Cinema as Metaxu

Abstract: In this article, Simone Weil's notion of the material world as "metaxu," an in-between or bridge between this world (gravity) and the absolute (grace), is positioned within the tradition of cinematic realism to consider how the natural world in film functions as a bridge to the supernatural. In this way, the cinema intertwines ecology and theology in ways that are particularly resonant now, at a time of large scale environmental collapse and the search for new values to support human and other lives.

Citation: Pick, Anat.  “Cinema as Metaxu.” The Jugaad Project, 8 Sept. 2020, thejugaadproject.pub/cinema-as-metaxu [date of access]

This world is the closed door. It is a barrier. And at the same time it is the way through.—Simone Weil. [1]

For the philosopher and mystic Simone Weil (1909-1943) the material world was metaxu, an intermediary or bridge between the mechanistic universe governed by necessity, and the supernatural action of grace. Weil’s ideas are arranged along two axes, the intersection of which constitutes the cruciform shape of her thought. Gravity and grace, the necessary and the good, do not intermix. For Weil, there is no divine intervention in worldly affairs. On earth, she writes, “God’s will has nothing to do with any morality.”[2] Rather, it is the incompatibility between the created world and the divine that makes metaxu possible.[3]

In this essay, I link the idea of metaxu to Weil’s aesthetics [4]. I argue that metaxu is a useful concept for thinking about the cinema as a more-than-human medium in which creaturely life appears as materially embedded and theistically oriented. Placing Weil in the tradition of cinematic realism, I consider how the natural world in film functions as a bridge to the supernatural, corresponding to a transcendence that film cannot show. The invisible in film appears in the form of an intimation, precisely via the stark materiality that film foregrounds. In this way, the cinema intertwines ecology and theology in ways that are particularly resonant now, at a time of largescale environmental collapse and the search for new values to support human and other lives.

Metaxu and the Beautiful   

The thick materiality of the world infinitely separates living beings from God. Weil likened creation to a wall that divides two prisoners (the creature, and God) in their respective cells yet allows them to communicate with one another by tapping:

Two prisoners whose cells adjoin communicate with each other by knocking on the wall. The wall is the thing which separates them but it is also their means of communication. It is the same with us and God. Every separation is a link.[5]

Creation is a barrier and a conduit, but there is no middle ground between being and nonbeing, between the temporal objects of the world and the eternity of God. Passing through the barrier entails a creaturely undoing that Weil calls decreation: “[n]ecessity is the screen set between God and us so that we can be. It is for us to pierce through the screen so that we cease to be.”[6] Only once the thickness of creaturely being has been thoroughly rubbed out can the screen be said to be lifted. Decreation, then, perilously, even impossibly, completes the bridging of realms.

Decreation is integral to the extrapolation of a theory of art, and of film, from Weil’s religious philosophy. Because decreation removes personal biases from a vision of the world, decreation and necessity lend themselves to well-established ideas of aesthetic experience as a mode of disinterestedness. As Lyra Koli has brilliantly shown, Weil’s understanding of beauty inverts Kant’s idea of “disinterested pleasure” in the Critique of Judgment. While Kant’s disinterestedness implies man’s transcendence over his own carnality, in Weil disinterestedness is tied to the subjection of human life to necessity, so that beauty is enjoyed from below rather than from above—not in spite of but from within corporeal limits and needs. As Koli puts it, “[i]n contrast to Kant’s aesthetics, where hunger needed to be cancelled out beforehand to make the disinterested pleasure possible, Weil envisages a constantly present tension between carnal wants and aesthetic attention.”[7] Weil’s aesthetics of mediation does not resolve the tensions between the finite, mortal body and transcendence but locates the beautiful at the point of intersection between materiality and its (impossible) surpassing. Beauty emerges out of the humbling recognition that one is part of the material order.[8] Humans can impact the natural order, but they can neither exit nor escape it.

Beauty in Weil entails a perception that the world exists outside of the interests of the wishful, imperious self. We experience beauty not through our imagination, but with what Weil calls “attention”: a passive, impersonal mode that waits for rather than seizes upon its objects.[9] We attend the beauty of the finite objects of the world, and it connects us momentarily to the infinite goodness that lies outside the world. For Weil, beauty glimpses God in matter. If matter is oblivious to human will, it is equally oblivious to the will of God insofar as it adheres to necessity alone. But through its docility, matter is “eminently suitable to reveal the presence of God.”[10]

In the two films discussed below, necessity, in the form of the natural phenomena of wind and light, takes precedence over human design and divine orchestration. I argue that the beauty of these films hinges on their decentring of human agency through its subjection to the natural order. Aesthetic pleasure derives from the films’ showing of necessity as sovereign, which in turn places human beings on a par with the rest of reality. God’s ostensible absence in both films further accentuates necessity’s rule. But the susceptibility and fragility of matter that the films expose, which blends pleasure and melancholy in the experience of watching them, connotes a transcendence located beyond the world, manifested as a love of and reverence for material reality. I refer to the relationship between the material and the spiritual that the films occasion via their invocations of necessity as “reverential realism,” building on Weil’s central idea of mediation.

