What matters in our engagement with art is just that engagement; and thus there are no concepts that matter that are not extensions of our descriptions or confessions of this engagement. Art generalizes through our descriptions of examples and through our offering of ourselves as exemplary. Before we can talk about the content of film as sublime or not (whatever that might mean), we must describe our modes of engagement with film—and from that describe the possible effects or ways of responding to the content shown in a film. This is what I will do here—you might call this a talk on the pre-sublime.
In Godard’s Vivre Sa Vie (1962), the impassive and lost Nana goes into a theater and watches Carl Theodor Dreyer’s silent masterpiece The Passion of Joan of Arc. David Thomson describes what he thinks happens:
She weeps at it, and knows it is about her. You will find the same pitiless conclusion—or rapture. Dreyer believed in God, but he trusted that movies are for people who know the screen is their mirror. (136).
Thomson’s interpretation of the scene seems reasonable: Nana recognizes herself in the suffering Joan (and in the face of Falconetti) and reacts; we recognize ourselves in Nana reacting to Joan, so we react. These recognitions might be unconscious or bound to particular descriptions. But what would be the content of Nana’s recognition? Nana, for whatever reason, cries at what she sees. Does she see Joan as the victim of politics, of God, or—like herself—as a victim of men? Are her tears and lament an expression of outrage or self-pity? We might react to Nana’s suffering with our own tears: but would this mean that we too were seeing ourselves in Nana seeing herself in Joan? It need not mean that. We might cry or clutch ourselves in anguish because she is unlike us. Or out of simple compassion, although it is compassion for a character in a film, and so we must have found our way with Nana the character in order to give her a claim on us, to give her the authority of mattering to us.
But there is a difficulty in how Thomson describes these recognitions. If I recognize the shape of my eyes in an old picture of my grandfather it would be odd to say my grandfather (or the picture) is a mirror of me. I might say that I mirror him (or the picture)—but that is partly because I am descended from him. If I note the same eye shape in a stranger, I am not sure I would say that either of us is a mirror of the other, although we might use “mirror” as a verb to mean “resemble each other.” This is partly what Thomson means to capture. But if Nana recognizes herself in Joan, does that then mean that the film “is about her,” as Thomson claims? It could be, but it need not be.
Maybe the movies are, as Thomson says, “for people who know the screen is their mirror,” which is to say for those who recognize themselves in what they see. But how can a mirroring of us be about us? To mirror is passive and non-intentional. To recognize myself in the mirror does not mean that the mirror or even my image is about me. About is intentional, both in its directedness and in having propositional content. “Mirror” and “about,” as conceptualizations of what we see, function within two different logical registers, which Thomson seems to collapse into synonymy. To construe films as mirrors of ourselves (at least potentially) need not entail that they are about us.
This is not a quibble. Reflection and intentionality (aboutness) are logically distinct relations. To collapse them together is a mistake. Thomson’s logical error has consequences. Mirrors reflect; they are blank, and parasitic on that which they reflect. A mirror give us back our reactions. A film does not reflect back our seeing; it remains indifferent. What Thomson seems to mean is that Nana recognizes herself, some version of herself, and thus weeps for herself instead of weeping for the immolated Joan.
Thomson’s description of film as a mirror that can be about us, however confused, gestures towards something profoundly true about our potential relationship with film, and not only a film’s potential to test our moral reactions and recognitions. Nana might see herself as suffering like Joan of Arc, a grandiose inflation of farce into tragedy. If I, as a viewer of the film, imagine that Nana is like Joan, then this should entail recognizing that suffering can become farce: that is, Nana’s situation falling into type, her desperation driving her into folly and melodrama. Such a recognition makes either Joan a caricature of Nana or Nana a caricature of Joan, at least for us who see them both on the screen. Caricatures are analogical structures, and thus imply comparison. Such comparisons constitute the primary cognitive and moral value of all art. What this means, and this is where the concepts to mirror and to be about come together in a new form, is that a film can describe us—that our watching of the film allows what we see to describe us, despite its non-reactive givenness (in fact because of that). In other words, a film is not a mirror of us, but I can become a mirror of it. This is what Nana has become—or rather—her face and anguish mirrors Dreyer’s film. I will try to give some sense to why I think this mirroring should be characterized as the film describing her.
