Escolar Documentos
Profissional Documentos
Cultura Documentos
Jerey Pence
English and Cinema Studies, Oberlin
Abstract Cinemas power to represent animate life, and produce a profound impres-
sion of reality, warrants and supports its other fascinating capacity, namely, to fab-
ricate frank yet appealing illusions. In certain instances, audiences may respond to
the fantastic creations as if to a new reality. Cinematic realism thus raises questions
about the nature of belief and reality that are of perennial, yet acutely contempo-
rary, interest in lm history. A genre of the spiritual lmdistinct from religious
lms that rely on traditional sources of religious authorityexplores these ques-
tions of being and the limits of the knowable. Recent lm criticism has inadequately
responded to this genre. Film studies has aligned itself in various ways behind Walter
Benjamins call for an iconoclasm that would sever arts connections with cultic tra-
ditions and contribute to social progress. The consequent suppression, or translation
to secular terms, of lms spiritual aspirations comes at great cost. Complex works
that address spiritual topics in form and content, such as Lars von Triers Breaking
the Waves (1996), are treated as evidence by a self-arming and secularizing critical
method. In neglecting the central concerns of such lms, critics are complicit with
the worst features of modernity. A criticism that evades an open engagement with the
limits of the knowable becomes instrumental; a criticism geared exclusively toward
demystication ultimately produces reication. A more proper analytic response is to
attend to the ways in which such lms produce experiences, and call for responses, at
the edge of the knowable. Such an approach begins with abandoning methodologi-
cal certainty; the spiritual lm demands an alignment of perception that cannot be
An earlier version of this essay was delivered at the Third International Crossroads in Cul-
tural Studies Conference, June 2125, 2000, in Birmingham, United Kingdom. I would like
to thank Ann Hardy for her generous reading of an earlier draft and James A. Knapp for his
collaboration throughout this project.
Poetics Today 25:1 (Spring 2004). Copyright 2004 by the Porter Institute for Poetics and
Semiotics.
This mute, grey life nally begins to disturb and depress you. It
seems as though it carries a warning, fraught with a vague but sin-
ister meaning that makes your heart grow faint. You are forgetting
where you are. Strange imaginings invade your mind and your con-
sciousness begins to wane and grow dim.
Maxim Gorky, 1972 [1896]
ters with cinema have traditionally been derived form George Sadoul (1975
[1948]), whose own research and conclusions are dubious. These accounts
tend to repeat a standardized myth of the primitives traumatic introduc-
tion to modernity. As the Lumires train pulls into the station, the story
goes, the audience panics, screams, and rushes for the exits. However much
this scene of upheaval captures, metaphorically, the early viewers surprise,
what it describes never literally occurred. As Gunning (1999 [1989]: 819)
demonstrates, even Christian Metzs (1982) sophisticated theorizing of spec-
tatorship depended on this easily debunked myth. Notably, Gorkys own
contemporary account downplays trauma or panic in favor of a rapidly
acquired skepticism, as shadows suggest something baseless, second-order,
illusionistic, and ultimately political about the royal display of power just
witnessed.1 Such an interpretation of Gorkys remark resonates with a domi-
nant, and currently predominant, strain in the history of cinema studies.
Since Walter Benjamins The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical
Reproduction (1979 [1936]), cinema has been linked to the demise of cultish
understandings of art and the progress of critical reason, thanks to its ca-
pacity to represent and reveal reality in heretofore impossible ways. The
theory of cinemas nature as essentially realist, and uniquely qualied to
disclose the essentially real, was initially developed by Bla Balsz, Andr
Bazin, and Siegfried Kracauer.2 These critics emphasized and valued cer-
tain visual, aural, and editing conventionssuch as the close-up, location
sound, and long takes linked by elliptical transitions rather than continuity
editing. In these techniques, they found in cinema a unique correlation to
reality, the way things appear in everyday perception enhanced by sugges-
tions of a meaningful depth, which habit, necessity, or even sensory limita-
tion elide in actual life. Subsequent theoretical developments, not to men-
tion lm history itself, abandoned the insistence of these theorists that only
certain techniques and forms are true to cinemas essence. Nevertheless,
more recent theories have explicitly retained an idea of realism that legiti-
1. Rachel O. Moore (2000) extends Gunnings work, and to some extent undermines his reli-
ance on historicist procedures, by looking at cinema as a prime medium for negotiating the
relationship between the modern and the primitive more generally, as it combines techno-
logical progress with features understandable as magic.
