Cinema and The Sublime

Poetics Today
Cinema of the Sublime: Theorizing the Ineable
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.
Published by Duke University Press

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30 Poetics Today 25:1
contained by a predetermined goal. This aesthetic response may contribute to an

open-ended ethical self-fashioning and may protect critical discourse from itself by
preventing the standardization of cultural experience.
1. Cinemas Shadow: Realism and Criticism
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]
Upon witnessing the rst screening of the Lumire brothers actualities

including LArriv dun train en gareat the Nizhny Nogorod Fair, Maxim
Gorky (1972 [1896]: 3) declared that he had just visited, or had visited upon
him, the kingdom of shadows. Considering the eventual socialist-realist
leanings of its source, this densely suggestive phrase can most obviously be
decoded along predictable political lines. While cinema may never have
seemed more an instance of modern progress than at its debut, Gorky links
it to the premodern by associating lm with a kingdom. Particularly in a
Russian context, autocracy implies stasis, terror, and inequity. The linkage
of a kingdom of shadows and lm works because of the ambivalence of
the term representation. In place of representative governance, and in com-
pensation for the arbitrariness of its own privilege, autocracy oers power-
ful aesthetic representations of its own legitimacy. Regalia, ritual, and tra-
dition coordinate to produce at least the illusion of popular consent to
the autocrats identication with the state. Gorky suggests that cinemas
mimetic prowess similarly substitutes bewitching representational eects
for an engagement with, for him, the most important dimension of repre-
sentationnamely, progressive political change. He grudgingly acknowl-
edges the lms powers of display, the ways in which animate life visually
recorded and represented may produce overwhelming aective experiences
in novice viewers. The choice of the second person you in his text seems
both to base his analysis on personal experience and to generalize it as
typical. The intimacy of his language and the deliberate precision of his
pacing suggest someone struggling to wake from a nightmare so powerful
that it must by necessity be universal. But rather than interpreting these
new technical and textual capacities as markers of progressof mimetic
accomplishment or aesthetic immediacyhe sees them as so much royal
plumage.
According to Tom Gunning (1999 [1989]: 818), accounts of initial encoun-

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Pence Cinema of the Sublime: Theorizing the Ineable 31
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.

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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-

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ence and religion, reecting the inadequacy of either orientation to satisfy

by itself all of our concerns.
The current dominance of an orientation toward social and historical
reality is obvious in cinema studies. Whether in the tradition of German
Kulturkritik from which Benjamin emerges (as with Anton Kaes [1989] or
Miriam Hansen [1991]), or in the movements of Althusserian Marxism and
Lacanian psychoanalysis that accompanied lm studies institutionaliza-
tion in the 1970s and 1980s (for example, Christian Metz [1982] or Mary
Ann Doane [1987]), or in what might be understood as cinema studies dis-
persal into the more freewheeling explorations of power and identity in con-
temporary cultural studies (a diverse array including such gures as Anne
Friedberg [1993] and Bell Hooks [2000 (1992)]), a critical perspective skep-
tical of the social relations and mentalities implied by cinematic conven-
tions aligns itself with those aspects of cinema that appear most modern
and radical. A pivotal institution of technological modernity, cinema may
uniquely bridge the divides between subjective and collective experience:
the theater provides opportunities to restage and revise primal fantasies of
identity while simultaneously oering a metaphoric crucible for produc-
ing a secular public built upon industrial modes of production and bound
together by mass media. Therefore, at least potentially, through a reexive
complication of its own conventions, lm can supposedly reveal truths that
everyday convention prevents our perceiving. Once revealed, these truths
are imagined to be the basis for some form of social action.
This iconoclastic approach to lm study, which Richard Dyer (1998:
6) calls sociological-ideological, shares many key features with its object
of skeptical study. That is, the lm industry and sociological-ideological
criticism share an emphasis on lms ability to reveal and remake a thor-
oughly human-centered world. When lm and lm viewing fail at these
projects, critics have found the cause in the mediums putative anity,
whether historically contingent or inherent to the medium, with structures
of fantasy and mystication. This identication of cinema with phantas-
mic social or psychic regressions was carried to its rigorous conclusion by
gures like Jean-Louis Comolli and Jean Narboni (1976 [1969]) and Jean-
Louis Baudry (1985 [1970]). While the array of critics mentioned earlier
rarely goes so far as Baudry in claiming that the cinematic apparatus, by
denition, is regressively ideological, the assumption remains that cinemas
transformative potential is more than matched by a countervailing conser-
vatism. Although theorists like Anthony Giddens (1979) have demonstrated
the problems with critical pretensions to scientic certainty, something like
ideology critique remains the best descriptor of the sort of work that domi-
nates cinema conferences and journals. In the current critical paradigm,

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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

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is uncannily familiar and dierent, reecting and exceeding the perspective

for which it is seemingly organized.
Gorkys default to imaginary political violence is not entirely convinc-
ing. That political violence was anything but imaginary for Gorkywhose
own death was likely a political assassinationdoes not mitigate his over-
hasty ight from an aesthetic engagement that seemed to call for a mode
of interpretation other than, or additional to, social allegory. (In much the
same way, one might argue, Gorkys perspicuous political analyses cannot
justify the excessive prescriptivism of socialist-realist doctrine.) His under-
lying anxiety about the relationship between realism and representation,
a spiraling questioning that doubts not only the latter but also the former,
has remained a concern throughout cinemas history. Indeed, one might
argue that a signicant factor in cinemas persistence as a unique medium,
with concerns of form and content sucient to animate innovation, are the
particular ways it permits this dialectic of realism and representation to
be manifestly explored. Cinema has not, then, solely delivered on critical
rationalitys desire for a greater and transformative purchase on historical
reality. Pace Benjamin, cinema has also ourished precisely because it pro-
vides a locus for exploring questions of meaning beyond the limits of empiri-
cism and rationality. In the words of Darrol Bryant (1982: 105), cinema
occupies a privileged position in modern technological culture [that] has
inherited the alchemical dreams of the past. Like the hermetic tradition to
which Bryant refers, lm mediates between technique and magic, between
science and religion. Far, then, from withering in the face of lm, the auratic
dimension of artworks found shelter in lm.
2. The Aura Is Dead. Long Live the Aura!
Suggestive of a supraordinary quality, of a nebulous emanation of grandeur

that surrounds the unique artwork with exceptional, cultic power, the aura
was famously consigned to oblivion by Benjamin. Technological reproduc-
ibility, he argued (1979 [1936]: 852), depletes the authority of the object,
which is vested both in its singularity and its identication with tradition.
According to Benjamin, lm appears to confound the categories by which
audiences have come to accept the conventions of theatrical performance
as plausibly mimetic. In theater, a clear distinction exists between percep-
tions of dramatic representations as primarily realistic or illusionary, since
the production is physically oriented toward the audiences perspective in
such a way that the play cannot immediately be detected as illusionary
(ibid.: 862). Likewise, the labor and mechanisms that produce theatrical
illusion are well known but hidden behind curtains, beneath traps, and so

