FILM-PHILOSOPHY

CONFERENCE
PROGRAMME
9-11 July 2019
#FP2019
TUESDAY 9 JULY
Room 09:30 – 10:15 – 10:30 10:30 – 11:45 11:45 – 13:00 – 14:30
10:15 13:00
Welcome Introduction Keynote 1 Chair Lucy Bolton
Sallis
Helen Kennedy (Head of Janet Harbord: Film as a
Benney School of Media, Training for Neurotypical life
University of Brighton)
Theatre
David Sorfa (Editor-in-
Grand Chief, Film-Philosophy) &
Parade Dario Llinares (Conference
Director, University of
Brighton)
Open Chair: Richard Rushton
105
Edward Lara Pereski – Must We Say What We See:
Street Keywording as Ordinary Language

Jules O'Dwyer - Bodies/being/landscapes: on

Alain Guiraudie’s environs
Registration and refreshments, Grand Parade Café, University of Brighton

Jiemin Tina Wei - Slippery Genetic Determinism:

Gattaca and the Staging of a Probabilistic
Genome Science
Aesthetics Chair: Laura Di Summa
102
Edward Francesca Massarenti - The impractical,
Street diminutive feminine in Jane Campion’s filmic
19th century

Aleksi Rennes - Aesthetics of Life (and Death):

Deleuze, Mandico, and the Problem of Animism
Lunch, Grand Parade Café

Claudia Kappenberg - Screenic Rituals

Horror Chair: Hedwig Fraunhofer

103
Edward Ece Üçoluk Krane - Posthuman Cannibalism: The
Street Non/Human Politics and Aesthetics of Antiviral
(2012)

Rebecca Rosenberg - Vampiric Transformations

in Dans ma peau (2002) and Grave (2016)

Tarja Laine - It Follows: Trauma in Contemporary

Horror Film

Ethics Chair: Ben Tyrer

309
Edward Christine Jakobson - Ethics as Aesthetic World:
Street Levinas and Heidegger on Art

Sylvie Magerstaedt - Lies, Stories, Myths –

creative power and ethical dilemmas in Big Fish
(2003) and Amélie (2001)

Savina Petkova - Real Metaphors. Animals in the

Films of Yorgos Lanthimos

305
Edward
Street

8
14:30 – 15:00 – 16:30 16:30 – 17:00 – 18:30 18:30 –
15:00 17:00 20:30

Love/Relationships Chair: Tarja Laine Stanley Cavell Workshop

Chair: Andrew Klevan (University of Oxford)
Maryam Tafakory - Contact at Distance - Īhām and
Eroticism in Iranian Sacred Defence Cinema Catherine Wheatley (King's College London)
Sandra Laugier (Université Paris 1 Panthéon-
Richard Rushton - Love in five films by Agnes Varda Sorbonne)
Trevor Mowchun (University of Florida)
Mila Zuo - The Girlfriend Experience: Virtual Beauty Daniele Rugo (BrunelUniversity London)
and Love in Post-Cinematic Times Kate Rennebohm (Harvard University)

Open Chair: Joseph Jenner Phenomenology Chair: Christine Jakobson

Neil Fox - Rethinking film education: What can we Ben Tyrer - “The picture is in my eye but I am in the

Drinks Reception & Book Launch, Grand Parade Cafe

learn from filmmakers? picture”: Lacan, Merleau-Ponty and Film-philosophy

Fred Brayard - Meillassoux, Perconte and realism: Alice Pember - ‘Shame on you, If you can't dance
digital time as hyperchaos. too’: The Intersectional Politics of Dance in
Coffee Break, Edward Street First Floor

Coffee Break, Edward Street First Floor

Contemporary Cinema
Lina Jurdeczka - Untimely Cinephilia and Spectral
Images in Phoenix and Ida Susannah Ramsey - An Exploration of my
Phenomenological Approach to the Exhibition of the
Filmpoem.

