Transcendental Experience Captured in a Movie

(Setsuko Hara and Yôko Tsukasa in Ozu's Kohayagawa-ke no aki - The End of Summer)

There are three categories of transcendental experience:

1. direct experience
2. indirect experience
3. active search of the transcendental

Mystical movies dream at the contact with the Holly One. Actually direct experience of the transcendental is each contact of us with something that transcends our immanent. Milorad Pavić gave a crazy example in his Dictionary of the Khazars: the fly ignores humans till one of us flicks it on his palm. Well, this sounds funny, but think at the Dead Man of Jarmusch: a parable about our entrance in the transcendent!

Transcendental movies follow the indirect experience: an image suggesting the transcendent (while the active search of the transcendental is the realm of religious movies).

Paul Schrader uses in his book about Transcendental Style in Film the Eliade - Wölfflin model. Let's note here that it is a sui generis model. Eliade and Wölfflin never met.

But their association in the book of Schrader makes sense: in order to describe accurately the transcendental in a movie there was need of an historian of religions (Eliade) along with an art historian (Wölfflin).

Eliade used the term of hierophany (the appearance of the sacre) in opposition with theophany (the appearance of divinity). Which gives actually the difference of meaning between direct and indirect contact with the transcendent.

Wölfflin used the term of closed (tectonic) form in opposition to open (a-tectonic form). The term of tectonic was used by Wölfflin to designate a self-contained composition where everything pointed back to itself, the typical form of ceremonial style, while the a-tectonic was used to designate a composition where everything tended to reach out.

Wölfflin coined this oppositional pair to describe the evolution from Renaissance to Baroque (the four other pairs coined by him were linear - painterly, plane - recession, multiplicity - unity and absolute clarity - relative clarity).

But the term of tectonic (characteristic, as we saw, to the ceremonial style) greatly applies to the work art that suggest the indirect experience of transcendental, i.e. the hierophany.

Schrader uses the term of stasis: a frozen image that suggest the atemporal: the sea waves riding over the shore, an ancestral ritual, an art object defying us by its classical perfection, the slow motion of clouds, the immaculate white of the snow... all these create in us a Zen mono no aware, a Virgilian lacrimae rerum: our sad revelation of the difference between temporal and eternity.

(Filmofilia)