How is our looking at a painting different from our watching a film?
Even if the painting cannot be grasped immediately, because of conflicts of perspective or obscurities of form and purpose, the seeing of it happens for us in our own time. Film, however, happens as a kind of measured succession, and thus it happens in its own time.
When we look at a painting in a room, for example, we enter the room from somewhere. We stop, we look. We might sit down. We become still, but nevertheless the painting is always more still than we are. And it has a place, a place we move past. No matter how long we look, we are passing. If the painting is on our own walls, then we live with it, but it is a part of that wall. And again it is always stiller than we are. And so the dynamism of our life passes by it, surrounds it.
A film, on the other hand, shows a dynamic world. We enter the theater (or some kind of room or space). We sit before a screen, and the film is presented to us in its particular form. As we watch, if we enter into its story, we enter into the film’s temporal order. Our breathing, our reactions track what we see. Our own temporal order is quieted and subdued relative to the film’s. No matter how attentive we are to a painting, no matter how absorbed, we cannot enter into its temporal order because it has none. It has a space, it can invoke a time, and it can seem to collect a story, an action, a gesture, but those all unfold in our looking, and it is our looking that gives the temporal order to its possibilities of sense and significance.
But our absorption with film can be more complete than with painting, because we are absorbed not simply with an image, but with the unfolding time-world offered by the film. A novel can encourage a similar kind of temporal absorption. Film, of course, has an a visceral sensory immediacy that novels lack. When I watch a film and am absorbed, my world is quieted. The situations, actions, and events I am watching—the characters and their trajectories of life—dominate my attention and my thoughts and feelings. My sense of myself and my surroundings get simplified into this absorbing attention to the film. I am simplified.
This kind of simplification through absorption is a kind of caricaturizing of myself. The film is the proximate cause of my reactions which are correlated with particular moments of the film; these reactions, in effect, represent the film: my reactive attention becomes a kind of representation of what I watch. If you saw me from the outside you would find my responses correlated with the film; my face could tell the story of the film and the film could tell the story of my face.
Here we see the key form of engagement—I react—the film is a proximate cause of this reaction—but this is part of an ordered, one might say, systemic experience—and so my reactions are correlated with the film. Hence, my face tells one kind of story (which is a kind of parody) of the film and the film can be understood as telling one kind of story of my face (and thus my feelings in some sense).
Consequences of our simplification before a film
Resemblance is one form of correlation—let us hold on to this form for the moment. I want to give you an example, that we can understand as almost paradigmatic, of what it means to take something as a parody. A parody describes an analogical relationship between two things—and thus a comparison. My key example is a corpse—or rather the face of a corpse, which is a parody of a living face—similar, but not the same. But a living face might also be taken as a parody of a dead face. Both invoke the other, but with a difference—a difference so great that you might take them as completely different things. (I will return to the analogical potential of the face in a moment).
Our relationship with film is similarly analogical. In our experience of film, we are simplified in some way through our absorption as we watch. Of course, as a living creature I remain far more complex than the film; so it is my attention and some aspect of my consciousness experience that has become simplified by my attentive absorption in the film. But as we see with the example of a living face and the “face” of the corpse—as parodies of each other, the living face which is more complex remains a parody of the the dead face.
Anything that absorbs us in the way that a film can has the potential to caricaturize us, which is to get us to caricaturize ourselves, that is, to describe ourselves as something else. Here is another example; almost a kind of parable. We simplify our commitments, beliefs and thoughts when we vote in an election; our vote caricatures us (our complexity simplified into a choice). The results of the vote caricature the voting population, simplified into whoever is elected (or whatever referendum wins). The politician wants to believe that those who voted for him are the corpses he animates, and the citizens want to believe that he is their corpse animated by their interests. Both are true. Democracy tends toward film, because our relation to our government is like our relation to film—it caricaturizes us by letting us caricaturize ourselves. (I want you to see the variety of analogical relationships through which we act, and to see their dependence on our descriptions.)
**
In my simplification into attention, my mind becomes the mind expressed as the film, my face by correlation like what I want to call the face of film. By this I do not mean the faces filmed, but that the film as projected and watched presents itself to us a face, with which we have a surprising intimacy. I offer the following brief motivation for this idea of the face of film.