Political Philosophy Chair: Christine Jakobson Open Chair: Victoria Walden

Kaveh Abbasian- “Illuminationist Cinema”: The Rise Angelos Koutsourakis - The Present as a Problem:
and Fall of an Islamic Film Theory Reenactment and Critical History

Eva Sancho Rodriguez - Looking for Political Martin Hall - ‘The inexistent of the world’: British
Engagement in the Aftermath of Discreditation Cinema, 1968 and the symptom

Martin O'Shaughnessy - Mediating collective Alicja Kowalska - Trauma and Rebellion. 1968
subjects or the encounter between the machineries reflected in Polish and German Film.
of political mobilisation and those of cinema

Space and Time Chair: William Brown Feminist Film Practice/criticism

John Ó Maoilearca - The Defragmenting Image: Ulrike Hanstein - Feminist Videoletters: Affection and
Stories in Cinematic Time Travel Address in Epistolary Exchanges

Hedwig Fraunhofer - Dark: Philosophy, Culture, and Anjo-mari Gouws - Love Waits, Love Conjures: Anne
Environment Charlotte Robertson’s Five Year Diary

Benjamin Dalton - Encountering the Multiverse Jenelle Troxell - In Praise of the “dreadful” Female
Through Film and Philosophy: Space Travels with Spectator: Close Up and the Emergence of a Feminist
Claire Denis and Aurélien Barrau in High Life (2018) Counter-Cinema

Open Chair: Holly Chard

Serena Moscardelli - The mosquitoes stayed -

Paolo Sorrentino's 'L'Amico di Famiglia' and the
dialectics of space and time in the Pontine Marshes
and the new towns

Victoria Grace Walden- Cinema's apocalyptic

essense

Laura Di Summa-Knoop - Recording the Future of

Memories: An Overview
9
WEDNESDAY 10 JULY
Room 08:00 – 09:00 – 10:30 10:30 – 11:00 12:30 12:30 –
09:00 11:00 13:45
Keynote 2 Chair: David Sorfa
Sallis
Andrew Klevan (University of Oxford):
Benney Ordinary Language Film Studies
Theatre
Open Chair: Neil Fox
105
Edward Evy Varsamopoulou - The Prometheus
Street Syndrome: Ridley Scott's Alien prequels

Chantal Poch - "So far from everything": The

Fall of Man according to Andrei Tarkovski,
Werner Herzog and Terrence Malick

Hee-seung Lee - “Father, don’t you see that I

am burning?” From Melancholy to
Burning(2018)
Ethics Chair: Gabriella Calchi Novati
102
Edward Kate Rennebohm - The Modern Conscience
Street as the Moving Self-Image

Francesco Sticchi - The Precarious People to

Come: Cartographies of Precarity in
Arrival Coffee, Edward Street First Floor

Contemporary Cinema
Coffee break, Grand Parade Café

Kate Ince - Ethics and Vulnerability in the

Lunch, Grand Parade Café

Films of Mia Hansen-Løve

Documentary Chair: Dominic Lash

103
Edward Eliot Besstte - Why there are no Affects
Street
Finn Daniels-Yeomans - Notes of Cinematic
Fallism: Aryan Kaganof's Metalepsis in Black
and Beyond

Christian Sancto - Architectures of the

Queer Archive: Documentary, Dance, and
Disjunctive Spatiality in Patrick Staff’s The
Foundation

Embodiedness Chair Hedwig Fraunhofer

309
Edward Colin Heber-Percy - "The Flesh is Weak."
Street Empathy and becoming human in Jonathan
Glazer's Under the Skin.

David Fleming - Actant en Set: Regarding

two or three oneified bodies of {DØmhnal
Gleeson}

Anette Svane - The embodied (hungry)

female subject in Julia Ducournau’s Raw

Open: Chair: Ewan Kirkland

104
Edward Dani Landau - Sense as Surfacing and the
Street Cinematic Thought of A.N. Whitehead

Adelaide McGinty - “He’s not from our

tribe!”: The construction of Jewish and
Muslim identities in the post-Soviet Russian
space of Balagov’s Tesnota/Closeness (2017

