Abstract
To understand any aspect of being-in-the-world in general or cinematic experience in particular, both reductionist and holistic approaches are needed. Psychological accounts can give us only functional explanations of human behaviour or responses to signifying artifacts such as art. To understand the significance of these experiences the psychological must be complemented by a study on a level which may be termed spiritual. This line of thought is applied to analyses of Robert Bresson’s Pickpocket, starting from David Bordwell’s formalist and cognitive account of why many people experience this film as religious despite there being no explicit reference to religion. Paul Schrader’s analysis of the formal structure of this film in terms of his notion of transcendental style in film goes a step forward by explaining how the formal structure as he analyses it suggests a transcendental dimension which cannot be addressed directly. This approach connects in an illuminating way with Slavoj Žižek’s notions of the imaginary and the symbolic sphere. Bordwell’s approach, functioning on the psychological level, is basically reductionist, while Schrader’s, boosted with Žižek’s ideas as appropriated for the purposes of this article, is holistic and operative on the spiritual level. This two-tiered analysis reveals how cinematic form in Pickpocket serves as an indirect expression of faith.
Highlights
IntroductionFaith is an integral part of life, even for seemingly irreligious people. We have to have some idea of life being worth living, despite all the adversities that each and everyone us have to face
Robert Bresson’s Pickpocket, starting from David Bordwell’s formalist and cognitive account of why many people experience this film as religious despite there being no explicit reference to religion
Bordwell’s approach, functioning on the psychological level, is basically reductionist, while Schrader’s, boosted with Žižek’s ideas as appropriated for the purposes of this article, is holistic and operative on the spiritual level. This two-tiered analysis reveals how cinematic form in Pickpocket serves as an indirect expression of faith
Summary
Faith is an integral part of life, even for seemingly irreligious people. We have to have some idea of life being worth living, despite all the adversities that each and everyone us have to face. Slavoj Žižek for one in his fine analysis of Kieślowski’s Blue uses the term “symbolic sphere” to describe what the protagonist has lost after surviving a traffic accident in which her husband and little daughter have perished This derives from his brand of Lacanian psychoanalysis and serves its purpose well as an element of his analysis. The Finnish philosopher Lauri Rauhala has focused on the distinction that should be made between the psychological and spiritual levels of conscious being Charting their interaction serves well as a starting point for exploring the dialectic between. Reductionism and holism from the point of view of what might called “existential narratology”: how levels of conscious being. Charting their interaction serves well as a starting point for exploring the certain formal properties of narration can be used existential andcalled even“existential spiritual concerns.
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