Poetics Today
forth. In contrast, actual lm productions (i.e., shooting sets) oer no per-

spective from which any witness could reasonably ignore such extraneous
accessories (ibid.) as photographic, lighting, and audio equipment as well
as the proliferating presence of crew, cast, and others. The conventions that
produce the illusion of realism in lm are the result of postproduction tech-
niques. In the popular cinema, with which Benjamin is here concerned,
continuity editing illustrates such postproduction work. In this process, the
lm illusion that was impossible to perceive in isolation at the time and
place of production becomes manifestly visible to the precise extent that
every other trace of that scene of production is erased. Such techniques as
match on action editing, shot-reverse-shot sequencing, and extra-diegetic
music support codied structures of narrative causality and coherence in
order to convert the work of production into a naturalized product on the
screen. As a result, the equipment free aspect of reality represented in
lm has become the height of artice (ibid.). Cinemas seductive presen-
tation of the real, then, seems profoundly unreal: the sight of immediate
reality has become the [unattainable] blue ower in the land of technology
(ibid.; interpolation in the original).
The blaue Blume here connects with Novalissthe quintessential sym-
bol of romantic yearning for the unattainable (Sagarra and Skrine 1999:
96). Also implied in the longing that imbues this poignant image is desire
for more than unmediated reality, as if such an encounter would deliver
us to another dimension of being altogether. Novaliss Heinrich von Ofter-
dingen (1802) concerns both the sensory distractions of experience and inti-
mations of something beyond; in the end, the novel shuns completion
as a negation of continuity and eternity (Sagarra and Skrine 1999: 96).
Whether or not Benjamin acknowledges the persistence of a desire for
something more than an unmediated glimpse of reality, or the theological
weight such a desire carries within it in the tradition he deliberately cites, is
far from clear. This stubborn desire for something connected to continuity
and eternity, for something auratic, must be addressed.
Benjamin attempts to make good on lms lack, its patently false im-
pression of reality, by dialectically presenting this fact as progressive. The
analogy he employs here develops further the contrasts established between
theater and lm, two notoriously collaborative enterprises, by drawing
another comparison between painting and lm. On one side, representa-
tive of an earlier, cultic dispensation, is the art of painting, the painter as
singular creator and the magician as his or her role model. On the other
side, expressive of a modern moment, is the art of lm, the camera operator
as technician and the surgeon as his or her role model. Where contrasting
theater and lm also establishes a similarity between them as two collabora-

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tive enterprises, the comparison of painting and cinematography plays on

a connection between two practices (generally) of individuals. The focus on
subjective agency, in turn, evokes the analogies between the causal power
or creativity of humans and an originary causal power or creativity attribut-
able to a transcendent entity. As a technician, the cinematographer depends
on no such analogy.
According to Benjamin (1979 [1936]: 862), the magician heals by a lay-
ing on of hands, an extraordinary activity that maintains authoritative dis-
tance from reality even in direct human contact. Likewise, the painters art
is a direct and human handiwork that also preserves a proper, perspectival
distance from reality.The painter can thus produce a total picture, a view of
an organically unied image eld, invested with a unique aura. In contrast,
the surgeon heals by incision, radically diminishing the distance between
healer and patient, as the healer penetrates the patients bodily boundaries
via standardized technique rather than the channeling of healing power
exterior to the magician and the patients body. Likewise diminished is the
human dimension of the interaction, no longer characterized by the recip-
rocal touch of hand and body but imaginable, per Luc Durtain, as virtu-
ally a debate of steel with nearly uid tissue (ibid.: n. 14). As the surgeon
penetrates reality to refashion it, so does the camera operator, whose instru-
ments produce multiple, fragmentary images to be reassembled under a
new law (ibid.: 863). Benjamin suggests that this blurring of the distinction
between reality and technology, far from extending or further exciting any
desire for an auratic blue ower of unmediated reality, actually becomes an
end in itself. More problematically, he presents this combination of reality
and technology as an end to dialectical thinking.
For contemporary subjects, Benjamin (ibid.: 862) notes, the representa-
tion of reality by lm far outstrips painting in importance: since it oers,
precisely because of the thoroughgoing permeation of reality with mechani-
cal equipment, an aspect of reality which is free of all equipment. Fram-
ing a dimension of reality as free of technology would provide a unique,
even anachronistic, experience for modern subjects, living as they do in a
world increasingly saturated by equipment. Accomplishing this framing by
the most technological of means, on the other hand, would truly reect the
experiences of such subjects, making the experience, in Benjamins idiom,
progressive. The movement of his argument is dialectical, establishing a
problematic premise and discovering within it an opposite possibility that
incorporates the rst premise into a potentially positive reconciliation of
the two. However, it is not clear how or why this process eectively ceases
once Benjamin nds an outcome tting for his purposes. One might won-
der precisely how the deep longing implied in the desire for the blue ower

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of unmediated reality would be satised by this paradoxical, equipment-

driven presentation of an equipment-free reality. However, Benjamin (ibid.:
863) declares an end to such questioning because the paradox he has pre-
sented is what one is entitled to ask from a work of art. The authority
supporting this prescription is obscure. In any case, however, entitlement
need not animate all of the desires we bring to cinema. It seems equally
possible that a longing for an auratic blue ower could coexist, peacefully
or not, with this decisive secularism. On the one hand, the blue ower,
painting, and magic represent the ongoing traces of religious consciousness
and practice that continue after the Enlightenment, regardless of their loss
of unquestioned supremacy in organizing cultural life. On the other hand,
technology, cinema, and surgery represent the continuing power and pres-
tige of rationality in governing cultural life. Neither of these alternatives
singly seems to satisfy all the investments we may bring to aesthetic experi-
ences. Rather than arbitrarily arresting their dynamic relationship at one
or the other of these poles, as Benjamin does, we may imagine them as
inseparably connected, if only because each requires the other to provide
what it cannot. If an orientation toward artworks based on magic may not
be able to oer procedures of thought and interpretation that apply across
dierent aesthetic experiences, the methodical advantages of deliberative
reason in generating such protocols also comes at the expense of being able
to appreciate the singular, and potentially nonrational, dimensions of aes-
thetic desire and experience in certain situations.
3. Beyond Authority: Cinema and Spirituality
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