2. For example, if, according to Kracauer (1965 [1960]: 3, 31), each medium has a specic
nature, then it is evident that the cinematic approach materializes in all lms which follow
the realist tendency. Balsz (1999 [1945]: 304) identied cinemas power with its capacity to
represent dimensions of reality either hitherto unknown or presumed to have been known:
We skim over the teeming substance of life.The camera has uncovered that cell-life. Finally,
Bazin (1999 [1945]: 196) famously declared the history of the plastic arts, which photogra-
phy and cinema both complete and escape, to be essentially the story of resemblance, or, if
you will, of realism.
mates their own project, as a realist endeavor now oriented toward a social
or psychological reality barely discernible beneath ideology and illusion.
Kracauer is something of a hinge gure, albeit in reverse, in this change.
His major works relevant to this discussion, From Caligari to Hitler: A Psycho-
logical History of the German Film (1947) and Theory of Film: The Redemption
of Physical Reality (1960), respectively take up cinemas expression of socio-
psychological turmoil and its fundamental capability to establish physical
existence. That his work moves from an emphasis on historical and politi-
cal interpretations to a more strictly formalist analysis, just prior to a more
general turn in the opposite direction in the study of lm, suggests that the
history of lm theory and criticism is not a narrative of progress. Instead,
this history is dened by an oscillation between interests and methods that
rest on dierent understandings of the relationship between lm and reality.
In one view, lm is part of a reality of social context, experience, and
conict, whether or not a particular lm evidences this fact deliberately or
symptomatically. Criticism here highlights the connections between lm
and historical reality in the interest of social understanding or progress.
In another view, the specicity of the lm medium may produce aes-
thetic experiences that impress audiences with a sense of reality, despite
the manifest dierence between the lm experience and normal experi-
ence. Criticism here considers what positive knowledge these encounters
may deliverwhether in regard to lm technique, to the pleasures and
desires of viewers impressionable in these ways, or even to the potential
signicance of these seemingly solid aspects of reality which are otherwise
invisible. The former approach is inherently modern, carrying on a tradi-
tion of critique established in the Enlightenment. It is skeptical of illusion
and the superstitious power of lm to fascinate, and therefore manipulate,
audiences.While one of the verities of postmodernism is that the emancipa-
tory discourses subtending modern thought (Marxism and psychoanalysis
primarily) are neither objectively true nor superior perspectives on cultural
life, the tradition of critique remains the most important in contemporary
lm studies. As such, it also extends the anity of criticism with an Enlight-
enment notion of reason as a privileged, scientic process that will lead us
to truth. The latter approach, that of focusing on real-seeming cinematic
experiences, can be understood as carrying on an alternative tradition of
seeking and valuing dimensions of thought and perception that continue
to attract us, despite being irreconcilable with a strict denition of reason.
This approach extends the anity of art and criticism with features of reli-
gion that have been gradually marginalized in modernity. The oscillation
between alternative methods and interests that has dened cinema studies,
then, replays in miniature the oscillation in the modern West between sci-
then, cinema is either a force for historical change or a symptom of its con-
tainment. In this regard, the task of the critic has been to work against the
counter-utopian tendencies of lm institutions and conventions in order
to resurrect the critical and liberatory potential of original cinema, the
potential for representational world-shattering that critics have so often (if,
according to Gunning, erroneously) projected onto the mythic moment of
the initial encounter with lm as the embodiment of modernity.
Writing of the initial encounter with which I began, Gorky moves quickly
from meditating on the moving images unsettling of consciousness to a
radical restabilization of self-awareness on the grounds of material history
and politics. As the replication of a mute, grey life begins to unravel
the viewers perspective, Gorky (1972 [1896]: 7) displaces the concomitant
anxiety by imagining an alternative, shockingly literal, and more edify-
ing lm depicting a poleaxed social villain. This abrupt translation of his
experience to the realm of everyday politics is, on the one hand, cognate
with interpretive tendencies that still govern much of critical practice today.
Whatever its motivational virtues, or even its (likely unmeasurable) ecacy
in the world of lived experience, the rapid default to everyday politics in
much cultural analysis reveals an anxiety about the value of engagement
with artworks if practical benet cannot at least be imagined. On the other
hand, in certain respects, Gorkys rush to construct a fantasy of social retri-
bution inadequately recuperates the cognitive and aective densities of the
cinematic encounter he has just elaborated. In fact, one may read the grisly
scene he imagines as an inverted mirror of the feelings of disorientation he
registered when lost in a world of shadows, as if only a violent commitment
to the known world could counter the temptations of illusion.
