Gnosticism in the Cinema

The article on gnostic films is out: Christianity & Society, Vol. XVIII, No.1, April 2008.

http://www.kuyper.org/main/uploads/volume_18_no_1.pdf - p. 48

This article is more or less background to several posts here. It is, however, more about gnosticism than film. The movies are examples of the ideas discussed. I wanted to get past the empty way the label “gnostic” is thrown around, often really meaning “esoteric”, “neoplatonic”, or “I hate this guy, so I will call him a name.”

Back to movies

I hope to get back to movies soon, having spent some months in genealogical and family history research, where I found far more than I expected. Also I have been busy with photo restoration.  I keep thinking I should write something about A Price Above Rubies (Boaz Yakin, 1998), which stikes as a much more revealing film than its creators probably intended.

Saved! and Jesus Camp essay.

The essay on Saved! and Jesus Camp, updated from the earlier web site are in Christianity & Society Vol. 17, No. 2 (Winter 2007)

http://www.kuyper.org/main/publish/journal.shtml#118

Goya en Burdeos

Goya en Burdeos (1999), written and directed by Carlos Saura, also uses the imagery from Kubrick’s 2001. This is all the more striking in that throughout the movie the scenes not only display his paintings, and show the creation of his paintings in context, but they sometimes come alive as tableuxs to become scenes. Yet for the death of Goya the available material would have been the early (178 St. Francis Borja at the Deathbed of an Impenitent, and this is not what Saura wanted.

Instead we find Adam’s gesture copied by Kubrick from the Sistine ceiling. (See the image in the September 3 post below.)

Goya says: “My life has gone by like a gust of wind. I’ve forgotten how I was as a child, I’ve forgotten how I was as a youth, and now, Who am I now?”

He raises his hand further into the light and uses it to cast a shadow, and draw a spiral around his own face with the shadow of his finger. Spirals recur throughout the film. In fact, from here there is a cut to a shot up a spiral staircase down which is daughter runs to come to him.

Where in 2001 and in Soderbergh’s Solaris the finger in the image points to a creator/savior figure, here Goya designates himself, but with an enigmatic spiral movement that fits the “Who am I now?”

Next, where the monolith in Kubrick’s image would be, at the foot of the bed, a figure appears off camera and casts a shadow over the bed and over Goya. We know who this figure is because in a earlier scene the figure walked out of a painting and toward Goya’s bed, and Goya addressed it as Death.

At this point Saura does allow himself a quotation from The Impenitent. (Notice the similar position of the right arm, and the two pillows with frills around them) But by inserting it into images from Kubrick, and other insertions, he has altered the meaning. Where the demons appear in The Impenitent, there is now Goya’s daughter and her shadow, and St. Francis Borja has become Death.

Saura’s film then disolves to an empty white bed, similar to the 2001 fetus on the bed shot, but without the fetus, and then to a scene of birth, where a camera enters the room from falling show outside through a window to this view:

This is the last shot in the film, and is parallel to the star child image in Kubrick’s.

Saura’s film closes with a card quoting Andre Malraux: “After Goya modern painting begins.” Saura, then, is pointing to the birth of something new. With the death of Goya comes a discontinuity and modern painting appears.

The meaning of artistic references in 2001 and Solaris

Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey (196 famously ends with the astronaut Dave pointing toward an alien monolith using the gesture with which Adam reaches toward God on the Sistine chapel ceiling in the portrait of creation. The aliens who sent the monolith, then, are man’s creators through their interference with the evolutionary process and by recreating man free of his bodily limitations at the end of the film.

 

 

Andrei Tarkovsky decided to reply to this in his Solyaris (1972), ending with an image of human reconciliation taken from Rembrandt’s The return of the prodigal son. (This painting is in The Hermitage in St. Petersburg). The difference is in the diagnosis of man’s problem and the direction of its solution. Kubrick is interested in the disparity between man’s nature and his aspirations. Since the problem is in his being (his physical constitution) what he needs as a re-creation on a better model. Tarkovsky starts with man’s moral brokenness, which precedes the problems of his physical nature, though they are related. The physical context, which Kubrick saw as the problem, must be restored before man can approach a moral reconciliation.

 

Steven Soderbergh’s Solaris (2002) returns to Kubrick’s image from 2001. Why is that?

In this picture the psychologist Chris Kelvin, sent to fix the failed mission at a space station orbiting the planet Solaris, reaches out to the hominid created by the planet. By this time in the film these hominids are seen as extensions of the planet’s consciousness, with a particular mission to man, making them analogous to the alien monoliths in 2001. These hominids, patterned on human memories, have a self-identity, but it is only as complete at the available memories of them seen from the outside viewers who remember them.

The images in 2001 and Solyaris occur at the end of these films. Soderbergh, however, uses his a little earlier, when the space station is being absorbed into the planet. Then the real ending starts and it is there that the topic of reconciliation is taken up.

Kelvin seems to have returned to earth but it turns out that he is a hominid replica of his original self (which presumably was not able to survive physically on Solaris with the destruction of the space station). The replica of his dead wife, which Solaris had first created on the space station, also appears. He asks her:

“Are we alive?”

