Long Pauses

Tag: Director: Zahedi

  • Diving Deep into Caveh Zahedi’s In the Bathtub of the World

    Diving Deep into Caveh Zahedi’s In the Bathtub of the World

    Dir. by Caveh Zahedi

    This essay was presented at the 2005 conference of the South Atlantic Modern Language Association.

    – – –

    When asked recently about the trend toward reality programming on television, filmmaker Caveh Zahedi called it a “good thing,” arguing that, despite the inevitable and corrupting influences of advertising and profit margins, reality TV does satisfy, to a certain extent, the viewing public’s craving for the “genuine article.” “Reality is where it’s at,” Zahedi said. “It’s where people ‘live,’ it’s what’s deep and true.” “Genuine, “reality,” “live,” “deep,” and “true” are, of course, among the most loaded of terms in discussions of documentary filmmaking, a fact not lost on Zahedi, who has spent the majority of his career blurring the lines between fact and fiction in his own peculiar brand of autobiographical cinema.

    In his official filmography, Zahedi lists four features and three shorts. A Little Stiff, his 1991 feature debut, co-directed with Greg Watkins, re-enacts his failed attempt to win the affection of a fellow art student. Constructed almost entirely of static master shots, the film is quite different formally from his other work — he has described it as an “aesthetic reaction to the kind of by-the-numbers filmmaking that [he was] being taught in film school” — but it introduces many of what would become Zahedi’s signatures. He himself stars as “Caveh Zahedi,” a sincere and strangely charismatic filmmaker whose charm (or off-putting eccentricity, depending on one’s general opinion of him) stems from his refusal to mask what he considers his most basic human desires, opinions and, perhaps most notably, his faults behind the guise of socially-constructed, “acceptable” behavior.

    That’s not to say, though, that Zahedi is a hedonist. Far from it, in fact. When exploring the most shameful and transgressive aspects of his nature, as he does, for example, with unflinching candor in his most recent feature, I Am a Sex Addict, there is actually a conspicuous element of moral instruction in his work. Rather, what interests Zahedi is what he consistently refers to as the “ego” — that manifestation of self-image that each of us performs in the day-to-day narrative of our public life. For Zahedi, the problem of the ego touches upon the most fundamental questions of life, art, and (for lack of a better word) God, all of which, in his view, are inextricably intertwined. As man lost faith in the Divine, Zahedi argues, the artist grew in self-importance — no longer a humble servant of Creation but, instead, a new kind of hero: the artist/performer as celebrity. “This problem of the ego in art,” Zahedi writes:

    stems in part from the fact that our self-worth has been severely eroded. To compensate for this erosion, artists have tended to emphasize their specialness, and to attempt to make themselves appear better than those around them. This is a big problem for the arts because if all art is in fact “channeled,” then Art rests on a connection to the Source of all creation. The problem with the ego in art is that it destroys this connection to the source by positing itself as the source, much like the Satan figure in Milton’s Paradise Lost.

    By virtue of its mechanical ability to capture and re-present photographed reality, or so the argument goes, film has a unique relationship with the ego. On the one hand, a camera establishes a power relationship not unlike Foucault’s panoptic gaze — and, indeed, Zahedi has cited Sartre’s policeman as a metaphor for the situation. Like Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle, there’s the sense that a camera — or an editor’s cut, for that matter — inevitably distorts “reality” by the very act of its observation. Under the scrutiny of a spotlight, the guilt and self-hatred we’ve internalized feel threatened with exposure, and so the ego blossoms, becoming large in order to protect its own integrity. On the other hand, film is also uniquely shaped by randomness, or by what Zahedi describes as “Fate or Reality or God.” It’s that peculiar aspect of the cinema that he calls a “Holy Moment” in Richard Linklater’s Waking Life. Because God is manifest in all of creation, and because film is able to capture and re-present those manifestations, the cinema, once loosened of ego, can reorient our perspectives not only toward the arts but also toward the beautifully varied and complex creation in which we live.

    In each of his films since A Little Stiff, Zahedi has attempted to create a “complex dialectic” between these two qualities of cinema, a dialectic, more or less, between “the will” and “chaos.” In order to do so, he’s employed very particular narrative and formal strategies, the most essential of which is his devotion to autobiography. Zahedi has jokingly referred to his on-screen persona as a “Mascot of Humanity,” as if he were somehow redeeming us all through his willing sacrifice to this artistic project. In I Don’t Hate Las Vegas Anymore, he dispenses with his script entirely, trusting, instead, that God will become revealed in the chaos of filmed life. In both I Was Possessed by God and Tripping with Caveh, Zahedi ingests large doses of hallucinogenic mushrooms in an effort to completely obliterate, temporarily, his own ego. And in his latest work, I Am a Sex Addict, he has taken an almost-Brechtian turn, carefully balancing the intellectual distance of meta-narrative with the emotional immediacy of “real” human experience.

    Which brings me, finally, to In the Bathtub of the World. Zahedi has written of the film:

    [It] exploits the most democratic genre that exists, the home movie, in order to reveal the workings of the divine in all of our lives. I had no idea what would happen in the film, but I knew that only a subtle combination of will (demanding of myself that I shoot one minute everyday) and surrender (I would try to listen each day to “hear” what I was supposed to do that day) would lead to the result that I desired, namely a film that would also be a work of art, meaning a work that has in some way been channeled.

