Michael Gibson Vanderbilt University Graduate Dept.

of Religion Beyond the Infinite: the Apophatic Vision of God in the Cinematic Art of Stanley Kubrick
ThroughartwediscoverthemeansforembarkinguponourjoyfuljourneyofreturntotheKingdomof God.BishopKallistosWare1

Introduction Art has attempted to express or represent the holy in a polyphony of forms, from ancient iconography to Serranos Piss Christ, underscoring the variegated approaches to visualizing the human encounter with the ethereal. Though art and religion share a contentious relationship, especially since the rise of modernity, there remains a resilient residue of substantive connection between the two spheres, in which they are involved in mutual critique and enrichment.2 The visual medium of art contains the prolific capacity for stimulating the religious mind (and body) towards fresh encounters with and understanding of the divine and the holy, and can open new layers of meaning for theological thought and analysis.3 Art can, in fact, take on the visual shape of theological
1

Ware, Creativity and the Meaning of Image from the Perspective of the Orthodox Icon, Theology Today 61 (2004): 61. 2 Robin Jensen writes: Images are vehicles for theology, both at the popular and official level, both within the institution of the church and outside it, as supports or subversion of mainstream teachings. I came to understand that the future church leaders and theologians needed to learn about the arts as a way of expressing, exploring, forming and challenging faith as well as a medium of divine self-revelation, in The Substance of Things Seen: Art, Faith and the Christian Community (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2004), 47, ix. Cf. Ware, op. cit., 54. It should be noted, as these authors suggest, that art is not conducive carte blanche to the religious mind, as some art is intrinsically inimical to religion; however, it is decisively important for the church to think through and experientially encounter visual imagery as concomitantly formative, provocative and challenging for faith. See Frank Burch Brown, Good Taste, Bad Taste and Christian Taste: Aesthetics in Religious Life (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), ch. 5; also, David Morgan, The Sacred Gaze: Religious Visual Culture in Theory and Practice (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2005), ch. 1, 4. 3 See esp. Hans Urs von Balthasar, The Glory of the Lord: a Theological Aesthetics, eds. Joseph Fessio, S. J., and John Riches, part I: Seeing the Form, trans. Erasmo Leiva-Merikakis (San Francisco: Ignatius,

2 ideas and forms, providing access to the transcendent through the provocation of contemplation; in a certain sense, art has a mediational capability in its inexhaustible and multivalent interpretational structure.4 In this, visual art is an expressive idiom through which theological modes of thought can be communicated in a powerful and relevant manner. Cinema is a particular type of visual art that has gained vast currency in contemporary culture, and represents a located artistic form with a tremendous reserve for visual articulation of theological ideas and provoking theological thought, contemplation and discussion.5 According to film critic and screenwriter/director Paul Schrader, the development of a transcendental style in filmmaking has given rise to the ability of film to be expressive of the holy; as Schrader indicates, the nature of the medium, and its concomitant techniques, lends itself to visual communication of the ineffable and invisible, the transcendent refracted through immanent, temporal means.6 The transcendental style of film creates a unique sense of connection between the medium of cinema and the nature of religious iconography, which projects the viewer beyond the immediate impression of the visual into the region of encounter, in contemplation and experience of the sublime and the beautiful.7 Film is able, at once, to
1982), 34-44, 79f.; cf. Trevor Hart, Through the Arts: Hearing, Seeing and Touching the Truth, in Beholding the Glory: Incarnation Through the Arts, ed. Jeremy Begbie (Grand Rapids: Baker, 2001), 1-26. 4 Cf. Friedrich Schleiermacher, On Religion: Speeches to its Cultured Despisers, ed. and trans. Richard Crouter (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 3-54, 69. 5 A. Bazin, Cinema Theology, South Atlantic Quarterly 91/2 (1992): 393-408; D. Bridge, Back to the Cinema: Theology Reflects on the Arts, Epworth Review 22 (Jan. 1995): 39-44; Paul Schrader, Transcendental Style in Film: Ozu, Bresson, Dreyer (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1972), 169. Clive Marsh, lecturer in divinity at University of Sheffield, UK, suggests that film is a key resource through which theology may discover constructively its discursive contribution to contemporary culture; he cautions, in so doing, that both theology and film must mutually engage each other in their own integrity, which is to say that one cannot co-opt the other in an expedient quarrying of utile parts. Cf. Marsh, Film and Theologies of Culture, in Explorations in Theology and Film, eds. Clive Marsh and Gaye Ortiz (Oxford: Blackwell, 2000), 2, 27-29. 6 Schrader, Transcendental Style in Film, 3-4, 7-8. 7 Ibid, 11-13, 161f., 169. Cf. Jim Forest, Through Icons: Word and Image Together, in Beholding the