Why pursue a Weilian film-philosophy? To non-believers, Weil’s theism can feel alienating. Her strict materialism, however, coupled with her rejection of all forms of idolatry (false conceptions of what lies categorically outside matter) make Weil’s work particularly fitting for reflecting on the relation between reality and art. Since its inception, the cinema has been hailed as the art closest to physical reality. The mechanical eye of the camera was said to capture the world impersonally, undermining the individual and human point of view. Photographic film, moreover, was not only mimetic but bore an actual imprint of the world in the interaction between light and emulsion. Perhaps the best known of the cinematic realists was André Bazin (1918-1958), who in the series of influential essays compiled in What is Cinema? Volumes I & II (1967, 1971) argued that the photographed world is more than a representation but a trace of reality [11]. Bazin’s realism combined his love of science with contemporary mysticism and leftist Christian activism that regarded art as both material and spiritual. His work probed “the relation of art to reality and the relation of reality to transcendent meaning.”[12] “At the heart of Bazin’s strictures on cinematic realism,” writes Peter Matthews, “lies the conviction that the movie camera, by the simple act of photographing the world, testifies to the miracle of God’s creation.”[13]

With Bazin Weil shares a theologically inflected materialism and an idiosyncratic Catholicism. But whereas Bazin was concerned with the unique properties of film, Weil’s focus is on art’s propensity to make necessity manifest. For as the correlative to gravity is grace, the work that most lucidly portrays the former is closest to the latter. A prime example of this is Homer’s Iliad, to which Weil devoted one of her most beautiful essays, “The Iliad, or the Poem of Force” (1940). In it she writes, “this poem is a miracle. Its bitterness is the only justifiable bitterness, for it springs from the subjections of the human spirit to force, that is, in the last analysis, to matter”[14]. So, while prioritizing reality in art unites Weil and Bazin’s aesthetics, a Weilian realist philosophy of film would be chiefly concerned with the portrayal of necessity in the work, not with the material properties of the medium. Films that suit this description are those in which events are driven not by character psychology or will but by the mechanical play of force.

A second reason for adapting Weil’s aesthetics to the medium of film is the proliferation of optical metaphors in her work. To describe mediation between the temporal and the eternal, Weil uses the metaphor of light: “[t]he brightness of a source of light is appreciated by the illumination it projects upon non-luminous objects.”[15] Grace enters the world as light upon earthly things. The invocations of illumination, projection, and screens speak specifically to a cinematic type of mediality, rooted in Weil’s materialism.

In what follows I develop the idea of cinema as metaxu: a bridge between the visible, material world and an exteriority that remains hidden yet towards which film is oriented.  God is not directly present in either of the films I discuss. Instead, the beauty of necessity makes God’s absence palpable and fosters a (painful) love of the world as a kind of facsimile for the love of God. If for Weil reality itself is metaxu, the cinema provides an image of necessity that accentuates its function as a barrier and an opening. Like the world, art is an incarnation. As Lissa McCullough explains, “art only imitates the beauty of the world, a beauty that instills detachment of desire and reverence for what is.”[16] McCullough’s use of the diminutive “only” might lead one to suspect that artistic mediation is undervalued in Weil, yet references to art, especially literature, are frequent in her work. When considering a Weilian film-philosophy, I am most interested in the ways in which necessity is manifested cinematically, whether formally in the way a film is structured and composed, or thematically, in the story it tells and the ideas it conveys. A Weilian approach looks at how the cinema frames worldly relations as the permutations of necessity. In what I call the cinema of necessity (as in tragedy), humans are not the organizing principle of the action, and this marginalization is often endured as physical and mental suffering. In films that foreground necessity, this painful process is also beautiful, expressing the beauty-in-fragility of all material life.

In ascribing to matter the capability to invoke transcendence-through-finitude, the cinema of necessity is tentatively religious. By visualising the limits that curtail earthly life, the cinematic image of necessity signifies beyond itself towards transcendence. The contradiction of the finite image and the limitlessness and invisibility of the divine is the founding paradox of cinema as metaxu. The contradiction is felt in the pleasure we take in art committed to showing reality as material and impermanent.