    To approach In the Bathtub of the World from Zahedi’s perspective, then, would see it as a document of a life — a representative life — freed of the fictions of ego. If we take him at his word, we must assume that the Caveh we “meet” on-screen is the “real” Caveh. When he looks into the camera and makes a frank confession like, “I had a wet dream this morning” or “I have a problem. I don’t know how to live,” we must trust that these statements — in combination with the unspoken language of his facial and body movements and the aesthetic effect of the cinematic reproduction — are as honest an articulation of his immediate experience as he is capable of expressing. “In that particularity” of his own experience, “there is universality,” he has said. “Your life is meaningful and unique. . . . It is the expression of creation happening.” As far as I can tell, it is Zahedi’s deeply sincere belief that the socially-constructed ego-masks we wear degrade human worth and human relationships, and In the Bathtub of the World is his purest and most egalitarian (if such a word is appropriate here) argument for the healing power of honesty.

    Okay, so two important points need to be made here.

    First, we’ve gathered here this morning to participate in a panel called “Reality Effects: Documentary in Film, TV, and Video.” And so I assume that, after watching the first few minutes of the film, and after listening to this overview of Zahedi’s career and guiding principles, at least a few of you are skeptical. If so, you’re certainly not alone. His work is routinely derided as “narcissistic and vain, in the pejorative sense” (to quote a great line from Bathtub). His intrusive use of the camera — for example, turning it on friends, family, and strangers against their expressed wishes — has been condemned as unethical. Popular critics often dismiss his films simply for being banal and boring. (In fact, on their DVD commentary, Zahedi and co-editor Thomas Logoreci recite by memory lines from Bathtub‘s original reviews: “There is no art here” and “The year 2000 couldn’t come soon enough.”) And then, of course, there are the theoretical problems of any post-Enlightenment aesthetic that calls upon transcendence or mystification for its epistemology.

    My second point is something of a confession. Despite my own reservations, I really like most of Zahedi’s films, and Bathtub, in particular. I’ve probably watched it fifteen times now, and I never fail to be moved by Caveh’s humor and sincerity. I suspect this speaks to my own peculiar and evolving ideas about art, democracy, humanism, and (again for lack of a better word) God, but it is also testament, I think, to Zahedi’s skill as a filmmaker. And so, with the remainder of my time, I want to begin to look more closely at the formal strategies he employs here in his effort to dig “deep” into reality.

    The first observation worth noting is that, despite Zahedi’s frequent calls to a kind of divine intervention, there is very little connecting his cinematographic style to that of the filmmakers most often associated with the term “transcendental.” Tarkovsky’s demand that images spring from the memories or “subjective impressions” of the author may have influenced Zahedi’s general approach to filmmaking — he has even cited, as a direct inspiration for Bathtub, Tarkovsky’s discussion of a theoretical film sculpted from the entirety of a single person’s filmed life — but little of the Russian’s uncanny, poetic logic is apparent here. Likewise, Bresson’s formal rigor, Ozu’s meticulous shot breakdowns, and Dreyer’s long tracking shots are all conspicuously absent.

    Bathtub also does not sit comfortably beside the films of other prominent autobiographical filmmakers. Although it raises interesting questions about, say, the nature of addiction and the sacrifices of art-making, Bathtub does not craft a specific argument along the lines of the essay-like films of Ross McElwee or Agnes Varda, for example. If Bathtub can be described as documentary filmmaking, then it’s a strange hybrid of documentary, performance art (here, I’m thinking specifically of Tehching Hsieh’s Time Piece, in which Hsieh photographed himself punching a time card every hour for a year), and also experimental filmmaking. Certain shots in the film are reminiscent, for example, of Jim Jennings’ meditations on the beauty that is to be found in the everyday. I especially like Zahedi’s strangely affecting compositions of stickers affixed to his bathroom tile and the shots of sunlight pouring through his apartment windows.

    Like I Don’t Hate Las Vegas Anymore, Bathtub is, in its final form, a deceptively conventional narrative. Granted, it originated from an unconventional conceit, but Zahedi has crafted from the raw footage a collection of compelling (if elliptical) stories. Assuming that he did, in fact, shoot at least one minute each day for a year, then his 80-minute film is cut and pasted together from approximately one-fifth of the available footage, allowing ample room to pick and choose which particular stories to develop. Among the narrative strands weaving through Bathtub, we see Zahedi’s battles with sex-, food-, celebrity-, and art addiction; we watch him struggle to survive as a poor independent filmmaker, teaching classes, applying for grants, and acting in others’ films in order to make a living; we experience the very real drama of his family life, particularly when his father suffers a massive heart attack, and Caveh, visibly shaken, fears for the man’s life; we get to share in the mundane details of an average routine — vacuuming, mailing letters, cooking dinner, traveling; and, most essential of all, we watch the evolution of Zahedi’s relationship with his live-in girlfriend (and now wife), Amanda Field. I’m tempted to call Bathtub a docu-romantic-dramedy (or something like that).

    Zahedi’s editing strategy is apparent from the opening moments of the film. The first shot is a medium-close-up of his almost-motionless face, a quiet, static image followed immediately by the more lively and kinetic scenes in which Amanda cuts his hair and Caveh discovers the contours of his own skull. His entry for January 4 th is an efficient narrative in miniature. He begins by echoing the opening shot in another direct confession to the camera (a recurring motif throughout the film), then cuts relatively-quickly to close-ups of a Frank Black CD and the front of a CD player, before pushing back to a medium-long shot of Caveh dancing. Another close-up, this time of a tape recorder, then a jump-cut confessional shot. January 6 th opens with a nicely-composed, still-life image of sunlight hitting shelves of books and fruit, followed by a shot of his kitchen window and the green wall on the other side.

