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The Cinematic Gaze as ‘A Long Loving Look at the Real’: Andrei Tarkovsky and Walter Burghardt’s Theology of Contemplation

2020; Wiley; Volume: 63; Issue: 3 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1111/heyj.13576

1468-2265

James Lorenz,

Nostalgia and Consumer Behavior

In his essay on Andrei Tarkovsky’s Nostalghia (1983), the theologian Gerard Loughlin describes the film as ‘a kind of prayer.’11 Gerard Loughlin ‘The Long Take: Messianic Time in Andrei Tarkovsky's Nostalghia’, Journal for Cultural Research, 13:3-4 (2009), 365-379. DOI: 10.1080/14797580903244753 Now, with the arrival of the documentary A Cinema Prayer (2019), which is composed of home video footage in which Tarkovsky reflects on his life and philosophy of film, Loughlin’s analysis seems more apt than ever. Tarkovsky’s distinctive style, his slow, contemplative long takes, his static, wide-angle shots, and his minimalist editing, feels very much like prayer in the way that Loughlin suggests. Through extended silences and prolonged inactivity, Tarkovsky spurns action in favour of stasis and primes the viewer for contemplation. By retarding time and withholding the action that the viewer expects, Tarkovsky’s long takes ‘activate the viewer,’22 Paul Schrader, Transcendental Style in Film (Oakland, CA: University of California Press, 2018), p. 9. to borrow Paul Schrader’s terminology, and precipitate a kind of contemplation that is centred in the duration of the shot; in the passing of time itself. Yet at the same time, Tarkovsky’s style not only primes the viewer for contemplation but also performs this contemplation itself. This is also a function of the time and duration of his long takes, but it is facilitated equally by the form and style of his compositions, as well as by the narrative and thematic structure of his films. This capacity both to prime and to perform contemplation is what makes Tarkovsky’s films so powerful, and it is exactly what prompts viewers like Loughlin to perceive his films as prayerful and attentive. This essay explores the cinematic gaze of Tarkovsky’s filmmaking as a form of contemplation. This is no mere ‘deep thinking’, but an embodiment of contemplative prayer within the Christian tradition.33 Contemplation, as a prayerful act, traces its origins to the early Church, for example with Gregory of Nyssa, and it is developed in the medieval period in the mystical tradition. It is helpful to contextualise contemplation and contemplative practice through mystics like John of the Cross and Teresa of Avila, however the specific context of this essay is best identified in 20th Century theologies of contemplative prayer, such as that of Hans Urs Von Balthasar, Prayer (San Francisco, CA: Ignatius Press, 1986). As such, it is open to the formal analysis of a theology of contemplation. To this end, the hermeneutical key for this study is Walter Burghardt’s essay ‘Contemplation: A Long Loving Look at the Real’.44 Walter Burghardt, ‘Contemplation: A Long Loving Look at the Real’ in: George W. Traub, An Ignatian Spirituality Reader (Chicago, IL: Loyola Press, 2008) pp. 89-98. Originally published in 1989. By interpreting Tarkovsky’s direction through the lens of Burghardt’s theology, this essay seeks to elucidate the various ways in which his filmmaking has been and can be considered contemplative. I wish to argue that ‘a long, loving look at the real’ (along with all the theological connotations that this description entails) appositely describes Tarkovsky’s filmmaking, and therefore provides a valuable theological framework for understanding the contemplative nature of his films. The first section of this essay is devoted to an exposition of Burghardt’s theology of contemplation. From this foundation, Burghardt’s theology can be applied hermeneutically to cinema, and the second section begins this task by examining the formal potentials of cinematic art for contemplation; that is to say, it evaluates the capacity of film as an art form to prime and perform contemplation. In this analysis, there are two aesthetic elements of cinema which must be considered: i) the corporeal immediacy of the art form, and ii) its particular temporality. In considering the first of these, this second section participates in a major project of film theory: film-phenomenology.55 This strand of film theory traces its origins to the great French phenomenologist, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, who described the corporeal and phenomenological gaze of cinema as “movie material par excellence” in an essay published in 1964 (originally given as a lecture in 1945). ‘Film and the New