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of the literature we read goes untouched by our discourses, or is deconstructed,

historicized, sexualized, or made symptomatic of covert power relationships.
The negative hermeneutic of such reductive discourse has been thorough and
successful.
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)
Taylor notes the signicant challenges facing any eort to establish an e-

cacious discourse about such ineable disruptions of systematic thought.
Such disruptive events render referentiality problematic: another way of
phrasing the unconditioned, all-demanding, and ultimately unevadable
is as the unnameable. The nature of the disruption cannot t into predeter-
mined cognitive or rhetorical categories; if it did, it would represent either
another system of meaning as yet unlearned or an internal variant in sys-
tems currently in eect.Taylor is clear that what we encounter is a challenge
to all systemswhich is to say something external to organized mean-
ing as we understand it. Rather than give this encounter a name, which
tends to stabilize and organize identity, we may think of it as being with
a vector or trace, an indeterminate movement that slashes athwart the
more stable frameworks we operate through and within. Its energy derives,
to some extent, from this fact of being unknown and dynamic. This open-
endedness, in turn, makes any discourse oriented to the ineable suscep-
tible to universal parody (ibid.: 17).
Taylor proceeds to imagine a tough critical language (ibid.) attuned to
the demanding uncertainty of experiences of the ineable but nonetheless
cognizable and consequential in the more familiar registers of critical and
reective consciousness. Although he does not supply this language (prole-
gomenon seems to be the primary genre of contemporary writing on these
topics), Taylor (ibid.: 14) identies its purpose as untangling the relation
of the religious and the spiritual; or, better perhaps, the religious and the
ethical, with the spiritual some kind of linking category. This untangling
that Taylor hints at requires some explanation.
The distinction between the spiritual and the religious positions the latter
as a determinant, and the former as a more indeterminant, understanding
of the nature of transcendent or ontological truth. Mieke Bal (2001: 242)
makes a similar distinction, and more straightforwardly reveals the stakes,

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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

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family resemblance, as regards their presentations of novel and demanding

opportunities for thought and feeling.
4. Seeing without Knowing
In Towards a Religious Visuality of Film, S. Brent Plate (1998) echoes

Taylors location of the spiritual as a mediating term, one plausibly con-
necting a cognizable ethical realm to a suprarational realm of the ineable.
He also elaborates further on the analogy between spiritual and aesthetic
experience. Rather than focusing on the content of a lm or the inner life
of a believing character or viewer, a religious visuality of lm would oscil-
late in the between space, between language and image, between lm and
audience, between lm and world (ibid.: 30). The goal of this essay is to
analyze spirituality in cinema as such a mediating dynamic in something
like the hard language without dogma that Taylor calls for.
This special issues larger commitment to exploring the critical space
between thing and theory has features specic to my analysis of the ineable
in lm. Critical response to cinematic treatments of the spiritual tend to dis-
miss these eorts, albeit in two seemingly opposed ways. As James Knapp
and I have argued (2003), historicist approaches express criticisms gravita-
tion toward materialist and positivist (thing-centered) modes of thinking.
In this context, historicist critics will allegorize spiritual concerns as symp-
toms of more tangible issues of power and politics.When criticism oscillates
away from the thing, and toward the metacritical concerns that Knapp and
I have abbreviated as theory, spiritual lms fare little better but for rea-
sons specic to the history of cinema studies. This discipline emerged as
a legitimate academic specialization in tandem with a complex discourse
about the nature of lmic representation and spectatorial involvement.The
search for general principles of the mediumfor instance, in the work of
Christian Metz (1982) and Laura Mulvey (1986 [1975])emerged as the
most privileged practice within the eld. This concentration was accom-
panied by a tendency to prescribe the boundaries within which lm events
could sensibly occur; conventions of form and reception could be eectively
treated as more or less inexible laws. The ambition of exceeding custom-
ary parameters of perception and thought, which characterize some lms
interested in spirituality, clashes directly with this tendency toward pre-
scription. As historicist approaches reprocess the spiritual as the secular in
disguise, theoretical approaches reprocess the spiritual as an attempt to dis-
guise the mediums own inherent limitationsits inability to lead beyond
itself. Neither approach promotes an openness to the dierences from con-

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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

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former in ultimately relocating the signicance of the spiritual to secular

experience. Soft functionalism is still functionalism.That alternative model
equally risks promoting the spiritual as the quasi- or not-yet-known, since
the uncertainty encountered there is presumed to edify and communicate
by its nature. This presumption domesticates the spiritual even before it is
encountered.
Rather than abandoning this notion of the spiritual as the critical inter-
val between the ethical and the ineable, however, I prefer to strengthen it.3
The benets and attractions of seeing the spiritual as a potential resource for
ethical corrigibility, to borrow Alan Singers term, may be maintained if we
simultaneously insist upon a contrary notion: namely, that the spiritual may
strip away the categories we presume native to the ethical, even to under-
standing itself. In this sense, while being neither a mystical transparency nor
a worldly projection, the spiritual may hold out the promise of enrichment
or the danger of disorientation without any discernible purpose. The aes-
thetic generally, but the sublime more particularly, I shall argue, provides
the intermediate aective experiences that Plate outlines above as well as a
language for speculating about the consequences of the auratic dimensions
of cinema.
The unfashionable language of the argument so far may appear scandal-
ous. The real, spirituality, the ineable: what value can such terms
have in contemporary critical discourse, except as objects of scorn? My
task would be easier if I knew, or believed I knew, what these terms meant
exactly. But in that case, this essay, and the desire to reformulate our criti-
cal discourse so that it might remain open to the possibility that these terms
may have vital force in accounting for crucial aspects of aesthetic experi-
ence, would have no purpose, and its audience would be restricted to sharers
of the same creed. In any case, the awkwardness of the language of the inef-
fable comes not from any belatedness, a turning of the discourse back to the
vestiges of a mythic, pre-Enlightenment moment. Instead, the embarrass-
ment of this language resides in its continual reminder to critical thought
that its most fundamental questions have less been answered by universal
secularism and the triumph of reason than they have been evaded. Per-
haps it is our task to learn to abide with these ineluctable questions, to work
through embarrassingly portentous terms in order to understand how the
challenge to critical convention they provoke may ultimately strengthen
critical discourse, if only by protecting it from its own tendency to idolize
its own methods.
3. I owe the phrase critical interval, with its connotations of a structural relationship and
a temporal dynamic, to Merrick Burrow (2001).

