Sex and the Spirit in Film
Searching Out The New Soul In Cinema
In an amusing line in the Spanish film Torremolinos 73, the director hired to help the central character with his first home movie claims that “Bergman used to say the position of the camera and the choice of lens must represent the soul of the human being.” This is especially portentous given the context: his job is to help Alfredo and his wife make more or less a porn film for a Scandinavian-based audiovisual encyclopaedia. Clearly Torremolinos 73 asks us to snigger at the pretentious combo of sex and spirituality. But other recent filmmakers expect us to take the combination straight: most obviously Bruno Dumont, with his four films, La vie de Jésus, L’humanité, 29 Palms and Flandres, and Carlos Reygadas, the director of Japon, Battle in Heaven and Silent Light. If these are the heirs apparent to that triumvirate – Ozu, Dreyer and Bresson – analysed by Paul Schrader in Transcendental Style in Cinema, then many may ask how such austere filmmakers came to be followed by directors so obsessed, it seems, by images of sexuality. Dumont’s La vie de Jésus includes a shot of a penis inserted into a vagina, and Battle in Heaven caused consternation with its opening scene of fellatio. Silent Light might seem a thoroughly austere work next to Battle in Heaven, but the torturousness of the flesh is clearly much more present than it was in the film to which it owes much: Dreyer’s Ordet.
Some would see the successors to Schrader’s trio as much more like filmmakers such as Paradjanov, Tarkovsky and Sokurov. But that is perhaps an article for another day, or perhaps for yesterday. After all, we should be fretting about the conundrum to hand: the idea that both these young directors seem to want to find the spiritual out of the sexual, showing a preoccupation generally absent from the work of Bresson, Dreyer, Tarkovsky and co. Yet would this fascination with sexuality not cancel out the transcendent, if we take into account Susan Sontag’s essay on Bresson in Against Interpretation? Here she proposes that, in reflective art, “its emotional power is mediated. The pull toward emotional involvement is counterbalanced by elements in the work that promote distance, disinterestedness, impartiality. Emotional involvement is always, to a greater or lesser degree, postponed.” This is hardly likely to describe Dumont or Reygadas, whose films use key moments of sex, as well as violence, to engage, even enrage the viewer. Dumont may have said of his characters, in an interview with Kaleem Aftab in Projections 12, that they “are not ordinary people – in fact they’re extraordinary. I think of them as being a bit like the sculptures of Rodin”, but it’s as though he’s interested in the very unsculptured, explicit ordinariness of sexuality contained within an extraordinary, implicit, sculptural spirituality.
This is the sort of spirituality, perhaps, that demands, in Borges’ story Borges and I, that “all things long to persist in their being.” What could more persistently persist than a sculpture, and is man not usually its antithesis, a constantly emotional, psychological and physically shape-shifting entity at the mercy of needs, drives and desires? Dumont gives us figures that are both sculptured stillness and unsculptural sexuality: in Flandres, for example, his leading character gets laid at the farm where he works, and then later fights in a desert war, but he remains somehow opaque to us. He moves between the vagueness of spirit and the concreteness of action, but is strangely unknowable. And of course in Dumont’s first two films, La vie de Jésus and L’Humanité, the director also offers us figures who are never quite there, never quite of this world, without proposing the characters actually belong to another one either. Both Freddy and Pharaon appear to carry a burden of guilt that never becomes personally, psychologically located, no matter the deeds for which they could be held culpable. It’s as if everything tangible must be vividly there (sexually and violently), but the psychological, spiritual aspect is slightly removed.
So while Dumont shows explicit sex in the films, the sex, like that in Reygadas’s work, is, finally, the corporeal at one remove. If the films work, we should view sex as though we were watching it ethnographically, but with a loosely transcendent purpose. Two scenes that especially come to mind in this context are the one between two supporting characters in L’Humanité, the central character Pharaon’s neighbour and her boyfriend, and the sex scene between the central character Marcos and his wife in Battle in Heaven. Heaving, sweaty bouts of activity, Dumont and Reygadas manage to remove the human significance of the acts, turning them into corporeal exchanges of fluids that move the characters towards alleviated drives. Both filmmakers animalise the sex but at the same time suggest a perspective beyond the animal. But this perspective beyond isn’t the social; but the spiritual, the sort of place Dumont invokes when saying he would like to be “someone who’s able to reconstruct the real, from the depths of the heart rather than the eye.” Maybe for Dumont the eye is too socially trained, too demanding of convention and verisimilitude, and he wants to show man bifurcated in such a way that we can sense the human as both animal and spiritual, instead of a watered-down compromise – the social self.