Olivia Belton - Posthuman Womanhood in

Science Fiction Television

10
13:45 – 15:15 15:15 – 15:45 – 17:15 17:15 – 17:30 – 18:45
15:45 17:30
Keynote 3 Chair: David Martin-
Jones
Victor Fan (King's College London):
Time and Nothingness: Image and
Temporality through the Lens of
Buddhism
Sound Chair: Tarja Laine Workshop: How to think about Europe
through a Mythopoetics of Cinema
Murray Pomerance - The Sound of Silence
Participants:
Hannah Paveck - Sounding Colonial Chair: Dusan Bjelic
Encounters: Strategies of Subtitle Translation Kriss Ravetto-Biagioli
Dragan Kujundzic
Michael Goddard - Between Music and Film: Maria Koundoura
Coil's Queer and Transhuman Cinematic Sean Homer
Encounters

Eco-cinema 1 Chair: Christine Jakobson Installation experiences Chair: Emre

Caglayan
Sarah Cooper - How Like a Flower: The
Ecologies of Rose Lowder’s Bouquets Cato Wittusen - Virtual Presence and
Cavellian Skepticism

Coffee to go, collect from Edward Street First Floor

Gabriella Calchi Novati - What is "The Shape
of Water" in the Age of Global Warming? Jihoon Kim- Documentary’s Expanded
Coffee break, Edward Street First Floor

Dispositifs : Contemporary Documentary

Anthropocene’s “Monstrous Ontologies” /
Performing Otherwise Installations and the Operations of
Relocation and Redistribution
Alex Forbes - Cartography of Paradise: The Hudson Moura - The Cambridge Squatter’s
Danube Delta as space of Transition Liminal Filmic Space
Feminist Poetics Chair: Anjo-mari Gouws Open Chair: Shai Bidermam
Daniel Pérez-Pamies - Glitch: a Potency of
Laura Staab - Title: coming to cinema with an Event - Gilles Deleuze’s Concept of
Hélène Cixous Diagram and Digital Cinema Aesthetics

Saige Walton - A ‘most revolutionary reality’: Joff Bradley - Deleuze, heccéité and the
from Maya Deren’s poetic thinking to Strange rising wind: A reading of Miyazaki's 風立ち
Colours ぬ (The Wind Rises)

Melenia Arouh - Food Films and the Female Xiao Cai -Flowing Cinema, Flowing
Chef: a philosophical analysis Aesthetics: Hallucination, Phantom, or
Apichatpong’s Montage
Video essays Chair: Catherine Grant Open Chair: Saige Walton
William Brown - Golden Gate Kalpana Subramanian - The Locus of Breath
in Experimental Film - Phenomenology,
Matthew Holtmeier - Vital Coasts, Mortal Irigaray and Yoga
Oceans: The Pearl Button as Media
Environmental Philosophy (a video essay) Sophie Lynch -La vie, il faut la mettre en
scène: Describing the Everyday in Chantal
Catherine Grant - Performing Film-Philosophy Akerman's Jeanne Dielman 23, quai du
Videographically: Three short examples (SO IS Commerce 1080 Bruxelles (1975)
THIS [A Demonstrative Concordance]; AT THE
LIMIT [Or, Vice Versa]; and FATED TO BE Paul Flaig- Bergsonism All Over Again:
MATED: An Architectural Promenade) Cinematographic and Post-Cinematographic
Perception from Slapstick to the Side-croller

Open Chair: David Deamer Television Chair: Michael Goddard

Jeff Fort- Bazin's Eternal Returns? David Martin-Jones - Columbo: Paying

Close Attention to Television.
David Sorfa - Our Imaginary Person in Havana:
Fiction Film Between Jean-Paul Sartre and Robert Sinnerbrink - Through a Glass Darkly:
Kathleen Stock Black Mirror, Thought Experiments, and
‘Television as Philosophy’
Lia Turtas - The Phantasm of Style: Cinema's
ubiquitous, yet unlocalizable, form of life. Dominic Lash - The danger of getting what
you asked for: expectation and reflexivity in
"Twin Peaks: The Return"