3 capture and represent the transcendent in the immanent, and subsequently to propel the imagination beyond the temporal, immanent moment. Cinematic art, as well, underlines the communal act of participation in the event of encounter and experience, insofar as it unfolds in the midst of a corporate gathering, and takes up the viewers into its gesture (or gaze) toward the transcendent and the sacred.8 This essay will explore the theological possibilities of film to actualize a sense of a vision of the divine as an iconographic corollary through its utilization of the transcendental style; in particular, I will focus on Stanley Kubricks film 2001: a Space Odyssey. The central argument of this essay will be that Kubrick has created a religiously metaphysical film that contains an apophatic vision of God,9 and that the film and its central feature, a black monolith, have a functional resemblance to iconographic art by drawing the viewer toward the divine, in effect transcending the immanental dimension of the vehicle. Kubricks film visually represents the apophatic theological model, structured around a series of encounters with the wholly other (viz., the monolith), in which the characters are propelled to embark upon increasingly distant expeditions toward the monolith (the conclusive encounter occurring at the very limit or boundary of the created realm); the upshot of this structure is precisely that the
Glory, 83-97. Roger Holloway makes a similar argument to Schrader in Beyond the Image: Approaches to the Religious Dimensions in the Cinema (World Council of Churches, 1977). 8 The communal feature of film, as well, highlights the nature of arts variegated interpretive structure, in which an artwork evinces a multivocality of meanings resident in the interpretative reception of the audience; cf. Jensen, Substance of Things Seen, 33, 47. Also, Marsh, op. cit., 3, 11-13, 35-37; Schrader, op. cit., 169, 172. 9 Kubrick, in an interview with the New York Times, indicated that the film has a particularly metaphysical quality about it, that the God concept is at the heart of 2001, but not any traditional, anthropomorphic image of God. I find it very exciting to have a semi-logical belief that there's a great deal to the universe we don't understand, and that there is an intelligence of an incredible magnitude outside the earth. It's something I've become more and more interested in. I find it a very exciting and satisfying hope. From New York Times (21 December 1968), 1D. Accessed at http//:www.nytimes.com/archives/art&ent/1968/Kubrickinterview/2001.html

4 knowledge of God is enigmatic, uncontainable, transcendent and ineffable at this point, the human being is utterly transformed in this agnosia. The strategic procedure of the essay will be as follows: first, I will briefly examine the apophatic theological method and iconographic art represented in the Eastern tradition, which will serve as the theoretic background to the main argument; second, I will rehearse the particular features of the transcendental style in film as outlined by Schrader;10 and, third, I will provide a theological analysis of Kubricks film, highlighting the presence of these features. In this, I will attempt to demonstrate that Kubrick provides in 2001 a supernal vision that evinces the theological viability of cinematic art in its accrual to being a visually idiomatic expression of encounter with the holy. The Apophatic Model of Theological Apprehension Pseudo-Dionysius suggests that human ascent in the knowledge of God occurs in a two-fold process consisting of a series of positive affirmations (cataphasis) followed by negations or denials (apophasis) concerning the nature and being of God.11 The attainment of true knowledge of God, for Ps-Dionysius, follows from the negation of affirmations limned from the created order, in which the human subject accrues analogies to the being of God from creation; the apophatic denial of the analogous affirmations, according to Ps-Dionysius, funds the transcendence of human perception from the
10

I am utilizing the analytical principles developed by Paul Schrader in order to guide and substantiate filmic exegesis according to the methods and specialized tools of the industry itself. This is an important procedural element in developing an interpretation that is veritable in line with the standards and idiom of cinema, which prevents indulgent, speculative eisegesis. Cf. Jensen, op. cit., 30. David Browne, similarly, writes that one can read a film only if one is familiar with its language. Whilst film is not a language in itself, it generates its meaning through systems which work as language in relation to the film text. Film should be regarded primarily as a system of signification, and those systems of signification produce meanings for the reader; Browne, Films, Movies and Meanings, Explorations in Theology and Film, 13. 11 Ps-Dion., De Myst. Theo. 1.1-3, 2-3 in Patrologia Graeca, ed. J-P Migne, vol. 3 (Paris, 1844): 1000A1001A, 1025AB, 1033BC; De Div. Nom., I.2-3 (3:588C-589C), 4 (3:589D), 2.7(3:645B), 4.11-12 (3:708BC-709D); Ep. 1 (3:1065A), 5 (3:1073B, 1076A).

