Sacred Time, Profane Screen: The Persistence of Mystical Contemplation in Cinema

Before any immediate plot, the viewer is invited to experience time, allowing images to speak before words, establishing a dialogue between the contemplative time on the screen and the subjective perception of the viewer. Cinema thus becomes a “poetic cinema,” seeking in its lyrical nature the mystical experience, where the unspoken, silence, and duration carry and update the contemplation lived through the work of art.

* * *

I have often pondered how Christian mystical lyricism, so often beautiful, has become rare in literature and intellectual discourse mid-20th century. Yet the same cannot be said of cinema. The contemplative voice, once pervasive in poetry and literary thought, seems to have waned or transformed, but in cinema, this lyricism remains abundant, vigorous, and original.

Although I identify as an atheist, I have always been fascinated by Christian poetic literature, which contains some of the most beautiful verses in our literary tradition. Ecclesiastes, the Sermon on the Mount in Matthew, the entire Gospel of John, The Song of Songs, or the Psalms are not only landmarks of religious “poetry” but also stand out as unique literary works in their ability to capture what only poetry can grasp in its poetic time. Auerbach articulated this better than I when he contrasted the narrative-poetic of Homer with the psychological-poetic time of the Old Testament.1 This poetic time, subjective and contemplative, is what we also call lyricism.

I am not referring precisely to the exuberant imagery of Hebraic-Christian mysticism. This exuberance, separated from the sacred text, can be found in Dante, Milton, or Blake, among others, and has influenced almost everything in our visual arts ever since. What I highlight here is “poetic time,” this contemplative “duration” – albeit borrowing imprecisely from Bergson’s concept2 – which is felt in Christian religious verses (including the Hebrew Bible), a subjective time of perception and relationship between the self and the world that is very difficult to grasp through rational understanding. It is a quality that we can still perceive in writers like Kafka or Emily Dickinson, for example, whose work preserves a mystical dimension, even if not directly related to religiosity. Paradoxically, this poetic dimension, which seems to have disappeared in much of contemporary literature and critical thought, has flourished in cinema over the past 50 years. Perhaps because cinema, like poetry for so long, is capable of capturing time in a nonlinear way, condensing or expanding the temporal experience, immersing the viewer in a rhythm that resonates with the contemplative subjectivity of mystical experience.

Contemporary Christian intellectuals seem to bypass this mystical-poetic aesthetic, this unique perspective on feeling the world. Figures like Jordan Peterson (a closeted apologist), Olavo de Carvalho, or, less strongly, William Lane Craig are, by definition, much closer to a Christian reactionism, in the sense that this mystical-poetic tradition is instrumentalized in its political and rhetorical aspect, being used against the “status quo” (democracy, “satanic” progressivism, wokeness, etc.). They seek teachings, morality, a return to a certain tradition, and to do so, they resort to a narrative of persuasion and reaction, setting aside the aesthetic experience. The narrative is stripped of its poetic substance, without its essential contemplative depth. But this character is still felt in cinema.

Stalker

The most compelling and inevitable example is Andre Tarkovsky. Solaris (1972), The Mirror (1975), Nostalgia (1983), and especially Stalker (1979) are clear manifestations of this “poetic time” transmuted into a sequence of images. In Stalker, the argument, the journey through the “Zone,” seen as a metaphor for the spiritual search for the sublime, is less important than its long shots of image associations, its significant silences, and the privilege of sensory constructions over narratives. When Tarkovsky told the filmmaker to “sculpt time,”3 I believe that is exactly what he meant, to prolong the cinematic experience, allowing the viewer to immerse themselves in a state of contemplation. Certainly, the director’s proximity to faith – he was an Orthodox Christian in Soviet Russia – was extremely important for his achievements; however, I do not believe that this type of cinema necessarily needs to emanate from a person of faith.

The Seventh Seal

This “duration” is also present – although not as dominant as in Tarkovsky – in Through a Glass Darkly (1961) or Cries and Whispers (1972), by the avowed atheist Ingmar Bergman (although, in his probably most acclaimed film, The Seventh Seal [1957], he exchanges this mystical duration for a Shakespearean linguistic drama). This same poetic dimension is manifested in the work of the “damned atheist” Lars von Trier, in the contemplative resignation of Melancholia (2011) or the extreme self-denial of Breaking the Waves (1996), even when he demonstrates active contempt for religion.

Among contemporaries, the one who has most updated this “duration,” largely under the vast influence of Tarkovsky, is Terrence Malick. It is difficult to talk about this topic without mentioning The Tree of Life (2011), an apologetic song about grace. Although Malick refrains from making religious statements, this “unique perspective” that I refer to is evident in his work, manifesting itself in a Protestant facet, in the tension between “commandment” and “grace,” between the Father and the Son. The updating of biblical imagery in his Days of Heaven (1978) is quite direct, but it is not necessary to reference the Christian imaginary to express this form of poetic “duration,” this mystical contemplation. In The Thin Red Line (1998), his best film, this contemplative poetics is tacitly an update of the contemplation present in the mystical lyricism of Ecclesiastes and, also, of Tarkovsky.

