Anri Ažel - Metafizika filma, godina 1978, vol.

10, broj 1

http://filmskesveske.mi.sanu.ac.rs/PaperElibFDU.jsp?journal=filmske-sveske&issue=1978_10_1&br=3

ANRI AŽEL: METAFIZIKA FILMA

(1976/1978; Pariz/Beograd)

Odlomci iz tekstova:
1. „Cinema as a Sacred Surface: Ritual Rememoration of Transcendence” (Walid El
Khachab, 2013)
2. “Those who don’t remember don’t exist anywhere: Historical Redemption in Patricio
Guzmán’s Nostalgia for the Light (2010)” (Cristina Ruiz-Poveda Vera, 2017)

At the intersection of Film and Religious Studies a tradition can be traced from Henri Agel’s
concepts of Sacré and Métaphysique to Eric Christianson’s Cinéma Divinité, whose premise is
that cinema materializes the sacred, and makes visible the invisible Godly essences. Another
tradition starts with Jean Epstein’s writings on the mystique or mysticism of cinema and Edgar
Morin’s Imaginary Man, which tradition is currently represented in France by Yann Calvet’s
work on the sacred. It is concerned with cinema as the locus of the performance of and the
connection with the sacred in our modern world.
The sacred is understood here in its broader sense, encompassing forces of nature that
seem overwhelming to the human, as well as the realm of supernatural entities that transcend the
world of the human, such as God, or “pagan” deities. The first end of the definition is best
formulated by René Girard: “The sacred consists of all those forces whose dominance over man
increases or seems to increase in proportion to man’s effort to master them. Tempests, forest
fires, and plagues, among other phenomena, may be classified as sacred.” (Girard, 2005, p.32).
The other end can be summarized by Lévy-Bruhl’s notion of the mystical experience which is
connected to a space set apart in connection to a complexus of actors including plants and
animals, but also heroes—and one might add—gods (Lévy-Bruhl, 1938, p.183).

El Khachab, Walid. 2013. „Cinema as a Sacred Surface: Ritual Rememoration of

Transcendence” Kinephanos, Journal of media studies and popular culture, Volume 4,
Issue 1, September 2013
URL= https://www.kinephanos.ca/Revue_files/2013-el-khachab.pdf

Dominant discourses about spirituality and cinematic form argue for contemplative aesthetics
based on austere formal choices. The phenomenologists Amèdèe Ayfre and Henri Agel, André
Bazin’s disciples, started this minimalist, contemplative trend in the early 1960s. For them, film
cannot be analyzed separate from the viewing experience because it depends on the complex
personal predispositions of the spectator.1 Therefore, “in the aesthetic evocation of the
transcendent, film demands the active participation of the spectator” to interpret the mysterious
meanings beyond the surface.2 For Ayfre and Agel, contemplative film has the potential to evoke
and capture the traces of the divine, but this divine is transcendent: it exists beyond the image, in
the invisible, and film can only portray signs of its presence. At the same time in the United
States, scholar Susan Sontag developed a similar model in her essay “Spiritual Style in the Films
of Robert Bresson” (1964), in which she argues for the same austere “spiritual realism” of Ayfre
and Agel. Sontag argued that Bresson’s plots and acting method made his films spiritual because
the confusing, inexpressive emotions of the characters suggested the mysterious and ambiguous
nature of the “human action and the human heart.”3
But Paul Schrader epitomized this anti-dramatic, introspective aesthetic paradigm with
his book Transcendental Style in Film: Ozu, Bresson, and Dreyer. According to Schrader
transcendental style describes a “representative filmic form which expresses the Transcendent.” 4

For Schrader, the transcendent refers to what “is beyond normal sense experience”: the holy and
the human experience of the divine. 5 Influenced by his predecessors Bazin and Ayfre, he argues
that due to the influence of specific cultural and artistic traditions, transcendental films need to
rely on formal austerity. He argues that this “style seeks to maximize the mystery of existence”
and, to that end, it uses a minimalist and less openly expressive form. 6 Schrader considers
cinematic elements such as montage, camera movements, narrative action, expressive acting, and
non-diegetic music as “excessive” and identifies them with the mundane and the immanent.
Therefore, transcendental films progressively eliminate those aspects to become subtler through
a process based on the following steps: first, the depiction of the everyday as a hostile space;
second, the “disparity” or conflict that emerges between the main character and the mundane;
and lastly, a decisive action that leads to “stasis,” the enlightenment of the film or the
transcendence of the character. As a result, Schrader’s definition of transcendental style aims to
be universal and to apply to all cultural contexts because it implies a contemplative, introspective
understanding of spirituality that exists in transcendence, in the beyond, and not within the
physical and mundane objects of social reality.

Ruiz-Poveda Vera, Cristina. 2017. “Those who don’t remember don’t exist anywhere: Historical
Redemption in Patricio Guzmán’s Nostalgia for the Light (2010)”, Journal of Religion & Film,
Omaha, Vol. 21, Issue 2, Art. 19

1
Sheila J. Nayar, The Sacred and the Cinema: Reconfiguring the "Genuinely" Religious Film (New
York: Continuum, 2012), 39.
2
Nayar, p. 42.
3
Susan Sontag, “Spiritual Style in the Films of Robert Bresson,” in The Films of Robert Bresson: A Casebook, ed.
Bret Cardullo (London: Anthem Press, 2009), 32.
4
Paul Schrader, Transcendental Style in Film: Ozu, Bresson, Dreyer (Berkeley: University of California Press,
1972), 9.
5
Schrader, p. 5-6.
6
Schrader 10