Holy, holy, holy! : toward a mystical style in film

Abstract

This thesis proposes a methodology that melds theological inquiry with cinematic analysis ultimately arguing that cinema can serve as a site of mystical encounter. In an age of increasing irrationality, spiritual expression in cinema has shifted from a meditative, passive transcendentalism toward an active, urgent, and often violent mysticism. Drawing on contemporary cinematic examples from multiple religious traditions, I demonstrate that a formal broken-ness emerging from a moment of absolute metaphysical excess in a narrative film results in a style that is phenomenologically affecting and spiritually edifying, culminating in a film-text that simulates an ecstatic or mystical experience. Such works enact a fracturing of the cinematic apparatus itself, suggesting that cinema can render reality as material and is equally capable of rupturing that material in a manner analogous to mystical experience. I propose a “Sontag-Kaplan” analytical dyad, combining Susan Sontag’s proposition of ‘style’ as the manifest quality’s of a unique artist’s will energized in their work with Aryeh Kaplan’s explication of the function of the Kabbalistic Sefirot, a tool Jewish mystics have used to understand the concretization of the ineffable will of the Godhead into the physical universe. I arrive at an understanding of Mystical Style as occurring when filmmakers ‘break’ the continuity of their own works through formal, narrative, ontological, and temporal means analogous to what mystics report as the breaking-in of divine creative power from beyond into the material world, where it is otherwise occulted. Films of a Mystical Style deliberately rupture continuity, offering a stimulatory experience of the metaphysical rupture that occurs in ecstatic experiences. I analyze a group of contemporary films whose broken-ness emphasize the resultantly ambiguous affect which I term ‘Ecstasy.’ I conclude by addressing aspects of contemporary culture, particularly the turn toward a teleologically focused politics charged by religious desire, that might account for the metamorphosing spiritual sensibilities in narrative film. I propose a philosophy of ethical encounter, whose mystical inferences have been articulated by thinkers like Martin Buber and Walter Benjamin, as an alternative to the mystical longing of political eschatology and as a possibility that cinema is uniquely capable of fostering.