This tendency also persists in our present scene. In a recent survey of
cinema studies, Dudley Andrew (2000) argues that forces of the academic
market have put wind to the sails of socially and historically oriented criti-
cism, as, among other reasons, these modes oer more ecient ways to
produce and distribute a scholars work. I agree with him entirely while
wishing to insist that the resistance to the most challenging dimensions of
lm aestheticsthat impression of reality that simultaneously seduces and
provokes strange imaginings in spectatorsderives also from their resis-
tance to interpretation, or at least to interpretations that arm the project
of criticism itself. The disjuncture between cinematic realisms potential
opening to a kingdom of shadows and a critical apparatus mainly devoted
to a model of problem solving invites a quick retreat to more familiar inter-
pretive grounds. A kingdom of shadows suggests a realm of being other
than our own, yet one to which we seem magically connected.The disorien-
tation Gorky describes only begins to register the impact of a lm world that
In its Hollywood and other commercial versions, and despite its technical
sundering of the auratics identication with singularity, twentieth-century
lm has evidenced a committed pursuit of the auratican investment in
representations of reality that seem phenomenologically if not materially
singular, redolent of ontological associations directly linked to traditions
of spiritual aspiration that Benjamin sought to marginalize as cultic. It
remains for lm critics, specically, and cultural analysts, generally, to
come to terms with cinemas own persistent interest in the auratic. Other-
wise, such an interest may only be understood, in Benjamins terms, as
ultrareactionary (ibid.: 857). In fact, we barely have a language to begin
such a discussion.
As Dennis Taylor (1998: 3) writes of literature in a related context,
We live in an age of critical discourses that are expert in discussing the dimen-
sions of class, gender, textuality, and historical context. Yet an important part
Yet, in the encounter with the auratic in certain cultural texts, this otherwise
potent hermeneutic is cut athwart by another dimension:
What interrupts is not another system but something that challenges all systems,
something as questioning and unsettling as the best deconstructive scalpels of our
critics, but suggesting something unconditioned, all-demanding, and ultimately
unevadable. (Ibid.: 5)
when she identies two desires that I wish to disentangle: the desire for
spirituality and the desire for authority. In both formulations, the spiri-
tual is seen as potentially, but not necessarily, confused with the interpretive
and institutional authority of religion. Instead, it seems, for Taylor, to oer
possibly unexpected connections between religious belief and ethical ori-
entation; for Bal, spirituality ultimately becomes a generally exploratory
resistance to authority. In neither case is spirituality identical with the utili-
tarian and pragmatic calculations of a secular understanding of a social
contract. Instead, the spiritual, as the discourse for exploring experiences of
the ineable and orienting them toward consequence in the world of agency
and action, mediates between these otherwise opposed realms of transcen-
dence and everydayness. It is a questioning of the possible meanings and
implications of encounters otherwise beyond our customary cognitive and
rhetorical categories of understanding; it speaks not strictly to the faculties
of reason but to that admixture of thought and aect more characteristic
of aesthetic experience and ethical inquiry.
Certain aesthetic and ethical encounters present subjects with strikingly
similar situations, with objects or experiences of vexing indeterminacy. The
open question of how to respond to the uncertain beauty before one, or
to the complex demand of responsibility, has a powerful aective dimen-
sion. On the one hand, beauty quickens . . . adrenalizes . . . makes the
heart beat faster (Scarry 1999: 24). On the other hand, facing ethical
alterity, the sense of responsibility toward an unknown other, even toward
the unknowable per se, elates the soul that, according to formal logic, it
should harm (Levinas 1999: 75). In both aesthetics and ethics, then, inde-
terminacy may generate interest, aective involvement, and new possibili-
ties for thought. Our interpretive responses in these instances can be seen to
replenish more everyday experience by renovating the individuals capaci-
ties for thought and action. I am concerned here principally with dilemmas
of choice making at the edge of our understanding of what beauty and jus-
tice might be. Potentially, these situations may provide opportunities for
energizing and transforming the deliberative agents sense of what is pos-
sible both in the world and in judgment. It is equally true that such situations
may exceed our abilities to comprehend and respond to their challenges.
In neither case am I suggesting a wholesale conation of aesthetics and
ethics, which would, as Jane Bennett (2001: 132) warns, license the unruly
and selsh or, at best, morally indierent forces of appetite and will. The
inverse is also possiblethe aesthetic could then become a didactic exten-
sion of a moral certitude rather than a source of innovative experimenta-
tion. Instead, I insist here only on the parallels between the two realms, their
vention that may be encountered in certain lms that engage with the inef-
fable. As such, both orientations are more properly self-arming methods
than dispositions enabling self-reection and refashioning in the face of dif-
cult and indeterminate aesthetic works.