5 visible, created structure, in which one becomes consummately aware of the essential dissimilarity of the divine Being from the inferior gradations of being in creation. God is, in the estimate of Ps-Dionysius, incapable of being grasped or defined as an object of knowledge in a symmetrical way with visible, tangible things. The divine, accordingly, is superabundant, and hyper-essential to such a degree that the being of God is incommensurate with human comprehensibility; humanity can only know God through unknowing (agnosia), in which the ascension through negation reaches a telos in an immersion in silence and ignorance:12 this is an upward flight into the darkness above comprehension, in which we discover ourselves not merely bankrupt of discourse but utterly speechless and unknowing.13 Human transformation and participation in God is contained in the ecstatic (ekstasis) experience of the sublime ineffability of the divine; this is nothing less than the creature going out of herself and becoming wholly intoxicated and united with the transcendent as that which eludes all utterance.14 Gregory of Nyssa, from whom Ps-Dionysius borrowed the exemplary model of the ascent of Moses, describes the experience of Mount Sinai as the contemplative typological model in which the human subject ascends above the material to that which is invisible and unknowable. Gregory avers that the darkness of the invisible is precisely the location of the domicile of the divine and the incomprehensible the form of the true knowledge of God.15 The emblems of created materiality, which appear to human cognition, according to Gregory, do not provide access to knowledge of the true nature of

12

Ps-Dion., De Div. Nom., 1.1-3 (588AB, 588C-589B), 1.7 (596CD), 7.1 (865B-D), 13.3 (981AB); De Myst. Theo. 1.3 (1001A), 2 (1025AB), 3 (1033C), 5 (1048AB) 13 Ps-Dion., De Myst. Theo. 3 (1033C). 14 Ps. Dion., De Div. Nom. 4.13 (712AB), 7.1 (865CD); Ep. 9.5 (1112B-1113A). 15 Gregory of Nyssa, The Life of Moses, 162-169, trans. A. J. Malherbe and Everett Ferguson (New York: Paulist Press, 1978), pp. 94-96.

6 God, as the divine being eclipses all such analogous structures of human comprehension. The human mind must continually push beyond the constraints of the created structure in order to ascend to the pure, uncreated, and utterly transcendent essence of the divine. The elusivity of the divine essence engenders an unceasing and progressive desire that moves human beings to pursue knowledge of and unity with the divine, which continues in an ever heightened enjoyment (epektesis) throughout the eternal aeon.16 The upshot, for Gregory, is the incircumscribablity of the divine essence, which always remains in excess and surplus of human understanding this idea grounds the transformation of humanity in her baptism in the sea of unknowing.17 The apophatic ascent begins within the order of creation, in which the human mind and senses are drawn into a contemplative mode by the apprehension of beauty and the generation of desire. For the Eastern theologians, as well as for Augustine, who synthetically imbricated Christian doctrine and Neoplatonic philosophy, beauty orients and directs humanity to increasing apprehension and desire of itself, which in turns projects the human subject into an ascending attraction to and longing for union with the true beauty of the divine source; according to Jensen, the energy [of the Divine source] draws us upward [away from the created starting point] to perfection. In this pursuit [of perfection and ascendance] we are taken outside of ourselves and oriented to the other, which is our transformation.18 While Augustine avoids the language of theosis (in the ontological sense), which is shot through the Eastern theologians, he does similarly

16 17

Ibid, 163, 219-255: pp. 95, 111-120. Cf. Greg. Naz., Ora 20.10 (SC 270:84). I am playing, here, off of the language of Gregory of Nazianzus, who asserts the divine nature is a like a sea of essence, indeterminate, and without bounds, which spreads far and wide beyond all notions of time or of nature, Ora. 38.7 (PG 36:317BC); cf. Ora. 21.1-2 and Poem. dogma. 33. Also, John Damasc., De fide orthodoxa I.4 (PG 94:800C). 18 Jensen, Substance of Things Seen, 7f.

7 describe, as Jensen notes, a noetic ascent to the immaterial as an eclipse and transcendence of the material realm; human attraction is generated in the graceful presence of beauty in the material, but to attain true knowledge of God one must ascend to that which is beyond and is immaterial, which is the ultimate source of all beauty, and, as such, wholly describable and ineffable.19 The telos of this ascent occurs in the sublation of human comprehension into harmonious intentionality and participation in the transcendent archetype of beauty and being.20 Maximus the Confessor draws similar lines, indicating that love, originating from the divine, draws humanity toward itself by provoking insatiable desire that can only be quenched in that which is truly good and beautiful and through which all things made by God are brought back to abide in God forever.21 This movement is indicative of creaturely being, according to Maximus, and emerges from the instability of being that is itself not God and thus is directed in attraction toward that which is utterly stable and immovable. At the center of this view is the ineluctably transcendent and immutable being of God which eclipses all motion, passion, and circumscription, who is, as such, the ultimate goal of all things through the rhythm of becoming and participatory transposition. Maximus contends that God inscribes in the created order principles (logoi) of beauty which present themselves to the dispositions and sensations of created being to engender attraction, by which human beings are drawn to the source of beauty in which the logoi themselves are irrevocably grounded.22 The allure or attraction of the beautiful is consonant with grace, in which the creature is drawn from the sensible to the
19

