Lord, I want to thank you for this film. I want to thank you for the shoot. Everything went so well. I want to thank you for all the happiness involved. We all made this film in honor of you. Let me pray for every single person who watches this film, may they be willing to encounter you in a new way. May they gain a new vision of you.– Elfriede Ahmad, Jesus, You Know
Lord, I dedicate this project to your cross, the cross of victory... I profess that you, Jesus Christ, you are our Lord and our living God, that are you are the master of this film, the master of Austria. I profess that you want to do something completely new with this film, something that no one can foresee or predict. Lord, you can do it.– Hans-Jurgen Eder, Jesus, You Know
Ulrich Seidl's 2003 documentary (or docudrama, or docu-something) Jesus, You Know begins with these words, intoned by two supplicants addressing the camera. In both instances, the speakers are viewed in a static shot from a frontal perspective, forming a rigidly symmetrical composition that places each individual in the midst of a network of vanishing parallel lines (pews stretching into the distance in the first case, two sets of votive candles in the second). This is an overarching aesthetic stricture that will reappear often in Jesus, You Know—a stylistic motif suggesting, perhaps, that a rigorous and coldly composed graphic network is the clearest way to denote the presence of a divine being.
But what divine being is this? If one detects a certain narcissism in the conflation between omniscient auteur and omniscient God in the film's opening lines, this, too, is a theme that will reappear often in Jesus, You Know (albeit implicitly). While the film is ostensibly a somber look at increasing secularization in Austrian Catholic churches in the modern age—it observes the prayers of devout individuals in an age that increasingly devalues religious morality—there is also the sense that Seidl smuggles editorial subversion of these themes into the film, positing traditional religious icons and rituals as empty objects offering nothing but emptiness and false hope. Indeed, the minimalist, spare aesthetic of the film—entirely static shots filming individuals from a close frontal perspective as they offer prayers to Jesus (or more accurately, to the audience; or even more accurately, to the camera)—would seem to suppress Seidl's authorial intervention entirely, allowing viewers to come to their own conclusions about his sincerity (or lack thereof) regarding his religious subjects. But as we will see, Jesus, You Know offers an extraordinary play with spectatorial identification, the act of visual mediation, and the role of the cinematic author, all of which serve to form an incredibly multivalent view of modern religion.
The sociohistorical context of Jesus, You Know is a continuing and accelerating trend of secularization in Austria. In 2001, a census report listed 11.5 percent of Austria's population (approximately 915,000 citizens) as regularly attending Sunday mass. As of the end of 2005, according to a report released by the Catholic Church of Austria itself, that number had fallen to nine percent of the total population, or approximately 750,000 citizens, a number that has continued to decline over the last five years.
Ulrich Seidl, the director of Jesus, You Know, is himself the product of a traditional Catholic upbringing, yet he's also a controversial maverick on the European art cinema scene. His 2007 fiction film Import/Export concerns two Ukrainian emigrants who experience brutal sexual degradation during their life-changing journeys; his 2001 fiction debut Dog Days was described by the Village Voice as a shining example of sadomiserablism; and his 1995 documentary Animal Love was described by fellow provocateur Werner Herzog as “looking directly into hell in the cinema.” In addition to his willful wallowing in sadistic and shocking human behavior, Seidl is controversial for his aggressive blurring of the boundaries between fiction and documentary. “I don't make any difference between feature films and documentaries,” Seidl said in an interview printed in taz magazine. “That's why the term 'staged reality' was coined. That means the people in my film are non-actors, but sometimes don't act that way. And that irritates some people. They want to think and see in tidy categories.”
Jesus, You Know as a whole will likely also irritate people who want to conceive of film in tidy categories. Although this “staged reality” offers no direct judgment upon its subjects as nobly devout or as foolishly naïve, Seidl's rigorous aesthetic and editing structures do convey subtle subversions of the characters' beliefs in an omnipresent and attentive deity. Seidl's editorial evasion is made doubly discomforting because we are offered access to such disturbingly personal information. The film is almost entirely a series of prayers delivered directly to the camera by real-life churchgoers (that is, as “real-life” as we may expect from a Seidl film). For them, during the act of filming, the presence of the camera has miraculously substituted itself for the presence of God. One woman tells the camera—tells us—about the crisis of faith experienced by her and her Muslim husband, a religious antagonism that is destroying their marriage; another distraughtly discusses her husband's infidelity and confesses that she has considered administering a lethal dose of poison to him; a man regrets how infrequently he saw his daughter after he and his wife divorced; and so on. The obvious emotional charge these prayers have for their speakers (and undoubtedly for the audience as well) makes it especially troubling when Seidl develops a sly exegetic counterpoint to his subjects' faith-based proclamations.
