Like
a Dream that Vanishes by Janine Marchessault
“Faith
is the substance of things hoped for,
The evidence of things not seen.” (
“Community
simply means our endless connection with, and responsibility for, each other.”
(James Baldwin)
Like
a Dream that Vanishes (1999) juxtaposes three interrelated puzzles: miracles, cinematic ontology
and human experience. The film opens with scratched emulsion, a house at night,
a woman swimming, flickering colours, a baby on a beach, roads-all marked by a beautiful and
abstract materiality. We cut to John Davis, philosophy professor at the
Miracles
In
the eighteenth century, Scottish philosopher David Hume set out to explore the
plausibility of miracles. In his essay Of Miracles, he challenges the belief in
miracles; in so doing, he threatens the foundation of all organized religions,
and most especially Christianity, for which the founding miracle is the resurrection of Christ. Hume does not deny that miracles
ever happen; he ponders the nature of the evidence upon which we believe that
miracles occur. A miracle is “a violation of the laws of nature, a
transgression of a law of nature by a particular volition of the Deity, or by
the interposition of some invisible agent.” With this definition, he finds that
there is in fact no physical evidence for miracles beyond human testimony
(which is itself unreliable and contradictory). This philosophical attack was
part of the Enlightenment challenge to all things supernatural.
The
argument against the belief in miracles sought to direct attention away from
mystical sources, to focus attention on society rather than God, as a means to
understand human misery. Hume’s materialistic attack was devastating to organized
religion. And even today, it continues to function as a model for legal
reasoning and for the evaluation of evidence. It is Sternberg’s great talent as
a filmmaker to bring this argument to film form. For the cinema, founded upon
the violation of natural laws, is nothing if not miraculous.
Film
Popular
responses to the first screenings at the turn of the last century characterized
cinematographic spectacle as modern miracle. Moments long gone could be made to
come alive once more. Like its predecessor, the Phantasmagoria, early
moviegoers described the cinema in terms of resurrection. (Perhaps this is why
some of its most astute commentators have been Catholic.) This kind of
description would grow into what film historian Noel Burch has called the “Frankensteinian” tradition. By this he means a way of
seeing and understanding images in terms of their relation to reality, either
as ontological proof of a past event and/or as something real in and of itself.
In
the one-hundred-year history of the moving image, film has been employed both
to document and create realities. While the cinema grows out of the positivist
and rationalist tradition that Hume helped to establish-a tradition intent on
making visible all things hidden, on bring to light—it has also worked to
create a whole phenomenology of aesthetic experience that depend on the hidden
and visible.
What
would Hume say of the cinema? Could it supply him with the kind of empirical
evidence he claimed was lacking to support belief in miracles? Since film can be used to create and document, Hume’s answer would
be “no.” Like human testimony, film is unreliable; we cannot
wholeheartedly believe in the empirical reality it projects. Yet, as we watch
Sternberg’s montage of movements, the argument against miracles is reframed in
a blinding flash of light: a white lamb, lightning bolts, sun reflecting off of
water, light streaks across emulsion.
Sternberg
cuts back to philosopher John Davis throughout the film; his presence and words
inflect our reading of the images. As an old man at the end of his life, he
looks shyly towards the lens, speaking to the filmmaker directly as if in
conversation. Each time we return to him, the argument and debates that ensued
from Hume’s famous challenge to religious belief are clarified in greater
detail; possibly the definition of miracles was not accurate enough, perhaps we
don’t know enough about the laws of nature, leaving the very character of a
miracle inconsonant. As the film unfolds, the argument against miracles appear
increasingly incomplete, unresolved. Is it simply a word game or can it tell us
something about the world we inhabit?
In
the juxtaposition of those small, everyday gestures so familiar in Sternberg’s
films-film scratches, emulsion flares, Niagara Falls, children paying,
teenagers drinking beer and smoking hash, a lake seen from a boat, two women in
loving conversation, more children, the sky, the wind in the trees, light on
water, old men debating in a town square, a woman blowing out a birthday
candle, more children’s parties, a man running on a dirt road, a young woman
leaning over a bridge, a woman swimming-there is something present. In these
images, silent for the most part, cut rhythmically to create a collage
intensified by the contemplative music of Rainer Wiens,
Hume’s argument is displaced by the filmmaker’s sense of wonder. Located in and
through the connectedness of things, people and nature, the film sculpts a
profound invisibility that reconfigures the rationality of a logical argument.
It lays it to rest on the brink of uncertainty. The image of a birthday candle
about to be blown out recurs throughout the film and is one of its central picturings: children blowing out candles, opening gifts; a
woman leaning over, eyes closed, breathing, a wish out
into the darkness. Such images speak to being human: hoping, wishing, innocent faith in the future.
Experience
John
Davis died shortly after Sternberg filmed the interview with him in 1998. This
brings an added dimension to his reflections and presence in the film. Towards
the end of the interview, he tells us that every culture has built into its
very structure the need to undersand “what it’s all
for,” a need to make sense of the universe. Yet no one has solved the riddle,
and the world is filled with contradictions and inconsistencies. Philosophy, he
feels, has come full circle, is moving back to its origins of “beginning in
wonder.” He continues: “The world is not a very tidy place; in fact, it’s
pretty messy.” He leans back in his chair and gives Sternberg a beautiful,
mischievous smile. This ist
he last time we will see him.
The
film does not resurrect anyone from the dead, not does it promise a miracle.
What it conveys, however, is the mystery of life itself. This mystery is
contained in the very materiality of the life-world, in social rituals and
languages, in the communication between people. The two lengthy, sync-sound
sequences in the film concern communion: two East Asian women sitting across
from one another at a table, discussing a map, laughing, gesturing, engrossed
in each others’ directions. And teenagers hanging out on a
front porch, drinking and smoking to pass the evening hours. The camera
does not intervene or pass judgement in either case;
it simply captures at some distance the communication and sharing that exists
between people. These social exchanges are grounded in gestures, words,
clothes, meaningful glances; that is, they are in the cultural fabric that
binds communities. The final sequences of the film record communities in
movement (marches, parades, and celebrations of solidarity), communal
identities (
The
very last image in the film returns us to the black-and-white sequence of a
young woman blowing out a birthday candle. It brings us to the wish and,
crucially, to the gift. It is fitting that Sternberg ends the film on this
image, for gift-giving is perhaps the oldest of social rituals, initiating and
maintaining personal relationships. It is a gesture that is undoubtedly at the
root of community. The gift is held out not as actuality but as potentiality,
tied to the wish that disappears into darkness. It is this darkness, this invisibility, that the film insists upon, and like a dream
that vanishes, we are left with rich uncertainty.