The Mystical Gaze of the Cinema

The Films of Peter Weir

Richard Leonard

• Publisher: MUP Academic Digital
• Year: 2009
• Print ISBN: 9780522856620
• eBook ISBN: 9780522859942
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Film & Video

'Magical', 'out of this world', 'an experience you'll never forget': Peter Weir's films have enthralled audiences around the globe. Whether in iconic Australian works such as Picnic at Hanging Rock and Gallipoli or international mainstream thrillers such as Witness, Weir has deliberately created mystical movie experiences. Modern cinema studies is used to dissecting films on the basis of gender, class or race: now, for the first time, Richard Leonard shows that a mystical gaze also exists and is exercised in the secular multiplex temples of today.
The Mystical Gaze of the Cinema is a meticulous and accessible book that uses a psychoanalytic approach incorporating the insights of Jung, film theory and theology to break new ground in what continues to be a hot topic in cinema studies: the spectator/screen relationship. Leonard provides a fresh and innovative perspective on what happens when we behold a film.

CHAPTER 1

The Mystical Gaze

There are those who dispute the reality of mystical experiences or conclude that these are manifestations or symptoms of a psychiatric pathology. One neuropsychiatrist argues that mysticism is part aberrant perception and part belief pathology.¹ Since the Enlightenment, Western cultures, especially, have challenged the veracity of mysticism and its attendant structures as trading on illusions. It is argued that medical science can explain most of the culturally defined phenomena described as mystical.² For Freud religious feelings and any appeal to the mystical was evidence of neurosis, to an ‘early phase of ego-feeling’ where the individual desires a father figure.³

The physical origin of religious ideas ... is illusions, fulfilments of the oldest, strongest and most urgent wishes of mankind ... the terrifying impression of helplessness in childhood aroused the need for protection which was provided by the father; and the recognition that this helplessness lasts throughout life made it necessary to cling to the existence of a father, but this time a more powerful one. Thus a benevolent rule of a divine Providence allays our fears of the dangers of life.⁴

Other scholars equate mystical experience as an encounter with consciousness.⁵ Using John White’s phrase, each of these observers thinks that there are various ‘classic trigger situations’ during which a so-called mystical encounter can occur. Hans Penner has argued that there is no such thing as pure consciousness, only social relationships and therefore mysticism should be treated only in the study of religion as a whole. ‘The mystical illusion is the result of an abstraction which distorts religious systems. As such it is a false category, unreal, regardless of whether or not it is taken as the real essence of religion or a particular feature of a religious system.’⁶ Penner left the door open for mysticism to exist as an experience but only in the context of religion as a sociological phenomenon. Daniel Madigan went further.

It is not so much a direct experience of God as an experience of believing ... If religious experience appears to be a phenomenon common to all traditions, we cannot claim that it is because a single absolute or ultimate is clearly at work in them all. What gives these diverse experiences a tantalising commonality amid all their differences is the fact that they are all instances of human persons being drawn into communal vision or hypothesis about reality.⁷

There are, however, several other scholars, especially those without any confessional interest, who recognise mysticism as a multi-layered, multicultural, cross-generational event.⁸

Dismissing mysticism does not assist an understanding of what film critics and writers mean when they use terms like ‘mystical’, ‘metaphysical’, ‘magical’, ‘meditative’, ‘spiritual’, ‘mysterious’, ‘occult’, ‘religious’, ‘dreamlike’ and ‘supernatural’ to describe a theme in Peter Weir’s mise en scène. These writers have used these terms interchangeably. Generally, they have been struggling to find a language to describe what they see and experience in Weir’s work. If the reality of the mystical gaze stands up to scrutiny it needs to be a cross-cultural phenomena, independent of confessional definitions. Akin to mysticism are other important religious, theological and anthropological terms like ‘liturgy’, ‘mythology’, ‘ritual’ and ‘church’. These other terms are examples of institutionalised mysticism.

Why use the word ‘mysticism’ to describe this overlooked element in spectatorship? Mysticism has come to mean an action, separate from the activity of daily routine where an individual or a group experiences an apprehension, illumination or union that the members perceive to be something greater than themselves. Mysticism is found in every major religious group where there is a tradition of apprehending a presence greater than that of the adherents through union or illumination. Krishna, Divine Mother, Heavenly Father, Lover, Allah, Wakan, the wholly other, Buddha, the Lord, Amida’s widow, the Dreamtime Spirits or Satan: there is already a long history and a wealth of literature about the process of entering into a greater presence. The process and content of the experience can be mysterious for the participant, as repulsive as it can be alluring, but retains a compelling attraction.⁹ It has the power to be personally or socially transformative.¹⁰ Religious collectives, doctrinal beliefs, ethical systems or a particular culture, while related to long-standing definitions of a mystical phenomenon in other disciplines, do not define mysticism. The apparatus of the cinema, the act of spectatorship and the content of films are coded to enable the spectator’s experience to the mystical gaze.

