Cinematic Belief

Abstract

Given the so-called “crisis” in film theory, the digital mutations of the medium, and the renewed interest in historicism, cinephilia, and film philosophy, André Bazin's thought appears ripe for retrieval and renewal. Indeed, his role in the renaissance of philosophical film theory, I argue, is less epistemological and ontological than moral and aesthetic. It is a quest to explore the revelatory possibilities of cinematic images; not only their power to reveal reality under a multiplicity of aspects but to satisfy our desire for myth – to allow an aesthetic overcoming of the limits of consciousness and memory. The question I wish to explore is whether cinema has the power to restore our belief in reality, in the worlds that film can reveal, in the experience that it can capture and transfigure. My case study for exploring this question, the question of belief in cinema or what we could call a Bazinian cinephilia, will be Terrence Malick's The Tree of Life (2011); a film whose sublime aesthetics and unorthodox religiosity has provoked polarised critical responses, but whose remarkable ambition is to create a mythology – personal, historical, and cosmological – capable of reanimating belief in cinema and in the world.

Keywords:

• Bazin
• Malick
• cinephilia
• film-philosophy
• belief

Notes

Notes

The Australian Research Council (ARC) Discovery Project scheme (DP1092889) supported the author's research for this essay. The views expressed herein are those of the author and are not necessarily those of the ARC.

1 Deleuze, Cinema 2 172.

2 Bazin, “Theatre and Film (2)” 197.

3 Idem, “Cinema and Theology” 61.

4 As Joubert-Laurencin remarks, “[f]ew intellectuals have suffered a more difficult, contorted, and contradictory reception than has Bazin in his native France these past fifty years” (Andrew and Joubert-Laurencin xiii). This difficult reception is echoed in the anglophone world, as Hunter Vaughan observes: “Bazin has received one of the most systematic drubbings in twentieth-century cultural studies” (100).

5 See Younger, “Re-thinking Bazin.” See also Carroll; Henderson, “Two Types of Film Theory”; Macbean; and Michelson.

6 See the critiques of Bazin by Carroll; Henderson; Macbean; MacCabe; and Wollen's influential interpretation.

7 See Cavell 16, 20, 21, 39, 166; and Deleuze, Cinema 1 16, 24. Compare Cavell's remark: “Why are movies important? I take it for granted that in various obvious senses they are. That this can be taken for granted is the first fact I pose for consideration; it is, or was, a distinctive fact about movies” (4). I discuss this issue further in Sinnerbrink 90–116.

8 See Cavell 16–41, 60–73; and Deleuze, Cinema 1 1–12, 58–72, 201–19.

9 See Sinnerbrink 7–8.

10 Crouse, “Because we need him now: re-enchanting film studies through Bazin.” See also the recent essay collection Opening Bazin, edited by Dudley Andrew and Hervé Joubert-Laurencin; the 2007 Bazin special issue of Film International edited by Jeffrey Crouse; Ivone Margulies’ edited volume Rites of Realism; Philip Rosen's Change Mummified; Daniel Morgan's “Rethinking Bazin”; William Rothman's “Bazin as Cavellian Realist”; and Richard Rushton's The Reality of Film 42–78. Christian Keathley has explored the relationship between Bazin and cinephilia (see his Cinephilia and History) while Prakash Younger has retrieved Bazin as an exemplar of “cinephilosophy” or film philosophy.

11 See Carroll 108–09.

12 Mournier's Christian personalism was an important influence on Bazin, in particular the valorisation of individual moral autonomy, creative freedom, and social responsibility against the abstract universalism, impersonal institutions, and depersonalisation wrought by capitalism. See Mournier.

13 See Andrew, André Bazin.

14 As Colin MacCabe remarks: “Bazin's Catholic humanism and realist aesthetic had banished him from the theoretical reading lists of the 1960s and 1970s” (75).

15 Carroll, for example, sharply distinguishes criticism from theory, remarking that Bazin's astuteness as a critic makes up for his weakness as a theorist: “What fails as theory may excel as criticism” (171).

16 Bazin, “Ontology of the Photographic Image” 4.

17 Ibid. 8.

18 Sartre makes a similar point in The Imaginary.

19 Rosen (“Belief in Bazin” 107ff.) makes the point that Hugh Gray's translation of the term croyance as “faith” rather than “belief” in key texts has obscured the importance of belief while giving Bazin's essays an overly “religious” tone.

20 Dudley Andrew has challenged the received view over many decades. See his André Bazin and “A Film Aesthetic to Discover.”

21 See Morgan.

22 Ibid. 445.

23 Bazin, “William Wyler” 52.

24. Cavell 16–17. See Morgan 451.

25. See Bazin's essays “De Sica” and “In Defence of Rossellini.” Against the standard reading, Morgan (451) makes the point that Bazin's ongoing dissatisfaction with his various accounts of the ontology of the image is evident in his recurrent use of metaphors to capture film's relationship with reality (as mummy, mould, death mask, mirror, equivalent, substitute, and asymptote).