11
THURSDAY 11 JULY
Room 09:00 – 09:30 – 11:00 11:00 – 11:30 – 13:00
09:30 11:30
Sallis
Benney
Theatre
Grand Parade

Aesthetics/Slow Cinema Chair: Neil Fox Eco Cinema 2 Chair: Matt Holtmeier
105
Edward Hui-Han Chen - Slow Cinema's Cacophony and Tyler Parks- Thinking with the World About
Street Flux in Carlos Reygadas' Japón History: On Landscape and James Benning's
Deseret (1995)
Bruno Lessard - The Monumentality of Evil:
Wang Bing’s Dead Souls (2018) Ludo de Roo - Elemental Imagination in the
Phenomenology of the Film Experience: From
Emre Caglayan - Dead, Silent, Slow: Notes Cinematic Immersion to Environmental
Towards a Cinematic Minimalism Engagement

Orna Raviv - Embodied Responsibility

Open Chair: Gabriella Calchi Novati Documentary Chair: Christian Sancto
102
Arrival Coffee, Edward Street First Floor

Coffee break, Edward Street First Floor

Edward Conn Holohan - The Key that Fits: Melodrama's Jack Williams - The Flow of Things Seen:
Street Uncanny Objects Conflicts of Purpose and Practice in the
Documentary Film of John Grierson
David Deamer - The Death of God (At Five in the
Afternoon) Michael Holly - Shake, noise and bad resolution:
strategic uses of the poor image in
Mario Slugan - A Philosophical Approach to contemporary ethnographic documentary film
Fiction in Early Cinema
Thomas Austin - Benefaction, processing,
exclusion: documentary representations of
refugees and migrants in Fortress Europe
Open Chair: Richard Rushton Open Chair: Eva Sancho
103
Edward Kriss Ravetto- The Image That Comes Back to Tamas Nagypal - Myroslav Slaboshpytskyi’s The
Street Haunt Us Tribe and The Post-Socialist Cinema of Cruel
Pessimism
Samira Makki - Palestine through Exilic Kino-Eye:
Reclaiming Space in Palestinian Fiction Film Mark Cauchi - Paterson and the Renewal of
American Secularity in the Age of Trump
Michael Grace - Folds in the Continuity:
Catherine Malabou, Plasticity and Cinema Dionysios Kapsaskis - Representations of
translation in the films of Jim Jarmusch

Open Chair: Tarja Laine Open Chair: Evy Varsamopoulou

309
Edward Joseph Kickasola - The Feeling of Cinematic Shai Biderman - The sound of philosophical
Street Temporality: a Phenomeno-Cognitive Approach rhetoric: fables and parables in the Coen
brothers’ The Ballad of Buster Scruggs (2018)
Greg Singh- Iterative Television, Connected
Viewing and Moral Architecture: The James Jackson - The World as Poetry in
Bandersnatch Variations. Cocteau's Orphée

James Slattery - Cutting Through: Coding Chiara Quaranta - Icons and Idols: Philosophical
Trauma in Sharp Objects Iconoclasm in the Cinema

12
13:00 – 14:00 – 15:15 15:15 – 16:00
14:00
Keynote 4 Chair: Dario Llinares Closing Remarks
Dario Llinares, David Sorfa, Richard Rushton
Jane Stadler (Queensland University of Technology,
Australia): Deepfakes, Bad Actors, and Synthespians: Ethics
and Embodiment Technologies
Lunch, Grand Parade Café

13
“So far from everything”: The Fall of Man according to Andrei Tarkovski,
Werner Herzog and Terrence Malick
Chantal Poch, PhD candidate at Universitat Pompeu Fabra (Barcelona)
Presented at Film-Philosophy Conference 2019, University of Brighton

This presentation is part of my PhD project, which I am conducting at Pompeu Fabra

University in Barcelona within its Centre for Aesthetic Research on Audiovisual Media.
So, to begin with, I will say that my thesis consists in a comparative study of the works
by Andrei Tarkovski, Werner Herzog and Terrence Malick focusing on the idea of the
Fall of Man, very present in Christianity but also in myths all around the world about a
past golden age, a lost paradise, etc. The main idea of this universal myth is that man
had once lived in an original unity with God and Nature, and that at some point he
separated from this unity. As different as these filmmakers are, they converge in some
visual and narrative motifs that revolve around this notion of a lost deeper link with the
world, specially in relation to modernity, of which the three of them are part at some
level if we think of it not as much as an enclosed, settled chronological period but more
of as a mood. The protagonist of Herzog’s The Enigma of Kaspar Hauser exposes this
idea when he says “Mother, I’m so far from everything” to later add “birth was a painful
fall”. Since we have a brief time, today I will focus on characters, on the representation
that Andrei Tarkovski, Terrence Malick and Werner Herzog make of the internal state
of the man after this metaphorical fall.