    I mention the specific shot-pattern because, in the course of writing this paper, I’ve realized that there are two main reasons I find Bathtub so improbably watchable. The first is the complex rhythms of the piece — what Leo Charney calls the “peaks and valleys” of narrative. Even in that opening sequence I’ve just described, a sequence that lasts barely three-and-a-half minutes, Zahedi varies, quite deliberately, the shape and color of felt time. Juxtaposed against the quick pace of the earlier sequence’s efficient story-telling, those static images of light and shadow are made all the more strange and new. Likewise, the shot of Caveh’s body in motion, dancing ecstatically to a Frank Black song, is especially surprising after we’ve witnessed his first two, staid confessionals. Zahedi’s greatest talent, in fact, might be as an editor. I Am a Sex Addict is an even more impressive exercise in precise modulations of tone.

    Finally, though, I must concede that the greatest source of pleasure in this film is, for me, Caveh himself. In the Bathtub of the World seems to prove that a compelling narrative can be shaped from the “real” moments of “real” life, which shouldn’t come as too great a surprise, I suppose, to anyone who has read a decent autobiography or memoir. But what of the ego? And what of its relationship to cinema? Zahedi has said that a camera has the unique ability to capture “truth”: “You want to be accepted for the true self, not the false front. . . . . Love me despite all this.” Ultimately, despite my intellectual resistance as a critic, I find myself of the same mind as one of Zahedi’s film students, who, given a moment alone with his camera, looks it in the eye and says, “Caveh, I was touched by your sincerity.”

  • I Am a Sex Addict (2005)

    I Am a Sex Addict (2005)

    Dir. by Caveh Zahedi

    After staring at a blinking cursor for better than an hour, trying — and failing — to compose the opening sentence of this “review,” I’ve finally abandoned all hopes of objectivity. I can’t seem to find the right tone of third-person voice to describe this film, which is only appropriate, I guess. Like each of Caveh Zahedi’s previous features and shorts, I Am a Sex Addict is a work of autobiography in which Zahedi himself plays the starring role. In the opening shot, he addresses the camera directly, introduces himself as Caveh, and tells us that for many years he was a sex addict. His film is a frank, neatly-plotted, and curiously moving recreation of those years. It’s also incredibly transgressive and very, very funny. Quite a balancing act.

    Hi, Caveh. I’m Darren, and this is my attempt to make sense of how and why I reacted to your film as I did.

    By way of plot summary, I’ll just mention the two marriages and the three other relationships that were affected by Zahedi’s addiction. We meet all of these women over the course of the film. A few are glimpsed only briefly in old footage; others are brought to life by actresses. “Brought to life” is actually a curious choice of words here, given the film’s meta qualities. In several cases, we meet the “real” woman (via home movies), the performed version of her (via the film proper), and the “real” actress who plays her (via behind-the-scenes, documentary-like footage). I say documentary-like because the film’s form questions the truthfulness of cinematic representation at every turn. I mean, after Zahedi interrupts one of the opening scenes to tell us that the Paris street we are looking at is actually in San Francisco because he couldn’t raise enough money to shoot in France, and after he interrupts a later scene in Paris to inform us that they made the trip after all, all epistemological ground is up for grabs, including some of our most basic interpretive strategies. Home movies and behind-the-scenes hand-held footage are more “real” or trustworthy than staged recreations? Who says?

    What most impresses me about I Am a Sex Addict, and what makes it, I think, Zahedi’s most accomplished film, is the care with which he (in cooperation with co-editor Thomas Logoreci) controls its tone. The film feels as though it could fall apart at any moment, and that it doesn’t is some kind of miracle. After writing that sentence, it occurs to me that I’m quoting almost verbatim Hal Ashby’s description of Being There: “This is the most delicate film I’ve ever worked with as an editor,” he told Aljean Harmetz. “The balance is just incredible. It could be ruined in a second if you allow it to become too broad.” It’s not a perfect analogy. Ashby’s challenge was to illuminate the absurdities of simulacrum politics while preventing his satire from slipping into banal parody. Zahedi’s task, I think, is even more difficult. For I Am a Sex Addict to really work, it must humanize the victims of sex addiction, expose the very real consequences of addictive behavior, and, despite all that, remain watchable, which is easier said than done given the particular nature of Zahedi’s fetishes.

    Zahedi’s addiction became manifest most often in a desire to have sex with prostitutes. To combat that desire, he instituted a series of progressively destructive strategies, beginning with a genuine desire to openly and honestly acknowledge the problem with the support of his partner; by the time he attends his first Sex Addicts Anonymous meeting years later, his “prostitute fetish” has taken a much darker and sadistic turn.

    Zahedi shapes the film’s tone through careful modulations in humor, self-reflexivity, and music. The image of a sound mixer comes to mind — raising and lowering the levels of each voice to create a kind of satisfying harmony. I’m thinking of two difficult scenes, in particular. In the first, Zahedi tells his wife about his desire to receive oral sex from a prostitute. She responds by offering to satisfy the craving herself. Which she does. Three times. In the second scene, Zahedi visits a prostitute with the intent of enacting his deepest, most humiliating desires. Warning: the following blockquote is verygraphic:

    In my fantasies, I will grab whoever it is by the hair, and I’ll make her say things like, “I want to suck your dick” and stuff, and maybe call her a bitch or a slut. And then I start fucking her really hard in the mouth and make her gag and stuff. . . . What I’m thinking is that, if I went to a prostitute one last time and just did everything that I always fantasize about doing, then I think maybe I could get it out of my system once and for all.

