Film and/as Devotion: Bruno Dumont’s Enworlded Cinema

Abstract

I am trying to be a filmmaker [... ] I despise the religious, the clerical. I think that there is something profound in human beings, something mysterious, bound to the sacred. The sacred is also in the profane [... ]Bruno DumontFrom the wide-screen environs of Bailleul that open upon and dwarf the tiny human in L'Humanite (Humanity, 1999) to the recurrence of the vast, impassive California desert in Twentynine Palms (2003) or the windswept expanse of the Cote d'Opale in Hors Satan (Outside Satan, 2011), the films of French director Bruno Dumont level the precedence of the human over the environmental. Dumont's characters often find themselves engulfed by the physicality of their surroundings or subject to violent actions that lie beyond their own control. In these terms, the director's selfconfessed shock tactics frequently test our ability to look without looking away- from viscerally charged scenes of human violence, rape and suffering that take place within his beautifully detailed worlds.1To date, much of the existing scholarship on Dumont has been divided between those critics who explore his films as philosophical meditations on topics such as religion, secularism and art but elide their embodied effects and those who associate his films with a sensory, non-representational order in which narrative comprehension and reflective engagement are all but redundant.2 In either case, the intellectual, religious and artistic implications of Dumont's remain severed from its sensorial appreciation. In this article, I will attempt to breach these divisions by considering how the feeling of Dumont's is bound up with both his privileging of the natural world and his conscious re-working of various religious and artistic frameworks. To develop this argument, I draw upon Nathaniel Dorsky's critically neglected concept of cinema to better understand Dumont's own enactments of and/as devotion.3 Concentrating my analyses on Hors Satan, I examine how Dumont's materialist aesthetic, together with his considered emphases on duration, stillness and the painterly tableau, incite our contemplation of and affective to other bodies, selves, landscapes and objects, as well as to the sensuality of itself.As the title of this article indicates, my understanding of and/as need not be attached to exclusively religious or sacred subject matter. Despite the Biblical allusions and figurations of prayer that recur in Hors Satan, it is the expression of a worldly that I am most interested in with regards to Dumont, especially as his activates what Vivian Sobchack calls the passion of the and the grace of [a] common material in film.4 Finally, this article will consider how Dumont's de-centering of the human need not only be framed through destruction, violence and horror. While negative affects pervade Dumont's work, his can appeal to us in intimate, vital and enworlded ways that have yet to be fully explored.DevotionIn his book Devotional Cinema, the American experimental filmmaker Nathaniel Dorsky detaches devotion from its traditional theological connotations to extend it to film itself [as] the spirit or experience of religion.5 According to Dorsky, is an alchemical medium that has the to transform our everyday reality into moments of revelation or aliveness.6 Dorksy mobilises as a model for human and for cinematic being. This model of being speaks to films' potential to be transformative, to be an evocation of spirit, and to become a form of devotion.7 For Dorsky, devotional arises from the way a filmmaker use[s] itself'.8 As such, his book invokes a number of specific formal features: a tendency towards topics that relate to the mystical or the mysterious; a foregrounding of the vibrancy of the surface, together with intimations of depth (the screen, in union with its subject matter, becomes a luminous square-a reflecting pool of surface and depth); an attention to materiality (human and cinematic) and a distinct temporal structure. …