In the cinema of necessity, I am claiming, intimations of transcendence rely on an affirmation of materiality. The supernatural in Weil’s aesthetics, and I am suggesting also in film, is glimpsed in the form of an absence that passes through immanence. It is when necessity is most acutely (and brutally) felt, in the condition of extreme suffering that Weil calls affliction (malheur), that a pathway to the divine is cleared. If the tradition of cinematic realism, grounded in film’s singular relationship to physical reality, has tended towards the theological this is because its proponents (Bazin, as well as filmmakers like Eric Rohmer, Robert Bresson, and, more recently, Mia Hansen-Løve, Katrin Gebbe, and Park Jung-bum) find reverberations of the eternal in the harsh temporality of material life. “Only spiritual things are of value,” writes Weil, “but only physical things have a verifiable existence. Therefore the value of the former can only be verified as an illumination projected on to the latter.”[17] Light doubles here as electromagnetic radiation and divine radiance. The former obeys natural law (necessity), while the latter represents absolute value (good). Weil’s rhetoric of light is the basis for thinking of cinema as metaxu and the foundation of a reverential-realist poetics of film.

In two films, Louis Lumiére’s Le Repas de bébé (Baby’s Lunch, 1895) and Eric Rohmer’s Le Rayon vert (The Green Ray, 1986), reality acts as a barrier and a portal to transcendence that reveals itself apophatically as the incommensurability of necessity and the good. I take both films as works of a religiously-inflected realism that inspire joy in, and reverence for, the material world as intermediary.

Lumière’s first “actualities” mark not only the beginning of the cinema but of a realist conception of film: snippets of everyday life and visions of the natural world in motion that were to inspire a realist tradition of film criticism. Decades after Lumière, Rohmer’s realism is bound up with an ecological sensibility that places the natural environment at the centre. In her introduction to Rohmer’s collected interviews, Fiona Handyside sums up Rohmer’s integration of realism, religion, and ecology. As filmmaker and critic, Rohmer:

privileges the cinema over art forms… because cinema leads us back to nature itself. His philosophy of cinema is infused with a theological and ecological view, in which the role of the filmmaker is to record (and conserve) the ordered beauty of the world, rather than attempting its transformation.[18]

In showcasing the meteorological phenomena of wind and light, Repas de bébé and Le Rayon vert are companion films that feature the natural world as more than a mere backdrop of the human drama. In Le Rayon vert, Rohmer, an admirer of Lumière, deploys the motif of leaves in the wind for which Lumière’s film is famous. Rohmer’s film is titled after Jules Verne’s 1882 novel of the same name, and both novel and film refer to the optical phenomenon of the green ray. While not symbolic, the blowing leaves and the green ray are synecdoches of necessity. A second association between Rohmer and Lumière’s films is their focus on eating. Eating in both films signals humans’ ambivalent relationship to their environment. Situated between the cultural and the biological, eating places humans in the world via acts of consumption and communion. Through representations of eating, cinema also contemplates its own proclivities to consume and preserve the living world on which it “feeds.” Eating is indicative of the relationship between reality and image production as a process of ingestion/ destruction and reproduction/ conservation through which cinema continuously unfolds.[19]

1. Airborne

The wind bloweth where it listeth, and thou hearest the sound thereof, but canst not tell whence it cometh, and whither it goeth: so is every one that is born of the Spirit. (John 3:8)

My local cinema, the Rio, has closed for the duration of the coronavirus lockdown. Like everyone, I am streaming films at home. Ours is not the first pandemic to take place in the age of cinema; there was the Russian flu of 1889, then, devastatingly, the Spanish flu of 1918, the deadliest in human history.[20]

Figure 1. The Rio cinema, London, April 2020. Image by author.

The 1918 pandemic is present in Le Repas de bébé in the form of a future contingent.[21] I have watched the film countless times. I have even written about the untimely death of its child “star,” the baby of the title, Andrée Lumière.[22] But in lockdown, the film renewed itself in my eyes yet again as the portent of a global catastrophe.

Joséphine Léocadie Andrée Lumière was born on June 22nd 1894. She died of influenza on the 26th of November, 1918, at the age of 24. As a one year old, she appeared in Repas de bébé and in Pêche aux poissons rouge (Fishing for Goldfish). In the former, now iconic film, Andrée is seated between her doting parents in the garden of their home. The day is especially windy and as the parents feed their child the leaves in the trees behind them energetically sway. Andrée bites into a biscuit before unexpectedly offering it to someone off-screen.

Figure 2. Baby Andrée’s generosity breaks the fourth wall in Louis Lumière’s Repas de bébé (Baby’s Lunch, 1895).