26. Morgan 463ff.

27. Ibid. 461. The internal Bazin quotation is from Bazin's Jean Renoir 84.

28. Morgan 463.

29. Bazin, “Ontology” 6.

30. Morgan 447ff.

31. See Wollen, Doane, and Mulvey for differing examples of this approach. Wollen presents an “indexical” reading of Bazin via Peirce, Doane emphasises the capturing of contingency, whereas Mulvey takes up the relationship between Bazin, Freud, and Barthes's Camera Lucida. See Gunning for a recent critique of the index argument.

32. As Bazin himself will claim: “There is an ontological identity between the object and its photographic image” (“In Defence of Rossellini” 98).

33. Bazin, “Ontology” 8.

34. See Scruton; and Walton.

35. Bazin, “Ontology” 8.

36. Bazin seems to suggest that the image reveals the “universal” in the particular, the coincidence of shared aesthetic meaning and sensuous particularity.

37. Bazin, “Ontology” 5–6.

38. See Moore for a fascinating discussion of cinema as modern magic or technological phantasmagoria.

39. Bazin, “Ontology” 3.

40. For discussions of death and loss in Bazin's writings see Smith; and Oeler.

41. Morgan 469ff. See also Rothman.

42. See Morgan; Rothman; and Rushton 44–78.

43. For an interesting discussion of time in Bazin see Carruthers.

44. Bazin, “Ontology” 9.

45. Ibid.

46. Crouse (9) praises this as “the most jaw-dropping idea I have ever encountered in film studies.”

47. Cf.

The crucial difference between historical and mythic time interpretation is related to the model used for comprehending temporality. Historical time is linear, continuous, and is composed of unique events, but mythical time is cyclical and repetitive. The latter encompasses and unites two temporal dimensions: the original time and the present. (Pentikainen 235)

48 See Allen (190):

Mythic time is sacred time, mythic history is sacred history … mythic space is sacred space … In Eliade's interpretation of the nature, structure, function and meaning of myth, mythic believers actually become contemporaneous with the supernatural beings and other sacred realities described in their myths.

Many aspects of this mythic mode of presentation and experience will also be apparent in Malick's The Tree of Life.

49 Cf. Cavell:

The idea of and wish for the world re-created in its own image was satisfied at last by cinema. Bazin calls this the myth of total cinema … What is cinema's way of satisfying the myth? Automatically, we said … It means satisfying it without my having to do anything, satisfying it by wishing. In a word, magically. (39)

50 See Rosen, Change 29.

51 Morgan 452.

52 See Bill Nichols’ criticism that Bazin's theory of film presents us with: “[a] dual and perhaps contradictory approach combining transcendent spiritualism and sociology” (151).

53 Crouse 9.

54 Bazin, “Diary of a Country Priest and the Robert Bresson Style” 150.

55 Quoted from Malick's press release on the film before its public release.

56 Cf. the famous voiceovers in The Thin Red Line: “Maybe all men got one big soul where everybody's a part of. All faces are the same man, one big self. Everyone looking for salvation by himself. Each like a coal drawn from the fire” (Witt). “Who were you that I lived with, walked with? The brother, the friend? Strife and love, darkness and light – are they the workings of one mind, features of the same face? Oh my soul. Let me be in you now. Look out through my eyes. Look out at the things you made. All things shining” (Train). The phrase “All things shining” comes from James Jones's war novel The Thin Red Line, upon which the Malick film is (loosely) based. The phrase “one big soul” recalls Emerson's “over-soul,” that which unites men, nature, and God. See Emerson.

57 See my discussion of The New World in Sinnerbrink. Richard Neer gives a finely nuanced interpretation of the film that takes issue with the imposition of philosophical readings that do violence to the film's aesthetic and cinematic complexity.

58 Jones 26.

59 Ibid.

60 Ibid. 24. Scott Foundas asks why Malick's The Tree of Life received such a hostile response at Cannes, whereas Apichatpong Weerasethakul's 2010 Palme d’Or winning Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives, “another meditative film about nature, death, and possible afterlives,” did not. Foundas 61.

61 See Ebert.

62 Taubin 57.

63 Most of the composers used in this sequence are not “classical” but contemporary (Zbigniew Preisner, Giya Kancheli, John Tavener, and Mother Tekla). The sequence concludes with the “Domine Jesu Christe” movement from Berlioz's Grande messes des morts (or Requiem) Opus 5 (1837).

64 While acknowledging the link between Malick and neo-Platonist philosophers such as Johannes Scotus Eriugena – in particular his theophanic metaphysics of light as the expression of divine life (“all things are lights”) – Jones dismisses the description of The Tree of Life as a “religious” film in the sense of one adhering to Christian doctrine. It is more a cross, he claims, between “Eriugena's vision of life of earth and pre-orthodox Buddhism,” a work fixated not on the afterlife but “on the ‘glory’ of this life” (26).