This aspect is particularly apparent in Augustines writings On the Beautiful and the Fitting and Confessions. 20 Aug., De civ. Dei XXII; Greg. Naz., Ora. 26.19 21 Max. Conf., Ambig. 7 (PG 91:1069D). 22 Ibid, 1077C-1080B, 1084BC

8 infinite and sublimely uncontainable and ineffable.23 Christology becomes the convergent point, for Maximus, between the cataphatic and apophatic structure of divine knowledge, in which Christ, as the true Logos, brings into union the created and the uncreated, stabilizing the instable. The Word enfleshed brings the transcendent into proximate visibility, and from this vantage point human sensibility is raised up to gaze in an incomprehensible quality upon the unchangeable, ineffable, unknowable, infinite and blessed Godhead.24 The apophatic, in Maximus, turns upon the emergence into visibility of the divine in Christ, and the subsequent ascension of the human into the ethereal through Christ; knowledge of the divine, herein, proceeds upward in negation from its grounding in Christ, so that there is a dialectical substructure that holds together the immanent in an ultimate sublation in the transcendent. This is, as Lossky suggests, a ladder of descent that leads to ascent, in which the divine manifests and appears in the immanental structure of creation in order to lift up the created into the transcendent sphere; knowledge of the divine follows along this particular circuit, in which humanity gains entrance to the transcendent through the narrowing progression of negation of the material until she reaches a point of union with the incomprehensible, which remains such in excess of the intimate, divinizational union but this is the transformation and new creation of humanity.25

The Icon and the Vision of the Holy The Iconoclastic controversy of the 8th-9th century reveals a tension present at the
23 24

Ibid, 1076D-1077B, 1089B. Max. Conf., Ambig. 10 (PG 91: 1168AB, 1172A, 1176B-D). 25 Vladimir Lossky, The Mystical Theology of the Eastern Church (Crestwood, NY: St Vladimirs Orthodox Press, 1975), 38-39.

9 time in the Eastern tradition, in which the doctrine of God and Christology played a role in the configuration of nature and use of icons. The iconoclast party employed an argument against the use of icons based upon the view of the simplicity and invisibility of the divine substance; in a certain sense, the iconoclasts adhered strictly at the apophatic vision of the being and nature of God as transcending all visible and material reality. For the iconoclasts, the crux of the problem resided in the encroach[ment] [of icons] on the sacred terrain of the holy, in which the use of icons overstepped the boundaries of the separation of the sacred and material, amounting to a confusion of the object with the holy itself.26 The resultant confusion of icons with the holy, according to the iconoclasts, ran afoul of the second commandment prohibiting the use of graven images, which suggested to them a hard restriction of any visible representation of the divine through material objects as such things are wholly incapable of manifesting or revealing the divine image. Moreover, the Iconoclasts contended that the iconographic representation of Christ undercut the negative formulations of the Chalcedonian configuration of the hypostatic union.27 The argument ran that the visual depiction of Christ circumscribed the divine nature of the Word in materiality, and negated the negative force of Chalcedon to the effect of promoting a Nestorian Christology; according to Meyendorff, the iconoclasts considered the Iconodules to be amplifying the humanity of Christ to the exclusion of the divinity of Christ, and thus forging a solidly dualistic Christology.28 Iconography, in essence, represented to the Iconoclasts a circumvention of the
26

Jensen, Substance of Things Seen, 56ff.; cf. John Meyendorff, Christ in the Eastern Tradition (New York: Fordham University Press, 1976), 173-175, 178-186. 27 Meyendorff, op. cit., 180ff. 28 Ibid. It should be noted that the Iconoclastic party did not suggest that the Iconodule party denied the divinity of Christ, but rather imposed a hard distinction between the two natures.