It was said that the film’s early audiences delighted in the motion of leaves in the background more than in the human action in the foreground. The two widely disparate gestures—the fluttering of the leaves and Andrée’s unprompted generosity—share the spontaneity and contingency of movement that the cinema is uniquely adept at reflecting.

In a remarkable piece on “cinematic meteorology,” Emil Leth Meilvang describes the rustling leaves in Repas de bébé as a testament to the particular “consonance between weatherly and cinematic movement.”[23] Cinematic weather draws the viewer to the “margins of the image,” an idea that recalls Dai Vaughn’s comments on the Lumière films’ revelation of “the incidentals of a scene,” such as the motion of water or air.[24] Weatherly phenomena “hold a sprawling vitality, a non-narrative abundance saturated with their own inversed form of significance. Weather on film signifies but not in any allegorical, directly interpretive sense. Rather, the weatherly cine-phenomenon is an end onto itself… cinematic weather can never be fully instrumentalised in narrative.”[25] 

The presence of wind in Repas de bébe has no narrative role but is ecologically significant. As a natural force, the wind acts as a leveller between humans and everything else. Audiences’ delight at the sight of the moving leaves suggests that aesthetic pleasure arises out of the perception of what is impersonal about human experience: humans are moved by the same forces that cause leaves to flutter. Repas de bébé determines the “point of equilibrium between man and nature…. preserves the traces of an activity in which man encounters nature on equal terms.”[26] If, on the one hand, Repas de bébé conventionally splits the visual field into human foreground and nonhuman background, the force of the wind thrusts the film in the other direction: breaching the human-nonhuman divide and resituating human life in the wider ecological order, amidst the mesh of living agents.

The wind can be seen to move the leaves in the background. Unseen is the movement of air that would prove lethal for Andrée years later. Watching Repas de bébé now, wind assumes the portentous role of a transmitter of infectious disease. The visibly moving leaves and the invisibility of viral spread belong to different ontological orders of the image: the former is captured as it happens, albeit indirectly (as wind itself is invisible), while the latter is knowable only in hindsight and impossible to capture by the cinematograph. But in another sense, meteorological and biological processes belong to the single order of necessity that overcomes leaves and people alike. The beauty of art expresses the beauty of the world, which in turn expresses the real. The people and leaves in Repas de bébé (as well as the filmic material on which both are inscribed) will decay and eventually die, a vulnerability that I have argued is essential to Weil’s realist aesthetics.[27] The film allows us to ponder a wind that can charmingly move the leaves in the trees and transmit a deadly virus.

Figure 3. Lockdown Leaves. Clip by the author, London, 2020.

2. Reverential realism

The windy motif recurs in Eric Rohmer’s Le Rayon vert, which adds a second meteorological element: the optical phenomenon of the green ray, the last ray of the setting sun, visible only under strict atmospheric conditions.[28] In a second nod to Lumière, Rohmer’s film contains not one, but a series of al fresco meals, through which it explores the relationship between humans and the natural world.[29]

Le Rayon vert boasts a minimalist plot: Delphine, a single Parisian office worker, tries in vain to go on her summer vacation. After her original plans are cancelled, she leaves and returns, unable to enjoy or connect with the people around her. Seeking love rather than casual sex, she cannot bring herself to take the advice of her increasingly irritated friends to lighten up and go with the flow. The film proceeds as a series of disappointments until the final segment, when Delphine’s chance encounter with a young man leads her to a rare sighting of the green ray.     

The presence of the green ray in the film is not primarily formal but thematic, that is, the culmination of the plot rather than the “sensible engagement with the cinematic appearance of weather.”[30] Delphine comes across the green ray by chance, first in a conversation she overhears, in which a group of holidaymakers discuss its literary provenance and the scientific reasons for its existence [Figure 4], then as the name of a beachfront store that prompts Delphine to try and see the real thing. The green ray itself appears at the end of the film, to Delphine’s elated cry, “Oui!” [Figures 5, 6]. The difficulty of capturing the green ray on film obliged Rohmer to reshoot it elsewhere and insert the footage. Despite this compromise (especially compared with the genuine spontaneity of Lumière’s wind), dismissals of the doctored shot as a “cack-handed attempt at simulating the green ray” misunderstand how realism operates in the film. Although Rohmer, like Bazin, believed in the indexicality of analogue cinema, the reality of the green ray is crucial at the diegetic level of plot, not at the level of the film itself.[31]

Figure 4. Discussing the optical phenomenon of the green ray. Eric Rohmer’s Le Rayon vert (The Green Ray, 1986).