Psychology’, in: Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Sense and Non-Sense (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1964) pp. 48-59. In the 1990s, film-phenomenology was developed significantly in Vivian Sobchack’s seminal book The Address of the Eye: A Phenomenology of Film Experience (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1992), and it has since been taken up by numerous scholars, most notably by Jennifer Barker, The Tactile Eye (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2009) and Steven Shaviro, The Cinematic Body (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1993). In considering the second, it engages with two seminal texts that explore cinematic time: André Bazin’s essay ‘The Ontology of the Photographic Image’,66 In: André Bazin, What is Cinema? Volume 1 (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1967) pp. 9-16. and Gilles Deleuze’s Cinema II: The Time-Image.77 Gilles Deleuze, Cinema II: The Time-Image (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2013). Originally published 1985. It is this temporal element more than any other which is so essential to Tarkovsky’s contemplative filmmaking, as he himself makes clear in his remarkable hybrid of memoir and film theory, Sculpting in Time. As such, this paves the way for a third and final section to address Tarkovsky specifically, and to engage in close textual analysis of his films through the theological framework provided by Burghardt. What emerges from this study is a picture of Tarkovsky’s filmmaking as theologically and contemplatively powerful, where the cinematic gaze can be framed in Burghardt’s rubric as a long, loving look at the real. ‘The real, reality, is not reducible to some far-off, abstract, intangible God-in-the-sky. Reality is living, pulsing people; reality is fire and ice; reality is the sun setting over the Swiss Alps, a gentle doe streaking through the forest; reality is a ruddy glass of Burgundy, Beethoven’s Mass in D, a child lapping a chocolate ice-cream cone; reality is a striding woman with wind-blown hair; reality is the risen Christ…What I contemplate is always what is most real.’99 Burghardt, pp. 91-92. Beyond his poetic language in this passage, which speaks to the aesthetic quality of contemplation, there are a number of crucial observations contained in this quotation. The question of transcendence, in the first instance, is raised in such a way as to challenge the conventional dualisms of immanence-transcendence, natural-supernatural, and mundane-supramundane (the latter a central aspect of Rudolf Otto’s theology).1010 See: Rudolf Otto, The Idea of the Holy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1958). ‘Reality,’ says Burghardt, ‘is not reducible to some far-off, abstract, intangible God-in-the-sky,’ before listing a plethora of earthly realities which culminate with and which are subsumed by the statement, ‘reality is the risen Christ.’ In other words, to be truly contemplative is not a matter of meditating on some abstract notion of a celestial and intangible God, but rather a matter of attending to the tangible flesh of our worldly existence within creation. This bears a significant consonance with the way Merleau-Ponty conceptualises transcendence, eschewing the conventional language of ‘so-called vertical transcendence’1111 Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Signs (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1964) p. 71. and preferring instead to talk about transcendence beneath the surface of the world. At the same time, the theologian cannot help but think of Teresa of Avila here, who passed through the ‘long dark night’ of Carmelite mysticism to discover God in the mundane fabric of her reality: ‘God walks among the pots and pans.’1212 St Teresa of Avila, Book of the Foundations 5.8. The great value of such an understanding of transcendence is that it is grounded in the incarnation. It recognises that the incarnation, the doctrine that God’s creative Word was made flesh, is a call to seek the God incarnate in the flesh of everyday existence, that is, in the minutiae of ordinary life. This is why Burghardt situates ‘the risen Christ’ at the climax of his long list of quotidian realities; the incarnation – which is to say the whole Christ event – calls the believer to contemplate embodied, enfleshed, and enworlded creation, not some disembodied and otherworldly ‘God-in-the-sky,’ as Burghardt puts it. He writes, ‘what I contemplate is always what is most real,’ and for Burghardt there is nothing more real than the incarnate God. From this understanding of the ‘real’, Burghardt moves in reverse through his description of