Carl Theodor Dreyer characterized his aesthetic vision of what he called his Jesus film, a film he never made, but on which he worked for years, using Saint Veronica’s handkerchief:
How she met Jesus on the way to Calvary and gave him her veil to wipe away the sweat from his brow? His features became imprinted on the cloth. Now I truly see for my Jesus-film the screen—yes—an immense Veronica’s Handkerchief! (Wahl, 53)
Dreyer is not speaking of the face of a single actor, but of the film itself as a form of a face made visible on the screen as Christ’s face was on Veronica’s handkerchief. What Dreyer makes specific can be described more generally—the screen delimits the film which forms a changing expressive whole that makes a kind of face to which we can react. Film always has this face, the face of Veronica’s handkerchief, but it is brought into focus in different ways by different film-makers. The potential of this face is actualized through a particular style and aesthetic.
The more the expressiveness of the human face is diminished, or the more things are filmed as opposed to people and actions, the more visible the face of film, itself, becomes. The diminishment of the expressiveness of the human face, as it is manifest through acting, is central to the aesthetic of Robert Bresson, who thus makes most visible the face of film in what he calls “cinematography,” as opposed to scene and actor oriented cinema.
Pipolo, in his important book on Bresson, remarks “the actor unavoidably disrupts the rapport,” the integral intimacy revealed as the film, the actor “does not just occupy the image, but dominates it, often rendering other features irrelevant or invisible” (19). The film performs, not just the actors: “The actor is one instrument, along with framing, lighting, editing, and sounds, and it is usually these elements that displace the most dramatic ‘actorly’ scenes” (19). The potential for things not only to become personified by the camera’s attention and framing, but for things to become expressive, is a potential in all film, but Bresson highlights this possibility into an aesthetic.
Paul Schrader analyzes the focal tensions that follow from Dreyer’s oblique camera orientation in scenes like that in which Joan pulls away from a guard, not visible except as a vertical line on the edge of the frame. The effect is, as Schrader claims, to break the unity of space. Something is happening in the space beyond what we see, but that space is visually implied. Joan moves away and against what is not fully visible to us. But this disunity of visible space is still unified in our seeing through the film’s frame. We need to find a focal unity amidst the violent perspectival shifts of the camera. These shiftings are held in a tense unity by the frame of our seeing. That frame of film and our seeing makes a whole that is coherent in its limitations, across and through which the disunities of space and emotion play across. Such a unity matches the unity of Joan’s face, played with demented despair by Renée Jeanne Falconetti, her face a landscape of passions and tensions, between her human situation and her divine calling, between her suffering and her commitment to that suffering. There exists a kind of correlative mimicry between Falconetti’s facial expressions and the expressive unity of the film’s frames, tense as they are with extremes of shadow, cuts, and angles of view.
Both Dreyer and Bresson, united by a similar stately pace of action and cuts (especially Bresson in his later films), expose and make expressive this face in different ways. Dreyer relies on mise-en-scene like units that embody feelings and possibilities. Bresson seldom relies on mise-en-scene, instead building overlapping continuities producing a kind of narrative momentum. But in both cases, they are masters of making visible the face of film, in ways that are analogous to the faces they attend to with such care within their films.
Bresson and Dreyer make explicit what all film does: stages a kind of ritualized face to face confrontation, where the coherence of a face shifting as a whole in various meaningful expressions is also the surface of the film as a film, as shots in which objects and people fit into a single plane of light that is expressive as a whole, to which we look and react.
The film in which I am absorbed and to which I react becomes my caricature and my surrogate—animate while I am still. The film becomes a song written by someone else, to which I react as if it were my song. When I sing a song, taking up the “I" in the lyrics as my own, voicing the tune in my singing, then in my performance my voice has been simplified into that song. Singing a song is a kind of mimicry. If I cry, however, as I hear someone else sing the song, then my emotions have been prompted by the song, but not as a simple effect. I had to understand the song, relate to it, feel it, and in so doing I focus myself into its emotional valence.