The realm of subjective experience is nite and bounded; any continuity
and coherence of subjective identity depends on the assumption of limits
dening who one is, what one knows, and what life one has lived. It is
no great diculty to extend this model from an individual to a collective
register, since the scale alone would change but not the principle. In con-
trast, we may conceive of the ineable as innite and unbounded. It rep-
resents alterity per se, that which one is not, what one does not know, the
experiences one has not had. And we can again easily conceive of inef-
fability regarding collective mentalities. However great the sample, the
group, there is always implied a greater exterior and dierentiated realm
against which the collectives identity is known. The structural binarism
operative here may become more perceptibly dynamic if we consider, fol-
lowing Plate, the spirituals role as a mediating term, as a way in which the
specic relationship between identity and experience, on the one hand, and
the ineable, on the other hand, changes in specic ways. The spiritual,
in this regard, introduces temporality, change, and possibility into a model
that may otherwise appear to bind our aspirations within its analytic terms.
This is precisely what thingor theoryoriented methods tend not
to oer, as they conrm their own procedures against the desires evident in
both aesthetic works and consumers for the possibility of something as yet
unknown to happen in spiritual lms.
How might we understand the spiritual as the mediating interval be-
tween the nite and the innite so dened? A strongly religious or mythic
perspective might view the spiritual as, to a greater or lesser extent, a trans-
parency, granting visitations between the religious and experiential realms
with a corresponding diminishment of their distinction. A strong Enlighten-
ment or rationalist perspective, in contrast, might see the spiritual as either
a mirror for the projection of values and taboos or an opaque lens through
which nothing is discernible. The one depends upon the miraculous, the
other upon its reduction. Both explanations disparage spiritualitys medi-
ating roleas hardly necessary, on the one hand, and hardly possible, on
the other hand. As a realm in which experience is reected upon in order to
transform the subject in the interests of ethical self-management, the spiri-
tual may instead be conceived in utilitarian fashion as a theater of counter-
factual ideals, in which alternative modes of living are imagined.This prag-
matic alternative can, however, easily be understood as a weaker version of
the Enlightenment or of the mythic perspective. It can be seen to follow the
3. I owe the phrase critical interval, with its connotations of a structural relationship and
a temporal dynamic, to Merrick Burrow (2001).
Carlsons argument parallels and extends my earlier claim about the consti-
tutive conceptual relationship between categories of the nite and innite
and between categories of experience and the ineable. Here, the interplay
of the material world of objects and experience and a range of desires that
exceed any such material satisfaction is seen to characterize contemporary
lifes most supercial and deep aspectsthat is, shopping and theology.
The material and the immaterial, or even the secular and the spiritual,
seem inseparable in this formulation. Treating this inseparable relationship
presents a challenge to a critical discourse that tends to rely on much rmer
distinctions between what is and is not knowable.
Contemporary analysts of lm and culture tend to reproduce in their
own work a methodological realism that functions along instrumental lines
that, consciously or not, mirror Heideggers notion of techne. For Heideg-
ger, instrumentalist rationality, as a mode of revealing being within techne,
treats the entirety of nature and experience as a usable resource. Whether
an extractable mineral or data mined for a purpose, all elements within
the world have value only insofar as they can be organized into what Hei-
degger (1977 [1953]: 322) terms, in The Question concerning Technology,
a standing reserve of such resources. Such an ordering is aggressive, a
setting upon nature that, to the extent it does reveal some aspect of being
by such force, is equally blind to other aspects of being that are not redu-
cible to predetermined notions of use. Techne is inherently imperialistic,
crowding out other modes of revealing being, and ultimately subsumes even
humans who conceive of themselves as masters of instruments within its
logic. Under this sort of rationality, we ourselves become useful resources.
In suggesting that much cultural analysis operates under a logic of instru-
mentalism, I mean specically the tendency to develop and promulgate
methods that either ignore other possible modes of thought, expression, and
feeling or convert them violently into the methods own terms. I will address
examples of such criticism at length below; as the introductory essay to this
volume attests, however, such examples are far from atypical.