Figure 5. Waiting.

Figure 6. Waiting, rewarded.

When asked by her companion if the green ray brings luck, Delphine replies, “not exactly.” The film’s “happy ending,” then, offers no romantic guarantees. But it is a happy ending nonetheless. As Vittorio Hösle puts it, Delphine’s sighting is not important because “the sign brings luck but because it warrants trust. In a world in which all sentiments are so easily counterfeited, for Delphine, the warrant of trust can only come from outside.”[32]

The green ray stands for a genuine exteriority, in conjunction with the lesser spiritual tropes (horoscopes and playing cards) that pepper the narrative [33]. A meteorological phenomenon, the green ray is first and foremost an affirmation of earthly things (Delphine’s emphatic “Oui!”), which, for religious materialists like Rohmer, Bazin, and Weil, are intimations of the divine. Indeed, Hösle’s description of Rohmer’s version of realism comes close to Weil’s definition of metaxu as a bridge between the ordinary and extraordinary: “Rohmer’s special branch of realism… means that his world is permeated by spiritual forces, suffused with values, and open to the manifestation of the divine. But it is crucial for him that even the workings of grace are such that they fit into reality.”[34]

The Green Ray is anti-Romantic. The man Delphine meets at the end of the film is no Prince Charming. He is, as Weil would have it, a means to an end. She writes: “[a]ll created things refuse to be for me as ends. Such is God’s extreme mercy towards me.”[35] Created things could only ever be means because they are temporal and finite. She continues that the refusal of earthly things to be ends in themselves “constitutes evil. Evil is the form which God’s mercy takes in this world.” [36] As is often the case with Weil, what seems right—thinking of people as inherently valuable rather than as means to an end—is contested matter of fact, in favour of the opposite, less appealing assertion. Weil’s inversion of ends and means is not resolved but lands in a contradiction: what is evil down below is merciful from above. There is no way to resolve the contradiction because it attests to the fundamental incompatibility between necessity and the good. To make a bridge between them is only possible by avoiding confusing ends with means, recognizing, however unsettlingly, that people are means not ends. To project unto earthly things the absolute value of ends would be false, and idolatrous. It would also be cruel, since it would preclude creation’s intermediary function as a gateway to God. Thus, the “essence of created things is to be intermediaries. They are intermediaries leading from one to the other and there is no end to this. They are intermediaries leading to God. We have to experience them as such.”[37]

The structure of Le Rayon vert mimics this movement exactly, in Delphine’s visits from one set of friends to another: “[t]his world, the realm of necessity, offers us absolutely nothing except means. Our will is for ever sent from one means to another like a billiard ball.”[38] Weil’s inverted-Kantianism suggests that it is precisely as means, not ends, that worldly things should be protected: “What is it a sacrilege to destroy? Not that which is base, for that is of no importance. Not that which is high, for, even should we want to, we cannot touch that. The metaxu.”[39] Flipping on its head Kant’s categorical imperative, Weil asks us to love the intermediary. In Le Rayon vert, love attaches itself to people as means, Delphine’s love object at the end of the film, but also the imperfect characters along the way.

How could a seemingly slight summer movie be said to carry Weil’s weighty themes? Do not Delphine and the film make a mountain out of a molehill? In his essay on The Green Ray in the collection The Hidden God, Phillip Lopate suggests that for Rohmer “leisure is the supreme spiritual test faced by modern men and women.”[40] The series of failed attempts at vacationing, and, less fatuously, at making an authentic connection with people and the surrounding environment illustrates Weil’s claim that “[o]ne only reaches that point [being open to grace] after a process of exhaustion which takes time.”[41] The cinema of necessity naturally tends toward the violence of affliction and decreation, states in which characters find themselves worn down by gravity. In Rohmer, the cinema of necessity extends its artistic remit to explore its comedic possibilities. Necessity is still present through the workings of chance and the imposition of the natural order, but the divine is accessed not through the excesses of suffering (as in Bresson, Gebbe, or Park) but through the minor tribulations of a comfortable, articulate milieu. Although far from afflicted in Weil’s sense of the term, Delphine’s torments are at once trivial and utterly serious. Her aborted trips take their toll until, by the end of the film, according to Lopate, “[s]he has achieved degree zero.”[42] Despite its lightness, then, Le Rayon vert is a film about gravity. It charts Delphine’s decreation at the end of which she is ready to receive love. “I have nothing,” she tells Lena, an easy-going tourist she meets in Biaritz. At the end of the film, this emptiness is “experienced as the space of a wordless contact with something rare and beautiful in nature.”[43] Delphine’s new companion is neither the cause nor the reward of her transformation; at best, he is a friendly witness, someone in whose presence she can have her revelation.  

