The making of a movie mantra

The word ‘gaze’ is sometimes used to mean a little more than to merely look at something intently. In many contexts — such as in deep meditation — it means when the observer begins to actually approximate and experience the object of view, and vice versa . In which connection, Fr Richard Leonard SJ who is also a cinema critic has an interesting take on the gaze as it’s exercised in the act of watching a film. He believes the cinema now rivals the previously popular venues of worship such as churches, temples or synagogues as the place where spectators deploy what he calls the mystical gaze. The gaze that is capable of contemplating an Otherness.

Also, that whereas cinema studies is generally used to dissecting films on the basis of gender , class or race, Leonard thinks that a mystical gaze also exists and is used in the secular multiplexes of today. He has a point. Compared to public places of daylight prayer where perhaps the only nod to veneration is the ritualistic closing of eyes, the confined and intimate darkness of an auditorium can become far more conducive instead to a completely wide-eyed suspension of belief in the normal everyday world outside.

Of course not all film viewing leads to an encounter with Otherness. However it’s still true that cinema can create a space which, in the hands of a director with an interest in the exploration of the metaphysical, can lead a spectator to report an encounter with Otherness using language previously reserved for religious experience. Films like 2001: A Space Odyssey or Picnic at Hanging Rock — both in the genre of speculative fiction — immediately come to mind. People who have seen them usually talk of being struck by their transcendent quality.

It’s ironic that such a modern artefact as cinema with its play of light and shade, time and space, visuals and resonance, private and public areas, hierarchies and stars — all of which are rooted in social constructs and technology — can also possess a multicultural mystical consciousness . As Peter Weir the director of Picnic told an interviewer for Sight & Sound, “We worked very hard at creating an hallucinatory, mesmeric rhythm , so that you lost awareness of facts, you stopped adding things up, and got into this enclosed atmosphere. I did everything in my power to hypnotise the audience away from the possibility of solutions.” Does that sound like a Zen koan or not?