Identifying the Transcendental Style

[T]ranscendental style chooses irrationalism over rationalism, repetition over variation, sacred over profane, the deific over the humanistic, intellectual realism over optical realism, two-dimensional vision over three-dimensional vision, tradition over experiment, anonymity over individualization. [1]

Alí Allié's film El Espíritu de Mi Mamá coolly answers each of these discrepancies on the side of transcendental style.

In another essay, I emphasize the relevance of classical cinematic values within the technocratically-predisposed medium of digital video. But Espíritu has not emerged from the crypt of classical cinematic values—in fact, it rebels against the classical tendencies of film with tendencies even more atavistic, even more conservative. Espíritu is transcendental; thus it resides within a tradition which defies classical values by pre-dating them.

Many of the techniques which have been used throughout history to express the Holy in art originated in primitive art. Sacred art has often seemed to favor primitive techniques: two-dimensionality, frontality, the abstract line, the archetypal character. [2]

Though Schrader's book addresses exclusively the films of Yasujiro Ozu, Robert Bresson, and Carl Dreyer, I would suggest the additions of the work of Andrei Tarkovsky (specifically Ivan's Childhood, Andrei Rublev, Mirror, Nostalghia, and The Sacrifice) and Terrence Malick (most specifically The Thin Red Line, though Badlands and Days of Heaven certainly qualify), the two transcendental filmmakers with whom Allié seems to have the most direct affinity.

The actual directorial methodologies of these filmmakers do not warrant comparison here. In many ways they are markedly unalike. However, their films manifest the essential transcendental qualities enumerated in the opening paragraph, deftly communicating in two dimensions with archetypal characters, most of whom, due to an imperturbable stoicism or inscrutability, are inaccessible to the viewer in any conventional sense.

An Overview of Primitive Techniques

Audiences have been perturbed by their inability to identify the protagonist of The Thin Red Line. The only tenable protagonist is the island which serves as backdrop to the central action. This thoroughly transcendentalist assertion needs no further explanation—after all, "[h]uman works...cannot inform one about the Transcendent, they can only be expressive of the Transcendent." [3]

Rublev, Espíritu, and The Thin Red Line demand that we watch without formulating interpretations. We are asked merely to see. However, this is not something for which we have much appetite in the twenty-first century. Eric Rohmer identified the problem by comparing the work of Bresson to that of Hitchcock.

Bresson's art is undoubtedly purer [than Hitchcock's]...The fact that stylization on the expression of time is given more attention than is spatial construction, is a measure of the distance separating modern cinema from that of the "grand époque" of silent films. In learning how to understand, the modern moviegoer forgot how to see...To the extent that an art of seeing still exists, we are, quite simply, more likely to understand the intentions of a language that can have the nuance and subtlety of a spoken language but that most often remains every bit as conventional. [4]

Sparse Means

A motion picture, from its first frame, has great potential empathy; one of the functions of transcendental style is to use that empathy as potential and keep it at that level. The audience has a natural impulse to participate in actions and settings on screen; a film-maker employing transcendental style can use these given abundant means, this natural empathy, to hold the audience in the theater as he gradually substitutes sparse means for abundant...Transcendental style must...set up a new priority. [5]

The nonchalant disregard for spatial specificity in Espíritu is echoed in a similar disregard for temporal specificity. The film appears to begin in the present but almost immediately thereafter descends pell-mell into various events of preceding years. The events thus recounted are inevitably cast through the prism of Sonia's current spiritual dilemma, namely spectral visitations from her deceased mother, whose lamentations and pleas sound not unlike those of Hamlet, Sr., and seem to inspire in Sonia the same petulant vacillation and ineffectual self-searching that Hamlet, Jr., so timelessly embodies.

The disorienting lack of establishing shots demeans the physical setting of the narrative, if not of the film itself (the film extends with remarkable dexterity beyond the strict bounds of the narrative), to the extent that the physical world is itself held at arm's length from the film's center of narrative gravity. When Sonia talks to a uniformed friend in a vague office, we are compelled to ask, "Where is this office?" "What sort of office is it?" and other questions prompted by our rational need to organize and classify experience, whether factual or fictional. The story itself prompts similar questions: "Why was the soldier in Sonia's village?" "How did the relationship develop between them?" Distracting oneself in this way will corrupt the irrational charm, the "new priority" of the film. These questions cannot and should not be answered. They are inessential detail in a story that deals only with essences—with quintessences.

In the South by Southwest Film Festival catalogue, El Espíritu de Mi Mamá was described as "a unique film essay...[b]lending narrative and documentary techniques..."

As viewers we have been trained to associate voice-over and the inclusion of narratively irrelevant images with documentary technique. The sparse means of the transcendental style accounts for this perceived likeness to the documentary form. With narrative presence also diminished, the viewer feels increasingly responsible for the supervision of his experience, responsible for his own level of engagement. The abundant means through which his attention is typically manipulated and wrangled are absent in the transcendental film, as they often are in the documentary.