contemplation: ‘This real I look at,’1313 Burghardt, p. 92. he writes, succinctly beginning a new section. This ‘look’, of course, is not merely visual. ‘Looking’, here, is a metonym for the whole of attentiveness – a vital aspect of contemplation. ‘Attentiveness’ (from the Latin ad-tendere; literally ‘to stretch out towards’) is the direction and focus of one’s senses and thought towards an object or idea. To ‘look’ at the ‘real’, then, in Burghardt’s understanding, is to ‘stretch out towards’ reality with one’s affective, bodily, and cognitive faculties. Moreover, this attentive ‘look’ is only made possible by the embodied, enfleshed nature of human being; ‘I am not naked spirit; I am spirit incarnate; in a genuine sense, I am flesh. And so I am most myself, most human, most contemplative, when my whole person responds to the real.’1414 Burghardt, p. 92. Thus contemplation, for Burghardt, involves an embodied act of attentive ‘looking’; a ‘look’ which is phenomenal, tactile and haptic, even audible. In his own words: ‘To ‘look’ wholly means that my whole person reacts. Not only my mind, but my eyes and ears, smelling and touching and tasting.’1515 Burghardt, p. 92. Here Burghardt is surely thinking of Ignatius, when he encourages the person who prays to use all of their senses in the act (Spiritual Exercises n.121-5). This recognition of our embodiment and the embodied nature of ‘seeing’/’looking’ is crucial, and it will be particularly important in the next section’s discussion of cinema as an embodied, enfleshed medium of seeing. Our embodiment, though, cannot only be understood spatially, but must also be understood temporally. This temporal aspect is the next element Burghardt dissects in his essay, as he observes that ‘this look at the real is a long look.’1616 Burghardt, p. 93. Crucially, Burghardt does not mean ‘long’ in the quantitative sense of time that can be measured: ‘This look at the real is a long look. Not in terms of measured time, but wonderfully unhurried, gloriously unhurried.’1717 Burghardt, p. 93. What does he mean by this? How can ‘long’ refer not to counted time but to something else? In short, it is to do with something like the intensity of time spent, rather than any sense of time as an ‘amount’; in other words, it is a question of understanding time qualitatively rather than quantitatively. There is a significant parallel between Burghardt’s conceptualisation of time here and the philosophy of Henri Bergson, who understood the conscious perception of time precisely insofar as it is not quantitative.1818 Bergson’s philosophy is also vital for Deleuze’s two volumes on cinema, especially The Time-Image. The two essential texts for Deleuze are Bergson’s Time and Free Will, and Matter and Memory. Indeed, Deleuze’s various commentaries on Bergson (see section II, above) emphasise his notion of durée in the following terms: time appears as duration to consciousness, constantly and endlessly dividing in two as ‘the present which passes and the past which is preserved in the present’ – both of which coexist in the conscious experience of time as pure ’duration’. Bergson emphasised that time is perceived by consciousness not as measured minutes or seconds, but as duration (his essential concept durée); the conscious self never experiences time as a kind of ‘counting’ or ‘measuring’ of experience, it simply ‘endures’ in the perceived world. As he puts it, ‘pure consciousness does not perceive time as a sum of units of duration.’1919 Henri Bergson, Time and Free Will: An Essay on the Immediate Data of Consciousness (New York, NY: Routledge, 2013) p. 196. In the same way, Burghardt’s ‘long’ look refers not to any ‘amount’ of time which passes, but to the quality, the intensity, of time that is experienced by the attentive and contemplative seer. As he writes, ‘you do not time the Philadelphia Symphony; you do not clock the Last Supper.’2020 Burghardt, p. 93. Burghardt completes the breakdown of his description of contemplation as ‘a long, loving look at the real’ with a focus on the second adjective: ‘this long look must be a loving look.’2121 Burghardt, p. 93. The key to understanding the role of love, here, is to realise that Burghardt sees contemplation as a deeply affective act, often articulating it in terms of the beautiful. For Burghardt, contemplation ‘demands that the real captivate me, at times delight me.’2222 Burghardt, p. 93. There are two points to note here. First, because Burghardt sees contemplation as a ‘loving’ look, he goes on to use the language of encounter and alterity: ‘whatever or whoever the real, contemplation calls forth love, oneness with the other.’2323 Burghardt, p. 93. Such a