    If Zahedi’s story had been told by a more naturalistic filmmaker, it would, I imagine, have looked something like Bruno Dumont’s Twentynine Palms, and, in that case, my tendency as a critic would have been to describe — and to experience — the onscreen sex metaphorically. Zahedi, however, has a vested interest in exploring the psychological underpinnings of his own addiction, and so he constantly undermines our learned tendencies as “readers.” About Twentynine Palms, I wrote, “Audiences are forced to observe everything — the ordinary and the terrifying — unloosed from the safe comfort of quick cutting, manipulative sound design, or stylized photography.” Zahedi’s approach is the polar opposite, and, as a result, watching I Am a Sex Addict is, interestingly, a simultaneously intellectual and deeply personal or human experience.

    The passage of dialogue quoted above is from a conversation between Caveh and Greg Watkins, who was not only Caveh’s best friend at the time of his addiction but is also Sex Addict‘s cinematographer and co-producer. (Their conversation is also a nice echo of the opening scene in their first feature, A Little Stiff.) When we see Zahedi’s visit to a prostitute a few minutes later, his words — with all of their graphic detail and hopeless self-delusion — linger over the scene. The act portrayed in the scene is difficult to watch. It’s misogynist and sadistic. But the scene itself is fascinating. Zahedi interrupts the sequence several times with jokes and with his ubiquitous voice-over, both of which act, throughout the film, as Brechtian distancing devices. Whereas someone like Dumont dares you to keep looking (and assumes, probably, that many of us won’t), Zahedi needs you to look. It’s important. This is what he did to women, and not metaphorically speaking. A man who had once marched in an anti-pornography rally and who considers himself a feminist degraded himself and women, and did so recklessly. Asked recently about his approach to comedy in the film, Zahedi quoted Oscar Wilde: “If you are going to tell people the truth, you had better make them laugh or they will kill you.”

    Zahedi’s attention to the personal and human dimension of his story pays emotional dividends in the film’s final act. Each time I’ve watched Sex Addict, I’ve felt my relationship with the material shift categorically at exactly the same moment. Soon after the release of A Little Stiff, Zahedi began a relationship with a woman named Devin, who, as it turns out, was an alcoholic. The actress who plays Devin, Amanda Henderson, is also an alcoholic — or, at least, so claims Zahedi, who interrupts the film to show us backstage footage of Henderson pulling her bottle from a brown paper bag. (I have no idea if she actually has a drinking problem. It’s impossible to know given the film’s hall-of-mirrors relationship with “truth.”) Sex Addict is structured around such revelations. The woman who plays Zahedi’s first wife, as it turns out, is actually a porn star. The woman who plays Zahedi’s girlfriend Christa, as it turns out, is unwilling to simulate on-screen sex.

    But the scene with Devin/Amanda is different, and I think the difference is owing both to the quality of Henderson’s performance (which is much better and more natural than either of the other two female leads’) and to the deftness of Zahedi’s direction. For the first 75 minutes of the film, I feel at some remove from the material. It’s an intellectual distance, the ironic distance of, say, Annie Hall writ large. But when Zahedi cuts from Henderson and her bottle to Devin drunk and spewing slurred insults, that comforting distance vanishes, and the effect is potent. I’ve been on the verge of tears both times I watched the film. I’m reminded suddenly of the “Eternal City” chapter in Catch-22, when Heller steps out of his satiric voice just long enough to send Yossarian on a walk through the grotesque streets of war-torn Rome.

    For the remainder of the film, Zahedi exists, by and large, outside of his mensch-y persona. There are fewer jokes, and the voice-over and recurring musical motif become less obtrusive. Like the lines of dialogue I’ve quoted above, images of Zahedi’s transgressive sexual encounters linger over the final twenty minutes of the film, but they’re suddenly transformed by the tragic human consequences of his behavior. We in the audience, in effect, undergo an awakening similar to his own. He “hits rock bottom” (to borrow from the language of recovery) and is forced, finally, to abandon his intellectual justifications. The stakes are high. And real. In the opening scene, Zahedi informs us that he’s narrating the film on his wedding day — his third — and those of us familiar with his previous feature, In the Bathtub of the World, know that it’s Mandy who will soon be walking down the aisle toward him. I can’t seem to resist the urge to paraphrase that cheesy Jack Nicholson line: Mandy clearly makes Caveh want to be a better man.

    I’ll be damned if the last scene in Sex Addict wasn’t the first time I’ve ever cried at a wedding.

  • Random Musings . . .

    Random Musings . . .

    On some recent viewings . . .

    Shame (Bergman, 1968) — Liv Ullmann and Max von Sydow star as Eva and Jan Rosenberg, cultured musicians who escape to a rural island when their orchestra is shut down during a war. Their new, more simple life as farmers is soon interrupted when their home is invaded, and they are forced to confront the violence that they had so meticulously avoided. Shame is typically described as a psychological portrait of the dehumanizing consequences of war. The splintering of Eva and Jan’s relationship, then, becomes representative of savage self-interest and alienation, and the interruption of their careers (captured most obviously in an image of Jan’s broken violin) serves as a metaphor for war’s denial of Art, beauty, and culture.

    Shame is my least favorite of the Bergman films I’ve seen. By setting the action amid some unspecific, fairy tale-like war, Bergman (who obviously knows a thing or two about the proper uses of symbolism) invests too much “Meaning” in his characters and in their actions. Shame is an Allegory with a capital A, trapped uncomfortably somewhere between absurd, dystopian satire and the real here and now. I think I would have preferred the film had it jumped completely to one of those extremes. As with all collaborations between Bergman, Ullman, von Sydow, and cinematographer Sven Nykvist, Shame is packed with remarkable performances and jaw-dropping photography, and it’s well worth seeing for those reasons alone. I was only disappointed because it fails to reach Bergman’s own ridiculously high bar.