The Tree of Life

Approaching an apology of religion on-screen, Scorsese places the Christian imaginary at the heart of his artistic development. Already in Raging Bull (1980), he constructs a parable about guilt, expiation, and redemption, where Jake LaMotta’s self-destructive journey reflects the search for purification through suffering. Later, the proclamation of faith becomes evident in the exuberant and Dante-like sensual The Last Temptation of Christ (1988), as he explores, with the sensory weapons of cinema, the theme of the humanity of Christ, this paradoxical duality at the heart of Christian poetics. However, here we still find a work that is more devotional than contemplative in the poetic sense present in the previous examples. It is in Silence (2011) – a more recent and less discussed work (for me, his masterpiece) – that Scorsese places mystical contemplation at the center of his narrative theme. Here, this contemplation is an introspection that seeks to resist, even in the face of martyrdom or death. The sense of self-denial becomes the central axis of this meditation, since in Silence, truth, like faith, is personal and incommunicable. The mystical experience demands silence even in the face of martyrdom, as if Daniel, in the lion’s den, never became exasperated even knowing that the angel would never be sent for his salvation.

Silence

Silence is one of the channels for communicating the incommunicable, which has always been a mystical guideline of poetry. What cannot be expressed in narrated words is transformed into a poetic image to try to say what cannot be said. Whether this is a feasible task is another conversation, and it depends, to a large extent, on the position of faith of the beholder. The greatest poetic imagination that I know of, Dante’s, created images to try to represent the unspeakable. These images move and succeed each other bodily in ascents, falls, concentric translations, or in the vast sensory-imagery description of what is, supposedly, ineffable. Beatrice, in Paradise, is always reminding Dante that what is happening there before his eyes are visual modulations so that he can understand and remember, so that he can see, even if limitedly. They are scenes from a film, adapted and diluted from the transcendent, because if he accessed it directly, it would be fatal to him.

Mystical revelation is incommunicable, or even unrecoverable by memory, as the poet himself tells us at the end. Even so, he is there, telling us about his contemplation of the unspeakable through images that unfold before our eyes like a screen. The development of the image in time – this “temporal mosaic” that Tarkovsky speaks to us about4 – unfolds before and independently of being said, before its translation; therefore, cinema is able to try, and often tries, to show us what cannot be said.

Jeanne Dielman, 23 Quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles

In its opposite manifestation, the temporal dilation in cinema finds its radical example in Chantal Akerman’s Jeanne Dielman, 23 Quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles (1975). Diametrically opposed to Tarkovsky’s transcendentalism, Akerman’s manifesto immerses us in the meticulous routine of Jeanne, a widow caught between domestic chores and prostitution. The camera accompanies her every movement, confronting us with the repetition of each gesture and revealing the dehumanizing mechanization of her daily existence. The film is, simultaneously, contemplative and suffocating. While Tarkovsky and others explore the poetic or mystical dimension of time, Akerman instrumentalizes this contemplative cinematic time, transforming this “slow cinema” into a tool of social criticism. And now, nearly 50 years later, the film tops recent lists of “best films of all time” such as those published by Sight & Sound and the British Film Institute (BFI), reaffirming the prestigious place of such an approach in the industry.

However, this characteristic of privileging temporal extension and the sensory over the narrative, of the temporal mosaic of images before the verbal narrative, extends even within the largest Hollywood productions, as in the science fiction of Denis Villeneuve. What cannot be communicated within the linear structure of time becomes the central theme of his Arrival (2016), for example. Here, as in Stalker (another sci-fi) or in Silence, argument and form converge, and the message of contemplation is expressed through the very act of contemplation. Dialogue must necessarily take a back seat in this aesthetic experience, since this cinema needs to “show” before it “says.” As Villeneuve declared in an interview about his Dune film series: “Frankly, I hate dialogue. Dialogue is for theater or TV.”5

Dune: Part Two

Thus, the persistence of contemplative time on the screen remains even in productions aimed at the general public, as in Dune: Part Two (2024), one of the biggest recent cinematic events. Despite being a big-budget blockbuster, the film preserves its “slow” pace, with long sequences or spaced cuts, where the sensory and immersive aspect of the seventh art prevails. Even being a dense adaptation of Frank Herbert’s seminal science fiction classic, the film prioritizes the contemplative aesthetic experience over the conventional narrative. As Villeneuve himself stated very directly, “I seek to make a ‘sensory cinema.’”6 However, to achieve this feat, it is necessary to immerse the viewer in this contemplative time, seducing their senses, not their narrative understanding, to experience the time portrayed on the screen.

This approach contrasts sharply with the technique of “exposition,” where the film is limited to revealing through dialogue what is happening or has already happened, reducing the audiovisual experience to a purely verbal and explanatory narrative. A recent and notorious example of this practice is the infamous dialogue “Somehow, Palpatine returned” in the new Star Wars trilogy, where exposition occupies a central yet empty place in justifying the plot. In this case, cinema becomes mere enunciation: the action occurs because it was verbalized, not shown, and the experience of what happened has no place.

In this contemplative cinema, so often filled with mystical evocations, it is necessary to recover what poets until recently pursued in the sensory elaboration of their verses: the “willing suspension of disbelief” proposed by Coleridge, where cinema is structured not as prose but as lyricism in motion. Before any immediate plot, the viewer is invited to experience time, allowing images to speak before words, establishing a dialogue between the contemplative time on the screen and the subjective perception of the viewer. Cinema thus becomes a “poetic cinema,” seeking in its lyrical nature the mystical experience, where the unspoken, silence, and duration carry and update the contemplation lived through the work of art.

 * * *

All images are screenshots from the films discussed.