Abstract
Since 2005, a number of European films have emerged examining the legacy of Christianity in Western Europe, and the ways in which men, women and children struggle to negotiate questions of religion and secularity, the personal and the institutional, faith and doubt. This article looks at two of these films—Jessica Hausner’s Lourdes (2009) and Dietrich Brüggemann’s Stations of the Cross (2014)—in relation to questions of religious experience, the female body and film style. In both films the battle between these opposing categories is played out on the bodies of women—a paraplegic MS sufferer in Lourdes, an anorexic teen in Stations of the Cross—and both the films end ambiguously with what may, or may not, be a miracle of sorts: a confirmation of faith or a rebuttal. I wish to connect this ambiguity to the use of a very distinctive mise-en-scene in both films, which relies on a heavily restricted colour palate; highly formalised, painterly-compositions; and crucially what David Bordwell has termed “planimetric photography”: a shooting style that eschews depth or diagonals, refusing the spectator entrance into the image and holding her instead at a deliberate distance. My argument, in short, is that these stylistic choices—while gesturing towards a tradition of Christian art—also refuse the spectator either visual or haptic knowledge of the events that the characters undergo. Rather, they are suggestive of the fundamental unknowability that characterises religious experience, leaving us alone, outside of the action, forced to negotiate ourselves between belief and doubt.
Highlights
I urge you, brothers and sisters, in view of God’s mercy, to present your bodies as a living sacrifice, holy and pleasing to God—this is your true and proper worship
In short, is that these stylistic choices—while gesturing towards a tradition of Christian art— refuse the spectator either visual or haptic knowledge of the events that the characters undergo. They are suggestive of the fundamental unknowability that characterises religious experience, leaving us alone, outside of the action, forced to negotiate ourselves between belief and doubt
The review of Jessica Hausner’s 2009 Lourdes quoted above gestures towards a serious provocation, which turns around the dualism of mind and body in relation to religion
Summary
I urge you, brothers and sisters, in view of God’s mercy, to present your bodies as a living sacrifice, holy and pleasing to God—this is your true and proper worship. In what follows I will examine how these films negotiate formally and thematically between faith and doubt, religion and secularism, cynicism and credence, arguing that their lack of decipherability is a deliberate strategy for illustrating—perhaps even simulating—the problem of belief4 In their fascination with religious themes and questions, these films stand in a tradition of works by filmmakers stretching from Carl Dreyer, Ingmar Bergman and Robert Bresson to Terrence Malick and Lars von Trier. If each filmmaker a trite manner of forcing meaning-making onto thethat spectator—this is agnosticism is we are to understand them as agnostic, it is my contention that—far from an individual position on embedded in the film’s very frames Through their aesthetic choices, these films are suggestive of a the part of each filmmaker or a trite manner of forcing meaning‐making onto the spectator—this is fundamental unknowability in relation to religious experience. These films are suggestive of a fundamental unknowability in relation to religious experience
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