The primary way in which he achieves this subversion is by intercutting static (indeed, the camera never moves in Jesus, You Know) medium shots or close-ups of statues, altars, sculptures, murals, and other religious iconography into the subjects' prayers. Now, even such cut-ins could be interpreted as either affirmations of a benevolent divine force (represented through crucifixes, portraits of Jesus Christ and the Virgin Mary, etc.) or as evidence that modern organized religion (or at least the Roman Catholic Church in Austria) amounts to no more than empty signs and objects, mediated constructs, simulacra of religious forces that are meant to simplistically stand in for the real thing. We want to believe in the presence of a divine listener because the plight of these individuals is so palpably real. During one man's discussion of the collapse of his family after he and his wife divorce, for example, Seidl cuts to a portrait of the Virgin Mary cradling the baby Jesus, and we can hear church bells reverberating on the soundtrack; we want to believe that someone is listening to this man's supplication (staged or no, there's nothing phony about it). We want to believe that those church bells are some kind of divine rejoinder to this man's prayer. Maybe they are.
But more often Seidl juxtaposes these onscreen prayers with ironic editorial counterpoints. For example, after one woman voices her desire to call her cheating husband and pose as her own imaginary paramour, Seidl cuts to an image of a man carefully unrolling a plush red carpet before a church's pulpit, suggesting that the operations of this church amount to no more than a meticulous performance, a show of religious ceremony. This idea is similarly, though more enigmatically, represented in several scenes that act as “interludes” between subjects' prayers: performances by church choirs staged (like almost every shot in the film) in a static, frontally direct, rigidly symmetrical composition. Though the performances of these hymns and chants are beautiful and sincerely performed—on their own, we would have no reason to question their sense of religious affirmation—within the context of the film they serve as simply more performances, staged in front of grandiose altars and reredos. But the clearest example of Seidl's veiled religion-as-performance subtext arrives when one of the onscreen supplicants, who also serves as caretaker at her church, begins scrubbing a large crucifix with a rag. At this moment, the divine import of religious imagery and the more pragmatic concerns that keep religious institutions functioning smoothly could not be more distantly separated. Furthermore, the existence of the crucifix here as an object, a construct, an adornment in need of constant upkeep, reminds us of the film itself as a mediated construct. While Jesus, You Know is concerned with increasing secularization in Austria, with the emotional and ethical value of prayer, and with the very real hardships experienced by the individuals onscreen, it too ultimately cannot amount to more than an object—a thing—pieced together into a very specific arrangement by a sole overriding author. It cannot be a religious film, then; indeed, taken most purely, no film can be a religious film, since the transplantation of religious subjects into mediated objects necessitates an elimination of the theological ambiguity that must define every spiritual relic or experience.
This theological ambiguity may also be termed the “aura,” a concept that has been discussed by Walter Benjamin and Andre Bazin, among others. In “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” Benjamin warns us of the loss of the artistic aura necessitated by the cinematic form. Since film, at both the level of production (the recording function) and of exhibition (the function of the projector), operates through an automatic mechanism rather than through human reproduction (or its context in a culturally validated gallery space), it loses the “aura” that had once been attained by painting, by sculpture, even by theatrical performance, with its actual presence of flesh-and-blood thespians. This aura that is conveyed by art (or, in Benjamin's estimation, used to be) is akin to the aura that surrounds the religious icon: an awe in the presence of a symbolically-weighted artifact—in the first case, an awe for the transcendental skill of the painter or the sculptor; in the second case, an awe for the divine and intangible force the exists beyond or is represented by the religious icon. Benjamin would likely agree with the interpretation that I have drawn from Jesus, You Know: that no film can truly be a religious film, since the one necessarily dissipates the aura, while the other relies upon it for its existence.
Bazin would disagree, however. In “The Ontology of the Photographic Image,” he correlates the relatively young art form of cinema to the ancient Egyptian practice of “mummification”—not only as a literal practice, but also a figurative one, through painting and sculpture. In his theory, both cinema and ancient Egyptian art forms serve to immortalize the human body through art, to preserve one's physical presence through a visual likeness. Indeed, Bazin argues that in the fifteenth century, Western painting sought to achieve its fullest spiritual expression by imitating as closely as possible the outside world. Given this philosophy, cinema was not the loss of the aura in art but the fullest achievement of it, the manner in which artists could most closely correlate their spiritual (creative) expression with an imitative likeness of reality. So, we have another contradiction which does not help us to resolve the ambivalence in Jesus, You Know: the visual representation of religious iconography in the film could either be a Benjaminesque condemnation of the loss of the aura through reproduction, or a Bazinesque respect for the transcendental power that can be attained through reproduction. (It is my interpretation, however, that Seidl aligns himself more closely to Benjamin, undercutting the potential “aura” these icons and supplicants could have by juxtaposing them editorially.)