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5. Already a Kind of Miracle: Spirituality and Criticism
The easiest case to make for cinemas relationship to spirituality is circum-

stantial. According to Judith Wilts (1998: 331) survey of the uneven litera-
ture on the topic,
writers interested in lm and popular culture seem to feel, mixing approval with
disapproval, that lm itself, as the chief vessel of twentieth-century mass popular
culture, is religion in the sense that it does for the mass audience the cultural work
that religions have done, that is, supply models for ethical action and provide
grounding images for ideals and desires.
Such a vaguely anthropological approach, which Wilt herself eschews, has

only a limited appeal. We could easily replace cinema in this formulation
with sports, politics, popular music, the culture of celebrity, or a number
of other practices and receive an equally satisfactory account of the persis-
tence of mythic forces in contemporary life. What is needed is an account
of the particular features of cinema that distinguish its purchase on these
questions.
In Andr Bazins elegant phrasing, the spirituality of cinema inheres in
the medium: The cinema has always been interested in God, because
the cinema is in itself already a kind of miracle (Bazin 1992 [1951]: 393).
Bazin aims to highlight cinemas distinctive form of mimesis. For him, the
impression of light upon the chemical surface of lm made cinema the most
literally realistic of media, as it physically indexed the material world with
an automatic accuracy. As much an extension of reality as its representa-
tion, then, cinema allows us to see reality anew. Most importantly, certain
techniques (the long take, deep focus, elliptical editing) may, in the right
narrative context, permit us to discern a general depth of beingindicated
above as a distinctive interest in Godthat normal conventions of percep-
tion and thought fail to indicate. In a similar vein, David Jasper (1997: 240)
suggests that the medium itself is the locus of lms potential for spiritual
exploration: cinema comes closest to stimulating theological reection . . .
not by its themes or specic motifs, but by its very form and nature. Film
has a physical basis in chemical sensitivity to light and various techniques
for recording sound. What is gathered by instruments designed to exploit
these physical potentials is remediated by a variety of visual, aural, and nar-
rative conventions in the process of scripting and editing a lm. The nal
product of this process is itself remediated by the apparatus and conven-
tions of exhibition, whether at a public screening or in alternative formats
at home. Despite these multiple forms of mediation, cinema is nevertheless
often responded to as if it uniquely captures or expresses reality in some
immediate fashion.

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An illusory projection of shadows and light accompanied by disembod-

ied sound, cinema receives the audiences investments of attention, desire,
and faith. The audiences pleasurable experience of individual fascination
and collective absorption can suggest transcendence of normal experiences
of subjective and collective identity. That this transcendence is never fully
realized does not disqualify it from consideration. Indeed, the process of
provoking, frustrating, and reanimating spectatorial desire for an elusive
connectionwhether with the auratic, with an existentially deep aspect of
reality, or with some form of transcendencemay be understood as char-
acteristic of lms capacity to mediate between material and immaterial
dimensions of reality. Thomas Carlson (1999: 40) argues that such a pro-
cess also characterizes consumer capitalism, in which subjects desires are
by their very nature attenuated, their satisfaction innitely pursued and
postponed. Here, the deferral of any nal coincidence of material represen-
tation and spiritual aspiration actually links the material and immaterial
more closely:
a theological shadow . . . haunts the interplay of image and desire within con-
sumer culturea play whose very movement and meaning feed on deferral and
on the radical expectation that deferral alone can sustain . . . signal[ing] both
a theological dimension of consuming culture and a consuming dimension of
theological desire.
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

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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

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virtue of a tendency toward endlessness. The point here is that realisms

initial drive toward the particular heightens awareness of particularity in
general.4 In turn, this awareness raises the stakes and ambitions of the realist
project, which is now haunted by the knowledge that the really real it per-
petually pursues exceeds, even as it animates, the representationally real.
As Wilt, borrowing from Paul Giles (1987), phrases this relationship, the
boundary of comprehension is marked by the trace of the Other beyond
the known, which is equally that element of indecipherability, of incor-
rigibility, of alterity . . . at the heart of the sacred (Giles quoted in Wilt
1998: 352). In analyzing how cinematic realism may frame the teleology
that religion and lm share, Wilt (ibid.) notes the paradox that, despite
the abundance of cinema . . . [its] glamorous profusion of image and
the momentum of narrative, in fact it is interestingly dicult to properly
produce the eect of the extraordinary, the uncanny, the exalted, the tran-
scendent, the holy. Putting the moviemakers full arsenal of visual, aural,
and narrative techniques into the service of evoking the miraculous may
paradoxically undermine the eort to represent suprarealistic entitiesin
the way that Cecil B. DeMillestyle spectacles draw attention to themselves
rather than direct it beyond them in some fashion. Wilt nds an alterna-
tive mode of representation in the work of Paul Schrader (1972) and Robert
Ray (1985). Both emphasize the potential of stylistic austerity in exploring
spirituality. Limited camera movement and montage, narrative simplicity,
elliptical editing, and natural sound, for them, deepens our attentiveness
to a suggested depth of experience rather than distracting us by abundant
techniques.
In stripping away cinemas more spectacular special eects, Wilt (1998:
351) discovers a baseline aesthetic form capable of simultaneously achieving
textual closure and prolonging an open-ended experience for viewers:
The chief special eect of narrative, of course, is that it ends. The special eect
of lm narrative is that it wraps itself all together, concludes with a satisfying
and inherently religious teleology a split second before the world of the lm,
coherence of color and sound, meaning and feeling, shatters, and the world of
the seats and the screen and the crowds and the streets and the meaning still to
be made returns.
Aristotelian patterns of resolution produce pleasure for audiences, regard-

less of the specic desirability of any particular nal state of aairs revealed
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.