Dumont generally escapes the presentation of this social self through the visual – as he says, “I prefer to see myself as a painter, a good impressionist or expressionist…” Reygadas, whilst also well aware of the weight and texture of bodies (think of the physical contrast between the two leading characters Marcos and the young Ana in Battle in Heaven) is just as likely to see himself as a filmmaker of sound, saying in a Sight and Sound interview at the time Japon was released, “sound is very important to me and in this film [Japon] I try to approach it in two ways: objectively and subjectively.” He goes on to describe Tarkovsky’s use of sound as subjective; Kiarostami’s as objective. In Battle in Heaven there is an early scene where the central character stands with his wife at their stall in the metro, and Reygadas moves between objective and subjective sound, as if the character himself were moving between heaven and earth. As various passers-by move in and out of the central character’s vision, we notice not so much a social person passing by, but, in several instances, a spiritual possibility, someone whose soul has been separated from their body subjectively (in the character’s case) and aesthetically (in Reygadas’s) rather than literally. Reygadas here isn’t looking to offer cinematic miracles: merely to offer aesthetic options towards a broader sense of being.
Schrader may believe ‘the transcendental style is fundamentally just that, a style.” Nevertheless, it seems that the style he felt could be generally pinned down, despite key differences in the work of Ozu, Bresson and, to a lesser degree, Dreyer, cannot be applied in the same way to Dumont and Reygadas, even if they’re surely as interested in the spirit as the filmmakers Schrader invokes. Dumont and Reygadas illustrate the split quite differently even from each other. But what they do both have in common is a refusal to literalize the spirit categorically, or, in Schrader’s borrowed phrase, refuse to offer a miraculous “decisive action”, and instead replace it with simply an allusive one, no matter the hint at the miraculous in a scene in the garden with Pharaon in L’humanité, and the conclusion of Silent Light. This is where, in Schrader’s words, “disparity is conveyed by a strange human density which seems inappropriate to the clinically observed environment…”
If, for example, Gus van Sant in Last Days shows his leading character, loosely modelled on Kurt Cobain, leaving his body at the end of the film literally, what is intriguing about Dumont and Reygadas is that they often try to find an aesthetic and sexual correlative to the spiritual. Sure, there is that very unusual moment in L’humanité we have mentioned where Pharaon attends to his garden, and the camera cuts from a shot of Pharaon crouching on the ground to a shot where we see him rising in a manner that looks like levitation. But it could just as readily be Pharaon getting up very slowly. Another shot, shortly afterwards, is filmed in a manner that makes it look like he may well be levitating, but we can’t quite be sure. The scene lacks the unequivocalness of the scene in Last Days. Even Silent Light, the most ‘miraculous’ of the films present here, contains within it the possibility of a medical anomaly rather than a graceful intervention, even if much of its clout comes from the audacity of its homage to Ordet.
Now this isn’t to pedestal certain filmmakers over others. Van Sant is just one of several very fine filmmakers who have chosen to literalise the spiritual: not only Dreyer, who of course chose to literalize the spirit in Ordet, when a woman rises from the dead, but also von Trier with Breaking the Waves, where we see huge dangling bells hanging freely in the sky. But it is to try and draw distinctions, and to understand something about these distinctions, and how filmmakers like Dumont and Reygadas try to blur them. If Dreyer, Von Trier and Van Sant move towards literalisation of the spirit, how would a filmmaker move away from it, no matter if the filmmakers still invoke the theological in their very titles?