Etymologically, mysticism is related to the Greek word ‘muein’, meaning ‘close the lips and eyes’. It has roots in the life of the Greek temples where rituals were conducted to express purity and moral righteousness.¹¹ It is, however, from the writings of the Roman philosopher Plotinus and his interpretations of Platonism that the systematisation and study of mysticism have developed. Plotinus was a mystic. ‘He is living proof of the fact that mysticism is not a religious phenomenon in the conventional sense that it must appear in the framework of some specific religious system, such as Christianity, Hinduism, Buddhism or Islam.’¹²

Common to both ancient and modern mystical traditions are three modes of apprehension: monism, theism and non-religious. Monism is the belief that the goal of mystical union is absorption into the Divine as an extension of the self.¹³ Theism acknowledges the distinction between the object of devotion and the subject. Mysticism in this tradition is the apprehension of the Divine while not being akin to it. The subject always remains a subject receiving mystical revelation.¹⁴ Non-religious mysticism recognises the reality of mystical experience, but does not accept that an ultimate being exists. It is not concerned with doctrinal revelation, metaphysics or making ultimate truth claims on the basis of individual experience. It is often called nature mysticism.¹⁵

In the common era of Western culture, the Christian religion has become the most significant definer of what constitutes a mystical experience. In fact the use of this particular term to describe a human experience is peculiar to Christianity¹⁶, though the phenomena it denotes are cross-cultural. In the fifth century the Syrian Christian monk, Pseudo-Dionysius used the term ‘mystica’ to describe the working of the subconscious.¹⁷ He was particularly interested in entering into the world of darkness so as to experience the Divine. ‘We pray that we come into this darkness which is beyond light, and, without seeing and without knowing, we see and know that which is above vision and knowledge; and thus praise, super-essentially, Him who is super-essential.’¹⁸ Pseudo-Dionysius defined the school of ‘apophatic mysticism’ as a conceptual darkness, where one empties the mind to encounter the Other.

Another, and equally significant, mystical tradition has been that of ‘katophatic mysticism’ or the mysticism of light. In this school the encounter with the Other is such that a suffusion of light illuminates a person’s experience and knowledge, even to the point of embracing oneness with the Divine.¹⁹ Teresa of Avila, the Spanish mystic of the sixteenth century, exemplified this approach. ‘The brilliance of this inner vision is like that of an infused light coming from a sun covered by something as transparent as a properly cut diamond.’²⁰ Katophatic mysticism concerns itself with beholding the Divine and, as a result, coming to illumination about one’s life, destiny and directions. Unlike apophatic mysticism, it attends to conceptualisations as primary ground for mystical experience.

The third school of mysticism is ‘nature mysticism’. This school attends to the unity one can experience with perceived reality. It does not make reference to a significant Other, nor does it concern itself with achieving unity with Divine Beings. Many people claim to have had a mystical encounter whilst apprehending nature, feeling an extraordinary unity with their surroundings. Poets and artists have been well known for expressing their experiences in this regard. Wordsworth was an example:

A presence of that disturbs me with joy

Of elevated thoughts; a sense sublime

Of something far more deeply interfused,

Whose dwelling is the setting sun,

And the round ocean, and the living air,

And the blue sky, and in the mind of man,

A motion and a spirit, that impels

All thinking things, all objects of all thought

And rolls through all things.²¹

William James observed that there are four elements to all mystical traditions: ineffability; noeticism; transience; passivity. Each tradition speaks about the indescribability of the experience. James called this ineffability: a cognitive problem in trying, linguistically and adequately, to express feelings, concepts or descriptions that might enable another to understand the encounter. Second, James also claimed that each mystical tradition has within it a noetic quality. The person comes to a particular kind of knowledge that is central either to the encounter or as a consequence of it. This even applies when the task of the mystical tradition is to lessen cognition because this is the knowledge gained from one encounter as a preparation for another encounter. Third, James observed that transience is a hallmark of mystical traditions. The experience or encounter cannot be sustained. (It is important to note that ‘transience’ is also a hallmark of modernity and of the cinematic experience.) It may be either a once-in-a-lifetime or repeatable event, but the subject does not stay in the mystical state forever. Either way, it is meant to change the devotee’s life and so the long-lasting benefits are the reordering of a life in a way that reflects the insight gained or more easily mediates another encounter. Finally, James noted that passivity is associated with mystical experiences. Either a Divine Being reveals itself to the believer through darkness or light, or nature impinges on the consciousness of the beholder. In all mystical experiences the person feels as though he or she has been taken over by the external force.²²