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in a representation. The reversal of fortune that precedes closure and ca-

tharsis is accompanied by an increase in knowledge that more than com-
pensates for any anxieties viewers may have about the nature of the outcome
itself. Wilt emphasizes the audiences cognitive, aective, and aspirational
investment in the providential ordering of experience revealed in this form
of ending. Whether this investment is acknowledged or not, it clearly ex-
presses religious, and specically teleological, desires.
In Crimes and Misdemeanors (directed by Woody Allen, 1989), Wilt nds
this teleological component of lm narrative accompanied by its opposite
namely, a failure to end:
The lm . . . produce[s] an eect both teleological (religious in the standard
sense) and unsettlingly ongoing, religious in the postmodern sense that gures
the sacred as the trace of the other, always elusive, always a challenge to
faith. (Ibid.: 352)
Rather than a resolution that would advance closure or the indeterminate

openness that Wilt discerns, she locates an attenuated juxtaposition of these
opposite eects and aects in the audience. We may desire, and to some
extent experience, the providential temporality implied by a well-shaped
ending. At the same time, we may experience, and to some extent desire, a
more unsettled type of ending that points beyond itself as a sort of search-
ing and an unresolved obligation. Wilts employment of the other as the
mobilized source of the sacred makes an equation easily associated with the
work of Emmanuel Levinas (1999). For Levinas, the experience of alterity as
ethical obligation and practice is inseparable from, if not identical to, tran-
scendence. This dual, contradictory experienceseeming to encounter the
telos we want and desiring its ultimate deferraldescribes precisely the
state to which Von Trier seeks to bring his audience.
6. Screening Spirituality: Breaking the Waves
In a remote Scottish community of extremely observant Calvinists, Bess

is distinguished by the passionate style of her religious practice. Although
women may not speak during services, nor attend ghastly funerals in which
the menfolk consign sinners souls to hell, Besss devotion to her faith ex-
ceeds the normal limits of her place and time. She cleans the church during
the weeka sign not only of an entrenched local patriarchy but also of an
extraordinary capacity for seless service. More obviously, she talks directly
to God; in fact, she holds regular conversations, answering herself in the
pitched-down voice of a judgmental God-the-Father. While it is clear that
she has had psychological problems in the past, these discussions with the

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divine are coded as a profoundly serious ethical self-searching, as Bess rep-

resents and challenges her own desires and duties. The lm establishes our
discovery of Bess as a central purpose. While the camera relentlessly scru-
tinizes every aspect of her face and body, the narrative frames her actions
and emotions with sensitive appreciation. Physically, sexually, emotionally,
and spiritually, Bess appears to couple an extraordinarily intense capacity
for feeling with exceptional fragility. As our perspective aligns with those of
the camera and narrative, either lovingly devoted to Bess, the lms mode
of address is fundamentally geared toward soliciting and deepening our
sympathy with her, even as her experiences become increasingly dicult
to appreciate. In this way, the lm pushes us not to view Bess as a victim of
a psychological disorder or social manipulation, as a depleted subject with
a weakened degree of agency and suspect powers of self-representation.
I would like to suggest we do the same with the lmnamely, take seri-
ously its gambit for the sacred no matter how irrational this eort initially
appears.
As the lm begins, Bess weds a stranger to the communitys xenopho-
bic theocracy, Jan, a Norwegian oil rigger. After Besss joyous emotional
and sexual awakening, Jan must return to work on a North Sea oil plat-
form; this necessity devastates Bess. Material circumstances, tradition, and
her mothers threatening her with another psychiatric hospital stay enjoin
her to accept the restricted pleasures of a long-distance marriage; so, too,
does her own representation of Gods impatience with her selsh desire for
her husband. Nevertheless, Bess cannot accept Jans absence. Just after she
pleads with God for her husbands immediate return at any cost, an acci-
dent paralyzes Jan, who is rushed ashore in critical condition. For reasons
that remain unclear (at one point he warns that he is evil in his head and
should be left to die), Jan eventually asks Bess to pursue sexual encounters
with other men and tell him, as he lies paralyzed, the story of these experi-
ences. Bess comes to believe that these actsself-destructive humiliations
in her conscience and communitywill save Jan. When Jans condition
worsens, she presses herself into more dangerous liaisons, ultimately being
assaulted horrically by men on a ship so notorious that the local prosti-
tutes refuse to visit it. She dies in the same hospital in which Jan likewise
seems doomed, but he appears, wounded but mobile and healing, at the
subsequent inquest into her death. After claiming her body and taking it
oshore for burial at sea (and to save it from the local ministers curse),
Jan and his workmates hear bellsforbidden by the churchringing in
the sky, making good on Besss desire to combine religious devotion and
self-sacrice with joy and pleasure.
Director Lars von Trier is a signer of the manifesto of Dogme 95, a

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mock-serious group of Danish lmmakers devoted to correcting the deca-

dence of contemporary lm via a vow of chastity (Dogme 95 Collective
1995). Forbidden indulgences include most articial lighting, tripods, non-
synchronous sound and music, noncontemporary settings and studio shoot-
ing, the importation of props onto locations, and the naming of the direc-
tor in the credits. Breaking the Waves clearly does not qualify for the Dogme
certicate of authenticity ( jokingly oered for sale on the Internet). For
instance, the lm is set over twenty years in the past and features highly styl-
ized panoramic scenes that introduce each chapter of the plot: they are
characterized by their tripod-dependent stability and evolving, computer-
enhanced visual richness, quite dierent from the relentless searching and
earthy palette of the handheld camera work elsewhere. These panoramas
are accompanied by extended samples of period pop music, which stands
against the lms normal reliance on diegetic sound.
As Stephen Heath (1998: 104) writes, The panorama scenes are a rest,
a tranquil third-person, lm-theology view of God. Heath (ibid.) rightly
indicates that these little moments of escape actually relieve us of the
rest of the lms frenzied groping for the incomprehensible, unlocalisable
[sic] range of God. Yet they also serve to foreground the introduction of
spirituality as the most apparent contradiction of Dogme 95s avowed natu-
ralism. This unchaste lm nevertheless powerfully enacts the conventions
of cinma-vrit and centers on the physical expression of emotions by the
cast, both core production values of Dogme 95.The spiritual initially seems
opposed to conventional standards of realistic representation; ultimately,
however, they become inseparable in their denition of each other and the
audiences reactions. Stylistically, this symbiosis is apparent in the two ele-
ments that dominate our experience of the lm: Robby Mllers handheld
camera work and extraordinary palette of textures and colors suggests a
grounding in mimetic accuracy, while Emily Watsons stunningly persua-
sive performance of Bess (modeled on Renee Falconettis Jeanne dArc, fre-
quently called the nest screen acting ever) suggests a reaching for dimen-
sions of reality beyond or beneath normal apprehension. The lm operates
in two registers that support each other. A jerking camera, wild sound, and
undecorated faces and places bolster the overall plausibility of the screened
world. This plausibility extends its inuence to the exploration of spiri-
tual questions, an extension ultimately warranted by the apparently literal
answering of Besss prayers. At that point, this formulation can also be
understood in a reverse fashion: the reality of the lms spiritual aspira-
tions extends its authority to warrant the surface realism, now revealed as,
potentially, more than a set of conventionalized gestures.
The primary challenge that Breaking the Waves presents to audiences and