The question of the loss of the aura in visual reproduction is even further complicated by the fact that Jesus, You Know is shot on digital video. In a way, this stylistic choice is necessitated by the shooting conditions of the film: recording extremely long takes in the low-light levels of church interiors (often at night), shooting on celluloid would have required elaborate lighting setups and cuts between reel changes that are counterintuitive to Seidl's spare aesthetic. But shooting on video achieves an added, some would say deleterious, effect. Cinematic purists have proclaimed, since the rise of videography especially in the 1990s but as early as the late 1970s, that only on celluloid can the “aura” of cinema actually be achieved. This art form was conceived and developed as the rapid movement of still frames imbued with a physical and chemical thickness struck by the interplay of light and matter itself; the projection of light through this physically thick, tangible substance miraculously embodied the movement of reality. It was (and is), then, an art form not only striking in its closeness to the physical world but powerful in its deviations from reality, in its graphic interplay of light and shadow and motion. Digital video, celluloid purists would say, removes cinema of its painterly aura by flattening its physical thickness (no longer chemicals reacting within a strip of celluloid, we now have only pixels logging binary information) and, unless the video is transferred back onto celluloid in postproduction, by removing it of its very tangibility and physicality during projection. Of course, a digital video when recorded or projected would still exist on a disc, a mini-cassette, etc., but this physicality is obviously different from a strip of celluloid several thousand feet in length. If my sympathies with the celluloid purists are noticeable here, so be it: even supporters of the digital revolution would likely concede that viewing celluloid through a film projector is a more “transcendental,” more oneiric, experience than seeing an image recorded and projected digitally. What's striking in Jesus, You Know is that Seidl seems to use the flatness and the muted colors of digital video as an essential component of the movie's bleak, spare aesthetic. Aided by his tyrannically symmetrical compositions, Seidl and his cameramen, Wolfgang Thaler and Jerzy Palacz, achieve a world that is oppressive, unexciting, and alienating. We may want a certain aura to manifest itself for the subjects who pray onscreen, but we must admit that, even with its close-up cutaways to religious icons, this never happens throughout the course of Jesus, You Know.
Indeed, the gap between visual mediation and traditional religious morality is a recurring theme in the movie. If its opening words, quoted above, seem somewhat absurd in attributing authorship of this decidedly problematic film to Jesus, this unsettling disjunction, this disharmonious cohabitation, of religion and mediation is constantly reiterated by Seidl and by the supplicants onscreen. One woman claims that her husband “simply does not have the gift” for choosing the right television program while channel-surfing; he often turns to titillating talk shows that act as a “legitimization of sins and redemption” (she says). “The aura on those shows is just plain negative,” concludes this woman in a serendipitous coincidence. Later, a young man confesses that he watches television solely for the “pretty actresses” on the programs; these shows instill in him immoral thoughts that further make him question his purity and his faith, especially since these television-fueled fantasies inspire him to find sexual gratification in many biblical stories. The suggestion implicit within these prayers is that television—or the visual media more generally, given that the young man later claims that he envisions himself as a vengeful and absurdly virile hero from a Hollywood action movie—has replaced the church as the modern discourse for questions of morality, sexuality, and other existential crises. “Problems don't get discussed anymore,” says the woman whose husband watches those tawdry exposès, “but watched on TV.”
