Gaps will always remain.
You don’t have to fall between them.
Bide your time with contemplation.
For limitless spaces offer boundless truths to be explored
and jumping between them can be exhilarating!
When feeling lost, I throw myself into watching ‘art house’[1] films with abstract narratives that remain open to interpretation. Watching such films, where the meaning is derived from its lack of definitive meaning doesn’t help me to feel found, but helps me reflect on what it means to feel lost.
Taking a philosophical approach to film through an analysis of cinematic strategies in Hunter Vaughan’s ‘Where Film meets Philosophy’, published in 2013, Vaughan pairs Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology of perception alongside Deleuze’s ‘plane of immanence’ to explore the experiential nature of embodied signs inherent within the composition of cinematic images, wherein, he ascertains how narrative forms can be used as strategies to frame grey areas and raise, what he defines as ‘fundamental questions’ that ‘perpetuate’ and ‘challenge’ situated thinking. [2]
Reflecting on the inexpressible void of a grey area, in ‘The Aesthetics of Silence’, from 1969, Susan Sontag refers to the ripples left in the wake of a world where Gods absence is now felt as ‘grey zones’ with a ‘spiritual restlessness’ that she claims is reflected in the matter of art. On the one hand Sontag’s text eludes to the monastic nature of silence, which she describes as a ‘zone of meditation’ and a symbolic form of ‘ethical purity’, through which, an ‘appeal for silence’ and the desire for a ‘perceptual and cultural clean slate’ expresses an idealistic and ‘mythical’ form of ‘total liberation’. On the other hand, Sontag re-situates silence as the loss of a transcendent spirit and a ‘crises of demystification’, which she defines as a ‘post-psychological conception of consciousness’, through which, we can lose our sense of spirit and become ‘estranged’ from the self.
But how does the artist capture the inexpressible nature of silence? Discerning how some artists have eliminated the subject of the self from art, Sontag purports how, since a sense of spirit can no longer authentically sublimate the reality of material forms, she considers all that is left for the artist unable to embody a state of transcendence is to reinvent new ways of reconciling their spiritual crises. Eloquently describing the artist as having to explore new forms of language to communicate with ‘unknowingness beyond knowledge and for the silence beyond speech’, comparing the experience of witnessing the silent space of art-works to the aesthetic nature of a vast landscape, Sontag discerns that boundless, scenic spaces can lead the viewer to forget the self as the authoritative power of silent spaces has the ability to create an ‘unchallengeable seriousness’ and a ‘noninterfering vision’ that can leaves its spectator unable to add anything but ‘contemplation’.
Defining the spatial presence of silence as creating the conditions for feeling a sense of ‘plenitude’, Sontag describes this as a psychological phenomenon that she calls ‘deindividuation’ and describes it as having an ‘impenetrable…opaqueness’, which can create situations for being open to interpretation and creating ‘an array of possibilities’.[3]
[1] Arthouse films are independent, experimental films that are not aimed at a mass market like mainstream Hollywood films. Symbolic in content this genre of film focuses on the development of ideas and new techniques for exploring narrative, focusing upon thoughts and dreams which motivate characters as opposed to a clear, sequential narrative.
[2] Hunter Vaughan, ‘Where Film Meets Philosophy : Godard, Resnais, and Experiments in Cinematic Thinking’. New York: Columbia University Press. 2013, p18-22
[3] Susan Sontag. ‘Styles of Radical Will’. London: Secker & Warburg, 1969. p1-34