LOLA
                                  

Cinema of Compassion
 
Amelie Hastie
[W]hat is the good of film experience?
                                                                   -- Siegfried Kracauer (1)
  1. Siegfried Kracauer, Theory of Film:
Directly one looked up and saw them, what she called ‘being in love’ flooded them. They The Redemption of Physical Reality
(Princeton, NJ: Princeton University
became part of that unreal but penetrating and exciting universe which is the world seen Press, 1997), p. 285.
through the eyes of love. The sky stuck to them; the birds sang through them. And, what
 
was even more exciting, she felt, too, as she saw Mr. Ramsay bearing down and 
retreating, and Mrs. Ramsay sitting with James in the window and the cloud moving and  
the tree bending, how life, from being made up of little separate incidents which one lived 2. Virginia Woolf, To the Lighthouse
one by one, became curled and whole like a wave which bore one up with it and threw (New York, NY: Harcourt, Inc., 1981),
pp. 46-47.  
one down with it, there, with a dash on the beach.
                                                                   -- Virginia Woolf, To the Lighthouse (2)
 

Think of the repeated image of the landscape of war in Terrence Malick’s The Thin Red    
Line (1998): the waving green grass that remains on the hills as soldiers rush forward to
their deaths. In one long sequence that oscillates between the peaceful changing light on
the hill and the harrowing deaths of men who cross it, we cut to a soldier hidden in the
blades as he catches his breath. ‘Calm down, calm down, calm down, calm down’, Captain
Staros (Elias Koteas) mechanically entreats, and we cut to men rushing through the
grass, killed one after the other. We return, again and again, to these images of the green
hills – so much so that, upon its insistence, the grass seems infinite, endless. Though
definitively ephemeral in its individual strands that surround the gasping soldier, its
masses together invoke a state of permanence, mooring us in the earth.
 
Because of the image of this landscape’s insistence on life, we are in turn violently
unmoored by the soldiers’ frantic movement across it. This contrast, these opposing
rhythms, form an exhortation that the film continuously extends. There is the grass
waving on the hills. And there come the bodies of soldiers, charging forward into their
deaths. Thus, the cyclical permanence of the natural world juts against the transience of
human life. And together, as in Lily Briscoe’s narration above, these ‘separate incidents’ of
life ‘become curled and whole like a wave’. In watching the soldiers run forward on the
hill, whether en masse in an ascent, or as they are each hit by gunfire with their bodies
flung forward and back, I experience the sensation that she here describes: the wave of
images bears me up with it and throws me down with it, ‘there, with a dash on the
beach’. And in this dash, borne of the clash between the natural world and the transient
human bodies rushing through it, comes the potential for our own magnified perception –
our meditation on being – and, in that, an invitation to feel with what we see.

In attempting to define what she means by ‘moments of being’ (as opposed to the ‘cotton
wool’ of ‘non-being’), Virginia Woolf tells a story of a fight with her brother as a child: ‘We
were pommelling each other with our fists. Just as I raised my fist to hit him, I felt: why
hurt another person? I dropped my hand instantly, and stood there, and let him beat me.  
I remember the feeling. It was a feeling of hopeless sadness’. (3) She goes on to describe  
another instance: ‘I was looking at the flower bed by the front door; “That is the whole”, I
3. Virginia Woolf (ed. Jeanne
said. I was looking at a plant with a spread of leaves; and it seemed suddenly plain that Schulkind), ‘A Sketch of the Past’,
the flower itself was a part of the earth; that a ring enclosed what was the flower; and Moments of Being (New York, NY:
Harcourt, Inc., 1985), p. 71.  
that was the real flower; part earth; part flower’. (4) These stories appeal to me not just
 
for their revelation of the complexity of feeling in and of themselves, but also in the 4. Ibid., p. 71.  
connections between the revelations: the young Virginia’s refusal to inflict pain on her  
brother seems a result of her recognition of their shared rootedness (‘another person’),
 
not merely as siblings but as people together in the world (‘part earth; part flower’). This
is the shared rootedness which film also has the potential to show us. Siegfried Kracauer 5. Kracauer, p. 63

would call this phenomenon an element of film’s endlessness, its capacity to record and  
reveal the ‘flow of life’. As he writes, ‘it is as if the medium were animated by the
chimerical desire to establish the continuum of physical existence’. (5) He later notes
film’s ‘affinities’ with photography and, in turn, the world it records:

