Summary
Abstract
This essay explores the elusive quality of poetic mystery in cinema, beyond the conventional sense of mysteries that structure plots. Poetic mystery is at once atmospheric and suggestive; it envelops a rich film and offers a different, and at first glance hidden, pattern that allows us to grasp its events and motifs more deeply and thoroughly. Although mystery is a matter of mood, it is also fully material, and can be traced through careful analysis. Looking at works by Víctor Erice, Leos Carax, Samuel Fuller and others, the essay suggests ways of tracing the sense of mystery in a film, paying particular attention to narrative alternation and suspension. Theorists considered include Pier Paolo Pasolini, André Bazin, and Raymond Bellour.
Keywords: Mystery, poetic film, cinema aesthetics, Víctor Erice, Pier Paolo Pasolini
Mystery belongs to everyone and is the principle of genuine community.
– Louis Aragon, 1927At any rate the point is first of all to find again the mysteries.
– Norman O. Brown, 1960Mystery
I often think that we go about the analysis of films the wrong way around. We usually start from the end of the film, as it were, and project all the things that we have come to know about the themes, the characters, the form, the entire trajectory, back to its beginning. Once we think, speak, or write about a film, the hardest thing to recapture, as we re-view it, is the experience of starting in blissful ignorance, knowing (for the most part) nothing of what is to unfold, understanding nothing of the strange figures, places, objects and incidents that appear before us.
There is a phrase, from a panel discussion transcribed at the end of the 1970s, that I often recall: responding to some negative remarks about experimental cinema made by the theorist Jean-Louis Comolli, Peter Gidal snapped, “You must be blind”. To this, Comolli calmly, cryptically replied: “I am blind, and we are all blind”.
In Le Récit au cinéma, Alain Masson emphasises the intense aura of mystery that accompanies almost any film in its initial moments. Everything is unfamiliar, ambiguous, full of multiple potentialities.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Mysteries of CinemaReflections on Film Theory, History and Culture 1982–2016, pp. 173 - 192Publisher: Amsterdam University PressPrint publication year: 2018