For Meilvang, cinematic meteorology “starts and in a certain sense ends with the mythical leaves of Le Repas de bébé.” [44] If Rohmer’s presentation of the green ray does not conform to the strict formalism of cinematic meteorology by which “the weatherly margins of film” establish “an ontology… not made up of narrative or interpretive cues, but entirely of sensation, immersion, and movement,”[45] his relation to Repas de bébé is ecological. Not only does Rohmer repeatedly show leaves in the wind, he films humans dining outdoors in what I take to be a clear allusion to Lumière. In one such scene, prefaced by a shot of leaves in the wind [Figure 7], Delphine struggles to defend her vegetarianism. If in Lumière the wind in the trees discretely breaches the human-nonhuman divide, in Rohmer, dualism gives way explicitly to the mode of entwinement-as-love which prohibits Delphine from consuming animal flesh (and from picking flowers). As a host of (male) commentators have noted, Delphine’s case is unsupported by rational arguments, and rooted instead in her feelings of interconnectedness with the rest of the natural world.[46]

Figure 7. Rohmer’s reverential realism: leaves in the wind in The Green Ray.

Eating plants, Delphine says, feels lighter, a convivial, less violent incorporation. Her remark that “lettuce is a friend” baffles and provokes her hosts [Figures 8-9]. Delphine is not helped by her stuttering, incomplete speech. But what looks like a weakness in Delphine’s debating abilities discloses a general aporia of eating, the possibility that “eating is inherently unethical, a violent destruction of the immediate autonomy of the eaten incorporated into the eater.”[47]

Figures 8-9. Debating the ethics of eating in Le Rayon vert.

Figure 9.

A replaying of Repas de bébé, Le Rayon vert opens up questions about what it means to eat, and about the connections between cinema and eating as activities that “feed” on the objects of the world. There are no easy solutions to the problem of eating since eating entails the ingestion and destruction of the eaten. Delphine’s awkward attempt to consume less violently is reflected in her hesitant defense of vegetarianism. This, in turn, “prompts a spiteful rejoinder from a companion: ‘You’re a plant!’”[48] There is something of the plant about Delphine, who is often filmed flanked by vegetation or wandering alone in windswept landscapes [Figures 10-12]. Like a plant, moreover, Delphine turns to light as a source of nourishment.

Le Rayon vert’s documentary feel is partly the result of its collaborative, improvisational ethos (it was co-authored with lead actress Marie Rivière).[49] The film’s meteorological and vegetal elements inform the film’s light-touch approach to production, which is intentionally ecological (Rohmer used a three-person skeleton crew). In content and form, then, the film addresses questions of consumption and violence that are bound up with earthly life as metaxu. The film’s vegetal ethics is part of Rohmer’s rethinking of the human-nonhuman relationship in the context of necessity.

Figures 10-12. Delphine amidst the windy green.

Figure 11.

Figure 12.

Inscriptions of necessity confirm cinema’s realist credentials and render it devotional.[50] In Le Rayon vert, Rohmer succeeds in “making the cinema the privileged site where the miracle could be reborn, in the apparent absence of any human will,” signalling transcendence within the finite frame.[51] By linking the miraculous and the meteorological, Rohmer’s reverential realism does not denounce matter, quite the opposite. For him, as for Weil, “earthly things are the criterion of spiritual things…. The virtue of anything is manifested outside the thing. If, on the pretext that only spiritual things are of value, we refuse to take the light thrown on earthly things as a criterion, we are in danger of having a non-existent treasure.”[52] Weil believes in the correspondence between the earthly and the divine, mediated by matter. A devotional cinema, then, is not one in which necessity is superseded and humans restored to their imaginary status as central and exceptional. As ecological, cinema acknowledges the indispensability of the material world, as neither a human resource nor as an end unto itself, but as metaxu. Metaxu lends itself to the tradition of a theologically-infused realism in which attention to necessity allows for an inflow of the divine.

Endnotes

1.     Simone Weil, Gravity and Grace. Emma Crawford and Mario von der Ruhr, trans. London: Routledge, 2003, p. 145.

2.     Simone Weil, First and Last Notebooks. Richard Rees, trans. Eugene, OR: Wipf and Stock, 2015, p. 133.

3.     Weil’s thinking as a whole revolves around mediation, exemplified by the cross. Bradley Jersak explains that “Weil’s conception of mediation (i.e., the Cross) is so encompassing that terms and analogies multiply throughout her notebooks. For example, the Cross is divine participation in the world and the world in God, recalling Plato’s methexis—the mutual participation of universals and particulars—of beauty, justice, and truth in the world. The crucified Christ is the ultimate Metaxu (intermediary), the mean proportion (from geometry) and the unity of incommensurables (from logic), linking divinity to humanity by partaking of both natures. Thus, Christ is harmony and mediation itself.” (From the Cave to the Cross: The Cruciform Theology of George P. Grant and Simone Weil (p. 245). Abbotsford: St Macrina Press, 2015. Kindle Edition.

