it does without a neatly causal explanation, it requires that we consider it as a mysterious unfolding between and across multiple scenes. Among other incipient examples of the post-war modern cinema with a contemplative bent, Ordet is not alone in this regard. A roughly comparable method organises Rossellini's Journey to Italy (1954), which ends with two miracles that coincide in the same sequence: that of the central couple, Katherine and Alex Joyce, reasserting their love for one another just seconds after agreeing to a divorce; and that of a lame man, an actual citizen of the Neapolitan town where the scene is set, throwing aside his crutches and walking as he takes part in an annual religious procession. Rossellini encourages us to view these two intertwined events as somehow bringing to a head an entire series of near-epiphanies in the film, specifically those that concern Katherine as her encounters with ancient artworks and with natural phenomena move her incrementally toward a perceptual reawakening.18 What comes to pass at the end is thus part of a cumulative development, the effects of which go beyond the suspiciously tidy resolution of the plot and have to do with an enlivening of the senses, a seeing anew. At the same time, while the finale bears with it an undeniable resonance, the miracle has a dispersive aspect even within the closing scene. Neither the couple's reunion nor the villager regaining his capacity to walk is convincing on its own: the former rings false dramatically, and the latter (which seems to be a stock feature of the communal ritual) occurs off-screen and is discernible only by virtue of the tumult it creates in the crowd. Nevertheless, taken together, these two events acquire a curious force, in and through their cinematic treatment. The miraculous impact issues from, and directs our attention to, the relational field between these incidents. This is why, in the last seconds, the camera takes leave of the couple and studies the movement of the anonymous crowd. The final shot plunges into the middle of the commotion, detaching itself from the Joyces and making the prospect of an epiphany our own. To return to Ordet, the style of the film is more tightly controlled than Rossellini's, of course, but we are still presented with a challenge that is scarcely worked out in the film itself, a supernatural event whose determinants are withheld, whose narrative-based resolution fails to convince us, and whose cumulative structure requires further probing on our part. In Dreyer's film, the dispersive character of the miracle comes across through an array of stylistic aspects that inflect or interrupt nearly each meticulously composed scene. Even as the mise en scène is reduced to seeming essentials, we are often given to suspect the partial, somehow insufficient status of the images on view and the actions they portray. As Dreyer reveals in his remarks on the film, he sought to infuse the drama with a quality of ‘rhythm-bound restlessness’, a peculiar sense of inconstancy that registers in the frequent, multi-destination tracking shots, as well as in the toing and froing of characters as they enter and exit the mobile frame, as though to keep us mindful of its delimiting edges.19 This restlessness is further reinforced by rhythmic cutaways to the lush landscape surrounding the Borgen farmhouse: now and again, without warning or overt justification, a cut takes us mid-scene from the inside to the outside of the house, so as to draw our attention to commonplace and seemingly extraneous events. Even when we stay indoors for the duration of a scene, a variety of noises intrude from the exterior at irregular intervals, from bellowing animals to wind in the grass. In concert with this persistent trope, windows as well as doorways have a prominent role in the dramatic staging, and they often figure as thresholds akin to the film frame itself. The insistence with which Ordet acknowledges its own images to be necessary but in some way incomplete has led many commentators toward notions of transcendence that stem from the film's religious subject matter. Yet the effect of dispersion I have been describing is everywhere dedicated to keeping the miracle on a worldly and physical and ordinary plane, to weaving it into the fabric of the everyday, this being a second aesthetic operation that marks its development. Johannes invokes God's ‘Word’ when he rouses Inger, but the details which most stand out as pivotal in the depthless, near-abstract space of the scene are the clasping hands of Johannes and his niece, the suddenly mobile hands of Inger, the tear that runs down her cheek, and then, when she rises and gnaws more than kisses the side of Mikkel's face, a thin band of saliva that momentarily catches light. If the conclusion readies us for transcendence, what it in fact underscores is an unyielding immanence. And that, I take it, is where the accent falls in the last, rather stirring and elliptical words of the film, spoken by Inger as she stares blankly into the off-screen, as though in a trance: ‘Life … life …’ (figs 1, 2). Johannes (standing) laments the other adults' lack of belief in Ordet Inger's curiously carnal resurrection in Ordet The two expressive operations we have touched on thus far, the dispersive treatment of the miracle and its inscription in the ordinary, resurface with even greater mystery in Reygadas's film Silent Light. Here, too, the miracle is rife with implications at once spiritual and physical. The plot follows the crisis of Johan (Cornelio Wall Fehr), a Plautdietsch-speaking Mennonite farmer in northern Mexico whose refusal to end an affair with another woman causes his wife Esther (Miriam Toews) to suffer a fatal heart