Ascension and ego disintegration

A SIGNIS-WACC-INTERFILM seminar on the Controversy about the Image in Present Cinema

By Karsten Visarius, Frankfurt a/M

It seems paradoxical to look for traces of an old religious historical controversy in the cinema of all places – the image controversy between the iconoclasts and the iconophiles, between those despising images and those loving them. As cinema is regarded as the precursor of the new visual age that – following Marshal McLuhan – has superseded the Gutenberg galaxy, the age of writing. Should not a contemporary iconoclast – incidentally as a historical figure and as he sees himself a supporter of the new, of revolutionary changes and the revolt – be an enemy to cinema? And thus an advocate of an if not hopelessly outdated, yet an ultra-conservative understanding of culture? There is also this faction, and with the motto of the “death of the fun society” that has been spread after September 11th, crying without disguise for a psychological arming, it has brought itself back to memory just recently. With gloomy war scenarios and diagnosises of decline, it goes against the media industry as a whole so far it has been shaped by needs of entertainment although their protagonists strive to use the same media as instruments for spreading their convictions as well as to their political accomplishment. The seminar “(Dis)Regarding the Image – The Controversy about the Image in Present Cinema (8th- 9th November 2002) that has been organised by the international church media organisations and that took place during the International Film Festival Mannheim-Heidelberg was dedicated however to less coarse questions and front positions. Church film organisations no longer use the fact that the cinema has established an alliance with the audience’s needs as a reason to admonish morally or to patronise pedagogically. Rather, it recognises the chance there to track down human desires and self-determination – and thus to find questions concerning our own Christian tradition in a contemporary form.

On the truth of cinematic images

 Since the DOGMA manifesto of the Danish directors around Lars von Trier at the latest, the moral question as to the truth of cinematic images has returned to contemporary cinema. It propagates a new art of poverty that goes against the technical extravagance of Hollywood cinema as well as against the aesthetics of European author cinema. More than this rigid requirement, the simplification of image production by digital video technology has given momentum to the DOGMA aesthetics – shooting spontaneously with a light hand-held camera, at original sets with natural light and with scenes improvised by the actors.
 Other directors – without connections to the DOGMA group – have also taken up these technical and aesthetic possibilities and adapted them according to their own objectives; at the Mannheim seminar Dominik Graf’s >Der Felsen< (The Rock) and >Rosetta< by Luc and Jean-Pierre Dardenne represented the thus opened stylistic spectrum. However, the exercises in stylistic composition do not matter neither to them nor to the DOGMA directors. They rather use these new possibilities to reveal the intimate psychological conditions and stirrings of their characters. Dominik Graf portrays the inner groundlessness of a woman who has been left by her lover during a trip to Corsica; while the Dardenne brothers describe the despair of a young girl – a social outsider – who has lost her chances in life over and over again. In spite of all the differences between the two films, they both lead their characters to emotional or mental extremes, to the loss of their social identity: to an emptiness that is taken for freedom with Graf, to an exhaustion of all vigorous energies with >Rosetta<.

The problem of image scepticism

 Maggie Roux, speaker at the seminar from Leeds, England, saw the iconoclastic impulse of the DOGMA films less as a breaking with cinematic conventions and the overcoming of artificiality of cinema, but more as a waning of the ability to surpass the representation of the perceptible world by cinematic narration, as the death of the magic spark by which the cinema illuminates the shadow world of the psyche. Taking Victor Fleming’s Hollywood classic >The Wizard of Oz< as an example, she illustrated the transformation of the trivial every day world to a landscape of emotions by mere studio tricks. This transformation in which she found a phenomenological affinity to the Catholic liturgy is – according to Maggie Roux – the essence of cinema fascination. In case of success, - to sharpen her position - the cinematic illusion creates no deception, no fake paradise, but gives rise to a kind of illumination, precisely because the images appeal to the senses and less to reason. The image scepticism of the DOGMA movement runs the risk of only producing a drama of words and being able to arouse only an intellectual interest.

A cinema trusting in images

 The two examples of a cinema that trusts in images and calculates the effects of images – Tom Tykwer’s >Heaven< and Pedro Almodóvar’s >Hable con ella< – tell stories whose fantastic and improbable course seems plausible and necessary just by means of the logic of the images. In both cases it is love - a cinema subject par excellence, as trivial as inexhaustible – that brings about miracles: a true ascension with Tykwer, a resurrection from (apparent) death with Almodóvar. In >Heaven<, a police man loves an assassin who is responsible for the death of innocent people; in >Hable con ella<, a male nurse loves a dancer who is in a coma. And the audience – being under the spell of mythic love that has become cinematic images – forgives the one the liberation of a murderer and the other the impregnation of a helpless woman. Tykwer’s and Almodóvar’s films annul the morality that is valid in every day reality. And thus plead for another, maybe fuller reality.
In spite of all the admiration for the aesthetic finesse of the two films, the scepticism against such suggestions was also discussed by the participants at the Mannheim seminar who saw themselves exposed to the suspicion of symbolic but empty phrases (with Tykwer) or to voyeuristic complicity (with Almodóvar). The ambivalence between image fascination and image scepticism is hard to get rid of even by an enthusiastic audience.

Every image a brief moment

 The surprising productivity of the question as to the status, the function and the control of images – once preoccupied with fanatic religious energy, today almost forgotten – was confirmed once again and with a further turn by the second speaker at the seminar, the media philosopher Boris Groys from Karlsruhe. Groys analysed cinema and modern visual media as a machinery in which the iconoclastic impulse of protestantism exults as one of the designing forces of modernity – an image machine that does not only produce images of destruction and catastrophy over and over again under an almost neurotic duress – but in which every newly produced image also destroys the preceding one. In Groys’ interpretation, the iconoclastic energy has been adopted in the logic of media itself. At the same time, the iconoclastic impulse loses its sense by means of this logic of media because in this flood of images, there are no more religiously charged, meaningful and supporting images: every image is only a brief moment that has to give way to a new image. Television, the most powerful visual medium at the moment, best demonstrates Groys’ thesis. At least a cinema enthusiast has always known that television is a medium that does not only destroy film, but also images. Its favourite forms – news, talkshows, soap operas – occupy our optic sense without satisfying our desire for images. It is the acoustic messages that blind us. In this situation, the question as to the nature of images arises again. Referring to Walter Benjamin, Groys defines it as the presence, the here and now of something or someone absent. Cinema holds a precarious balance between the destruction and the creation of images. Where – if not in the cinema – is the presence of the absent more tangible? Groys predicted to cinema an aesthetic demodification (because of the replacement of films on the other side of main stream cinema), an artistic devaluation (because of means of expression like for example video installations that develop their own incomparable charisma) and a marginalisation by new attractive forms of media communication. At least in this belief, the participants – assembled in Mannheim, committed to film and church – would not follow him any more.