    I Don’t Hate Las Vegas Anymore (Zahedi, 1994) — Zahedi, his father and half-brother, and a small film crew spend Christmas in Vegas, where Zahedi hopes, among other things, to heal his familial relationships and to prove the existence of God. With this film alone as evidence, I would say that he accomplishes neither, but the attempt is fascinating to watch. Caveh is a polarizing figure, to be sure, and Las Vegas shows him at his most obnoxious and manipulative, particularly during an extended sequence in which he attempts to talk his 62-year-old father and 16-year-old brother into taking Ecstasy. I’m still not sure whether or not he succeeded.

    To me, the appeal of Caveh Zahedi is his willingness to emote unapologetically, to subject those emotions to close scrutiny, and to do so all under the watchful eye of a camera in which he places an almost naive faith. In his more recent film, In the Bathtub of the World (2001), and in this interview with Film Threat, Caveh talks about his disappointment with an experience (reading a great book, attending a film festival) that failed to be “salvational,” and I think that word is the key to his project. There’s something beautiful about watching someone search so desperately for that salvational experience, particularly in a mostly Christian nation like America, where we are so comfortable with the language of grace and forgiveness. Caveh’s films remind me of a concept that I seem to come back to again and again: negative transcendence — “God appears only as the Absent One, as that which is signified only by the depth of the artfully expressed yearning.”

    Before Sunrise (Linklater, 1995) and Before Sunset (Linklater, 2004) — I had planned to write up a full-length response to these films, which, when taken together, are something of a minor miracle. Sunset is my favorite film of the year so far. Told in real time, it captures an eighty minute conversation between Jesse (Ethan Hawke) and Celine (Julie Delpy), a couple who spent “one magical night together in Vienna” nine years earlier, then never spoke again. When they finally reunite in Paris, they are older (their early-30s) and somewhat hardened by experience, and their reunion unravels the comfortable lies upon which their lives are founded. I can’t seem to write or talk about this film without rambling on about my wife, about how we met ten years ago, and about how our ideas of love and romance have evolved since, which is why I’m cutting this short. I’ll just say that Before Sunset is a remarkably well-crafted film that ends at precisely the right moment and that treats its characters and its audience with great tenderness and respect. Like I said: a minor miracle.

    The School of Rock (Linklater, 2003) — A film that doesn’t for a minute divert from its by-the-numbers plot but that is a hell of a lot of fun to watch anyway. In other words, I laughed when Jack Black tried to be funny and I got goose bumps when the band played their big show. Plus, any film that mentions Rick Wakeman’s keyboard solo in “Roundabout” get bonus points. The School of Rock‘s biggest surprise: Who knew Joan Cusack was so hot?

  • Snow

    Snow

    Since watching Caveh Zahedi’s In the Bathtub of the World on Sunday, I have probably listened to The Innocence Mission’s “Snow” thirty times. Hopefully I’ll find time to write about Bathtub in the next day or two. It’s been a long time since I was so moved by a film.

  • Holy Moments

    Holy Moments

    Note: The following was written for an issue of Findings devoted to common grace and contemporary culture. This piece is inspired by, if not specifically about, Waking Life.

    • • •

    Seeking “Holy Moments” at the Movies

    “My function is to make whoever sees my films aware of his need to love and to give his love, and aware that beauty is summoning him.”
    — Andrei Tarkovsky

    Midway through Richard Linklater’s Waking Life (2001) — a wonderful film that is equal parts documentary, animation, philosophical enquiry, and bildungsroman — a remarkable thing happens: Caveh Zahedi, an experimental filmmaker, launches into an impassioned defense of Andre Bazin, the French film critic most known for publishing Cahiers du Cinema and for inspiring the careers of Francois Truffaut, Jean-Luc Godard, and Eric Rohmer, among others. What most excites Zahedi is Bazin’s peculiarly Christian film aesthetic, his faith in the cinema as a medium uniquely capable of recording and revealing God’s active presence in our lives. Because God is manifest in all of creation, or so the argument goes, film by its very nature necessarily documents those manifestations, capturing them on celluloid or video and representing them to us in a darkened theater. For Bazin, the master filmmakers are those most adept at filtering out the mind- and soul-numbing white noise of life in the process, thereby offering us brief glimpses of the transcendent. Zahedi argues that, by revealing these “Holy Moments,” film should (though it seldom does) reorient our perspectives not only toward the arts but also toward the beautifully varied and complex creation in which we live. “We walk around like there are some holy moments, and there are all the other moments that are unholy,” he says, his hands gesturing wildly:

    But, this moment is holy, right? Then, in fact, film can let us see that. It can frame it so that we see this moment: holy. Holy, holy, holy, moment by moment. But who can live that way? ‘Cause if I were to look at you and just really let you be holy, I would just stop talking. . . . I’d be open. Then I’d look in your eyes, and I’d cry, and I’d feel all this stuff, and that’s not polite. It would make you uncomfortable.

    What follows are several minutes of silence as Zahedi and his companion do just that, deliberately engaging one another — and by extension the Waking Life audience — in a truly transcendent “Holy Moment.”