notion of contemplation as encounter with the other is quickly attributed sacramental significance, as Burghardt goes on to argue that ‘from such contemplation comes communion. I mean the discovery of the Holy in deep, thoughtful encounters – with God’s creation, with God’s people, with God’s self – where love is proven by sacrifice, the wild exchange of all for another, for the Other.’2424 Burghardt, p. 93. This sacramental language of encounter is drawn directly from McNamara, whom Burghardt quotes earlier in his essay, citing his definition of contemplation as ‘a pure intuition of being, born of love. It is experiential awareness of reality and a way of entering into immediate communion with reality.’2525 Burghardt, p. 91. In this way, Burghardt arrives, via McNamara, at a concept of contemplation as ‘intuitive communion’2626 Burghardt, p. 91. with people and with quotidian reality, in which the idea of sacramental encounter with the other in creation is essential. The second point to note is Burghardt’s acknowledgement that the ‘real’ is not always beautiful. In fact, he specifically includes a list which challenges any notion that all of reality will delight the contemplative beholder: ‘The real includes sin and war, poverty and race, illness and death. The real is AIDS and abortion, apartheid and MS, bloated bellies and stunted minds, respirators and last gasps.’2727 Burghardt, p. 93. Crucially, though, elements of reality as cruel and lugubrious as these are not to be exempted from a ‘long, loving look’. For Burghardt, the contemplation of these elements of the real must be included, and moreover contemplation of them ‘must end in compassion,’ for ‘compassion that mimics Christ is a synonym for love.’2828 Burghardt, p. 93. ‘When I speak of aspiration towards the beautiful, of the ideal as the ultimate aim of art… I am not for a moment suggesting that art should shun the ‘dirt’ of the world. On the contrary! … To tell of what is living, the artist uses something dead; to speak of the infinite, he shows the finite… Hideousness and beauty are contained within each other. This prodigious paradox, in all its absurdity, leavens life itself.’2929 Andrei Tarkovsky, Sculpting in Time: Reflections on the Cinema (London: Bodley Head, 1986) p. 28. Tarkovsky, like Burghardt, emphasises that contemplation of the beautiful and the infinite begins with contemplation of finite, worldly existence. And cinema, perhaps more than any other artistic medium, possesses the potential to render and image finite, everyday reality with an immediacy that facilitates such a form of contemplation. This claim, however, requires further scrutiny, and now that an exposition of Burghardt’s theology of contemplation is complete, it is high time to ask the question what, if anything, invests cinematic art with the potential for contemplation as it is described by Burghardt? In what sense might we begin to conceive of cinema as a long, loving look at the real? That this description is incubated within a specific theological context reveals the challenge at hand; in more than one way here, we are asking if the medium of film is itself theologically significant. This section responds directly to Burghardt’s description of contemplation, illustrating the primary ways in which cinematic art can be conceived of in his terms of a long, loving look at the real. I will focus on two main points of comparison: i) that film ‘looks at the real’ through a similar mode of embodiment and corporeality as that which Burghardt explores in his essay; ii) that the unique temporality of the art form allows film to take a ‘long’ look in the very manner that Burghardt suggests – not as a measured quantity of time spent, but as an unhurried, intense quality of time endured. ‘The real’ has long been a preoccupation of cinematic art. Realism was associated with the medium from its inception, and the earliest films were essentially documentaries (beginning in 1895 with the Lumière brothers’ L'Arrivée d'un train en gare de La Ciotat). Even throughout the advent and later dominance of cinematic fiction, critics and theorists still celebrated the realist potentials of the art form, and filmmakers often deployed documentary footage within their films (few more so than Tarkovsky). Many still deploy documentary footage, even in the mainstream (consider the final images of Spike Lee’s 2018 film BlacKkKlansman). For the great French film theorist, André Bazin, the tremendous power of the cinematic image was its realist potential; for him any distinction between fiction and documentary is obscured, since every film image is ‘documentary’ because photography renders phenomena ‘as our eyes in