The spiritually oriented lm that serves as my example, Lars von Triers
Breaking the Waves, resists instrumental appropriation by such critical meth-
ods. The initial question of how to relate to a lm that confounds expec-
tations becomes something larger, as our responses go to the very heart of
what cultural studies is or might be. The lm exaggerates conventions of
realistic representation to potent eect. However realistic the surface of the
lm, any critical attempt to tether this representational style to an actual
historical reality fails to account for the lms drive to exceed the particu-
larities of its concrete setting. Michael Quinns (1999) attempt to situate the
lm in contemporary European politics, discussed further below, represents
such an interpretive move. Moreover, such attempts reveal the constrictive
hold of a certain cognitive and critical realismthe technology of repre-
sentationon cultural studies. Such a mode of analysis easily moves from
demystication to reication, particularly when critique is directed solely at
the object of scrutiny and not turned on the analysts practice as well. A lm
that plays to, and then attempts to exceed, our customary sense of a lms
mimetic relationship to reality ought to provoke self-awareness about the
role of such a category of mimetic realism within critical practice. Other-
wise, criticism risks hardening into predictable method. I am not calling
for a revival of an ahistorical formalism, much less for a willful gullibility
in the face of lms more grandiose features and claimssuch as Bazins
claim for the miraculous chemical nature of the medium itself. Rather, I
seek to highlight the ways in which the conventions of mimetic realism in
cinema may lead not strictly to secular concerns but to consideration of
equally profound, and potentially far more dicult, questions about aes-
thetic experiences relationship to the ineable.
Following Kracauer (1965 [1960]: 232, 233), cinema shares with the novel
a capacity for the rendering of life in its fullness, which in turn produces
a drive to transcend the boundedness of any particular representation by
4. In another register, this paradox runs through Helen Freshwaters contribution to this
volume; in particular, Freshwater points out that the archive seems to oer a record of the
quotidian totality of existence while necessarily containing only a tiny portion of the reality
toward which it gestures.
5. Von Trier seems to have intentionally tested the limits of his viewers credulity. In light
of the lms melodramatic emphasis on the physical expression of emotionhe notes that
Besss love tread[s] on the verge of kitsch (Maslin 1996: 1)he hoped that for more intel-
lectual audiences the story will excuse the tears (ibid.). Nevertheless, he locates the power
of his work precisely in this conjunction of the credible and incredible: the strength of my
lms is that they are easy to mock (Travers 1996: 1). Their vulnerability to mockery makes
acceptance of the work a sort of leap of faith (Maslin 1996: 2); a leap accompanied per-
haps by an elevated sense of pleasure in the lm. At the same time, such a leap is not only
impossible for some critics, the suggestion that it be taken at all may be perceived as unac-
ceptable. In this light, Kenneth Turan (1996: 1) declares that the lm oers a imsy illusion
of profundity, which is more likely a fools errand. Typical of many such responses, Turan
(ibid.: 2) focuses on the narrative vector of Besss sexual sacrices as expressive of a tarted up
and even misogynistic perspective on Von Triers part that is puerile and renders the lm
trite and even juvenile . . . more embarrassing than convincing. If Turan nds Von Trier
pathetically exposing his own immature notions of sexual sacrice and saintliness, Jonathan
Rosenbaum pursues another line common among dissatised reviewers. For him, the lm
is best understood as a pastiche-like reworking of earlier lms by related directors, such as
Dreyer, or lms, like La Strada; it participates in what Rosenbaum (1996: 2) takes to be a com-
mon calculated and postmodernist sense of lm reference. Against this backdrop of Euro-
pean art cinema, the cynicism and shameless crudity of Von Triers plot and dramaturgy
make it impossible to take him seriously (ibid.). Rosenbaums main charge seems to be that
the indeterminacy of truth in the lm, combined with its insistence on the possibility of the
impossible, makes it a very clever con game, a faux-naif masterpiece, in which the direc-
tor heaps on so many layers of postmodernist irony about truth and faith that isolating any
form of belief or disbelief from the resulting tangle seems impossible (ibid.: 3, 5). He ulti-
mately locates Von Triers failure to produce clear meaning in his misfortune at being part
of a post-1950 generation for whom the world has never oered optimism.
The problem with the three readings I have given is, on the one hand,
their overreliance on a critical method that privileges that which is already
knownand hence the cognitive templates in which the already known is
framedover openness to the possibility of encountering the unexpected.