    It is a remarkable scene for a number of reasons. Waking Life follows twenty-something actor Wiley Wiggins as he floats through dream-state conversations with a varied assortment of academics, artists, and travelers, each of whom offers some strategy for making sense of the world. Imagine Dante’s Virgil leading us by hand on a spirited voyage through the Inferno of an undergraduate liberal arts curriculum. Yet even in such an intelligent and joyful film — Roger Ebert has praised Waking Life for its ability to cleanse us of “boredom, indifference, futility and the deadening tyranny of the mundane” — the holy moment sequence stands out as both its most explicitly religious and its most deeply affecting. (And surely any Christian who has watched an American film in recent years can appreciate the welcomed novelty of said combination.) Here, Linklater successfully melds “theory and action,” an ongoing concern of the film, by providing a commentary on the potential contemplative and revelatory uses of film, while simultaneously modeling that process. As Zahedi stares at his friend, his eyes beginning to tear, Linklater cuts to a close-up of Wiggins, who we now discover is watching the scene in a movie theater just as we are. As our surrogate, Wiggins becomes suddenly alive to the strange, inarticulate experience of an encounter with Truth, Beauty, and Goodness. And with the proper orientation, this moment teaches us, so can we.

    Working from certain assumptions about common grace — particularly, as Richard Mouw has written, the belief that “God also takes a positive interest in how unbelievers use God-given talents to produce works of beauty and goodness” (49) — I would like to follow Andre Bazin’s lead and propose that Christians take a more active and deliberate approach to the arts, in general, and toward film, in particular. Too often Christian commentary, most notoriously among evangelicals, has reduced “the movies” to morally bankrupt mindless entertainment from which we must be protected. Even those Christian critics who are obviously well-versed in matters of aesthetics seem disproportionably concerned with gleaning banalities from, or simply attaching relevant Bible verses to, the latest Hollywood pabulum. I would argue, instead, that the chief goals of the Christian critic are to inspire in film viewers a thirst for the transcendent by intentionally reorienting their expectations, and to equip them with the skills and knowledge necessary in order to become more fully engaged with the medium itself and with the cultures in which it has been produced. The same goals might also be transferred to all church leaders and “regular Christians” who are concerned with finding the proper place for the arts in their lives as God’s creatures among God’s creation. Seeking holy moments, then — like meditation, study, and isolation — becomes a process, a spiritual discipline that, through devotion and practice, can help us to “enter into a conscious and loving contact with God.”

    How the Movies Work

    The influential French film critic Serge Daney defined a “cinephile” as one “who expects too much of cinema.” By that standard, one might argue that a large segment of the church in America today is characterized by an unfortunate paradox: we do often expect too much of cinema in that we genuinely fear its corrupting influence, gladly denouncing it publicly when our sensibilities are threatened. And yet we also expect so very little of films, deeming them unworthy of display in our buildings, or discussion in our classrooms and Bible studies. Except on those rare occasions when a particular film is given the mysterious Christian Seal of Approval, we willingly surrender all of cinema to the secular world, choosing to remain silent in a global, century-long conversation with wide-ranging implications. This strikes me as odd, particularly considering that the film viewing habits of most Christians I know are not terribly different from the general population’s.

    Our fear of the movies is not, of course, completely unfounded. The impact of violence and explicit sexual content on viewers, both young and old, has been well documented, for instance. But, with the proviso of St. Paul’s warnings against “passions and desires” of the flesh, I would suggest that our greater concern should be with the cinema’s uncanny ability to transform even the most enlightened audiences into passive consumers, a word with obvious moral, theological, and political implications. The Soviet filmmaker Andrei Tarkovsky, a devout Russian Orthodox, called this tendency “tragic”: “if art can stimulate emotions and ideas, mass-appeal cinema, because of its easy, irresistible effect, extinguishes all traces of thought and feeling irrevocably. People cease to feel any need for the beautiful or the spiritual, and consume films like bottles of Coca-Cola.” Instead of entering the New Releases aisle with only a checklist of objectionable words and situations in hand, we should also be consciously aware of our own thirst for “mindless entertainment,” a concept — at least as it is typically employed — for which I have yet to find Biblical precedent. As Richard Foster has noted, “Superficiality is the curse of our age,” and superficiality is precisely the stock and trade of the movies. Fortunately, we can combat this tendency by choosing to become actively engaged in the viewing process, which begins by learning something of how films work.

    A grammar of filmmaking slowly evolved during the medium’s early decades, thanks in large part to the experiments of people like Louis and Auguste Lumiere in Paris, Sergei Eisenstein in Moscow, and D.W. Griffith in Los Angeles. Their various styles finally coalesced in what is typically called “standard continuity editing of the classical Hollywood cinema.” Nearly a century later, most of us now internalize these standards before we have even learned to read. Knowing the jargon of continuity editing — shot/countershot, dissolve, match on action, etc. — is useful in discussions, but is less important than becoming consciously aware of their general effect, which is to precisely direct the audience’s viewing experience, often with discomforting moral consequences.

    The textbook example is Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho (1960), which accomplishes the unthinkable by forcing us, midway through the film, to transfer our emotional allegiances from Marion Crane (Janet Leigh) to her murderer, Norman Bates (Anthony Perkins). For the first forty minutes, we experience the world of the film through Marion’s subjectivity, a feat that Hitchcock accomplishes by cutting constantly from close-ups of her face to medium shots of her surroundings. Through these “eyeline matches” we come to identify with Marion, quite literally experiencing her anxiety as she decides to leave town, and her terror when she wakes to the sight of a policeman’s face. Once at the Bates Motel, though, our perspective slowly shifts to Norman’s, the transition becoming complete when he peers at Marion through a hole in the motel wall. Now, instead of seeing the world through Marion’s eyes, we are staring at her, joining Norman in his voyeuristic thrill. The hand-wringing nervousness that we experience as Norman attempts to cover up his crime is testament to Hitchcock’s prowess as a master crowd-pleaser.