"The more a work of art can successfully incorporate sparse means within an abundant society, the nearer it approaches its transcendental 'end'." [6]

If we consider the spatially fastidious montage of Battleship Potemkin reflective of the abundant means of the filmmaker and the cinematic culture in which he was ensconced, then we must consider the montage of spatially reckless close-ups in The Passion of Joan of Arc to be sparse in comparison. If abundant means are represented by the narrative fullness and paint-by-number visual schema of Saving Private Ryan, then sparse means are embodied in the narrative economy and incessant visual digression of The Thin Red Line.

For every film made in the aloof transcendental (i.e., sparse) style, there is a critically and commercially successful counterpart which achieves accessibility through the vigilant implementation of classical (i.e., abundant) cinematic techniques. Naturally, films made in the classical mode invert the qualities attributed to transcendental films: they choose rationalism over irrationalism, profane over sacred, the humanistic over the deific, optical realism over intellectual realism, three-dimensional vision over two-dimensional vision, individualization over anonymity.

An apotheosis of primitive technique in film inevitably leads to an appropriation of the medium for visual approximations of spiritual quests and subsequent awakenings, a trend illustrated by The Passion of Joan of Arc, Ordet, Andrei Rublev, Solaris, Mirror, Stalker, Nostalghia, The Sacrifice, The Thin Red Line, El Espíritu de Mi Mamá, and Bresson's thinly metaphorical stories of faith and redemption (this does not extend to humanistic films which embrace sparse means to affect false profundity—films by directors such as Abbas Kiarostami and Theo Angelopoulos). These films operate under an ultra-conservative awareness analogous to Andre Bazin's theory that "[p]erspective was the Original Sin of Western painting." [7] After the discovery and proliferation of the principle of perspective, the spiritual ambitions of painting, which had long since become embedded in the form, diminished in inverse proportion to increasing realism. The aspiration to a spiritual end in painting was supplanted by an aspiration to verisimilitude.

In cinema it is possible to say that Bresson, whose films have been compared to ikons, purified and rarified the work of Dreyer, whose films have been compared to a Gothic cathedral. Spiritual cinema has had to continually draw away from its potentials; being "abundant" at birth, it had to discover the "sparse." [8]

The comparison of Bresson's films to ikons is amusingly convenient, since Rublev is a film which employs sparse technique in a contemporary medium of inherent abundant means to chronicle, however loosely, the life of a monk who was renowned for his work in the primitive ikon form. Shifting suddenly and strikingly from black-and-white to color, Rublev ends with a survey of surviving ikons painted by the titular character. Though this is not as overtly a proselytic climax as that of Bunuel's Nazarín (a rare transcendental outing for the Spanish Surrealist), it has the effect of dignifying the religious application of the ikons by explicitly relating them to the spiritually earnest life of their creator.

Ambiguity

Neither the surroundings nor the timeline of the story are initially clear, as the film moves between the present and hazy flashback scenes, and between a vague Westernized setting (it turns out to be Los Angeles) and an exotic beach locale (Honduras, as eventually becomes clear). [9]

The following are some fundamental aesthetic principles of pure cinema (as opposed to classical cinema, a system of values rife with impurities):

1. Primacy of image over narrative (narrative emphasis is borrowed from literature)

2. Chronological ambiguity

3. Flat performances (the emphasis on the actor is a hold-over from the theater)

4. Dissociation of sound and image

5. An attempt to communicate a mood or state of mind, rather than explicitly formulated ideas

Operating in unison, these qualities can result in impenetrable ambiguity. Though not desirable in the opinion of literal-minded audiences, this effect is often a by-product of uninhibited spiritual expressiveness. Transcendental Chinese filmmaker Hou Hsaio-hsien has said:

I discovered that I became liberated from certain constraints: the traditional story with a beginning, middle and end, self-explanatory transitions, and the dramatic climax...I became aware that I was able to concentrate exclusively on the human soul and its emotions...my goal is to film states of the soul, atmospheres, and moments of reflection...[10]

Espíritu is the work of a filmmaker, not the work of a writer. Because I am primarily a writer, primarily a traditional storyteller, I hold the cinematic values enumerated above (all of which are proto-primitive in the cinema) in particularly high esteem—these are the values which distinguish the cinema from other narrative arts, the values which have been too easily muted and defiled with commentative music, refined histrionics, and an economical directness of plot at the expense of thematic lucidity—a relationship which is refreshingly inverted in Espíritu.

Late in life, Ozu remarked that "Pictures with obvious plots bore me now. Naturally, a film must have some kind of structure or else it is not a film, but I feel that a picture isn't good if it has too much drama or action." [11]

This remark can be extrapolated into a transcendentalist defense of the pervasive ambiguity in Espíritu, since the "drama" and "action" of Espíritu are almost impractically internalized, spilling over only slightly—only as much as necessary—into the physical world.

Distinguishing the Cultural from the Spiritual

I have always been amazed by Bresson: his concentration is extraordinary. Nothing incidental could ever creep into his rigidly ascetic selection of means of expression...Serious, profound, noble, he is one of those masters whose every film becomes a fact of their spiritual existence. Apparently, only in the final extremity of his own inner state will he be moved to make a film at all. [14]

While Alí Allié is not "rigidly ascetic," he does have in common with Bresson the compulsion to express himself in carefully metered stanzas of spiritual development. El Espíritu de Mi Mamá, in its primitive earnestness, is a fact of its director's spiritual existence.