Central to the aesthetic form is bifurcation: a sense that the social cannot encompass the nature of a self, and thus the filmmaker suggests the human not as a unified being, but a divided one whose perceived identity is only one element of the whole. Thus there is the separation of objective and subjective sound in Reygadas, the sculptural versus the corporeal element in Dumont. This aesthetic of separation allows for a gap to be presented between self and other within the one being, without necessarily resorting to the miraculous. However, this would only take care of the form. What about the thematic - how do the filmmakers somehow suggest that the sexual can occupy the same plane as the spiritual? To help us here, it might be useful to bring in the philosopher Gilles Deleuze, who utilises both Epicurus and Lucretius when describing, in The Logic of Sense, the three phantasms: the spiritual, the sexual and the oneiric. How can the sexual be attached to the spiritual, if we assume that the theological is intangible abstraction and sexuality is corporeal immediacy? Deleuze would say that each has its own phantasms, simulacra that detach themselves from the object and nevertheless constantly surround it.
One way of looking at this is to see the sexual as possessing a capacity far beyond the corporeal, that it can contain within it an element of the spirit, if we take, for example, two writers with very different notions of love and see how they dovetail on this point. In Proust, we often have love as the observation, pursuit and analysis of the cherished object in Swann’s Way and La Prisonnière (and evident in the film adaptations Swann in Love and La Captive). In Marguerite Duras, she often shows love as a surrender of self rather than observation of another. In her script for Hiroshima Mon Amour, and in novels like The Lover and The Malady of Death, women understand the shattering of self that may come from loving. In the latter novel, the male character asks the female one how loving can happen, and she replies that it comes from “perhaps a sudden lapse in the logic of the universe” - that it seems to work like an immediate conversion. In Proust, it often works well within the realms of logic, with endless analysis and observation as the male characters search out the many ways in which a woman exists. Hence all those instances of male characters following, spying and prying.
So where in Duras' work we often have love as a sudden moment of epiphany, in Proust's we have the worshipful object, a ritualising of another as if an icon. Here we can see how there could be a linkage between the sexual and the spiritual; and that it is perhaps this very linkage between what would appear to be contraries that can illuminate the necessary bifurcation. It is the non-literal separation the filmmakers seem to be seeking out. What can shatter us or obsess us, we might ask, but for something that contains an inexplicable aspect?
Now we can look at two further sex scenes from Reygadas’s work. One is the masturbatory moment where the central, suicidal character in Japon fantasises over a beautiful young woman at the beach; the other is the apparently ‘real’ scene in Battle in Heaven when the overweight, working-class central character makes love to the slender, very rich and very attractive daughter of the general he chauffeurs. Ostensibly these are very different: the former is clearly not taking place in any notion of real time, and Reygadas, suspicious of those who claim the woman in the sequence must categorically be an ex-lover, dismisses it as a “wet dream”. The latter, however, would very much seem to be ‘actual’. Yet in this type of metaphysical cinema, real time to some degree gives way to oneiric time – the third element in the Deleuzian triptych of terms – so that finally there is little difference between the wet dream and the ‘real’ scene. In the latter, Reygadas’s camera retreats from the lovemaking, and moves outside the window and around the courtyard in a moment that might, in another era, in a cinema of sexual discretion, have signified tact. But obviously Reygadas is hardly looking for sexual coyness. As he says when asked about sexual explicitness in his work, “the normal thing to do would be to ask every other director why they don’t have sex in their film…” This is a disingenuous answer, yet a more useful one comes later in the same Guardian interview. When he again talks of love and sex, he says “I am just saying that we long for things and long for love. Hope is the most important feeling we have.” When the camera surveys the courtyard and leaves the sex scene in Battle in Heaven, it is the sexual contained within the hopeful: that sex isn’t only an animal act between two bodies, but a communion of souls in bodily form. The camera’s circular motion around the courtyard seems to muse over how many other acts of communion are taking place elsewhere.