Reviewing their work we find the repeated appearance of several archetypes such as the
innocent, the Holy Fool or the savage. These are universal characters that have been
created from their nature of otherness. The concept of the child or the innocent is
created by the adult, by the knowing; The fool is created by the sane and the savage is
perceived as such by the one who calls himself civilized. Most of the characters in these
films are big Others. Because these filmmakers perceive the modern man as an Other,
they are interested in all the people that they are not. Given that they are men, this also
applies to women in their work, which are treated more as archetypes of the feminine
than as real people. I’m not going to stop on these archetypes now, but instead focus on
what they share.

If each time has his man, the lonely man will be the centre of the modern age. And
we’re not only talking of a solitude among people; in their movies humans struggle to
find meaningful relations with their surroundings, including both people and land.
When Gertrude Bell in Herzog’s Queen of the Desert says that "silence and solitude
form an impenetrable veil around me" as she walks small in a grandiose and empty
desert, it comes to mind the description that the great Spanish philosopher María
Zambrano makes of "this very condition of man of not being perfectly enclosed in the
environment, such as the animal or the plant, of not being part of something else
broader than him, but to be whole and lonely”.
There’s an interesting friction in the work by these directors between the distant concept
of landscape and the depiction of a nature that is sensual and multidimensional; between
the expression of this man that feels separated from his surroundings (think of the
abundance of silhouettes and indiscernible figures in landscapes) and the expression of
the constant search to penetrate them (think of their rich use of sound, movement and of
which has been labelled as visual hapticity in their images).

This tension is concentrated on a scene at the beginning of Herzog’s Heart of Glass,

where Hias, the prophet of the protagonist town, like Friedrich’s Wanderer, watches a
sea of clouds in the distant background. But at the same time he extends his hand, he
wants to, needs to, touch the distance. He wants to be part of that One that he once
formed with the world. This desire finds an immediate expression in the contact that the
hand of Hias is searching.

Many of the characters in these films will look for nearness, like Hias, from the
spontaneity of gesture. In Malick’s To The Wonder Marina brings her face close to a
leaf and touches with the tip of the tongue a drop of dew; in Tarkovski’s Solaris Chris
Kelvin washes his hands with the water of the lake; in Herzog’s Land of Silence and
Darkness a deaf blind man approaches a tree and begins to feel with his hands its bark
and branches carefully, as if trying to understand it.

A significantly repetitive gesture will be that of those who put their ear to the ground to
try to hear its voice in some way. Herzog’s Woyzeck, in his hallucinatory state, feels
voices that he thinks come from underground. Linda in Malick’s Days of Heaven lays
down and puts her ear to the ground while her voice explains “I’ve been thinking what
to do with my future. I could be a mud doctor. Checking out the earth underneath”.
Laura, the lead scientist in Herzog’s Salt and Fire, tries to understand a threat in the
surrounding landscape, and she also listens to the earth. In Bells from the Deep
Herzog’s voiceover tells us that there are people looking for a lost city under a layer of
ice; we see a group of men dragging themselves in the background in an image that the
director recovers in Encounters at the End of the World. There’s also the archaeologist
in Into the Inferno who in order to show reverence to the land that he studies, kneels
down and kisses it, or those who let themselves fall to the ground, as if the land was a
safe, familiar place, such as Kaspar Hauser, Zishe Breitbart in Herzog’s Invincible, or
Boriska, who cries unconsciously into Andrei Rublev’s arms: they all end up laying on
the ground, most of them when doubting and suffering, like those who seek a mother's
comfort or cure. The Stalker, the child in Sacrifice and the exhausted BV at the end of
Song to Song will also lay down on the floor, looking up in a gesture that evokes the
words of Remo Bodei: “to lay down in direct contact with the earth and the nature, but
at the same time looking towards the sky, unites the high and the low, the beautiful and
the sublime of the nature, the rooting in the ground and the elevation to the stars in a
mystical and private celebration of the communion with the cosmos or with God”. It is
this total union that these gestures seek; the one between the sky and the earth, the one
between the man and the nature, and also the one between the sacred and the physical.
The modern man will be the imperfect reflection of the nostalgia for an initial unity:
closed in himself and wishing to leave himself. The nature of this dissatisfaction will
appear in the films by these three directors in the tension between two types of skin that
could be illustrated in a basic way with Walt Whitman’s “no callous shell” and Max
Weber’s “shell as hard as steel” (stahlhartes Gehäuse), between a non existent
separation from the world, a tendency of the being to join the world, to absorb the
landscape and the otherness, and the constant limitation of this being by all the physical
and intellectual cages that hold it in society as Tarkovski, Malick and Herzog perceive
it.