attack. She is later revived through the actions of Johan's mistress, Marianne (Maria Pankratz), who seems to be aware of the power she wields, though it goes unexplained. As in Ordet, this event is neither discrete nor conclusive but arises as an uncertain gathering of forces within and across multiple scenes. In Reygadas's film, this build-up consists mainly of sensory details that come to the fore as the narrative slackens. The carnal dimension is also more salient in the overall patterning of relationships. For instance, a number of ostensibly minor episodes in the film are connected to the transformation at the end through a subtle series of echoes and correspondences involving both bodily and terrestrial fluids, from the water of the pond in which Johan's family bathes to the tears and sweat beads that materialise during his and Marianne's love scene, through to the rainstorm that coincides with Esther's collapse. When Esther is brought back to life at the film's end, it is somehow, at least in part, through a sustained kiss on the mouth and through a no less sexually charged tear shed by Marianne onto Esther's cheek. And this event, more emphatically than in Dreyer's film, registers in cosmic terms which include but far surpass the psychological ramifications of the plot (figs 3-6). Whereas Ordet ends with the resurrection, Silent Light carries out one last riff on the inside/outside dynamic by following, through a continuity cut, the barely evident flight of a butterfly out the window (possibly the most easily missed match on action in cinema history); and from there the film reverses the hypnotic progression by which it began, now showing a sunset in time-lapse and returning, in an almost ritualistic manner, to the space between the same two trees. Johan and Esther's children bathing in Silent Light Marianne's post-coital tears in Silent Light Esther sobs under a rainstorm in Silent Light Esther revived by Marianne's teardrop and kiss in Silent Light There is still a third operation that we soon need to take up, as doing so will permit us, finally, to get at how the term ‘contemplative’ is vital to an understanding of these films. But first, I want to open a brief parenthesis around a related issue that bears on what we have already examined; namely, the factor of performance. It is commonly observed that the post-war modern cinema sets itself apart from the more ‘classical’ paradigm largely through experimental orders of time. What tends to receive less attention is the way in which these innovations require for their effects radically new kinds of performances. In his study of the ‘time-image’, Deleuze celebrates a cinematic form in which time unfastens from schemata of action and becomes primary, thus giving rise to an authentic cinema of thought. Such an account must be understood alongside his attendant assertion that this cinema also necessarily gives us a ‘new race of characters’, or, as he further describes them, ‘mutant[s]’.20 Later in his book, as he delineates the time-image at a more advanced moment in its history, he refers to these beings as ‘“actor-mediums,” capable of seeing and showing rather than acting’.21 This begs the question as to what the precise relation is between these visionary creatures within the film and the optical, aural, and interrogative work undertaken by the film itself. And more to the point, where does this relation take a ‘contemplative’ turn? Deleuze singles out a number of characters who effectively channel the intensities of the time-image, such as Hitchcock's impaired non-heroes, Antonioni's directionless perceivers, and Resnais's cerebral ‘zombies’.22 But where in this modern cinema do we find embodiments of a genuinely contemplative mode? Let us take an example that is just as demonstrative as the opening of Silent Light – the first seconds of Tarkovsky's Solaris (1972). The film starts with a series of shots that inspect up close a rippling body of water and the green mosses and weeds that sway in its current. Inserted into this prelude are two views of the protagonist, Kris Kelvin (Donatas Banionis), mutely taking in the surroundings, his face calm, almost expressionless. He seems an integral part of the landscape. The slow, studious camera movements primarily work to convey a certain tempo, to register and respond to natural rhythms already inscribed in the world shown (this is Tarkovsky's concept of ‘time-pressure’23), and to articulate a sense of connectedness among the different elements in play. What the sequence captures, and urges us to ponder, is a commingling of life forces. (It is as if Tarkovsky leads off with a cinematic description of what the Stanislaw Lem source novel thematises all the way through as impossible, owing to the limitations of modern science: ‘contact’ between the human and the non-human.) Note how the initial shot of Kelvin completes a mobile long take that gradually rises from the current and ascends his figure until the camera rests on his face, which is shown in a medium close-up. Certainly this character, whom at this point we know nothing about, is submerged in thought, ‘contemplating’ in the familiar use of the term, and thus he serves to establish a mood proper to the film's aims. But the scene doesn't assert an interiority or even a distinct individual subjectivity24 so much as it pictures a figure caught up in and partially dissolved into a rhythmic field. As the camera traces his body we can see on his hand, coat sleeve, and face an undulating play of light from the water off-screen. And in the following shot, though we cut away from him (there is a suggestion of a match on his eyeline, since his downward glance triggers the cut), we can see his figure reflected on the ripp