reality see them.’3030 Bazin, p. 11. For an overview of Bazin’s theory of cinematic realism, see J. Dudley Andrew, The Major Film Theories: An Introduction (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1976) Part II, Chapter 6: ‘André Bazin’. For Bazin, realism is the supreme principle of cinema as an art: ‘photography and the cinema…satisfy, once and for all and in its very essence, our obsession with realism,’3131 Bazin, p. 12. because ‘we are forced to accept as real the existence of the object reproduced, actually re-presented, set before us, that is to say, in time and space.’3232 Bazin, pp. 13-14. Filmic realism, however, is not limited to a purely materialistic, reductive empiricism; in film’s great capacity for realism lies its spiritual potential. Robert Bresson, who is frequently associated with the French realism school begun by Bazin,3333 Andrew, p. 95. emphasised exactly this; that the transcendent can be contemplated in film through realism and attention to the real: ‘the supernatural in film is only the real rendered more precise.’3434 James Blue, ‘Excerpts from an Interview with Robert Bresson’ in: ‘James Blue Papers’ 1905-2014 (Eugene, OR: University of Oregon Libraries, Special Collections and University Archives) box 6, folder 41, June 1965. The supernatural is only the real rendered more precise. With these words, Bresson succinctly observes the redundancy of the ‘God-in-the-sky’ model of transcendence, realising the transcendental significance of everyday reality in nearly precisely the same terms that Burghardt would use decades later. That Bresson sees the transcendent within the immanent, the supernatural within the real and the natural, is never more evident than in Diary of a Country Priest, when the priest receives a vision of the Virgin Mary. Bresson refrains from any abstract attempt to depict the divine throughout the entirety of this holy apparition; the imagery of the vision is delivered with voiceover, from the priest’s journal, while the camera remains focussed solely on his face. There is no vertical transcendence in this vision, no intrusion or overflowing of the supernatural into the everyday as if there were some partition between the two. Rather, it is a radically interior experience, played out in the innermost being of the visionary. Even as the priest collapses at the sight of the Virgin, Bresson only holds on more tightly to a close-up, as if the only way to portray this vision is to see its traces etched across the priest’s face, amidst the spatters of mud from his fall to the ground. Such realism stands in stark contrast with certain Hollywood ‘epics’ which contrive to show the divine through blasts of sound and lighting, futilely attempting to depict parousia with special effects. Such is the theological power of cinema to ‘look at the real’. Yet this look at ‘the real’ is a corporeal, embodied look, for the cinema is an embodied, enfleshed medium of seeing. Phenomenological film theory is invaluable in demonstrating the embodied nature of cinematic art, since it explores cinema as a physical, enworlded mode of viewing. Film-phenomenologists describe an art form which is as carnal as it is cerebral; as Steven Shaviro puts it, ‘[cinema] assaults the eye and ear, it touches and it wounds. It foregrounds the body.’3535 Shaviro, p. 260. The embodied nature of the medium invests cinema with the capacity to ‘look’ at the ‘real’ – the mundane everyday – in the very manner that Burghardt describes; with one’s whole person. Film-phenomenology takes seriously the communication between the various ‘bodies’ of the film experience – filmmaker(s), viewer, and even the film itself. In the first place, it seems evident that the filmmaker’s own embodiment should play a significant role in cinema; everything about her position in the world will determine the making of the film. At the same time, the viewer’s embodied position in the world determines the film experience; when we watch a film, we enter an expressive and communicative domain, contingent on our embodied perception of the world. Just as Merleau-Ponty observes that we only experience the world through our bodies,3636 This is a central tenet of Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology, who follows Gabriel Marcel’s maxim ‘I am my body.’ See especially Maurice Merleau-Ponty Phenomenology of Perception (London: Routledge, 2012) pp. 67-206. From p. 84: ‘The body is the vehicle of being in the world (être au monde)…my body is the unperceived term at the centre of the world toward which every object turns its face…I am conscious of the world by means of my body.’ so we only experience film through our corporeal embodiment. Everything from the other bodies around us to the physical space on which the picture is projected shapes the film experience. Even though watching a film can be a profoundly cerebral experience, the viewer’s consciousness can never be dissolved from her phenomenal existence as an embodied human being. This embodiment is in no sense a limitation of the capacity to interpret film, but rather the actual mode for all interpretation of the film experience. Yet it also makes sense to talk about the body of film itself. This can be done analogously at first: the camera and microphone as eyes and ears; cranes, rigs, and dollies as limbs and motor functions; director and cinematographer as the brain and central nervous system which directs the motion and the senses of all. However, Vivian Sobchack, a pioneer of film-phenomenology, takes the concept of the film body substantially further. In recognising film as ‘an act of seeing which makes itself seen, an act of hearing that makes itself heard,’3737 Sobchack, p. 3. she identifies an ‘invisible presence of an other’3838 Sobchack, p. 203. at the heart of the film experience. This ‘invisible other’ is embodied in the performance of the film, since the viewer experiences the picture through this other. It is a ‘point of view’ in many senses of the phrase, embodied in space and time, and Sobchack calls it ‘an eye that belongs neither solely to the filmmaker, the camera, or the spectator.’3939 Sobchack, p. 203. What is essential is that this ‘invisible other’ can only be understood insofar as it is in some way embodied; it is not a point of view from nowhere (such a thing is nonsensical), but a point of view from a specific and corporeal somewhere. It ‘sees’ through a particular ‘eye/I’, characterised perhaps by a close-up, wide angle, or crane shot; yet it is characterised not only by the position of the camera or the type of lens, but also by that spatial-temporal perspective embodied through the screen. In this way it is radically reflexive; at once an act of performance which is perceived and an act of perception which is performed – theologically, it is a look which can prime and facilitate contemplation in the viewer and simultaneously perform contemplation itself. However, as has already been anticipated, cinematic embodiment must be understood temporally as well as spatially. This is not least because time is an essential principle of cinematic art; to put it succinctly, the motion picture is contingent on the time given for that motion. This seems a basic intuition, for the language of movement is wrapped up in the language of time; we can move our bodies slowly or quickly, for example, and speed is a function of time. In cinema, the length of a shot affects its meaning, while editing determines the ‘pacing’ of a film. Juxtaposition, in particular, demonstrates just how interconnected time and spatial movement are, for juxtaposition refers both to the spatial proximity of images next to one another on a spool of celluloid, and to the temporal proximity of those images as they appear successively in time on the screen. This is why transitions (such as fades, dissolves, splices, or sweeps) are used differently to render different passages of time. Montage is the ultimate expression of juxtaposition; deploying several successive (or even concurrent) images in montage has profound effects on the time-sense of a sequence. In short, the phenomena captured on film are determined as much by their temporal properties as by their spatial properties. André Bazin recognised this in the very same essay in which he extolled the cinema’s potential for realism. In fact, the unique temporal aesthetic of film – that the moving image is determined by its duration – is one of the primary reasons why Bazin thought film was the supreme realist medium. ‘The cinema is objectivity in time,’ he argues, ‘for the first time, the image of things is likewise the image of their duration.’4040 Bazin, pp. 14-15. What Bazin means by this is simply that the duration of a shot is as much the substance of a film image as is the phenomena pictured. He illustrates this in a different essay with reference to the hunting scene in Robert Flaherty’s documentary Nanook of the North (1922): ‘the length of the hunt is the very substance of the image, it’s true object.’4141 Bazin, p. 27. Tarkovsky echoes the same idea throughout the pages of the appositely titled Sculpting in Time. Just as Bazin described the invention of cinema as the moment when the image of phenomena became intertwined with the image of their duration, Tarkovsky celebrates the Lumière brothers’ very first film as the moment when, ‘for the first time in the