The Cinematic Gaze as ‘A Long Loving Look at the Real’: Andrei Tarkovsky and Walter Burghardt’s Theology of Contemplation

Abstract

In his essay on Andrei Tarkovsky’s Nostalghia (1983), the theologian Gerard Loughlin describes the film as ‘a kind of prayer.’11 Gerard Loughlin ‘The Long Take: Messianic Time in Andrei Tarkovsky's Nostalghia’, Journal for Cultural Research, 13:3-4 (2009), 365-379. DOI: 10.1080/14797580903244753 Now, with the arrival of the documentary A Cinema Prayer (2019), which is composed of home video footage in which Tarkovsky reflects on his life and philosophy of film, Loughlin’s analysis seems more apt than ever. Tarkovsky’s distinctive style, his slow, contemplative long takes, his static, wide-angle shots, and his minimalist editing, feels very much like prayer in the way that Loughlin suggests. Through extended silences and prolonged inactivity, Tarkovsky spurns action in favour of stasis and primes the viewer for contemplation. By retarding time and withholding the action that the viewer expects, Tarkovsky’s long takes ‘activate the viewer,’22 Paul Schrader, Transcendental Style in Film (Oakland, CA: University of California Press, 2018), p. 9. to borrow Paul Schrader’s terminology, and precipitate a kind of contemplation that is centred in the duration of the shot; in the passing of time itself. Yet at the same time, Tarkovsky’s style not only primes the viewer for contemplation but also performs this contemplation itself. This is also a function of the time and duration of his long takes, but it is facilitated equally by the form and style of his compositions, as well as by the narrative and thematic structure of his films. This capacity both to prime and to perform contemplation is what makes Tarkovsky’s films so powerful, and it is exactly what prompts viewers like Loughlin to perceive his films as prayerful and attentive. This essay explores the cinematic gaze of Tarkovsky’s filmmaking as a form of contemplation. This is no mere ‘deep thinking’, but an embodiment of contemplative prayer within the Christian tradition.33 Contemplation, as a prayerful act, traces its origins to the early Church, for example with Gregory of Nyssa, and it is developed in the medieval period in the mystical tradition. It is helpful to contextualise contemplation and contemplative practice through mystics like John of the Cross and Teresa of Avila, however the specific context of this essay is best identified in 20th Century theologies of contemplative prayer, such as that of Hans Urs Von Balthasar, Prayer (San Francisco, CA: Ignatius Press, 1986). As such, it is open to the formal analysis of a theology of contemplation. To this end, the hermeneutical key for this study is Walter Burghardt’s essay ‘Contemplation: A Long Loving Look at the Real’.44 Walter Burghardt, ‘Contemplation: A Long Loving Look at the Real’ in: George W. Traub, An Ignatian Spirituality Reader (Chicago, IL: Loyola Press, 2008) pp. 89-98. Originally published in 1989. By interpreting Tarkovsky’s direction through the lens of Burghardt’s theology, this essay seeks to elucidate the various ways in which his filmmaking has been and can be considered contemplative. I wish to argue that ‘a long, loving look at the real’ (along with all the theological connotations that this description entails) appositely describes Tarkovsky’s filmmaking, and therefore provides a valuable theological framework for understanding the contemplative nature of his films. The first section of this essay is devoted to an exposition of Burghardt’s theology of contemplation. From this foundation, Burghardt’s theology can be applied hermeneutically to cinema, and the second section begins this task by examining the formal potentials of cinematic art for contemplation; that is to say, it evaluates the capacity of film as an art form to prime and perform contemplation. In this analysis, there are two aesthetic elements of cinema which must be considered: i) the corporeal immediacy of the art form, and ii) its particular temporality. In considering the first of these, this second section participates in a major project of film theory: film-phenomenology.55 This strand of film theory traces its origins to the great French phenomenologist, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, who described the corporeal and phenomenological gaze of cinema as “movie material par excellence” in an essay published in 1964 (originally given as a lecture in 1945). ‘Film and the New Psychology’, in: Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Sense and Non-Sense (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1964) pp. 48-59. In the 1990s, film-phenomenology was developed significantly in Vivian Sobchack’s seminal book The Address of the Eye: A Phenomenology of Film Experience (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1992), and it has since been taken up by numerous scholars, most notably by Jennifer Barker, The Tactile Eye (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2009) and Steven Shaviro, The Cinematic Body (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1993). In considering the second, it engages with two seminal texts that explore cinemat