Is Film a New “Affirmation of the Spirit of Man”?

by Bryn Gatehouse.

“The only people for me are the mad ones, the ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved, desirous of everything at the same time, the ones who never yawn or say a commonplace thing, but burn, burn, burn like fabulous yellow roman candles exploding like spiders across the stars”
        Jack Kerouac, On the Road.

In Ulysses, young Stephen Dedalus makes the bold statement that literature is the “eternal affirmation of the spirit of man” (Joyce, 1975). This idea is, for me, indubitably true, but what I want to talk about is film, not literature! Of course, literature and film share many attributes (in general) – a plot, characters, emotion, perhaps an arc – but when reapplying this Joycean statement to a new art form in film, can we really see cinema as a new “affirmation of the spirit of man”? It would certainly be presumptuous to immediately concur with this idea of the spirit of film. If nothing else, film as an art movement has been anything but eternal, so we can concede that element of the statement. This leaves us with two real questions that we must probe in order to greater understand the role of film within a general human consciousness. First, does film replicate the spirit of man? And second, does film affirm this spirit? To answer this, I’ll be drawing on a number of films across the history of cinema. Of course, I cannot evaluate every film that has been produced, so I’ll focus mainly on films that support my conclusion. However, to counteract this bias I will include a secondary focus on whether film is primarily an art form or entertainment – the conclusions of this may affect any wide-reaching statement on film I want to make. I would also like to include a short aside that my claims around the “spirit of man” should be thought of as abbreviations for humankind in general, rather than any gendered statement denying a universal inclusive spirit.

Does film succeed in replicating the spirit of man?

This first question seems a little odd at first, so I’ll begin by breaking down what I really want to probe. Film cannot help but present some level of humanity, either simply by focusing a lens on a human actor or by animating human or anthropomorphic characters. However, I find it difficult to allow that simply showing humans to an audience is a successful replication of the spirit of man. In order to appease these qualms, which may take a simple form – representation of the spirit of man is something beyond the general depiction of man – I want to reuse Joyce’s own words. Something closer to a definition of what we mean by the spirit of man may help.

“Human society is the embodiment of changeless laws which the whimsicalities and circumstances of men and women involve and overwrap.”

“It might be said fantastically that as soon as men and women began life in the world there was above them and about them, a spirit, of which they were dimly conscious, which they would have had sojourn in their midst in deeper intimacy and for whose truth they became seekers in after times, longing to lay hands upon it. For this spirit is as the roaming air, little susceptible of change, and never left their vision, shall never leave it, till the firmament is as a scroll rolled away.”
(Joyce, 2000)

It is important to note that these statements by Joyce are about drama rather than literature. However, by the time that Joyce had matured as a human and a novelist these views had changed, hence the quote from Stephen Dedalus, along with thoughts from Joyce throughout Ulysses and Finnegans Wake. Joyce wants to set aside the “whimsicalities and circumstances” of humans aside, given to a lower form of narrative art than those forms which aim to interrogate and uncover the “embodiment of changeless laws” of being. To paraphrase Joyce, there is something it is like to be, and to be human. In order to replicate the spirit of man, any art form must first question, and provide some sort of answer for what it is to be human. The focus on this must be primary, though it does not need to be the only focus of a narrative art form. Similar sentiment has been expressed by figures like Virginia Woolf, in her essay ‘the Cinema’, with a particular information-exchange afforded between film and the audience through moving images (Woolf, 1926).

When thinking of film in this way, our first problem arises. In no way does all film have an interrogation of the human experience at its core. One need only think of Martin Scorsese’s quote that films produced by Marvel are closer to rollercoasters than art. This seems to have occurred across Hollywood in recent years, although I am by no means denying the existence of films that have no artistic value. What has changed is our complete addiction to entertainment, and the way in which large companies respond to that by consistently oversaturating films that have the primary aim to entertain, along with very little else. This is also not to say that entertainment is wrong (without some entertainment films would be rather empty, with no sense of emotional movement towards an audience, to take from Foster Wallace), but instead only to point out that a singular aim to entertain avoids a possible artistic component of film, that being the replication and interrogation of the human spirit. Film must retain this component in order to be placed alongside these higher arts, as Joyce says.