Broadly speaking, this critical method is a kind of conventional realism
expressing standards of recognition and protocols of reasonableness simi-
lar to those of a realistic aesthetic style. On the other hand, the problem
with these interpretations is their not being quite realistic enough.The rst,
psychological, reading arbitrarily selects one of the interpretive possibili-
ties of the lm while suppressing others. After all, the bells are visible and
do ring out, as diegetic sound in the middle of the ocean upon Besss burial;
if her avowed perceptions reveal her as mad, then so do ours cast doubt
upon our own rationality. If such an interpretation depends upon import-
ing an extraneous sense of what is authentic to clarify this lm, the sec-
ond sort of reading, which explains identity, belief, and action historically,
does so even more obviously. Michael Quinn (1999), for instance, has dis-
cussed the lm as an expression of nationalist anxiety at the coming of the
European Union, with Jan and his international assortment of oil workers
representing the multifaceted miscegenation perceived to menace tradi-
tional European cultures dened by the borders of the nation-state. While
this reading is dexterously suggestive in its linking of global transforma-
tions and local struggles, it nevertheless comes at the enormous expense of
ignoring the real elephant in the room: the European Union has extraor-
dinary powers but has yet to pull a single Norwegian back from the dead.
So unexpected as to qualify for consideration as a miracle, Jans recovery is
coded as a resurrection linked to Besss sacrice. The possibility of a power
greater than life and death outreaches any reading that seeks to localize
the lms meaning in well-understood social structures. Unless, that is, one
wishes to project on the new political organization of Europe the sort of
incredible power the lm suggests to be at work. The nal reading, which
acknowledges and then disavows or dismisses the lms spiritual aspect,
comes from Stephen Heaths God, Faith and Film (1998) and deserves
more attention.
Initially, Heath (1998: 94) accurately identies the lms attempt to yoke
together representation and the embodiment of the unrepresentable: it
seeks to depict and urge something about love at the same time that it wants
to stand forindeed beit. Hence the tension between love represented,
the romantic fuel of narrative cinema, and love embodied, an ideal that
no representation could satisfactorily capture. Approaching cinema as a
symbolic system, a language understood along Lacanian lines, Heath sees
the lms attempt to escape the limits of representation via stylistic exag-
geration and aective implosion as a failure. If the love Von Trier seeks to
embody is an ideal, that ideal connects to a tradition of imagining God as
love: the lm aims impossibly at enjoyment of God (103). Responding to
the lms undecidability, Heath, one of the most important theoreticians
of lm form, aesthetics, and spectatorship, oddly resorts to journalism. In
interviews, Von Trier indicates no denite religious beliefs beyond an inter-
est in Catholicism.6 On this basis, Heath (ibid.: 105) decides that Von Trier
treats the spiritual like a fetishist who pretends that something exists even
when he knows otherwise: Not believing but hoping is like the fetishists
knowing but refusing all the same to know. Heath thus nds that the lms
ending delivers something like a false miracle and a negative rearmation
of the ineables absolute remoteness. Von Trier
makes up with his lm a security of meaning against the knowledge that there
is no miracle, nothing to save reality. The lm overcomes its obstacle of reli-
gion . . . and produces its miracle; at the same time, what it knows against its
end (both close and purpose, the former given as the conrmation of the latter),
is the impossibility of completion, the limits against which it breaks through-
out. . . . Possession of God would be exactly the loss of any sense . . . would be
the terrifying enjoyment of what cannot be integrated into symbolic order and
representation. (Ibid.)
Although the terms could not be more dierent, Heaths analysis shares
with Quinns an air of the orthodox. An established theory and method
meet a lm whose aesthetic, even spiritual, ambitions dier markedly from
their normal parameters; in the encounter, the established theory unsur-
prisingly tailors the thing to its own demands, ignoring or deriding the
irrecuperable features of the work.
Heath goes on to focus on Besss exclusion from her own miracle, seeing
in the lm a continuation of the gender politics of the represented world
itself. In his analysis, by contrast, Bess nds her rightful place in a Lacanian
allegory: The woman touches on this, the God-face, which is to say that
woman and God both gure and conceal the impossibility of this jouissance:
they edge on to, that is, but cover over the void of the non-existence of the
Otherthere is no answer, no ultimate signier, no nal guarantee to be
had (ibid.).
In its own terms, this reading has a persuasive force. The trouble is that
it is dicult to decide whether this force comes from its particular accu-
racy in this instance or from the internal coherence and rhetorical authority
6. I imagine Von Trier consciously imitating his great forbear, Carl Dreyer, here. Both Danes,
at either end of the century, produced extraordinary lms about nations and religions not
their own.
of its method. Its conclusions seem applicable to virtually all cinema (for
what is lm, without sex and God?). After all, if the foundation of gender
disparities is immanent in language, then language itself is the ineluctable
foundation of the terms of human subject identity (ibid.). In this light,
Heath seems ultimately to accuse the lm of not being worldly enough, not
owning up to the manifest vacuity of all claims to experience or represent
the ineable. By this move, however, he becomes the mirror image of the
town patriarchs who condemn Bess to the everlasting lake of re, precisely
for being too worldly. Neither judging party has done justice to Besss gam-
bit against orthodoxy. Doing justice to Bess and the lm requires a dierent
approach.