    And it is also testament to just how easily films co-opt our imaginations, manipulating us into experiencing an intensity of emotion for characters and situations that are completely unworthy of our empathy. Offering as an alternative to this style Orson Welles’s Citizen Kane (1941), a film that refuses such manipulation by its combination of long takes and deep focus shots, Bazin writes:

    Classical editing totally suppresses this kind of reciprocal freedom between us and the object. It substitutes for a free organization a forced shot breakdown where the logic of each shot is controlled by the reporting of the action. This utterly anaesthetizes our freedom. . . . It ‘subjectivizes’ the event in the extreme, since each moment or particle then becomes the foregone conclusion of the director.

    Hence, in Psycho we become personally invested in the plights of, first, a thieving adulteress, then a psychotic murderer because Hitchcock has given us no other option. We have no choice but to become passive participants, simply along for the ride. (Not by coincidence, popular films are often compared to amusement park entertainments, a fact that Hitchcock would have found quite gratifying.)

    Bazin’s critique is not unlike that leveled by fiction writers of the mid- and late-19th century, who reacted against the sensationalism of the popular sentimental novel by proposing a new brand of Realism. William Dean Howells could be describing any number of Hollywood blockbusters when he writes, “Let fiction cease to lie about life; . . . let it leave off painting dolls and working them by springs and wires.” Trained like Pavlov’s dogs to feel heroic when we see a low-angle shot of a movie star, or nostalgic when we hear a Frank Sinatra tune (regardless of whether or not we actually possess any genuine memories of his music), our ability to properly experience, process, and share authentic emotion tends to atrophy. Thomas Merton writes:

    The constant din of empty words and machine noises, the endless booming of loudspeakers end by making true communication and true communion almost impossible. Each individual in the mass is insulated by thick layers of insensibility. He doesn’t care, he doesn’t hear, he doesn’t think. He does not act, he is pushed. He does not talk, he produces conventional sounds when stimulated by appropriate noises. He does not think, he secretes clichés. . . . But to live in the midst of others, sharing nothing with them but the common noise and the general distraction, isolates a man in the worst way, separates him from reality in a way that is almost painless.

    This “anaesthetized” way of life is perhaps the greatest threat facing the church today. While film is not the primary remedy, of course — the spiritual disciplines should be practiced intentionally — we need to recognize and exploit our body’s submersion in film culture, raising their expectations and training them to meditate, thoughtfully and spiritually, on the movies that they watch.

    An Alternative Approach

    In a useful (and typically beautiful) analogy, Tarkovsky describes modern man standing at a crossroads, “faced with the choice of whether to pursue the existence of a blind consumer, . . . or to seek out a way that will lead to spiritual responsibility, a way that ultimately might mean not only his personal salvation but also the saving of society at large; in other words, to turn to God.” Tarkovsky is unquestionably cinema’s most eloquent and persuasive spokesman for the potential of film to render man’s soul capable of improvement. For him, as has been the case for so many of history’s saints and theologians, great art is a profound vehicle through which God offers brief glimpses of his unfathomable holiness. Film, for Tarkovsky, is like the bolt of lightning described by Calvin that illuminates the path of an unbeliever before plunging him back into darkness, still wandering but forever altered by the vision. “The idea of infinity,” Tarkovsky writes, “cannot be expressed in words or even described, but it can be apprehended through art, which makes infinity tangible.” This sentiment is echoed by Ingmar Bergman, who has claimed to make films because they allow him to touch “wordless secrets that only the cinema can discover.”

    In a word, film is capable of offering that rare experience of transcendence. Though casually dismissed by postmodern critics as either biological (a rush of endorphins) or ideological (a ritual construct of dominant mythologies and passé metanarratives), the transcendent power of art has been a constant of human experience, sacred and secular alike. Speaking of his delight in music, Luther wrote that it makes it “possible to taste with wonder (yet not to comprehend) God’s absolute and perfect wisdom.” Friedrich Schleiermacher argued, like every good Romantic, that art gave him a “sense and taste for the infinite.” Calvinist historian Gerardus van der Leeuw wrote: “Every true work of art is in a sense religious. Every true work of art bears within itself the germ of self-abolishment. The lines yearn to be erased, the colors to pale. Every true art is experienced as the incarnation of what is further distant from us, and different.” Richard Foster has marveled at God’s sanctification of our imaginations: “He uses the images we know and understand to teach us about the unseen world of which we know so little and which we find so difficult to understand.” And St. Augustine often defended his excitement for beauty by citing Romans 1:20: “For since the creation of the world His invisible attributes — His eternal power and divine nature — have been clearly seen, because they are understood through what has been made.” Tarkovsky likewise makes explicit this connection between the Creator and His creation in the closing sentences of Sculpting in Time: “Perhaps the meaning of all human activity lies in artistic consciousness, in the pointless and selfless creative act? Perhaps our capacity to create is evidence that we ourselves were created in the image and likeness of God?”

    My rhetorical strategy should be obvious here: I am deliberately blurring the boundaries that have grown up between film and the other artistic media, and am attempting to inject cinema into a theological discussion that began several centuries before the medium was invented. More specifically, I wish to elevate film onto the same plane on which Christian critics have gladly placed literature, music, and painting, for instance — that is, art forms through which God reveals His wisdom and in which He takes delight. In Celebration of Discipline, Foster enthusiastically encourages readers to study the plays of Shakespeare and the novels of Tolstoy, those works that “take up the central issues of life,” but Christians seldom expect a similarly enlightening experience from the movies that they watch. This can be attributed to a variety of reasons, most of them associated with the “business” of filmmaking. Ultimately, though, I am suggesting that any serious-minded, Christ-centered discussion of film will necessarily raise the question of taste, a field pocked with theological, sociological, and aesthetic landmines. For instance, Foster would argue, I assume, that a Christian is more likely to benefit from the study of John Milton than of Tom Clancy (and I would agree), but many in the church enjoy losing themselves in a military thriller and see no harm in doing so. Likewise, I believe that the typical film viewer is much more likely to experience a holy moment when contemplating Carl Theodor Dreyer, as opposed to, say, Michael Bay, but many Christians were inspired by the treacly jingoism of Pearl Harbor (2001). What is a Christian aesthetician or cultural critic to do?