Perhaps one reason that visual mediation and traditional religious morality cannot coexist is the conflation of an omniscient auteur with an omniscient deity. It is a commonplace that the cinematic auteur reigns over his or her set with an all-powerful omnipotence, and in orchestrating a world that commonly dismantles the real-world “rules” of spatiotemporal linearity, it must be said that the filmmaker does act something like a microcosmic God, deciding for the audience what we will see (and hear), when, and in what manner. Seidl constantly troubles this notion throughout Jesus, You Know, most simply through the ambiguous address of the prayers themselves. To whom are they addressed? Jesus, or a divine being, most directly—this is the basic mode of address in any prayer. Yet the supplicants in Jesus, You Know also direct their prayers towards the camera; although most of them look slightly offscreen while speaking (only one churchgoer directly, and unnervingly, returns the camera's gaze), the camera is nonetheless the only “presence” in the church during all of these individuals' monologues. So the camera and a divine presence are equated, but of course the audience and the camera are equated in any act of cinematic spectatorship; this is what Christian Metz termed “primary identification” in The Imaginary Signifier, the idea that the cinematic spectator regularly identifies with the disembodied camera as a distinct and sensing entity in itself. Yet if the spectator in the case of Jesus, You Know identifies with the disembodied camera through primary identification, we also identify with the “character” of Jesus Himself, whose perspective as addressee we inhabit during the onscreen supplications. This form of identification—our alliance with the perspective of not only the disembodied camera apparatus but with a distinct character's point of view—is termed by Metz “secondary identification.” The simultaneous coexistence of a primary and secondary mode of identification in Jesus, You Know—a coexistence which is usually considered incredibly improbable in the cinema (a character as the camera)—further refutes our unshakeable faith in the presence of a distinct and omnipotent receptive deity.
The prayers, then, are directed not only to a divine presence, not only to the camera, but resultantly to the cinematic audience as well, asserting us as a divine and omniscient force. The supplicants' mode of address collapses into a spectatorial triumvirate of identification. Yet we must add one more overarching addressee to this already-complex system: Ulrich Seidl himself, who controls and observes their prayers, who (given his penchant for “staging” documentary material) perhaps had a hand in articulating the prayers themselves. It is he who, in editing these prayers together and infusing them with cutaways, truncating them, extending them, forming juxtapositional commentaries, receives and responds to their prayers. Regardless of the opening words with which I began this presentation, Jesus Christ is not the master of this film; Ulrich Seidl is.
The most definite manner in which we may notice Seidl's authorial predominance is, of course, through the rigid, unchanging, almost dogmatic aesthetic of the film. The camera does not move once during the entire documentary. Almost every composition observes the supplicants, choirs, or religious iconography from a frontally direct perspective, meticulously creating a symmetrical design that suffocates, dwarfs, and oppresses the onscreen subject. Most takes are very lengthy, with some single-shot supplications taking up over five minutes of screen time.
Why this draconic self-imposed aesthetic stricture? This kind of slow, cold, resolutely balanced style has often been equated with an inquiry into human despair or spiritual doubt in the history of the so-called “art cinema”; we may think of Carl Theodor Dreyer's austere philosophical penetration in Gertrud (1964), Stanley Kubrick's bemused observations of societies going to hell in A Clockwork Orange (1971) or Eyes Wide Shut (1999), or Carlos Reygadas' compassionate yet distanced analyses of individuals tormented by a lack of faith in Japon (2002) or Silent Light (2007). (Indeed, Reygadas is likely the most spiritually rigorous filmmaker working today.) Such aesthetics equate the magisterial control of the auteur with the omniscient bird's-eye perspective of a divine being; they embody, to be overly aphoristic, symmetry-as-spirituality.
The equation of such an aesthetic with cinematic spirituality is somewhat ironic, given Jean-Louis Baudry's assertion that it was precisely the cinema's multi-perspectivalism that inaugurated, for the first time, a transcendental spectator in the visual arts. In “Ideological Effects of the Basic Cinematographic Apparatus,” Baudry argues that, following the Cartesian perspectivalism that dominated the paintings of the Italian Renaissance—a perspective that grants a linear viewpoint of a closed-off insular compositional space, in which the dominant objects or subjects in the painting are placed most conspicuously in the center of the canvas (or frame)—the cinema made possible a shattering of the rules of spatiotemporal cohesiveness within which traditional human vision operates. This sudden ability to jump through time and space through a mere edit—to flash back decades through a dissolve, to leap to a different continent through a jump cut—established a spectator who could see “through” the supreme omniscience of a divine being. Bazin similarly cites the cinema's “new” three-dimensional perspective as the fullest articulation of more traditional spiritual expression in the visual arts. It would seem, then, that a truly transcendental spectator is achieved through a seamless interrelation of disparate perspectives and temporal sequences.