These various readings all fail because viewers must face an ending that is
comprehensible only in terms of the extraordinary, the transcendent, the
sublime: a sudden, shocking encounter with an order or magnitude of being
(such as the innite) that nearly outstrips our abilities to perceive and pro-
cess it. According to Michael Bird in Film as Hierophany (1982), such
an experience is aective, deeply emotional, and potentially truthful in a
manner that need not be strictly rational. The nonrational need not equal
nonsense, since the binarism of instrumental reason does not necessarily
hold sway everywhere:
In spite of the triumph of determinant judgment in the contemporary world (in
the values of programming, forcasting [sic], eciency, security, computing, and
the like), other games or genres of discourse are available in which formulat-
ing a rule or pretending to give an explanation is irrelevant, even forbidden. In
particular this is the case with esthetic judgment. (Lyotard 1988: 21)
Tillich (1956) in erasing the distinction between these realms. If the material
world, governable by or at least cognizable by reason, presents us with
the limits of nitude and the awareness of nonbeing, it is this very empti-
ness that places us in a condition of openness to the Unconditioned (Bird
1982: 5). Far from excluding the miraculous as irrational, then, reason asks
for revelation, seeking an ultimate unity of its conicting and unresolved
polarities (ibid.: 4). Bird (ibid.: 6) emphasizes Tillichs notion of belief-
ful realism, located midway between a technological realism (which
recognizes only the immediately visible world) [and] a mystical realism
(which eliminates the material world as an obstacle to the ascending mind).
Instead of bifurcating the abstract and the actual, belief-ful realism cap-
tures a sense of nuance and paradox by which discernment of the tran-
scendent is made possible by turning in the direction of the real (ibid.).
Belief-ful realism turns us away from a bipolar opposition of the par-
ticular and apprehensible, on the one hand, and the general and abstract,
on the other hand. Rather than set against each other, we can imagine
these alternative foci of thought and representation as commingled in a
process of mutual imbrication. In turn, this relationship illuminates, by
homology, the general concern of this essay and volume. Both argue against
the assumption that a fundamental conict between critical approaches
that privilege an orientation to either thing or theory demands our choosing
between them. Rather, a conceptual error of simplication produces and
exaggerates the opposition between these orientations. Furthermore, this
false dichotomy may be seen as the root cause of the sweeping oscillation in
recent criticism between these alternatives, since neither orientation alone
can account for aesthetic experience in any complete fashion. Throughout
its history, cinema has been understood and explored in a bipolar fash-
ion, as a medium whose technological and textual features lend themselves
either to a transparent representation of reality or to the creation of illusions
that border on the magical. This binary conception of lm derives directly
from the nineteenth-century opposition of science and religion, reecting
the formers increasing public authority and the latters decline into pri-
vate desire and behavior. Art was then conceived of as mediating between
the poles of science and religion, as a practice that could accurately reect
and transform reality while addressing the aspirations for greater or deeper
understanding of our existence that were at one time more reliably met by
religious institutions. Nevertheless, lm history and criticism reveals a ten-
dency to downplay this mediating role in favor of focusing more strongly
on mimetic or fantastic concerns. The spiritual lm, in contrast, has always
foregrounded this mediating role.The remainder of this essay explores what
it would mean in practice to reectively abide in between the particular and
I must make myself conform to what feeling reveals to me and thus match its
depth with my own. For it is not a question of extending my having but rather
of listening in on a message. That is why, through feeling, I myself am put into
question. . . . To feel in a sense is to transcend. (Dufrenne 1973 [1957] quoted
in Bird 1982: 8)
In this situation, the openness of the subject in the face of the sublime per-
mits an anity with the innite to emerge. Against Heath, it is possible
to imagine representation and aesthetic reception as less strictly bounded
Breaking the Waves paradigmatically, and the cinema of the sublime more
generally, oers the opportunity to imagine and take seriously alternate
forms of cultural practice which are not methodologically harmonious with
the tendency toward reication that typies both modernity and cultural
studies. Rather than centered around reason and transparent realism, this
lm and any analysis that would do it justice (by which I mean would
treat it as more than a system of von Triers madness) must foreground
other modes of apprehension and knowledge. The lm works because of
the way in which it utilizes and undermines our most familiar mode of cog-
nition, representation, and critical interpretationwhich I gather under
the rubric of realism. The lm extends realism beyond the point at which
its short-term gains of exposing and disabling power relations have begun
to produce the negative eect of disenchanting the world by blinding us
to those features of experience that are unrecognizable in its terms. Break-
ing the Waves insists on the power of realistic technique to present a situa-
tion for the viewer that embodies, if only asymptotically, an encounter with
the ineable. Whether such an encounter is deferred indenitely or con-
stitutively, following Carlson, or is only negatively cognizable, and thus by
either route fails to satisfy the demands of reason, seems to me to miss the
point altogether. We may learn here from Stanley Cavells explorations of
the ontology of cinema.