10 communicatio idiomatum, which refuses an ability to divvy-up the two natures of Christ into reducible components or elements. The Iconodules, contrariwise, argued from the vantage point of the Incarnation to substantiate the usage of visible representation of the holy. John Damascene argued, for example, that the manifestation of God in the flesh grounded in Gods self the visible depiction of what is visible in God.29 The holy, according to this argument, can be represented legitimately through icons based upon the event of the tangible manifestation of the holy in the Incarnation of Christ. God as incarnate meant the negation of the alienation of materiality from the being of God, in effect bringing the divine essence and corporeality into proximate union. The upshot of the Incarnation, for the Iconodules, is that matter and materiality are no longer cordoned off from possessing the ability to capture the divine and the holy, though indirectly. Christ serves as the true archetype for all icons in that Christ himself reveals the invisible divine in his flesh; icons, as images or types corresponding to the archetype, are a conduit for the invisible reality that exists beyond or behind their material, physical depiction. Icons do not contain the holy as the thing in itself, but express the holy by gesturing beyond themselves. Only Christ, as the archetype, can be said to contain the holy in his visibility; the icon is a secondary representation of visible access to the infinite divine in virtue of the archetype. As such, the icon functions to issue the viewer into the invisible reality that exists in excess of itself. One can, in a certain manner, hold together the apophatic and the iconographic in
29

In former times, God without body or form could not be represented in any manner. But today, since God has appeared in the flesh and lived among humanity, I can represent what is visible in God (eikonizo theou to horomenon). I do not venerate matter, but I venerate the Creator of matter, who became matter for my sake, who assumed life in the flesh, and who, through matter, accomplished my salvation. John Damasc., Or. I (PG 94:1245A).

11 mutual, dialectical correspondence. In an approach similar to the Christology of Maximus, the iconographic can be conceived as the initiatory point of ascendance, in which the visible and the material communicate to the human subject in such a way that her sight and sense is transposed to the transcendent and not confined to the physical. This does not amount to a depreciation of the physical itself, but suggests the capacity of the physical to gesture beyond itself to the ground of its own reality, in which it is supported and affirmed in virtue of its correspondence to (however indirectly) and union with the divine as the originary source. The point of ascendance, as stimulated by representation, reveals the ultimate dissimilarity and incontainability of the divine essence; the material is an egress from itself to the inscrutable and ineffable, which holds the material in existence. The material is divinely gifted with participation in the divine reality on account of the union of created and uncreated in the archetype of the Incarnated Word, which opens the possibility of the created to indirectly reveal the divine, yet the divine exists in effulgent surplus that defers graspablity and comprehension. The human subject is beckoned above through the channel of the material to the immaterial in the transformation of human imagination. The Transcendental Style of Film Paul Schraders observations concerning the development of a transcendental style in filmmaking bear strong resonance with the features of apophatic and iconographic theology. Schrader argues that the transcendental style is a concatenation of techniques and methods which amount to an expression of the holy through this particular form of visual art; Schrader, in fact, suggests that the transcendental style in film is a striv[ing] toward the ineffable and invisible [through that] which is neither

12 ineffable nor invisible itself.30 Cinematic expression in this idiom is the employment of particular concrete forms in order to direct the viewer toward the transcendent as the ineffable. Schraders analysis underscores an artistic synthesis of apophatic theology with iconography: Human works cannot inform one about the Transcendent, who ultimately eclipses all such ability. Art, as human creation, can only be expressive of the Transcendent. Transcendental art, and particularly film in the transcendental style, expresses the Transcendent in a human mirror. The proper function of transcendental art, as such, is to express the Holy itself, though not being a containment of the Holy in the form, not an expression or illustration of holy feelings or impressions.31 Schrader posits that the very nature of the medium of film, through its technical features, lends itself to an indirect expression of the Holy that can mediate an encounter for the viewer with that which is beyond the frame. Though not borrowing explicitly from the Eastern tradition, Schrader indicates that the true upshot of transcendental film is the issuance of the viewer into the quiescent state of encounter with the supremely ineffable: Transcendental style can take a viewer through the trials of experience to the expression of the Transcendent; it can return her from experience to the calm region untouched by the vagaries of emotion or personality. Transcendental style can bring us nearer to that Holy silence, that invisible image, in which the parallel lives of religion and art meet and interpenetrate beyond themselves.32 Film, in this mode, becomes an icon in motion for the transposition of the viewer from the realm of the moving, physical object to that which is wholly beyond motion and definability.33 As Schrader indicates, transcendental style in film consists of particular
30 31

Schrader, Transcendental Style in Film, 4. Ibid, 7. 32 Ibid, 169. 33 In an intriguing coincidence, the particular film directors who form the center of Schraders analysis of the techniques constitutive of the transcendental style were, in fact, pivotal influences on Kubricks own technical style. Cf. Stanley Kubrick and Gene Phillips, Interviews (London: Penguin, 2001), 89f., 126, 204.