This incapability to connect with their surroundings will have a literal translation in the
constant presence of visual limits such as prisons, fences, or other types of barriers, a
fact that Faye in Song to song will put into words when she metaphorically expresses
her wish to find a more meaningful life by twice referring to a fence that is built around
her and which she is not able to trespass. Closed spaces will also act as visual limits
often opposed to open natural spaces; think of the spaceship in Tarkovski’s Solaris, the
fortified Jamestown in Malick’s The New World, the ship in Malick’s The Thin Red
Line or the castle in Herzog’s Nosferatu.

There will also be an important use of windows and doors in Tarkovski and Malick,
thresholds that mark the separation of the being and what is not part of it. The characters
that momentarily lean on a door’s threshold don’t look at the specific space before
them, but into a yearned idea. The apex of this can be found in Solaris, where the only
vision that the window of the spaceship offers to Chris is the deep black of the
unknown, or in The Tree of Life, where the crossing to an afterlife world will take place
at home’s threshold, which suddenly opens to a vast white landscape.

But between one person and another there will also be all kinds of separations, and both
in Tarkovski and Malick, this will have a very clear effect on the staging of the
dialogues. Tarkovski will organize the plans of the conversations so that communication
is often interrupted visually: sometimes the transmitter is seen from the behind,
negating the face, and sometimes we do not see its interlocutor at any time. Tarkovski
will insist especially on showing us the back of necks, an image that fills the cinema
with the arrival of modernity and that forces us into this perception of the character as
an Other. Malick, following Tarkovski’s path, places his actors in impossible positions
during their conversations. Moving constantly, Malick's characters look in opposite
directions, walk in circles and turn around. They rarely speak face to face; their
monologues are never answered.

If Tarkovski and Malick put an emphasis into the failure of communication between
individuals, Herzog will be more interested in the disengagement of the individual with
society. The inconvenience of the solitary character makes it the ultimate tool of
questioning. Let’s think for example of Walter Steiner, who will question the rules of
the competitions in which he jumps, or of Jonathan in Nosferatu who will continue with
his trip despite the warnings of the locals. His solitude is also a rebellion, just like
Herzog himself will explain: "The characters in this long history are, all of them, lonely
and desperate rebels who are lacking in language to communicate. Inevitably they suffer
for that. They know that their rebellion is doomed to failure but they continue without
breathing, wounded, struggling alone, without help from anybody”, he says. The
solitude of Herzog’s characters is as much a result of society’s rigid standards as a
condition that emanates from within them, making them feel out of place.