If we cannot turn to the Hollywood of today for such films, must we give up hope? To many this question seems silly, and I am prone to agree. The whole world makes films, and we’ve been doing so for over a century! Even in Hollywood the dominance of entertainment has not stopped films that probe what it is like to be, and to be human. We need only think of science fiction like Blade Runner (Ridley Scott, 1979), that seems to have some primary aim beyond simple representations of what people do. In this case, the question of what it means to be human pervades the film, even invading the minds of the characters to affect their actions. Questions around whether Deckard was a replicant or not miss the point of the film, that being that the indistinguishability of human and replicant within the film would dramatically change our moral sentiments and would affect our dim knowledge of the spirit of man, which we may now see as not held together by arguments from composition or flesh. In this sense, the film acts simultaneously as art and as a philosophical thought-experiment, the aims of which we may draw similarities to when thinking of art or film in Joycean terms.

One may note that I am assigning film a role as an artwork. I do not think this is a particularly controversial statement, and for now I am going to avoid expanding on this beyond necessity. It is difficult to reduce art to a single satisfactory definition, as with many things. However, with art in mind, one may look for film that replicates the spirit of man in film that consciously holds itself first as an art piece. The realm of “art-film” is a vague and largely unintelligible area, though some have tried to create some uniformity in its analysis. A useful figure here is Paul Schrader, who has developed the idea of a transcendental style in art-film – a style which allows for a primary focus on the mystery of existence (Schrader, 2018). Films in the transcendental genre shy away from the audience, ensuring a need for an active-thinking audience who must engage in the film in order to unravel and understand it. Whilst I do not necessarily think that this is needed in order to represent the spirit of man (see my previous paragraph with an example from Hollywood), these films do have a useful tendency to attempt replication of the spirit of man, often sacrificing some level of entertainment in doing so. The point at which Schrader assigns transcendental status to a film is known as the Tarkovsky ring – a reference to the Soviet filmmaker. In order to best evaluate the entire ‘transcendental’ genre, I will briefly assess whether Tarkovsky’s films succeed in their replication of the spirit of man.

Even from a first glance, the films of Andrei Tarkovsky seem to interrogate the spirit of man. In Mirror(Tarkovsky, 1975), a semi-autobiographical piece about the start and end of a poet’s life, along with intermittent fragments of Soviet history and personal genealogy. However, the plot of the film is a secondary feature. Put first is image, sound and attempts to grasp at changeless laws which our experience is structured around. Note the visuals of wind running through grass and trees, often passing straight through characters with no consideration of their whimsicalities. See also the low rumble of a trickling stream, or the effect of water droplets on human skin. Consider the burning flame that often haunts the film, the barn on fire or the light glowing through a pale white hand. All of these visuals are employed in order to assist the viewer in their interrogation of the human spirit. How do and how must we relate to nature, to memory, to the passing of time? In this sense Tarkovsky takes a primary aim of representing the spirit of man in film, if avoiding a rational element in his minimalistic plots – our relation to the film can only be semi-rational, both plagued by the same questions if not consciously drawing the same answers. Tarkovsky’s other films give a similar urge, a simultaneous emotional relation to the audience along with a shying away, allowing us to join Tarkovsky in our questioning of the spirit of man.

This gives us great hope for our first claim – film can represent the spirit of man, as vague as this is, and it often does so by supplying us with questions built upon common experience. This too seems to fit well with Joyce’s statement about our general awareness of some universal spirit and our probing into this. However, only half the question has been answered, as film is yet to be seen as affirming the spirit of man. This must be looked at in turn.

Does film affirm the spirit of man?