13 techniques, which are discernible to the critic and constitute the key to unlocking the meaning of a film. First, transcendental style, according to Schrader, involves the erasure of immanent subjectivity in the dramatic action, which means eliminating the emotive quality of acting and events.34 The emotional content of acting and in the narrative occurrences can become a block to realizing the true transcendent dimension, therefore action and reality are stylized through the removal of the conventional elements of human experience. Schrader suggests that to the transcendental artist, the trappings of the emotional and rational constructs of reality threaten to dilute or explain away the transcendental through misdirection.35 Kubrick, particularly in 2001, empties the characters and the plot of any emotionality; the actors, who were rigorously instructed and rehearsed by Kubrick, deliver their performances in a rather flat and monotone style. The dialogue and the action are reduced to nonexpressive mechanics in order to strip away the exterior conventions of meaning. Kubrick achieved this effect in a method similar to that of the directors discussed by Schrader, which involved monotonous, meticulous and excessively repetitive rehearsal; this type of exacting exercise eliminates expression and improvisation in the acting by reducing the performance to rote mechanics and physical performance.36 Jean Douchet comments that this method brings about the elimination of anything that may distract from the interiority of the drama by stripping away the immanent features of reality, which can occlude the true sense of transcendency (sic).37 Kubrick, even more, amplifies this feature in his framing style, wherein he shoots entirely from an objective vantage point, thus refusing the subjective
34 35

Ibid, 11, 65. Ibid, 11ff. Cf. Amde Ayfre, Cinma et transcendence (Paris, 1961), 157. 36 Schrader, op. cit., 65-66. Kubrick gained the notorious reputation for submitting his actors to rehearsals that spanned close to a year in duration, as well as requiring upwards of 120 takes per scene during filming. 37 Douchet, Bresson on Location, Sequence 13 (1958): 8.

14 moment in any angle. A second aspect of transcendental style disclosed by Schrader is the minimizing of the plot, reducing it to a bare, essential structure. Schrader argues, here, that transcendental film is to be unencumbered with the contrivances of unnecessary dramatic devices, narrative ploys (or decoys), and extraneous dialogue.38 The objective goal, in this, is to reduce the mechanisms by which directors can manipulate audiences into suggestive and easily deduced meaning. Structural technique can seduce or mislead the viewer. By eliminating the commonplace features of narrative design, the transcendent element becomes highlighted in the bare lines of dramatic simplicitythough this does not indicate simplicity in meaning.39 Kubrick, in 2001, utilizes a minimal approach in dramatic structure, constructing the whole narrative around three essential sequences (stretched out to about 50 minutes a piece). Further, Kubrick reduced the dialogue in the film to such an extent that only 46 minutes of the total 159 minute running time features spoken lines. Kubrick explains his rationale behind this choice: I don't have the slightest doubt that to tell a story like this, you couldn't do it with words. There are only 46 minutes of dialogue scenes in the film, and 113 of non-dialogue. There are certain areas of feeling and reality - or unreality or innermost yearning, whatever you want to call it - which are notably inaccessible to words. Music can get into these areas. Painting can get into them. Non-verbal forms of expression can. But words are a terrible straitjacket. It's interesting how many prisoners of that straitjacket resent its being loosened or taken off. There's a side to the human personality that somehow senses that wherever the cosmic truth may lie, it doesn't lie in A, B, C, D. It lies somewhere in the mysterious, unknowable aspects of thought and life and experience.40 The film itself, in its silences and visual images, communicates more fully than the use of narrative contraptions, allowing the viewer to engage and encounter the transcendent in
38 39 40

Ibid, 46-54. Ibid, 52. From an interview with the New York Times (21 Dec. 1968), D4. See n. 9.

15 the mystery of sight and the sound of silence. Third, camera composition and framing are pivotally important in transcendental style. According to Schrader, the techniques of cinematography are the most essential feature for communicating the transcendent in film by shifting the focus from acting cues or dialogical devices.41 The visual element of the film becomes the central key to the films meaning, whereby the contours and lines of the frame in the camera angle highlight the true feature of the film. Camera angles and movement, in the transcendental style, are often subtle and simple in order to distance the possibility of distraction by drawing attention to the device of the camera itself. Often, as Schrader notes, directors overindulge in hyperkinetic camera movement and flashy angles that signal to the viewer in an overly realistic and distracting manner. For transcendental film, simplicity of angle and framing are important, allowing the viewer to absorb and become involved with image rather than being drawn to the directors innovation. Kubrick, as mentioned above, employs univocally an objective framing technique in 2001. The camera movement is very slow and deliberate, more often unmoving and static. Kubrick uses, in most shots, a wide, flat lens and clean, perpendicular angles. The cinematography in 2001 is often meditative and simple, framing the characters and objects in soft, centered shots. A final feature of transcendental style, according to Schrader, is a quality of stasis at the conclusion of the film.42 Schrader indicates that the clinching of transcendent meaning is located in the quiescent, frozen, or hieratic scene which succeeds the decisive action and closes the film.43 This particular quality moves the film
41 42 43

Ibid, 66-67. Ibid, 81, 210. Ibid, 82.