Strange, then, that Jesus, You Know—which consists entirely of lengthy static shots, conveyed in absolute temporal linearity—equates the cinematic spectator with Jesus Himself, a direct result of equating the spectator with the camera. The film constantly and disturbingly questions whatever faith we may have had in a divine presence, yet it simultaneously posits us, the audience, as that divine presence in listening to, addressing, and responding to its subjects' onscreen prayers. Though our perspective is unrelentingly confined to a bleak, static aesthetic, we are nonetheless offered the opportunity (by the videocamera directly, and by Seidl indirectly) to unwaveringly confront individuals' religious, moral, and existential angst. If we are unsettled by our inability to mollify their unease, we are consequently reminded of the inability for any omniscient divine entity (should one exist) to directly affect the lives of human individuals, and perhaps we are similarly reminded of the essential distance between the cinematic spectator and the filmic text. Indeed, the disjunction between presence and absence that is so often conceived as the crux of the cinema's effect on its audience—the seemingly incontrovertible visual reality of the images we see, juxtaposed with our unflagging awareness that we are simply watching three-dimensional images splayed upon a two-dimensional plane—is likewise the duality that leads one to question his or her religious faith. One may be convinced of a transcendental force, or at least wholly committed to believing in the possibility of such a presence, but the complete lack of tangible and visual evidence of such a deity may lead to severe doubt and existential alienation—the predominating themes, in fact, of Jesus, You Know.
Given all of this, it may seem like Jesus, You Know is a cold, inhumane, condescending, postmodern conundrum that does not take the prayers of its subjects seriously. Such accusations are not off-base, but ultimately, despite its agnosticism, I think the documentary exhibits a compassionate empathy for its subjects' crises. I would like to close my paper with an example of this reserved, melancholy compassion. The last individual we see onscreen in an elderly woman who has voiced her fears regarding an irregular heartbeat and an overwhelming lethargy; she tells Jesus, the camera, and the audience that she feels that her time is near at hand. In the second last scene, she addresses this emotionally devastating prayer to a deceased uncle:
When I die, maybe there will be somebody with me. It helps when someone is with you. Just being by yourself, that's hard—though you have to pass away by yourself, anyway. Maybe you are already waiting for me. Maybe I really will go to some pleasant, eternal world when I die. I wonder if my father has a pleasant life now. I don't know. But I hope so and pray for him.
Our sympathies, of course, lie entirely with this individual during her prayer, and we desire more adamantly than we have throughout the entire preceding film that Seidl give us some proof that these prayers are not in vain, that some divine being is listening. We suspect, perhaps, that the film will end on a bleak note of despair and doubt, since these are the emotional wavelengths of Seidl's aesthetic and of the bewildering conflux of spectatorial modes within which we've been operating. But Seidl does offer us an allegorical alleviation of our fears, albeit an enigmatic one open to polarized interpretation. For one of the few moments in the movie, the camera journeys outside of a church, to the home of the woman we've just observed with such aggrieved concern. This leap from the film's typical religious space to the private domicile makes us aware of the staginess of this reenactment, of the fact that (characteristic of Seidl's genre-bending deconstructionism) we are no longer in the realm of the documentary. In a static long shot, this woman—Waltraute Bartel is her name—slowly approaches her open screen door from within her apartment, as we observe her distantly from outside. A dog barks and passes across the frame. Waltraute swiftly brushes aside a flowing white curtain drifting in the breeze. She steps outside, halts, and stares directly at the camera, only for a moment. And we cut, immediately, jarringly, to another performance by a church choir—tellingly, the hymn they perform is “Hallelujah.” We are asked to draw the implicit correlations between these three cinematic spaces and surmise that Waltraute has indeed passed on.
This ending—a symbolic and fictional conclusion fabricated by Seidl (indeed, Miss Bartel is, in reality, still quite alive)—is undoubtedly problematic. Most troublesome to me is Seidl's sudden intrusion as a distinct authorial agent, the belated introduction of an entirely new cinematic plane of fiction, allegory, and ambiguous visual symbolism (although, again, such blurring of boundaries is typical of Seidl). And of course we may draw from this conclusion a brutally hopeless interpretation: that Waltraute's prayers have not been answered, that her death was sudden and solitary. Yet the tranquility of this scene, its brevity and its swiftness, and Waltraute's sudden perspectival agency in confronting the camera's gaze (which she had not done in her previous monologues)—not to mention the decision to end the film with a performance of “Hallelujah”—suggests to me that her prayers have been answered (either by Jesus or by Seidl—in any case, by some omniscient force). I believe, perhaps because I so firmly want to believe, that an attentive deity has indeed allowed her a swift and painless passing into a new world. The uncertainty that lingers over this interpretation echoes the uncertainty we feel over Jesus, You Know as a whole—an agnosticism over the presence of a divine force, over the mode of spectatorial identification we inhabit, over the effects achieved by Seidl's rigid, symmetrical, yet still somehow transcendental aesthetic. The movie confronts, embraces, and maintains that overwhelming doubt. That may have been its benevolent mission all along.
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