In order to effectively answer this question I should first begin with an account of what it means to “affirm the spirit of man”. In a small act of interpretation, I am taking Joyce’s use of affirmation to be referencing the life-affirmative philosophy of Friedrich Nietzsche (who is often mentioned in Joyce’s works). Without diving into exegesis of Nietzsche’s works, life-affirmation involves saying yes to life and thus to all that comes with it – including suffering. For Joyce, an affirmation of the spirit of man is thus a capacity to represent all of the spirit of man, including the mundane and the outright nasty, and still conclude by saying yes to the experience of being human at all. This is closely followed in Ulysses, as one only needs to look at the final words of the novel, coming from thoughts by Molly Bloom:

“and O that awful deepdown torrent O and the sea the sea crimson sometimes like fire and the glorious sunsets and the figtrees in the Alameda gardens yes and all the queer little streets and pink and blue and yellow houses and the rosegardens and the jessamine and geraniums and cactuses and Gibraltar as a girl where I was a Flower of the mountain yes when I put the rose in my hair like the Andalusian girls used or shall I wear a red yes and how he kissed me under the Moorish wall and I thought well as well him as another and then I asked him with my eyes to ask again yes and then he asked me would I yes to say yes my mountain flower and first I put my arms around him yes and drew him down to me so he could feel my breasts all perfume yes and his heart was going like mad and yes I said yes I will Yes.”
(Joyce, 1975)

With this sense of affirmation accounted for, we may take a critical look at the history of film, making a final decision about whether or not film has succeeded or can succeed as an affirmation of the spirit of man.

When looking at the films that I have covered so far – the filmography of Tarkovsky and Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner – a sense of affirmation can be derived easily, if in very different ways. Tarkovsky aims to affirm the spirit of man through emotional connection, shared images, and the beauty of a collective experience of humanity. Beauty can be found in all that we perceive, even in the destructive force of fire, thus affirming even the darkest parts of nature in order to appreciate and say yes to human life as a whole. In Blade Runner, Scott aims to affirm the spirit of man through narrative and character, with Deckard’s arc in his consideration of the nature of human spirit before and after romantic and philosophical interactions with replicants serving as an affirmation of the human ability to question oneself, to love, and to hold memories. These philosophical films, no matter the company of production or director, tend to have some message (if only as a background message, perhaps inferred from a more direct message) – human life, despite all flaws, is in general worth living.

But, while these broadly philosophical films may trend towards, and often require, an affirmation of the spirit of man, does this apply to film as a whole? It is much harder to see conscious affirmation in other varieties of film. For the purpose of being concise, I would like to consider two areas of film that, on first sight, do not seem to have any intention of affirming the spirit of man.

The first of these are films with a clear pessimistic tone. A majority of my writings on film have the subject of fascism in film, so I’ll use these as examples of pessimistic films (of course, we can exclude films like Schindler’s List(1993) – Spielberg’s general thought that life is ‘magic’ may play easily into our affirmative project). In the film Salo(Pasolini,1997), perhaps the bleakest of the films I’ve covered, I interpret Pasolini’s aim from the film being to show that the post-war World is not one of victory, but instead of perpetual descent towards Hell. Of course, this comes across as anything but affirmative. But one must remember that Pasolini was anything but a traditional Christian. One scene comes to mind in order to provide some sense of affirmation. In the final act of the film, the Circle of Blood, one of the young guards is found to be having sex with one of the slaves. Caught in the act, they are killed in front of the others. Right before this, the guard raises a closed fist, an old symbol of solidarity first used by revolutionary groups in the early 20th century. This seems to provide some justification for a spirit-affirmative interpretation of Pasolini’s film. As for Dante, who Pasolini takes from in his ring structure, hell is not inescapable, and the few figures who understand the horrors of the film are those who we can take hope from, and thus affirm the spirit of man in what appears to be a revolutionary sense. Other fascist films covered have similar themes, including the entwined state of man and nature and aesthetic reflection in Mishima: a Life in Four Chapters(Paul Schrader, 2009), and the Platonic role of education in Il Conformista(Bernardo Bertolucci,1970).