16 in the direction of the transcendent itself, by disclosing in its denouement the essential oneness of all things gathered into and unified with the transcendent. The consummate representation of the stasis of the immanent in the transcendent is suggested by Schrader to be a still view of the external world intended to represent a unity in all things [and which] gestures toward the new world in which the spiritual and the physical can co-exist, though still in tension as part of a larger scheme in which all phenomena are more and less expressive of a larger reality.44 Schraders idea, in this, is realized writ large in the concluding sequence of Kubricks film, in which the film ends with a final shot of the earth itself, seen from space, conflated with the image of the transformed foetus, which turns toward the earth as a new creation of humanity in virtue of her final encounter and union with the transcendent. A Theological Encounter with Kubrickss 2001 Having observed that Kubricks film meets the criteria established by Schrader to be considered as a transcendental film, the final query of this essay is how to engage the film from a theological perspective. The theological meaning of the film, primarily, can be rendered through the reduction of the properties of the film to its visual imagery, since, according to Schrader and Kubrick,45 the significance and communication of the films essential meaning is not located in the subsidiary elements of plot device, dialogue, and character action. The central feature that holds the film together, and gestures toward the transcendent, is the black monolith. The theological essence of the film will be, accordingly, contained in determining the meaning and significance of this particular
44 45

Ibid. See Kubricks comments above, n. 40. Kubrick explained in a subsequent interview that the vacuity of plot structure allowed him to explore his personal fascination with technology, artificial intelligence, scientific theories of evolution and quantum mechanics, and space travel without constraining or interfering with the metaphysical quality of the films essence. Cf. Kubrick and Phillips, Interviews, 170ff.

17 object. The entire structure of the film is constructed around the appearances of the monolith, in which Kubrick arranges the unfolding of the film in three extended sequences visualizing the human encounter with the object. The first sequence, occurring at the beginning of pre-history, involves the sudden appearance of the monolith, in which it materializes from outside of the created world. Kubrick frames this appearance in a sharp, low angle that underscores the ethereal nature of the object, highlighting its perfect dimension and shape. The significance of this first appearance is located in the provocation of mystery and a sense of worship in the primordial species of humanity. The subsequent cuts in the sequence accrue to an implication by Kubrick that the monolith, as a representational form of the divine, transmits to the creatures a revealed knowledge that sparks or initiates humanitys evolution. In a series of scenes involving no dialogue Kubrick visualizes the noetic transcendence of the primate species into intelligent creatures; a single cut transitions from the pre-evolved creatures first utilizing rudimentary tools to the year 2001, in which human beings have developed far ranging space travel. The implication of this sequence, which turns upon the initial encounter with the monolith, is that human progress is the direct result of providential, intelligent revelation from the transcendent Mind. The two subsequent sequences, which make up the majority of the films length, revolve around the human pursuit of the monolith, which continues to emit receptible signals. Human inquest after the monolith, in these sequences, consists in progressively distant and heightened expeditions through the realm of the universe. The second sequence brings the human characters into an encounter with the monolith on the moon,

18 in which an attempt to record the object results in a propulsive shockwave that destroys the recording equipment and renders the human subjects immobile. The monolith, then, disappears, but leaves behind a traceable signal that instigates a subsequent expedition. This third, final sequence involves one of the human characters travelling to the outer boundary of the universe, in which he follows the trail of the monolith through a wormhole in the space-time continuum.46 At the edge of the universal system, the cosmonaut encounters the monolith for a final time, in an isolated, dim room. The human character, who is apparently dying from the trauma of the experience of dimensional transposition, glimpses the monolith before him, extends his hand in a contemplative act of desire for the object; though he remains out of reach of the monolith, Kubricks camera tracks toward the monolith until its finally fills the frame (suggesting an event of sublation). The final moments of the film reveal the cosmonaut transformed into foetus, a new creation, and suspended above the earth; the foetus slowly turns toward the earth with an ethereal gaze. What can be suggested, here, is that the black monolith functions as an iconographic image or representation of the transcendent or divine being, who is, in this, the creator and providential governor of the universal structure. The monolith, as a material object, with perfect dimensions and reflective surface, draws the human subjects (and viewers) toward itself, and ultimately beyond it to whatever invisible reality lies behind it. Encounter with monolith, further, engenders an insuperable desire to gain knowledge of and access to the object. Interestingly, the structure of Kubricks film projects the human characters in a literal ascent, extending further outward and upward
46

Kubrick, incidentally, inserted a title card at the front of this sequence, in which it is called Beyond the Infinite.