Poetics Today
critics is obvious. What are we to make of this stylized yet straightforward

treatment of the ineable? Secular, cosmopolitan viewers are predisposed
to de-emphasize the lms religious content and are encouraged to do so
throughout.5 At one level, the lm suggests that Bess is mentally and emo-
tionally fragile. Are we to understand that her discussions with a transcen-
dent being are madness? At another level, Bess seems to express the distress
produced by a social context so constrictive and life-denying. Are we to
understand Bess in terms of a social allegory of the need to liberate desire
and transgress conventions of gender and religious atavism? At still another
level, the lms attitude toward religion is deeply ambivalent. Besss reli-
giosity is bizarrely anachronistic (too primal for her conformist community;
too late for the world of pop music and outsiders which attracts her and to
which most of us belong). In fact, her excessive, childish indulgence of spiri-
tual impulse is apparently the awkward cause of Jans trauma and her own
degradation and death. Are we, then, to follow this tendency in the lm to
view religion skeptically? We might, in this sense, see religion from the van-
tage point of that most secular and cosmopolitan of perspectives, Critical
Theory, for which, according to Russell Berman (1999), religion has always
been an embarrassment.
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.

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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-

Poetics Today
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.

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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.
7. Reverse Fetishism: Knowledge against Belief
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)
What appears from a conventionally rational or realistic perspective to be

incoherent in the lms ending may, instead, be apprehensible by means of
a positive form of nonrational knowledge. By arming Besss self-sacrice
through sensory evidencenot only Jans recovery but also the pealing
bells over the oceanthe lms ending redeems and embodies our aec-
tive investment in her spiritual desire. In an inversion of fetishism, we get
what we want but believe to be impossible. We are arrested in a Derridean
quandary: what we see cannot be true, while equally it must.
Hierophany connotes a disclosure of the transcendent or sacred pre-
cisely through the material of reality (Bird 1982: 3). Against Heaths depic-
tion of an inescapable and circumscribed symbolic order, and of the impos-
sible remoteness of a miraculous exterior perspective, Bird follows Paul

Poetics Today
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

Poetics Today
abstract, between thing and theory, in a way which we might recognize as

productive, even if unexpectedly so.
8. The Subject of the Sublime
According to Bird, appreciating this alternative form of realism in art re-

quires resisting the impulse to treat a work either as a self-sucient material
or a symbolic entity; I would add that we must also resist treating a work
as an allegorical unit metonymically linked to a larger realm. In the wake
of Mikel Dufrennes (1973 [1957]) phenomenology of aesthetic experience,
Bird (1982: 8) argues that this resistance entails attending to the sensuous
aspects of the artwork, not only or primarily its physical qualities but the
way in which it is feeling that enables an encounter with depth, rather than
merely the surface of reality. In this sense, he posits that the artwork must
be understood as more a subject than an object, one that elicits sensuous
reactions that are actually responses to demands.
Bird insists that the artwork functions as a subject in order to reorient our
treatment of it away from instrumentality and toward some more indeter-
minate receptivity. What sort of subject the artwork would be is less clear.
We might conceive of it as an extension of the agency of its creator. Per-
haps a corollary conception of the artists creative agency as expressive of a
fundamental creative force in the universe could lead us through a particu-
lar artwork toward discernment of the transcendent. It is equally likely,
however, that, for good or ill, such a formula would redirect our attention
to the subjectivity of the artist as an end in itself. In that case, we would only
have (re)discovered a way to treat the artwork as evidence of something that
seems far from ineable. It is more productive, I think, to consider the art-
work as having the form and function of a subject in a basic sense of its need-
ing us, asking us for something, making demands that, however minimal
or dicult to discern, are greater than what we may impute to objects. If
the artwork needs something from us, then we need its solicitation; neither
the work, on the one hand, nor the consumers own paradigms of under-
standing, on the other hand, suciently dene the aesthetic engagement.
Their particular engagement may, in the instance of the spiritual lm, lead
toward something irreducible to either alone.
The artwork here can in no way be treated as mere evidence upon which
method can conrm its presuppositions. At the same time, the audiences
task is less a narrowly dened epistemic understanding or decoding than
it is an ethical alignment of their own aective and cognitive disposition
with the demands of the workindicated by the audiences own sensuous
responsesunderstood itself as a subject in form and function:

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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)
Birds example of such a transmogried realism comes directly from Kant

and Burkes earlier depictions of the sublime as a feature of indomitable
nature:
It is as in a thunderstorm at night, when the lightning throws a blinding clarity
over all things, leaving them in complete darkness the next moment. When
reality is seen in this way with the eye of self-transcending realism, it has become
something new. (Tillich 1956 quoted in Bird 1982: 6)
Translating these extraordinary dimensions of nature into lmic terms, Bird