This is a tranquilly hopeful shot of the very type of sexual feeling Dumont also wants to capture when his leading character in L’Humanité rejects his neighbour’s crude advances near the end of the film. Sure, Pharaon would probably like to have sex, but what underpins it, what contains it in such a way that sex can breathe, can have hope contained within it? Again, it seems to be what Katia in 29 Palms wants from her partner, David, when they make love in the small Californian town in which they’re holed up. As they have sex in various locations – bed, swimming pool and rock face – Katia seems to be looking for the sexual simulacra, this possibility of hope within the sexual that seems to be missing from David’s perspective - who always appears to see sex as an animal action: as pure physiology. When near the end of the film he’s brutally raped in an act of pure physiology in turn, Katia wants to console him by suggesting that despite the fact his social identity’s been utterly violated (a macho heterosexual who’s just been gang raped by group of men, and his face so beaten he’s barely recognizable), her love for him lies elsewhere, in the simulacra that surrounds the love object. David, however, cannot acknowledge this element of spirit, and just seems to see someone who offers his pathetically ruined social self some pity, and so he promptly, if perhaps melodramatically, kills her.
Here we return once again to notions of bifurcation, and the means of bifurcation. If Von Trier and Van Sant in films like Breaking the Waves and Last Days want first and foremost to literalise the spirit, want to express the separation of being firstly through life and a transmigration from it, Dumont and Reygadas want to sexualize the spirit, want to find a principle within the sexual that can allow it to attach itself to the meaningful. If we agree with Reygadas that the character’s masturbatory moment in Japon should be seen principally as a wet dream, rather than a recollection of an ex-lover, and therein lies the hope, this is because hope lies not in reflectiveness, in the sense of loss, but in hopefulness, in the character’s ability to conjure up figments from his imagination. It’s not a concrete image of the past, obviously, because we also see the old village woman he’s only recently befriended and with whom he’ll later make love. It’s as though yearning doesn’t need a fixed image; it needs a sense of possibility – and whether that possibility comes through a gorgeous young woman or a woman superficially well past her prime is something finally more significant than if we were to read the scene as a psychologically pertinent flashback.
It’s as though what Reygadas and Dumont want to do is free sexuality up from many of its moral and aesthetic preconceptions: they want to remove it from issues of fidelity and beauty, and utilise it for a spiritual manifestation. If we have to accept in our own age that the spirit cannot plausibly be literalised – no matter Von Trier’s and Van Sant’s provocations, and Dumont and Reygadas’s allusions - then what form should the spirit take? It can occupy our dreams, can take place in theological ritual, and can place itself within our sexual lives. Central to Silent Light is the idea of choice – whether the central character should leave his wife for his lover: the latter, a woman he feels he was destined to be with. But what happens if his wife appears to die of what seems a broken heart, and then survives, semi-miraculously? Is this a higher being telling him that his wife was the right woman for him, or is he once again forced to make a choice between the woman he married and the woman he loves? Thus, in relation to creating spirit in our existence, fidelity wouldn’t be an issue of morality, but an issue of purposiveness. We would be faithful to another the way we would be to a religious cause; not necessarily because that cause, or that person, is the ‘best’, the most logical, the most beautiful – nor because an imperative insists we should, but because it is the area in which we’ve invested the most intangible, simulacral meaning. In Silent Light, the central character may believe his wife’s ‘death’ proves he was wrong to fall for another woman, but would her death not leave him free to be with someone else? Then again, is her rebirth the opportunity to mend his ways, or a further sign that he should leave her, and that she will survive the loss? What counts here is less the miraculous than Kierkegaard’s problem of choice. The decision still lies in choosing, and thus on the problem of one’s thoughts and feelings in relation to the loved one: will they gather around the wife or return to the lover?
If we look back to those sweaty sex scenes in L’humanité and Battle in Heaven, or to the aforementioned scene where Freddy fucks his girlfriend in the field in La vie de Jésus, we might wonder how the human and the spirit can once again be reunited: is there enough simulacral energy surrounding the action? By working with the sculptural and corporeal, in Dumont’s case, and the separation of sound and the weight and lightness of bodies in Reygadas’s, the filmmakers suggest an aesthetic form of the split self, and leaves the viewer to work out how we might try to reunite them. As Reygadas says, “the audience is not a bulk package, they are individuals.” Dumont and Reygadas create an aesthetic where we cannot readily access the immediate meaning of sounds and images. Instead, we must, in making sense of the work, surround their potential meaning with simulacral intensities of our own. That the body is so blatantly on display, and the spiritual so often allusively present, may even mean that the challenge is still greater than in the masters of the past, as the spirit recedes when the flesh is so willing.
© Tony McKibbin