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Article Excerpt
The body is the beginning of the soul, the primal matter and substance of filmmaking. "The senses are the causes of the concepts, the body is the cause of the soul and precedes in the intellect (Philoxenus of Mabbog)."
--Bruno Dumont
All is foreseen, freedom of choice is granted, and the world is judged in kindness. (2)
--Rabbi Akiba (Akiva) ben Joseph
A Preamble: Theoretism and Political Economy In Contemporary Art/Media History and Theory
There cannot be two more dissimilar contemporary directors than the Australian-American Mel Gibson and the self-taught French filmmaker Bruno Dumont. The former, a (sectarian) Catholic who adheres to the Tridentinetheology of the pre-Vatican II period, is one of the most successful action film actors working in Hollywood in the past twenty-five years. The latter, an ex-teacher of Greek and German philosophy born in Bailleul, France, spent his early working years shooting commercial films for local businesses in north-east France.
Released in 2004, Gibson's The Passion of the Christ initiated an absolute firestorm of antipodal responses that ranged from unrestrained praise to outright public condemnation. The situation with the work of Bruno Dumont is no less antipodal, especially when it comes to the paroxysmal violence of his last film, Twentynine Palms (2003). His first feature, La vie de Jésus ("The Life of Jesus," 1997) was awarded several prestigious prizes. Dumont's second feature, L'Humanité ("Humanity," 1999), one of the most brilliant albeit bewildering works of cinematic practice to be released in recent memory, was a highly controversial winner of the Grand Jury Prize at the 1999 Cannes Film Festival.
Visceral reactions aside, a more revealing antipodal characteristic is the huge scale of published responses to The Passion in contrast to the dearth of material on Dumont's work. Worse is the critical quality of many of the published reactions to Gibson's work in comparison to the trivial quality of much, though not all, of the writing on Dumont. (3) Undoubtedly, there are number of substantial reasons for this situation. Not the least of which is the severity of the allegorism that permeates the contemporary dramaturgy of Dumont's productions as opposed to the neo-orientalist nature Gibson's production. Notwithstanding Gibson's use of an all Aramaic and Latin dialogue to lend the production a patina of historical accuracy, his film's representative tropes certainly fall into the film industry's traditional, neo-Victorian exploitation of nineteenth-century European historicism and orientalism. This accounts, in part, for the scale of the attending audiences, whose expectations have long been weaned on Hollywood's and, for that matter, many European-based orientalist productions.
Regardless of the importance of these and other factors, there is one rarely discussed socio-pedagogical determinant which, I would argue, also plays a role with regards to the nature of the writing on Dumont's films. It is a factor that is specific to the prevailing, if not dominant critical discourses, research methodologies, and pedagogies that are fostered within many university fine art/media art and communications programs. This is the near nonexistence of a contemporay, definably theological framework for critical meditation on all forms of cultural production.
By theology I am referring to three primary constituents: first, a systematic consideration of the ontology of the divine in relation to its different human manifestations, and the full implications of that study with respect to human experience. Second, an epistemological reflection on humanity's relation to the spiritual. Third, a theology of all cultural production and its meditative role in contributing to the explication of humanity's position with respect to the "divine." In all fairness to those persons who have had similar concerns, we must pose a Foucauldian question regarding all those disciplinary practices most directly implicated. Has a time not come for a curricular space to be opened up in these practices that will permit "another" voice to enter into the process of the explication of cultural activity and experience?
It might appear, on first read, that any difficulties which will inevitably arise when proposals are made to remediate the situation could, in the long term, be successfully negotiated. Nevertheless, the actual implementation of any proposed resolution may be far more contentious than it seems if we are to judge according to the critical reaction to Dumont's work. For some of the writing on Dumont exhibits a curious bewilderment about what the filmmaker is actually doing and, worse, a derisive antagonism which, in a few cases, becomes so openly hostile that it teeters on the edge of being patently offensive. Why? Perhaps it could be argued that some writers are so incognizant of the historical context which frames Dumont's work that we can understand some of their confusion. Consider the following:
At one stage we see him [Pharaon] from behind, and he appears to be hovering about a foot off the ground. Levitation --or is he just standing on a small mound of earth? Transcendence, or mundanity? The snot ends before it's possible for the viewer to makeup their mind, but we're undeniably disconcerted. Perhaps it was nothing, a throwaway snot. (4)
Dumont himself supplies at least one possible answer when, in an early scene in La vie de Jésus, Freddy and his friends are visiting the brother of one of his buddies who is lying in hospital slowly dying of AIDS. As they are standing around his bed one of Freddy's friends turns his head to see a small, cheap reproduction of Giotto's The Resurrection on the wall. Then, as he turns back around he tells Freddy that "it is Jesus who came back from the dead." To which Freddy immediately responds, "Shut up!"