4.     For Weil, great works of art, like Antigone, “could act as… bridges between the world of the good and the world of the necessary” (Siân Miles, “Introduction,” Simone Weil: An Anthology. London: Penguin, 2005, p. 30). On Weil’s conception of art as metaxu, see J. N. Baker, Jr. “Nostalgia of the Everyday: Earthly Things as Poetic Criteria in Weil and Jacottet,” Christianity and Literature 55.1 (2005), pp. 73-93

5.     Weil, Gravity and Grace, p. 145.

6.     Weil, Gravity and Grace, p. 33.

7.     Lyra Koli, “Hungry for Beauty: Simone Weil’s inversion of Kant’s aesthetics,” p. 34.

8.     I am using “humbling” in its literal sense that retains an etymological link to material reality and the order of necessity. “Humble” comes from the “Latin humilis ‘lowly, humble,’ literally ‘on the ground,’ from humus ‘earth’” (Online Etymology Dictionary). Throughout her writings, Weil presents two equally valid routes to the love of God: beauty and affliction. This is because both beauty and extreme suffering impose a sense of reality on the person who experiences them.

9.     Francoise Melzter describes attention as what “requires the passivity of the I and the disappearance of the subject” (“The Hands of Simone Weil,” Critical Inquiry 27.4  [2001], pp. 611-628,  p. 612). On attention in the work of Simone Weil, see also Sharon Cameron’s “The Practice of Attention: Simone Weil’s Performance of Impersonality,” in Impersonality: Seven Essays (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007, pp. 108-143).

10.  J. P. Little, The Theme of Mediation in the Writings of Simone Weil (1970). Durham theses, Durham University, Durham E-Theses Online, p. 471.

11.  Bazin emphasized film’s bond with physical reality by way of the chemical imprint on the strip of the film. But cinematic realism does not end with the advent of digital cinema. See for example Jordan Schonig’s “Contingent Motion: Rethinking the ‘Wind in the Trees’ in Early Cinema and CGI,” Discourse 40.1 (2018), pp. 30–61.

12.  Dudley Andrew, André Bazin. New York: Columbia University Press, 1990, p. 25.

13.  Peter Matthews, “Divining the Real: The Leaps of Faith in André Bazin’s Film Criticism,” Sight and Sound 18 April 2018.

14.  Simone Weil, “The Iliad, or the Poem of Force,” War and The Iliad: Simone Weil, Rachel Bespaloff. New York: NYRB, 2005, p. 33.

15.  Weil, First and Last Notebooks, p. 147.

16.  Lissa McCullough, The Religious Philosophy of Simone Weil: An Introduction. London: I.B. Tauris, 2014. Kindle Edition.

17.  Weil, First and Last Notebooks, p. 147.

18.  Fiona Handyside, ed. Eric Rohmer: Interviews. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2013. Kindle Edition.

19.  Anat Pick. “‘Nothing now but kestrel’: Simone Weil, Iris Murdoch and the Cinema of Letting Be,” The Iris Murdoch Review (2017), pp.  41-49.

20.  For a comprehensive history of the 1918 pandemic, see John M. Barry’s The Great Influenza: The Story of the Deadliest Pandemic in History. London: Penguin, 2005.

21.  Louis Lumière, Le Repas de bébé (France, 1895) can be viewed here, with commentary.

22.  See Endnote 19, above.

23.  Emil Leth Meilvang, “Cinema, Meteorology, and the Erotics of Weather,” NECSUS Spring (2018).

24.  Dai Vaughan, “Let There be Lumière,” in For Documentary: Twelve Essays. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999, pp. 63-67.

25.  Meilvang, “Cinema, Meteorology, and the Erotics of Weather.”

26.  Weil, First and Last Notebooks, p. 16.

27.  Weil writes that “the vulnerability of precious things is beautiful because vulnerability is a mark of existence” (Gravity and Grace 108). The phrase informs my discussions in Anonymous, 2011. Details omitted for double-blind reviewing.

28.  Rohmer was an admirer of the Lumière films. See his 66-minute documentary, Louis Lumière/ conversation avec Langlois et Renoir (1968), available here.