(ibid.: 14, 1516) privileges a cinematic realism . . . that . . . explores the real
by means of the real, because a realism which is poetic (sensitive to beauty)
is simultaneously a realism which is spiritual (sensitive to meaning). Carl
Dreyers Jeanne dArc is a chief example for Bird as well as one of Von Triers
inspirations. It illustrates how a stylistic realism which is neither supercial
nor mystical can reveal cinema as a diaphragm which is sensitive to the
speech of the cosmos waiting to be heard (ibid.: 20).
Given Taylors appreciation of the triumph of a negative hermeneutic
noted earlier, it is probably a greater challenge to critical thought to read
Birds claims sympathetically than it is to note similar aspirations in Breaking
the Waves. There are unmistakable traces of an almost positivistic religion
of art in Bird, derived in equal parts from Tillich and Dufrenne. However,
this formulation of poetic spiritualism, or spiritual poeticism, may still hold
if we recast it in acceptable skeptical and relativistic terms. Arthur Danto
(1986) argues that, after Andy Warhol, if not Marcel Duchamp, artworks
may be better understood by the questions of their statuses they provoke
than by any registering of their objective qualities. We may, then, rephrase
Bird in this fashion: a realism which is poetic (sensitive to the question of
what beauty might be) is simultaneously a realism which is spiritual (sensi-
tive to the question of what being might be). We thus retain the sense of the
aesthetic as exploration, but as exploration of the not-even-yet-established.
Crucially, we must appreciate Birds refusal, via Dufrenne, of the positivis-
tic implications of extending my havingas if the ineable were a con-
tent we could grasp like any other. Emphasized instead is the attainment
of a receptive disposition, an openness to the possibility of the unexpected,
which is the critical dierence from Heaths certitude.
Jean-Franois Lyotard (1988: 1819) describes this openness as a disposi-

Poetics Today
tion of perceptivity achieved only by the disciplining of normative cognitive

processes:
The secret of such ascesis lies in the power to be able to endure occurrences as
directly as possible without the mediation or protection of a pre-text. Thus,
to encounter an event is like bordering on nothingness. . . . There is a close con-
nection between this idea of an event and the question of matter or existence. . . .
We have to make our condition that of a suspicious, exacting receiver, with recep-
tion focused on the unmistakable, uncanny fact that there is something here
and now, regardless of what it is.
The stakes of this recurrent language of listening to a call that we do not,

cannot, fully master become clear when Lyotard (ibid.: 19) suggests that the
source of that to which we respond may ultimately be Being, or that entity
Kant calls the X in general. This conclusion brings us suggestively near
to Lyotards revisionary view of the sublime.
For Lyotard (ibid.: 40), the sublime results from an experience in which
there is a failure in the synthesizing function of either the imagination or
the will. Confronted with an object or condition whose magnitude or force
exceeds the minds ability to organize percepts into form, a mixture of pain
and pleasure results. Pain arises as the mind experiences its own limita-
tions (ibid.). Pleasure results from the necessary mediation of an Idea of
reason at the threshold of imaginative or cognitive failure, at which point
the mind discovers that it can conceive of something like the innite
(ibid.). In Kantian epistemology, delity to the Idea of reason is developed
within speculative or moral cognition, with their progressive registers of
achievement. Speculative reason may produce greater knowledge; moral
reason may produce greater justice. For Kant, aesthetic judgment is exempt
from any similar measurable progress, and this permits it to function as
a free space for cognition without instrumental goals. From the perspec-
tive of the late twentieth century, Lyotard, in contrast, is skeptical of any
record of speculative or moral achievement, both of which he understands
as susceptible to subsumption within an inhuman process of technocentric
development. He inverts Kants formula and locates human advancement
in the experience of the sublime, where
a kind of progress in human history is possible which would not be only the
progress of technology . . . not a progress of the beautiful . . . but of the responsi-
bility to the Ideas of reason as they are negatively presented in the formlessness
of such and such a situation which could occur. (Ibid.: 41)
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

Poetics Today
by the linguistic rules of competence and comprehensibility. Instead, these

practices may be conceived of as continually approaching and altering,
without erasing, the boundary between the knowable and the unknown. For
Lyotard, this highly abstract notion of progress indirectly replenishes and
refreshes our capacities for thinking with nuance and responsibility in the
putatively more transparent realm of the ethical. The implication is that a
politics driven by pretext pales beside a subtle ethics sensitive to the appre-
hension of the necessity of actions we do not fully understand. (To return
to an earlier point, this is why I am hesitant to suggest that the spiritual
lm oers a theater of counter-factual ideals in which alternative modes of
living are imagined. Such a formulation already predetermines experience
by assuming that what we will encounter in spiritual lm will not only be
recognizable but almost immediately useful.) In turn, this notion of hear-
kening to a call brings us very close to the most generous view of Bess
as an ethical subject, answering the call of a duty she cannot claim to fully
master.
9. Cinema and the Reality of Redemption
The errors in the interpretations detailed earlier, as well as in the myriad

reviews which tediously point out that northern Scotland in the 1970s was
not exactly as represented in the lm, have their equivalents in currently
dominant forms of lm studies and cultural studies in general. There,
a supercial diversity of interpretive approaches masks a deeper homo-
geneity, or what we might call the hegemony of the antihegemonic. Most
of these approaches share an emphasis on reason as the chief form of cogni-
tion in their own practice; a primary facility with realistic texts that mirror
their anity with this representational mode; and an understanding that
their fundamental goal is the decoding and debunking of sociological and
political power. Quinn and Heaths analyses can stand as exemplars here,
and these sorts of interpretation can alert us to the pressures that social and
political contexts bring to bear on cultural production and consumption.
Besss social and historical context does inuence her fate and our interpre-
tations, even if these inuences do not amount to the ultimate meaning of
either. A strict understanding of culture as a sphere of political struggle risks
reducing complex works to the object (and abject) status of evidence, even
when such works literally demand we focus on unanswerable, even inef-
fable questions. What is more, when critique is applied instrumentally to
objects, without a corresponding self-questioning of the motives and proce-
dures of the critic, it can become as moralistic as the judgments of the town
patriarchs. Cultural studies tradition holds that critique equals demysti-