    Frank Burch Brown has contributed significantly to this discussion by reconceptualizing taste as a spiritual discipline. “What we can affirm, minimally,” he writes, “is that denial or restraint of the senses (not to mention the imagination) is not inherently superior to training the physical eyes to see and enjoy spiritually. And now more boldly: Because we are embodied souls, the physical senses can themselves be spiritual senses, when rightly used and enjoyed.” Brown’s emphasis here upon our behavior, on our need to train our senses in order to use them rightly, carries into his three-pronged definition of taste: aesthetic perceiving, enjoying, and judging. This model closely mirrors Foster’s guide to reading: understanding, interpreting, and evaluating.

    Applying this methodology to a viewing of Dreyer’s The Passion of Joan of Arc (1927), we would begin by noting how each individual apperceives, or “takes in,” the film differently. Aesthetic perception will inevitably vary because each viewer is biased by his or her own particular experiences and expectations. In one seat there might be a man who has never seen a silent film of any sort, while beside him sits a woman who instantly recognizes Dreyer’s deliberate disavowal of standard continuity editing and the influence of German Expressionism on his cinematography. The two viewers will, in effect, perceive very different films. This disconnect is most obvious today in the prominent debate over worship music. Brown, a composer and music scholar, suggests that rather than discarding Bach’s cantatas (to take one of countless examples), we should instead introduce and discuss them in our church classrooms, “just as one discusses (or hopes to discuss) theology and scripture.” The lesson to be learned here is the importance of actively developing our perceptive faculties so that our senses might become more finely tuned for spiritual purposes, rather than simply absorbing our tastes arbitrarily as if through osmosis — “liking” automatically what is generally liked by others in our social, economic, gender, and age groups.

    But perceiving is only the first part of the process. Brown recounts St. Augustine’s boast in the Confessions of having overcome his emotional attachment to the music of the Psalms, which now allowed him to more fully appreciate and meditate upon the truth of the verse. This intellectual distance is a mistake, though, because those desired moments of transcendent inspiration “can transpire only if one can appreciate, enjoy, or be moved by what one is perceiving in the art.” Enjoyment, for Brown, is both spontaneous and carefully orchestrated by cues within the work. The Psalms, then, are so worthy of meditation because of their perfect coherence — their setting of divine content within rapturous rhythms and songs. In Passion, Dreyer transforms St. Joan into an icon of rigorous faith and integrity amid worldly oppression by cutting systematically between close-ups of her desperate face and slow tracking shots along the rows of her angry accusers. This harmony of form and function, a hallmark of all great art, will typically produce a more enjoyable affect. And conversely, when a dissonance arises between a work and its alleged purpose, we are much more likely to be disappointed. By comparison, Luc Besson’s The Messenger: The Story of Joan of Arc (1999) has been roundly criticized for appropriating Joan’s story of faith and conscience and setting it amid a glamorous, computer-generated, historical epic.

    This final act of evaluation, of deeming Dreyer’s film better than Besson’s, is part of what Brown means by “judging.” A common mistake, though, is jumping too quickly to the making of appraisals before we have critically examined our own ability (or, more often, our desire) to properly perceive and enjoy a work of art. “We give a critical analysis of a book before we understand what it says,” writes Foster. Tarkovsky railed against this brand of soul-deadening apathy:

    The beautiful is hidden from the eyes of those who are not searching for the truth, for whom it is contra-indicated. But the profound lack of spirituality of those people who see art and condemn it, the fact that they are neither willing nor ready to consider the meaning and aim of their existence in any higher sense, is often masked by the vulgarly simplistic cry, ‘I don’t like it!’ ‘It’s boring!’

    Tarkovsky’s hyperbole should, perhaps, be forgiven — he spent much of his shortened career defending his aesthetic to Soviet authorities — so that we might, without bias, wrestle with the consequences of his statement. For Tarkovsky, the thoughtless, knee-jerk resistance to art is just one symptom of a more general and increasingly prevalent spiritual malaise. Like Pascal, who reasoned that men are so unhappy because “they cannot stay quietly in their own chamber,” Tarkovsky recognized that, in our surrender to distractions, movies chief among them, we have sinfully distanced ourselves from earthly responsibilities.

    While all Christians have been uniquely gifted, meaning that some more than others will be naturally predisposed to experiencing God’s transcendence through the arts, all have been commanded to hunger and thirst for righteousness, a command that extends to all areas of our lives. Rather than “mindless entertainment,” we should instead be seeking from the cinema what the church Fathers called Otium Sanctum, or “holy leisure.” The two concepts are diametrically opposed to one another: the former is an earth-bound escape from heavenly communion; the latter is the restorative peace that comes from seeking God’s truth. Otium Sanctum is what Benedictine monks pursue when they begin each day by praying Psalm 95 with its admonition: “Oh that today you would listen to His voice!” And it is what Richard Mouw is describing when he writes of common grace: “In a society that emphasizes the limitless possibilities of the individual self, it comes as a strange freshness to be confronted by an unfathomable God, indifferent to the petty, self-conscious needs that consume us.” Film, when rightly enjoyed, can offer holy moments such as this during which we are able to escape, even if only temporarily, from this “extraordinary egoism” into the freedom of God’s grace, experiencing anew the beautiful complexity of his creation and our selfless calling in it.