Karl Rahner argued that personal action is another common element to all mystical traditions.²³ The person who has the mystical experiences either turns away from the world as a result of trying to repeat or refine the experience; enters into the world to live out the reality of the enlightenment attained; or understands his or herself as part of nature in a new way that leads to personal change or social action.²⁴ Harvey Egan went as far as to argue for a ‘mysticism of liberation’, where one looks to ‘break open the socio-political, militantly-committed, prophetic dimensions of contemplation’. He maintained that a mysticism of the future had to include a mysticism of suffering, victimhood and the scapegoat.²⁵

Criticism of these observations is significant. Islamist Daniel Madigan has observed that the centrality of the appeal to the mystical experience in the West has arisen since the anti-clericalism of the eighteenth century. Friedrich Schliermacher, William James and Rudolph Otto gave to the personal mystical experience a central importance, for it was an ‘immediate consciousness of the Deity’.²⁶ James thought mystical experience was untainted by ecclesial or social doctrines and so was the primary religious event.²⁷ Madigan, however, recognised that while purity, righteousness, darkness, light, visage, ineffability, noeticism, transience, passivity and personal action can be seen as cross-cultural manifestations of mysticism, study of these elements alone ignores that mysticism is ‘mediated for us by a community and situated firmly within that community’s tradition of belief’.²⁸ Madigan did not dismiss the reality of mystical experience or its social and religious importance but argues it is ‘firstly an experience of oneself ... assenting to or achieving insight into and finally giving oneself over to the vision of reality proffered by a community that lives by that vision ... ’²⁹ Furthermore, he argued that mystical experience is ‘not so much a direct experience of God as an experience of believing’. He concluded:

If religious experience appears to be a phenomenon common to all traditions, we cannot claim that it is because a single absolute or ultimate is clearly at work in them all. What gives these diverse experiences a tantalising commonality amid all their differences is the fact that they are all instances of human persons being drawn into communal vision or hypothesis about reality.³⁰

These critical insights into the concept of mysticism provide the framework for exploring what constitutes the elements of a cinematic mystical gaze. The invocation of the term ‘mystical’, and its associated language, is a telling commentary on what the viewer takes to the act of film spectatorship and what some directors like Peter Weir make explicit in their films. To describe the cinema experience as mystical is a shorthand way of describing an ineffable encounter, where a sense of absorption, the breakdown in subject–object relationship, a heightened awareness of and unity with the natural and created order, of forgetting oneself or being illuminated, has occurred. This transient experience, if regularly repeated, is powerful enough to change visual and emotional perspectives, to impart information and to influence attitudes and behaviours. The experience of spectatorship is an encounter with oneself, one’s culture and, at its core, of the belief in the suspension of disbelieving which it demands.

The language of cinematic mysticism opens up the Other-world in film that James Palmer and Michael Riley suggested was ‘apprehended not so much by sight as by vision’ and that certain contemporary directors and films are not focused on religion but on ‘faith, which is another mode of vision or knowing’.³¹ It is possible that, in the end, what is at stake here is a form of ‘secular mysticism’, an issue I will explore later.

The History and Development of the Theory of the Gaze and Its Relationship to Mysticism

Cinema’s immediate antecedent was vaudeville’s ‘magic theatre’, which in turn was to beget the emergence of fairgrounds in the early twentieth century. Before the development of its narrative character in the period 1907–1913, film was one of main attractions of popular and public entertainment festivals and shows. These earliest films of arriving trains and stampeding elephants running straight toward the camera assaulted the senses of spectators and drew out of them astonished and terrified gazes as well ‘a pleasurable vacillation between belief and doubt’. These earliest manifestations of the film theatre had four characteristics: the images moved; the audience was safe no matter how terrified they were of what they were seeing; and the image addressed the spectators directly; they ‘explicitly acknowledge the spectator, seeming to reach outwards and confront’. Borrowing an image from a curious ally, Gunning concluded that this cinema of astonishment was what the fifth-century St Augustine of Hippo called ‘the lust of the eyes’.³²

Gunning traced the roots of the cinema back through the fairgrounds and the vaudeville theatres of the mid-nineteenth century to the magic light shows in the centuries before. He did this to prove that the audience was not taken by surprise at the vividness of the first films they saw but that ‘the first spectator’s experience reveals not a childlike belief, but an undisguised awareness (and delight in) film’s illusionis...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1 The Mystical Gaze
• 2 The Unseen Gaze: Religion, Mysticism and Film
• 3 Defining the Codes within the Mystical Gaze
• 4 An Apprehension of Mysticism: Peter Weir
• 5 Picnic at Hanging Rock
• 6 Gallipoli
• 7 Witness
• Conclusions
• Notes
• Filmography
• Bibliography
• Index
• Copyright