65 As Peter Bradshaw remarks: “[p]eople would repeatedly reproach me for my own laudatory notice; this film, they said, was pretentious, boring and – most culpably of all – Christian. Didn’t I realise, they asked, that Malick was a Christian?”

66 See Sterritt for an “aestheticist” reading of the film that takes issue with Malick's alleged “theodicy.” Jones acknowledges the film's religiosity, as mentioned above, but rejects the attribution of a Christian meaning to the film. Pfeifer hedges on the question of religiosity, contrasting two contrary perspectives that the film attempts (with difficulty) to reconcile: that of the idealist, for whom The Tree of Life is an ineffable aesthetic and emotional revelation of beauty and spiritual truth; and that of the analyst, for whom the film is a self-reflexive cinematic meditation on memory, childhood, and history.

67 Bazin, “Cinema and Theology” 64.

68 See Otto. Otto popularised the concept of the numinous (from the Latin, numen), which was taken up by Carl Jung, C.S. Lewis, and in the religious studies of Mircea Eliade. It describes a shattering encounter with a transcendent dimension beyond ordinary experience (the sacred as “wholly other”) that resists description and comprehension. As a religious experience it is characterised both by a sense of terror (a “fear and trembling” or mysterium tremendum) eliciting dread or anxiety, as well as rapture or fascination evoking silent awe or wonder.

69 In this category we might include films such as Kubrick's 2001, Tarkovsky's Solaris (1972) and Stalker (1979), Kieślowski's The Double Life of Veronique (1993), Apichatpong Weerasethakul's Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall his Past Lives (2010), and Béla Tarr's The Turin Horse (2011).

70 The Tree of Life is mentioned in the Book of Genesis, after Adam and Eve eat the forbidden fruit of the Tree of Knowledge and hence are cast out of the Garden of Eden: “And the LORD God said, Behold, the man is become as one of us, to know good and evil; and now, lest he put forth his hand, and take also of the tree of life, and eat, and live forever” (Genesis 3.22, King James edition). The film evokes this quest to retrieve the fruit of the Tree of Life (eternal life), but within the limits of our natural and historical dwelling.

71 See Darwin's The Origin of Species (1859) chapter IV “Character of Natural Selection,” sub-section on “Divergence of Character.”

72 Steven Rybin points out that Malick has composed the story of Jack's childhood through flashbacks that go well beyond what the adult Jack could remember (or what the young Jack could have experienced directly), thus exposing and exploring the inherent ambiguity of the flashback as a way of communicating recollections of the past in a manner that overflows individual memory. In this way, The Tree of Life could be read, Rybin argues, as “a philosophical inquiry into the very nature of the flashback as a source of meaning in film” (176).

73 Thomas Wilfred was an American-Danish artist who was a pioneer in creating “Lumia” images or visual music; works of art composed of light, colour, and form, using the colour organ or “Clavilux.”

74 Jones 24–26.

75 A point well made by Steven Rybin 172. Rybin also notes that, unlike Thomas à Kempis, “Malick is ultimately concerned to show us how both the ethereally spiritual and the brutally natural are intertwined.” See also McAteer's illuminating discussion of the theology informing the Way of Nature/Way of Grace duality in The Tree of Life.

76 One intrepid viewer has shown that the Western Union telegram Mrs O’Brien receives states that her son's death took place in Mexico, on 6 February 1968, in an automobile accident (rather than by committing suicide, as Malick's brother Larry did while living in Spain and studying guitar under Andrés Segovia). See The Niles Files.

77 Much of this footage is taken from a project Malick had conceived in the twenty-year gap between Days of Heaven and The Thin Red Line, an experimental documentary piece on the origin of life in the universe entitled “Q.” Malick is reportedly working on a six-hour version of The Tree of Life that includes more extensive use of this material as well as much more narrative material depicting Jack's childhood, adolescence, and young adulthood.

78 See Pfeifer.

79 Crouse 9. Crouse also points out (20) the significance of Bergson's Creative Evolution for Teilhard's ideas concerning the reconciliation of science and theology.

80 Crouse 9. See Teilhard's posthumously published The Phenomenon of Man, which details the Darwinian evolutionary development of life and the Lamarckian or convergent evolutionary development of culture towards a unified field of consciousness (God).

81 Deleuze (Cinema 2 215) takes up the term “noosphere” in discussing the relation between thought and cinema; the noosphere is formed by the circulation of cinematic “noosigns” – expressing topological, probabilistic, and irrational cuts/connections – that together compose a new image of thought. The noosign, for its part, is defined as “an image which goes beyond itself towards something that can only be thought” (Cinema 2 335). Deleuze takes the Teilhardian noosphere in a materialist direction, regrounding its Bergsonian version of “creative evolution” via the immanent becoming of nature, removing its spiritualist dimensions of transcendence and thus blocking Teilhard's teleological naturalist theology.

82 Andrew, André Bazin 66–67; qtd in Crouse 10.

83 “In the world of cinema one must have the love of a De Sica for creation itself” (Bazin, “De Sica” 76).