Poetics Today
cation equals liberation. Yet when critiques ironic force is unconstrained,

it may become indistinguishable from reication, as the world is progres-
sively emptied of any signicance that is not adaptable to the predeter-
mined values of the critical method in play.
The balance of short-term gains (i.e., ecacious, even liberating, acts of
demystication) and long-term risks (i.e., reication) has been a question
since early in the Enlightenment. Drawing on Friedrich Schleiermachers
critique of contemporary Enlightenment antireligiosity, Russell Berman
(1999: 42) argues that the suppression of religion . . . impoverishes human
life. Culture without religion is not emancipated; it is only insipid. Ber-
man (ibid.: 43, 44) privileges explicitly the axial world religions of Juda-
ism, Christianity, Islam and Buddhism, since it is within their relation of
experiences of the divine . . . as pertaining not merely to a tribe, but to the
full cosmos that the life of humanity is largely played out. While based
upon a questionable and indiscriminate privileging of major traditions, this
move enables Bermans valuable schema of the dialectic between the local
and the universal within these religious cultures (ibid.). The key features
of this dialectic include:
1. a dramatic capacity for anti-traditionalism, as each of these reli-
gions emerges by a strong break with dominant practices;
2. a countervailing force of an orientation toward tradition within reli-
gion, which stabilizes antitraditionalist tendencies while providing
the grounds for their reemergence. This force provides, that is, a rich
idiom for shaping innovative religious practices while guaranteeing
some degree of legibility for them, and with it the exible constraints
against which antitraditionalism may operate;
3. a shared emphasis on the centrality of beginnings, which derive[s]
from the religious imagination of the human freedom to create in imi-
tation of the divine creator;
4. a related, chronological analogue to the tension between local-
ism and universalism [found] along a temporal axis between past
and future, tradition and creativity, memory and aspiration. (Ibid.:
4445)
Taken together, these elements amount to a project of redemption, for
which fallenness . . . is a constant fact of human life; its critical-theoretical
designation is reication, and the crux of axial religions, and of Critical
Theory, involves the project of calling reication into question (ibid.: 45).
If, for Bird, reason seeks revelation, Berman has captured a similar sense
in which reason seeks redemption. This dialectical schema helps us under-
stand the ways in which a particular spiritual struggle, like that depicted in
Breaking the Waves, warrants its claim to universal or cosmic signicance.

Poetics Today
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

Poetics Today
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.

Poetics Today
another, as if in a mythical chain of contiguity and obligation. The close of

Cavells The World Viewed captures something of the complex dialectic of
this ending:
A world complete without me which is present to me is the world of my immor-
tality. This is an importance of lmand a danger. It takes my life as my haunt-
ing of the world. . . . So there is reason for me to want the camera to deny the
coherence of the world, its coherence as past: to deny that the world is com-
plete without me. But there is equal reason to want it armed that the world is
coherent without me. That is essential to what I want of immortality: natures
survival of me. It will mean that the present judgment upon me is not yet the
last. (Ibid.: 160)
To linger receptively on Besss vision of her own exclusion, in a form that

defers judgment of her indenitely, does not produce [God] as lmic abso-
lute (Heath 1998: 103). Rather, it evokes a profound sense of the extent of
our aspiration. As hierophany, the ending reveals the persistence of hope,
which is to say, the persistence of cinema itself. It preserves the possibility,
against all expectation, that the absence of rational certainty about fun-
damental concerns amounts less to their negation than to their increase.
Crucially, it delivers more than the armation of any particular material
or transcendent desire; it reawakens a more diuse and oceanic sense of
the continuity and uncontainable potential of openness toward the sub-
jects of our reective judgment to transgure our own subjectivity. In so
doing, Breaking the Waves oers a sublime challenge to criticism, one that
can be resisted (as irrational), or translated into secular terms (like power),
or treated in terms of a reality we do not pretend to fully know or master but
to which we owe the greatest obligation. Shouldnt the same obligation to
act without pretense to certainty, to listen for the unsettling call beyond and
within the real, animate the heart of cultural studies? And if this is the case,
nally, might not cultural studies realize a mode of real resistance: Break-
ing the leveling waves of reication, which threaten to atten everyone and
everything into computable commodities and exchangeable determinant
judgments, we can begin to imagine the reenchantment of reality and the
redemption of hope.

Poetics Today
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Cinema and The Sublime

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Poetics Today

Cinema of the Sublime: Theorizing the Ineable

Published by Duke University Press

30 Poetics Today 25:1

contained by a predetermined goal. This aesthetic response may contribute to an

1. Cinemas Shadow: Realism and Criticism

Upon witnessing the rst screening of the Lumire brothers actualities

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Pence Cinema of the Sublime: Theorizing the Ineable 31

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32 Poetics Today 25:1

Published by Duke University Press

Pence Cinema of the Sublime: Theorizing the Ineable 33

ence and religion, reecting the inadequacy of either orientation to satisfy

Published by Duke University Press

34 Poetics Today 25:1

Published by Duke University Press

Pence Cinema of the Sublime: Theorizing the Ineable 35

is uncannily familiar and dierent, reecting and exceeding the perspective

2. The Aura Is Dead. Long Live the Aura!

Suggestive of a supraordinary quality, of a nebulous emanation of grandeur

Published by Duke University Press

36 Poetics Today 25:1

forth. In contrast, actual lm productions (i.e., shooting sets) oer no per-

Published by Duke University Press

Pence Cinema of the Sublime: Theorizing the Ineable 37

tive enterprises, the comparison of painting and cinematography plays on

Published by Duke University Press

38 Poetics Today 25:1

of unmediated reality would be satised by this paradoxical, equipment-

3. Beyond Authority: Cinema and Spirituality

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Pence Cinema of the Sublime: Theorizing the Ineable 39

of the literature we read goes untouched by our discourses, or is deconstructed,

Taylor notes the signicant challenges facing any eort to establish an e-

Published by Duke University Press

40 Poetics Today 25:1

Published by Duke University Press

Pence Cinema of the Sublime: Theorizing the Ineable 41

family resemblance, as regards their presentations of novel and demanding

4. Seeing without Knowing

In Towards a Religious Visuality of Film, S. Brent Plate (1998) echoes

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42 Poetics Today 25:1

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Pence Cinema of the Sublime: Theorizing the Ineable 43

former in ultimately relocating the signicance of the spiritual to secular

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44 Poetics Today 25:1

5. Already a Kind of Miracle: Spirituality and Criticism

The easiest case to make for cinemas relationship to spirituality is circum-

Such a vaguely anthropological approach, which Wilt herself eschews, has

Published by Duke University Press

Pence Cinema of the Sublime: Theorizing the Ineable 45

An illusory projection of shadows and light accompanied by disembod-

Published by Duke University Press

46 Poetics Today 25:1

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Pence Cinema of the Sublime: Theorizing the Ineable 47

virtue of a tendency toward endlessness. The point here is that realisms

Aristotelian patterns of resolution produce pleasure for audiences, regard-

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48 Poetics Today 25:1

in a representation. The reversal of fortune that precedes closure and ca-