Status Updates From El cine de la devoción

Devotion is not an idea or a sentiment. It is born out of the vastness and depth of our view. Out of dark-ness, behind all light, this vastness abides in nowness. It reveals our world. It is accurate and humbling and yet, for all its pervasiveness, it is not solid.

To the degree that a filmmaker can relate directly to the heart of an object, the viewer will also connect directly to the heart of the object. The audience will see the screen as the camera sees the objects, and a great unity of heart will take place between filmmaker and audience.

The camera must give itself completely and wholly to its subject, yet it cannot give itself away to its subject. When a filmmaker is fully and selflessly present, the audience becomes fully and selflessly present. The filmmaker's physical relationship to the world manifests as the cameras relationship to the image and becomes the audience's relationship to the screen.

So the question becomes: how does a filmmaker selflessly unite the viewer with what is seen? If there is too much self, then there is too much view.

If the filmmaker is not cognizant of the fact that a shot must express both the seer and what is seen, then the film's view isn't totally conscious. The view is make-believe; it does not admit that vision is a meeting ground of ourselves and the world. The filmmaker and what is seen are not in union. The basic ingredients for alchemy are not present.

How does a filmmaker sculpt light in harmony with its subject matter? How can light be deeply in union with evocation? How do you construct a temporal form that continues to express nowness to an audience?

..film at best is not primarily a literary medium. The screen or the field of light on the wall must be alive as sculpture, while at the same time expressing the iconography within the frame. Beyond everything else, film is a screen, film is a rectangle of light, film is light sculpture in time.

How does a film go from mere representation to the type of direct experience we've been talking about? It depends, for one, on the filmmaker's realizing that the screen itself is essential to our experience of a film, that it is its own self-symbol.

Nowness is always ... nowness. Every moment of time exists in the context of nowness, the eternal now. Experiencing the relationship of nowness to relative time is akin to walking on a treadmill: the nowness is your presence while relative time passes under your feet. Nowness in cinema deeply respects the nowness in an audience.

[Film is] … the reality of being in the dark theater of our skull, observing incandescence.

We simply see. We cannot describe it but only experience it. Film, insofar as it replicates our experience of vision, presents us with the tools to touch on and elucidate that experience. Viewing a film has tremendous mystical implications; it can be, at its best, a way of approaching and manifesting the ineffa-ble. This respect for the ineffable is an essential aspect of devotion.

How do we feel when a film is over? There are films, for instance, that are intellectually rigorous, or "adult," but when the lights come up at the end of them we feel unhealthy in some way. Were embarrassed to be with one another.

At the same time we also have the ability to observe this entire experience, to see through the moments of anger, fear, and tenderness rather than just experience them. We are part of our experience and yet we can see through it. We can see through it, yet we are not free from it. We are both appreciators and victims of material existence.

As human beings we find ourselves in a strange situa-tion. We have the same basic qualities, problems, emo-tions, and interests that animals have: we experience danger and often need to defend ourselves, we need to eat and sleep, we feel anger and tenderness, and we reproduce.

When film does this, when it subverts our absorption in the temporal and reveals the depths of our own reality, it opens us to a fuller sense of ourselves and our world. It is alive as a devotional form.

The word "devotion," as I am using it, need not
refer to the embodiment of a specific religious form. Rather, it is the opening or the interruption that allows us to experience what is hidden, and to accept with our hearts our given situation.

..film’s physical properties seemed so attuned to our metabolism that I began to experience film as a direct and intimate metaphor or model for our being, a model which had the potential to be transformative, to be an evocation of spirit, and to become a form of devotion.