The confusion, then, may have less to do with Ignorance and more to do with the sheer vacuousness of the cultural trappings of religious experience, so that a work by Giotto is reduced to being nothing more than cultural wallpaper. Nonetheless, this "vacuousness" is certainly not enough to explain the bewildered, hostile nature of some of the writing on films that so openly confront the viewer with scenes containing, sometimes, horrendous levels of human suffering and violence. However, "vacuousness" does go a long way in clarifying the situation if the term is interpreted to refer to the viewer's recognition of the ineffectuality, or worse, the inappropriateness of the ethos that frames Dumont's own response to the suffering and violence in his films. It is, I would suggest, the theological grounding of that ethics that many in the audience neither recognize, hence their bewilderment, nor countenance, hence their hostile derisiveness.
One foundational reason for this situation is that for many commentators any theologically grounded proposal that steps beyond the confines of the socially acceptable, discursive and institutional domains of "Religion/the religious" to participate in a socio-political debate with regards to non-religious issues is challenging a central structural component of Modernity/Post-modernity: the primacy of the secular. In 1846, the English free thinker and cooperator George Jacob Holyoake first used the terms "secular/Secularism" in his work Principles of Secularism. Holyoake's term is defined as follows:
Secularism is a code of duty pertaining to this life founded on considerations purely human, and intended mainly for those who find theology indefinite or inadequate, unreliable or unbelievable. Its essential principles are three: (1) The improvement of this life by material means. (2) That science is the available Providence of man. (3) That it is good to do good. (5)
Notwithstanding the novelty of Holyoake's use of the term "secular," his appeal to the providential use of "science" has the all too familiar ring of early English scientific modernity that is canonically represented by the triumphant scientism of Francis Bacon's The Great Insaturation (1620). By Holyoake's time the Christian esihatologiial dreams of Bacon's triumphalism had been reduced to a quasi theistic, if not de-Christianized utilitarian humanism.
Needless to say, any lingering post-nineteenth-century belief in the renovative possibilities of science of the type that imbues Holyoake's Principles of Secularism has certainly not gone uncontested. The dogmatic assertion that the correct formulation of the actual nature of human "thinking" and "action" can only successfully occur from within the overarching framework of the metaphysics of theoretism in Western thought has been repeatedly challenged. As Rev. Father Joseph S. O'Leary, S.J., notes:
Heidegger's project of overcoming metaphysics was strongly influenced in its initial form by Luther's polemic against the distorting objectification of Christian truth in medieval scholasticism ... there is considerable truth in his [Heidegger's] claim that the dominance of the theoretical concern in the West has repressed other forms of thinking, and blinded us to phenomena which do not come into view in the perspectives of scientific reason. Many nineteenth-century theologians, notably Ritschl and Harnack, pursued the topic of the repressing or distorting role metaphysical reason has played in Christian tradition. Heidegger's sensitivity to the inadequation of metaphysics to the properly philosophical task of thinking being was nourished by this theological climats .(6)
Nevertheless, regardless of the numerous salvos directed against theoretism, the primacy of secularity still marks a critically uncontested dualism that underwrites many of the responses to Dumont's work. As Holyoake states, "Secularism is ... intended mainly for those who find theology indefinite or inadequate, unreliable or unbelievable." If the theoretical/scientific ground that sustains the primacy of the secular is, at least in principle, challengeable, then why not the secular/theological dualism?
What is truly fascinating is that when we consider some, though not all, of the various philosophical challenges to the claims of theoretism, there is little corresponding willingness to consider that theology could, outside of its proscribed socio-institutional domain...
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