A lot of the characters will be literally out of place because of them being foreigners.
Characters who are far from their land are Stroszek in Signs of Life; the scientists in
Fata Morgana, The White Diamond, Encounters at the End of the World and Into the
Inferno; Aguirre and the rest of settlers; Bruno Stroszek and his two companions when
they are in America; Herzog himself and his team in the vast majority of documentaries
where they can be considered characters; Jonathan Harker in Romania and Nosferatu in
Germany; Fitzcarraldo and company; the soldiers of The Thin Red Line; Smith and the
rest of the crew in The New World; Marina in Oklahoma and Neil in Paris in To the
Wonder, as well as her daughter, father Quintana and Marina's friend, Anna; the French
lover of Faye in Song to Song, etc. Those who are not foreigners often are, in some way,
migrants, such as Andrei Rublev, who will go on traveling by foot looking for new
places to paint icons; the fugitive couple of Badlands; or the pilgrims that will walk
throughout all the work of Herzog. Or the protagonists of Days of Heaven and their
colleagues, that Malick contextualizes in the tradition of the American migrant through
the initial photographs and the projection of Chaplin’s The Immigrant.

But the ultimate foreigner in the contemplated works is Tarkovski’s Andrei Gorchakov,
given that his condition of foreigner is precisely the theme of Nostalghia. Gorchakov’s
struggle for harmonizing his memories of Russia and his present experience in Italy is
again a struggle to unite the interior with the exterior. The film leaves us with the
existential truth that Gorchakov feeling out of place is not because of his foreign
condition, but because of his human condition. All the characters in the films by
Tarkovski, Herzog and Malick are, in this sense, savages and fools and innocents and
foreigners. They are Others because being a human implies, for these filmmakers, to
feel this separation from the world. Just like Meursault in the book by Albert Camus,
they live their lives feeling strangers (étrangers) even at home. It is difficult for them to
communicate with people around them; they are alone even in love and family. But
Meursault is incapable of being moved by anything, he is a stranger, an outsider, from
his coldness and indifference. He has to kill a man to feel something. In the opposite
way, these characters are strangers from their sensitivity; their situation saddens them,
they would give anything to connect. Even in harsh characters like Aguirre we can
sense a need of external approval or recognition. The films of Tarkovski, Herzog and
Malick contain in different ways a hope in humanity. We see it in the way Herzog looks
at his subjects with such profound admiration; we see it in The New World, in the way
Pocahontas looks at all the things displayed at the docks at her arrival in England. In the
eyes of Pocahontas we see no domesticated savage, but fascination, wonder, faith. Also
in these three filmmakers there’s a faith –in the divine maybe, but also in that of divine
that can be found in the human being– and a religious sense of the world that still
struggles around.

The work of Malick, Tarkovski and Herzog is actually and against all the problems they
seem to locate in their idea of society, profoundly humanist. We could not expect
anything else from directors that manifest so often in their films their love for music,
literature, painting and all kinds of art. They are not interested in representing divinity
or sacredness itself, but its relationship with the human. What they explore is the place
of man in the world. Gorchakov, in the famous scene near the end of Nostalghia, lights
a candle and crosses a pool. If we take fire and water, from a basic intuition, as
something anthropologic and something theological, we’re watching the faith in
humanity confronted with the resistance of the world. By crossing the pool with the
candle Andrei is not proving his faith in God, but his faith in himself; after his
existential struggle throughout the film the victory is not in the confirmation of divinity,
but in the confirmation of his capability to believe.

In films so interested for the loss of a primordial unity, to look into the Other is to
recognize oneself in the Other: a first attempt of a return. There’s a moment where Ivan
from Ivan’s childhood, in one of his dreams among the raw reality of war, confronts
himself with his reflection in the deep waters of a well. Ivan, again like Hias, extends
his hand. He does it not to touch the star, but to try and reach himself. Kaspar Hauser
will find himself in a similar situation after someone tries to kill him for the first time;
he is not a child, but is in a pre-linguistic and pre-social reality close to that of a child.
Like Ivan, he is close to death: he looks into the quiet black water on a barrow and sees
his reflection. He then deforms it with his hand. In Voyage of Life, a documentary about
the origins of life, one of the first men also stops and stares into the water of a pond. He
seems for an instant to recognize himself in his reflection, an instant of the intelligence
to come. Then, as both times before, he fades it with his hand. The scene takes places
only moments after the first men appear and only moments before the future extinction
of the human species and destruction of the planet is depicted. Humanity starts and ends
with the search for a mirror. To look into the Other is to look into this mirror; and when
we put a mirror in front of another one, we open the perspective to the infinite.