However, pessimistic films are not limited to those about fascism. In some areas, film takes a different aim completely – see the works of Bela Tarr as a useful example. Here I may stray into some controversy. I cannot say that I have watched Tarr’s works, beyond attempts at The Turin Horse (Béla Tarr & Ágnes Hranitzky, 2011), and yet through reading interviews I can conclusively say that his reading of Nietzsche, who seems to hang over Tarr’s discography, is poor in light of the failure to account for a Nietzschean sense of innocence. The Turin Horse is laden with feelings of human guilt, and joint blame for the destruction of the world along with some God. Whilst the heaviness of human existence is certainly true at times, Tarr’s failure to account for even the possibility of change, or of joy, actually works against Nietzsche, who wants to survey and diminish the role of guilt in society and emphasise a new sense of freedom in childishness. Unlike films like An Elephant Standing Still (Hu Bo, 2018), the misery of the film seems more in line with exploitation films than commentary on the effects of mental illness on the mind, only with the exploitation involving passing guilt over to the audience. In this sense, the Turin Horse fails in both a Nietzschean and a Joycean sense, and thus we may discard it in our search for a real affirmative role of film. This ‘misery-film’ can be addictive, and if given in large doses is incredibly dangerous.

We may also fail to see an affirmation of the spirit of man in many blockbuster films of today, which in turn can lead us back to an unfinished comment on our primary designation of film either as art or entertainment. Of course, this does not apply to every film that can be deemed a recent “blockbuster”. Instead I would like to focus mainly on a relatively new model of film production which assigns films as part of a ‘movie franchise’, with a number of films sharing characters and settings, often for the purpose of creating an instantly recognisable image of a certain franchise from which no real sense of exploration or ‘making it new’ is needed. Whilst the tradition of a ‘movie franchise’ can be traced as far back as the 1930s, a new variation of the format has grown more recently which has dominated cinemas since the 2000s, and has almost become a parody of itself. It is this new format of film that truly fails to affirm the spirit of man – it questions nothing, presents us with no sense of humanity, and as a result is unable to affirm that which it has failed to grasp. The use of quips and one-liners, something that seems to pervade these franchises as something potentially ‘human’, falls short precisely as those who utter them are not human (and most often fail to be presented as minimally human). Not only does this new idea of film itself fail to interrogate the spirit of man, but it fails to allow an audience to interrogate with their own spirit. The solitary aim of overdoses of entertainment, realised through flashing lights, explosions, quips, colours etc. strips the viewer of the ability for serious interrogation, instead overawed at just how fun this film can be. This new structure is perhaps the most daunting obstacle to film as affirmation of the spirit of man, and thus as art (I do not want to go through such pains as attempting to define art – if it is completely definable it is inexpressible, I have only attempted to touch on some ideas that I associate with an ‘art’). It is for the future to decide the direction of film.

Excluding these varieties of film for the aforementioned reasons, there is no doubt that film is (or can be) a new “affirmation of the spirit of man”. Not only can it be, as shown by both mainstream and ‘art-house’ films, but it should strive towards this goal. Only with this goal in mind can film set itself alongside literature and drama as an art form worthy of the human spirit.

by Bryn Gatehouse, December 2023

(a quick aside – I have not dealt with another area of film, those being overtly political films (excluding my short section of fascism). I think political films may fit more into discussions of journalism rather than art – their fit into my current framework remains to be seen.)

Refrences

Joyce, J. (1975). Ulysses. London: Faber And Faber.

Virginia Woolf "The Cinema." The Nation & Athenaeum. 3 July 1926: 381-38

Joyce, J., Barry, K. and Deane, C. (2000). Occasional, critical, and political writing. Oxford. England ; New York: Oxford University Press.

Schrader, P. (2018). Transcendental Style in Film. University of California Press.