To which she answers:

“We don’t have to think like that any more. Everything we have done is forgiven. Everything.”

Here, then, is the theme of forgiveness and reconciliation. But it is only presented when the two can relate as replica to replica. These characters have been recreated, on analogy with 2001, with new bodies for which the problem of mortality is solved. Free of mortality, the picture suggests, there is an easing of the human predicament. The existential crisis is lessened, and with it the problems of meaning and of guilt.

Soderbergh, then, sides with Kubrick. Man’s problem is not in the first place moral and relational, but a problem with his physical nature, which cannot support the aspirations of his mental or psychological nature. When these inner states are made to survive in an indestructible body and environment, sustained by the godlike planet Solaris, man’s problem is eased, if not resolved.

The incoherencies in this are: 1) Is this really Cris Kelvin and his wife, or are they dead with their original bodies, and what the planet has created merely models replicating them? 2) If we don’t “have to think like that any more”, that is, according to the ideas of life and its purpose as they were understood in the natural bodies, what else changes? Is there a place for human purposes, or would they go away with the human bodies and human situations? 3) What can it mean that everything is forgiven? Why does this change of being equate to forgiveness? Who forgave whom? Why does she say “is forgiven” as though a third party did it (the planet Solaris acting in the role of God)? Doesn’t she really mean that the old scores are irrelevant now?

 

El Gnosticismo en el Cine

The Gnosticism in the Cinema essay is now available in Spanish. El Gnosticismo en el Cine PDF (432 k). This is an expansion of the essay that was on the old web site. The English version is supposed to appear this fall in Christianity & Society. The screen shots illustrating the points are only in this online version.

This is an attempt to define and illustrate modern gnosticism, distinguishing it from the ancient type, using movies to bring out the characteristics of gnosticism. It is only secondarily a film essay. I do point to certain incoherencies in gnosticism, which become a problem for movies that seek to express the gnostic vision.

The Round Table

The Biblical Horizons conference has announced that they will be studying Eric Rohmer’s Percival this year. Now that science fiction has been mined out ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pak_Protector ), the Federal Vision theology is turning to medieval romances about the Holy Grail.

As an antidote, try watching Bresson’s Lancelot du Lac (1974), which deromanticizes this material.

Art As Religion

This week I read Peter J. Bailey’s The Reluctant Film Art of Woody Allen. His theme is the way Allen plays off art against life throughout his films, with a constant attack on the idea that art is more important than living, or that art redeems life. Allen, being an artist known for sacrificing personal relationships to his film work, is in a conflicted position himself on this.

Is this topic central to the themes of the films in Bailey’s book just because it is Bailey’s chosen topic to study (instead of, say, gender relationships in Allen’s films)? Or is the topic really the central recurring theme of Allen’s work? Perhaps we need to look at it another way. In the world of Allen’s films, largely the world of New York intellectuals, or the world as seen by them, art plays a role much like that which religion does for more normal people. Art is expected to provide meaning to existence, the values to guide choices, and a fullness of living that is only ever demanded of it by a few elite minorities throughout history.

It is inviting, therefore, to consider whether Allen’s films could be translated for a different broader audience by replacing art with religion and then using the same plots and personal crises. In how many films would this work, and how well? It would make for very strange movies in that movies typically don’t want to delve into the personal authority of religion. For one thing, there is no common religion to which all the film audience potentially can respond. For another, movie people are a self selected group that largely ignores religion. When it does get into a movie religion usually is treated in a weird way. The result is that Bailey’s book helps us to image a type of film does not exist, but that theoretically has a broad unexplored cinematic territory open to it.

But who could relate to such films? In the 19th century, maybe, there were intellectuals questioning the integrative value of religion–in Europe in the 18th century. Today one would have to consciously choose to take up religion as a integrative value system. It is not a background assumption that keeps intruding into life and has to be examined. How odd, then, that art could attain that status for intellectuals, to the point that someone would build a film career on questioning it.

Harvey

I finished reading James Harvey’s Romantic Comedy In Hollywood From Lubitsch To Sturges. It’s about 700 pages. It seems a worthwhile exercise, as the book really is about film, and therefore teaches how to observe a film closely. Harvey also covers the same movies from different perspectives. He has chapters about a eras, others about directors, and others about actors. The same films come up several times, but with a different focus.

At the same time, I felt that there was something missing. There was no good discussion of the culture of the audience and how this conditioned the possibilities of movies. When a European director, such as Lubitsch, began to work in America, there must have been a big change in how audiences responded to his films.

More on Carlos

Only yesterday I uploaded a review of two films, from the old website, dealing with the terrorist Carlos, and I find that today he is back in the news. According to the Associated Press a French judge has “wrapped up 20 years of investigations into Ramirez’ possible role in the 1982-83 attacks”, which were a train bombing that killed five people, a car bomb in from the the offices of the Arab newspaper Al-Watan which killed another person, and then two more train bombings that killed two and three additional people.