That song not only prompts my crying, it describes it—for me; I can say "that is the song that makes me cry”—but as I listen and cry the song describes my reaction, as well as prompts it. I say: “That song describes how I feel.” You might say that I supply the emotions that the song provokes; and that is right. Any emotions prompted and caused by a song or a film with which I have no personal connection are extravagant and excessive. Without the song or film I would not have felt what I did, thought and reacted as I did. Given the excessive quality of my emotional response (since I have no personal connection; any emotion I feel prompted by can seem excessive or under motivated, gratuitous or even sentimental), and given the stable and repeatable (and non-interactive) quality of the song or film, after the fact, in later years, the song or film can seem a symbol for what I felt before. I say to the film: “You look like I feel.” Songs and films describe the emotions they provoke.
Thus, we can be described, and powerfully, by what does not describe us ahead of time, by what we simply find ourselves correlated with by intensity, attention, and reaction—relative to the pattern of changes that force our varied responses. We can be described by what is unresponsive to us; in our responses to it, we match our reactions to what invokes them, or provokes them—the film as a proximate cause.
The provocation and claim a film can have on us need not be founded in agreement with it; we can react and become correlated and simplified by a film we resist—as long as we remain absorbed. I can see a film as an attempt to negate me. I feel this about Bresson’s Au hasard Balthasar. The film binds a religious sensibility together with the feeling of suffering. The donkey, Balthasar, who is a target for our compassion and pathos, because he is ill-treated and suffers, comes to figure Christ, the suffering servant. But I bridle at the simplification that reduces Christ, who is also God and who chooses his suffering out love for us, to a passive target of abuse. I resist the resignation that attends seeing Balthasar as embodying our suffering, our human condition and our need for salvation, since we bear responsibilities for ourselves that Balthazar cannot. But in my reaction against this film, I am acknowledging its overwhelming power to reveal and even assert a religious sensibility against which I react. The film absorbs me; I cannot be passive, and so the film has the force of a necessary challenge to me. It is a mark of Bresson’s brilliance and my own need. I describe my reaction to the film by describing the film: I need and use the film to describe myself. But in a real sense my reaction to the film already does this, hence the film describes me because I cannot help but react to its images with which my feelings correlate: I mirror it through resistance, maybe even negation.
Conclusion
If we face the face of a film and let it speak for us, find that its expressions generate our own, then the film is both proximate cause and symbol of those reactions. I reflect the film, it does not, as Thomson imagines, reflect me; it becomes expressive in ways that I can match in some way, match not in what my expressions mean, but in my reacting to its expressiveness (which is not to me). By simplifying myself, or rather by finding myself simplified by the film, it becomes a description of my description—not a representation of that, since its content could be quite other than me.
Film is not a mirror of us; we mirror the film; we are quiet before it, and if we are absorbed in the film, then we enter into the pattern of time offered by it, and simplify ourselves before the film’s complexity; the film is indifferent to us, but we are not indifferent to it. Our reactions are both provoked by the film and correlate with its scenes. This combination of cause and correlation reveals our aesthetic relationship with the film; films relate to us as causes and symbols—both cause and symbol. It is not that my face and the film resemble each other, but rather that they are systematically related—correlated and caused—and thus each figures the other: my face figures the film and the film figures my face.
We have an analogical relationship with film; or rather our relationship with film describes an analogical structure. What that means, as I have said, for example, is that my face can tell the story of the film and the film can tell the story of my face.
The event that produces an effect also stands in (symbolizes) for that effect and that experience. This is the structure of our relationship with art; or rather this is what art is revealed to be.
Art happens when cause and correlation mutually reinforce each other—and feel necessary. The intimacy of film happens when we find that the film we watch describes us, traces us through mutually reinforcing cause and correlation, and we mirror it and for a moment we are exposed, revealed, expressed.
Whatever might be sublime in a film or through films—it will be through this special intimacy. Film is the aesthetic arena of intimate beauty and maybe of the intimate sublime.
Bibliography
Schrader, Paul. The Transcendental Style in Film. NY: Da Capo P, 1988.
Thomson, David, The Big Screen. NY: FSG, 2012.
Pipolo, Tony. Robert Bresson: A Passion for Film. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2000.
Whal, Jan. Carl Theodore Dreyer and Ordet; My Summer with the Danish Filmmaker. Lexington: UP of Kentucky, 2012.