Like Benjamin, Cavell insists that to appreciate lms potency requires
acknowledging its technical capacity to frame an aspect of reality for our
scrutiny. Unlike Benjamin, Cavell argues that this scientic or rational ele-
ment of cinema does not necessarily dene the medium in opposition to illu-
sion, fantasy, or even magic. Rather, he writes, movies arise out of magic:
from below the world (Cavell 1979 [1971]: 39). The world here is insepa-
rable from the templates of consciousness that frame this entity for com-
prehensible perception. As a medium generally, and within the genre of
the spiritual lm explicitly, movies reenact for our reection the process of
framing by which the innite possibilities of sensory perception and inter-
pretation come together in a pragmatically coherent entity (the world). By
this reenactment, movies alert us to the prior and foundational existence of
that which is not yet framed as a world. Furthermore, they remind us of the
persistence of the as yet unknown, here gured as the ground of magic with-
out which reason and representation would have no context or materials to
work with. In this light, we may read Breaking the Waves, and its miraculous
conclusion in particular, in an aectively intelligible manner dierent from
Heaths mere recognition of its impossibility.
For Cavell (ibid.: 102), modern sensibilities and conditions have produced
a situation in which our natural mode of perception is to view, feeling
unseen. We do not so much look at the world as look out at it, from behind
the self. Cinemas power lies in its automatic framing of the world for
us. In screening the world for us, lm also screens the world from us. Unlike
theater, lms unreel like events without witnesses. In accounting for why
this exclusion from the labor of framing the world would appeal to audi-
ences, Cavell suggests that the lifting of our responsibility for such fram-
ing results in a draining of anxiety, and the possible emergence of a per-
ceptive state similar to Lyotards notion of ascesis. Lyotard also links this
responsive openness to the Stoics disciplined pursuit of apatheia, or culti-
vated indierence. This latter disposition suggests a mode not simply of
resisting the potentially overwhelming stimulation of perception, but also
of transcending the grip of individuated perspective itself.7 Paradoxically,
this makes movies seem more natural than reality, as they permit the self
to be wakened, so that we may stop withdrawing our longing further inside
ourselves (ibid.).
The key to cinemas relation to the ineable, therefore, does not lie in its
subjecting the world to new standards of scrutiny. Rather, cinemas spiri-
tuality inheres in the eects produced in viewers freed to reect on powers
of perception and forms of desire which have been either diminished by, or
excluded from, conventions of thought and action, including those of criti-
cism. Unlike Heath, Cavell imagines a certain alienation of the subject as a
given that may be assuaged; when this happens, the subject is not so much
delivered over to another realm than to the world that is normally ltered
and occluded by and for an alienated identity. There is a parallel here to
the situation of the camera as well as a broad dierence from Heaths rep-
resentation of cinema and consciousness as more or less satisfying prison
houses of language. If the camera is outside its subject as I am outside my
language (ibid.: 127), then we can understand the disjunctive nal shot of
the bells pealing over the North Sea neither as a proxy point of view of God
nor as an ination of our own perspective. Instead, we peer from behind
this perspective, above the scene of Besss burial at sea. This vantage point
ought not be evaluated by a criterion of answering or failing to answer our
desire for times answer to the ineable . . . the wish for total intelligibility
(ibid.: 148).
If the nal, yaway shot of the lmoil platform and funeral below,
swinging bells abovebelongs to anyone, it is to Bess, who is no longer
either there or here. At best, we may peer from behind this ghostly perspec-
tive, imagining its implications for Bess, who imagined her implications for
7. If even our best students, or even ourselves, continue to be attracted by the thoughtless
bliss of cinema as against the cognitive pleasures of other pastimes, Cavell may here have
explained why this attraction is anything but a lapse of moral or working habits. Instead, it
goes to the very heart of what we desire from cinema.
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