19 from the created realm. Parallel to the Eastern motif of the ascent of Moses into the darkness of encounter with the divine, the pursuit of the monolith leads the characters to the absolute edge of the universe into literal darkness; at this juncture, human transformation occurs in the attainment of utter ascendance into the transcendent.47 The human experiences the sublimity of true becoming in the transcendent moment, and the achievement of stasis as deification. The divine, in Kubricks film, leads humanity out of herself in progressive moments of encounter and revelation; yet the divine is always ahead of and elusive of the grasp of humanity. The climax of the film reveals the true synthesis of the iconographic and apophatic structures in Kubricks intention, in which humanity is propelled forward through the icon of the monolith as the vehicle of ascent; at the pivotal moment, in the darkness of absolute space and infinity, humanity submerges into the immateriality of the divine, which emerges as that operative behind and beyond the material object. Human desire, in reaching into the expansive climes of creation, to emerge at the conjunction of the finite and the infinite (which involves suffering), results in ultimate participation and union with the divine in a manner eclipsing speech and comprehension. Kubricks apophaticism is ultimately suggested in that the infinite is never seen or explained, and humanitys transformation is dependent upon the ineffable encounter with the invisible standing behind the visible. In a certain sense, Kubricks film, though not explicitly Christian in orientation, functions in a similar manner to the apophatic Christology of Maximus. Here, both Maximus and Kubrick consider the human ascent to divine (un)knowing through the pivotal appearance and manifestation of the divine in the
47

In this moment of the film, the monolith no longer appears on the screen; Kubrick closes on the vision of infinite space, the earth, and the newly transformed foetusall of which occurs in absolute silence until the credits.

20 created order; from this vantage point, the human subject ascends into the unknown by following the material appearance into the immaterial, wherein humanity is lifted up into participation in the infinite reality and sanctified and transformed for new life in God. Conclusion Stanley Kubricks artistic vision in 2001: a Space Odyssey provides a contemporary artistic expression illustrative of the tradition of apophatic and iconographic theology. The cinematic work of Kubrick yields to theology a visual idiom for the expression and articulation of particular approaches and methods in theological construction and discourse. Kubrick shows, in a visually stimulating fashion, the theological path of contemplation and the ultimate goal union with the wholly other, in which humanity becomes newly created and transformed through participation in the beauty of the infinite and invisible. The transcendent brilliance of Kubricks film, perhaps unknown to the director, is its consummate representation and visual depiction of what is suggested in the words of Dionysius: But the real truth of these matters is in reality far above us. That is why their preference is for the ascent through negations, since this stands the soul outside of everything which continuous with its own finite nature. Such a way guides the soul through all the divine notions, notions which are themselves transcended bu that which is far beyond every name, every reason and all knowledge. Beyond the outmost boundaries of the world, the soul is brought into union with God himself to the extent that every one of us is capable.48

48

Ps.-Dion., De Div. Nom., 13.3 (PG 3:981B).

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Appendix:49
Figure1a TheBlackMonolith:theImmanentAppearanceoftheTranscendent

49

All photographic stills from 2001: a Space Odyssey have been taken from the official website at http://kubrickfilms.warnerbros.com. The photographs were approved by late director Stanley Kubrick for public access.

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Figure1b EncounterwithMonolithprovokescontemplation/worship

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Figure2

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TheSecondAppearanceoftheMonolith:NotethesymmetryinframingwithFig.1b(esp.3rdstill inthisset)

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Figure2b TheMonolithappearsontheMoon:comparewithFig.1ab

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Figure3 TheFinalSequence:theEncounterwiththeMonolithattheBoundaryoftheUniverse

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Figure3b Therebirth

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Figure4 ComparisonoftheEncounters:ProvocationofContemplationofMystery/Worship NoteKubricksframingstyle.

29

(Thoughnotparticularlyapparentinthisstill,thefigureshandisoutstretchedtowardthe monolith,repeatingamotifinthesequencesinwhichthereisanattempttocreatecontactwith theobject;inthisfinalsequence,asthecharacterdies,heexperiencestransformationsee.fig.3b, 5)

Figure5 TheNewCreation

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Figure6

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Kubrick,ontheset.

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