29.  Rohmer is not often thought of as an ecological filmmaker, but nature features prominently in his films. Tamara Tracz writes that his “only eccentricity was a passion for the environment before it was fashionable” (“Eric Rohmer,” Senses of Cinema 24 [2003]). See also, Rohmer’s interview with Cahier du Cinema, in Eric Rohmer: Interviews.

30.  Meilvang, “Cinema, Meteorology, and the Erotics of Weather.” 

31.  In “The Actor and the Hummingbird,” Ben Eastham discusses Tacita Dean’s short film Green Ray, inspired by Rohmer. He regards Rohmer’s shot as “cack-handed” and clumsy because of its belated insertion and due to the colour correction in post-production. Dean and Rohmer are committed to the realism of analogue film, but Dean’s film, unlike Rohmer’s, is about analogue cinema. Frieze 20 February 2018. Rohmer and Dean’s films make for a fascinating comparison. In “Like a Pulse on the Horizon,” Kaitlyn A. Kramer writes: “While Dean’s film asks the viewer to look closely, Éric Rohmer’s Le Rayon vert (1986) expects her, first, to wait”. Waiting is indeed central to the film. It is also key to Weil’s idea of attention. Both Weil and Rohmer considered waiting (l’attente) the correct disposition for grace. Delphine, too, is patient and passive, to receive rather than project revelation. Tacita Dean’s Green Ray can be viewed here.

32.  Vittorio Hösle, Eric Rohmer: Filmmaker and Philosopher. London: Bloomsbury, 2016, p. 70.

33.  In a 1986 interview with Gérard Legrand, Hubert Niogret, and François Ramasse, Rohmer explained: “I’m eager to show transcendence in a roundabout way, like a game. That’s how I use the theme of the stars, without believing in it, but without being a sceptic either, by which I mean being interested in people who believe in this area. I like people who have faith, even if I don’t believe in the thing they have faith in” (Eric Rohmer: Interviews).

34.  Hösle, Eric Rohmer, p. 114. On Rohmer as a religious filmmaker see also, Keith Tester, Eric Rohmer: Film as Theology. London: Palgrave, 2008.

35.  Weil, Gravity and Grace, p. 146.

36.  Weil, Gravity and Grace, p. 145.

37.  Weil, Gravity and Grace, pp. 145-46.

38.  Weil, Gravity and Grace, p. 146.

39.  Weil, Gravity and Grace, p. 147.

40.  Philip Lopate, “Le Rayon vert (The Green Ray, also Summer),” in The Hidden God: Film and Faith. Mary Lea Bandy and Antonio Monda, eds. New York: The Museum of Modern Art, 2003, pp. 170-173, p. 170.

41.  Weil, First and Last Notebooks, p. 354.

42.  Lopate, “Le Rayon vert,” p. 172.

43.  Leo Bersani and Ulysse Dutoit, “Rohmer’s Salon,” Film Quarterly 63.1 (2009), pp. 23-35, p. 33.

44.  Meilvang, “Cinema, Meteorology, and the Erotics of Weather.”

45.  Meilvang, “Cinema, Meteorology, and the Erotics of Weather.”

46.  Bersani and Dutoit write of Delphine’s “pathetic attempt to describe convincingly why she eats only vegetables and fruits” (33). Rob White calls her defense of vegetarianism “shambolic and contradictory” (“Against Nature,” Film Quarterly, September 1, 2009). Adrian Danks describes the ethical discussion of vegetarianism as “faltering, at times ludicrous, and plainly silly” (“Rohmer Talk,” Senses of Cinema 5, April 2000). For John Fawell, the scene makes clear that “Delphine holds herself a little superior to the others in her vegetarianism (“Eric Rohmer’s Oppressive Summers,” The French Review 66.5 [1993], pp. 777-787, p. 781), while Hösle sees her vegetarianism as a sign of fussiness: “She is a convinced vegetarian, somehow disgusted by the vulgarity and brutality of life” (67). 

47.  Michael Marder, “Is it Ethical to Eat Plants?” Parallax 19.1 (2013), pp.29-37, p. 30.

48.  White, “Against Nature.”

49.  On the significance of improvisation and chance in Le Rayon vert, see Antoine de Baecque and Noël Herpe’s “Six Comedies and Proverbs: 1980–1986,” in Éric Rohmer: A Biography. New York: Columbia University Press, 2016, pp. 321-378.

50.  See Nathaniel Dorsky’s Devotional Cinema. Berkeley: Tuumba, 2005.

51.  Baecque and Herpe, “Six Comedies and Proverbs,” p. 370.

52.  Weil, First and Last Notebooks, p. 147.