Due to the continuous influx of the psychophysical correspondences thus aroused,

 
they suggest a reality which may fittingly be called ‘life’. This term as used here
  denotes a kind of life which is still intimately connected, as if by an umbilical cord,    
with the material phenomena from which its emotional and intellectual contents 6. Ibid., p. 71.
emerge. Now films tend to capture physical existence in its endlessness. (6)

I consider these possibilities of rootedness and of the extension of life – its ‘endlessness’    
– through a series of images from three contemporary films. My choice of films and
images is somewhat arbitrary, grounded in this context in which they come together; but
they represent broader trends in contemporary independent and global cinema that invite
us to pause and reflect on connections between our natural world and our social relations
in it – what Kracauer terms ‘psychophysical correspondences’. The visual movement
between the natural and social worlds in these films inherently suggests a shared
rootedness both between them and between us as social beings, all the while enabling us
to feel and then to understand a rhythm of being.
 
***

This rhythm of being is rooted in film’s ability to record and reveal movement: Malick’s
waving grass, the soldier’s running bodies. And both a sense of this rootedness and its
unmooring comes again and again in the soldiers’ encounters with the natural world.
Early in The Thin Red Line, as a private waits on the hill for further battle, he runs his  
fingers across a leaf attached to a blade of grass and observes it folding into itself,
seemingly refusing the violence that surrounds it, instead finding a protective shell in and  
of itself. As Kracauer repeatedly suggests, movement is itself indicative of being. In the
case of this leaf of grass, even the slightest movement recorded and projected is evidence  
of a life force, or even a visual manifestation of breath. Indeed, film’s revelation of the
world is what Gaston Bachelard, after Baudelaire, would say is ‘vast’. Vast is a declaration  
of immensity, the immensity of possibility. This possibility is evident in our vocalisation of
the word itself. As he writes, ‘The word vast, then, is a vocable of breath. It is placed on 7. Gaston Bachelard (trans. Maria
our breathing, which must be slow and calm’. (7) The calm transmitted through the word,   Jolas), The Poetics of Space (Boston:
Beacon Press, 1994), p. 196. Earlier,
as in Baudelaire’s ‘Correspondences’, is ‘infinite’. Bachelard continues: ‘With it, we take he writes: ‘Here we discover that
infinity into our lungs, and through it, we breathe cosmically, far from human anguish’. immensity in the intimate domain is
intensity, an intensity of being, the
(8) intensity of a being evolving in a vast
  perspective of intimate immensity’, p.
193.  
I love an image that makes me conscious of my own breath, whether it comes in a gasp,
a steady rhythm, or a moment in which my breath literally stops. Our own breathing with 8. Ibid., p. 197.  
the image is part of film’s (chimerical) animation of the life before us. (9) Indeed, its
quality of movement – and therefore its demonstration of life itself – animates even the 9. Editors' Note: See Ross Gibson,
‘The Searchers – Dismantled’, Rouge,
inanimate, as we take in the images on the screen. Woolf also described this no. 7 (2005),
phenomenon, possible in our very acts of perception and attention, again, in To the
Lighthouse. Here Mrs Ramsay considers the world before her, looking out at the
lighthouse:

It was odd, she thought, how if one was alone, one leant to inanimate things;
trees, streams, flowers; felt they expressed one; felt they became one; that they  
  knew one, in a sense were one; felt an irrational tenderness thus (she looked at
 
10. Woolf, To the Lighthouse, pp. 63-4.
that long steady light) as for oneself. (10)

It is not simply that film captures an animated world, a world in motion; film animates. It    
animates the inanimate: the still, the unmoving, the concrete. It reveals that which is
already moving as an animated body. And it animates us as we watch.
 
***
 
Now think of the ocean in Niki Caro’s Whale Rider (2002): the film opens with an image
purely of the water. The camera does not move. The water simply moves before us. We
are both grounded and unmoored by this image. We do not know where we are; but we
know we are with the water. Soon we move from the surface of the water to a place
under the water, within the water, and a young girl’s voice rises out of the image: In the
old days, the land felt a great emptiness. It was waiting, waiting to be filled up, waiting
for someone to love it, waiting for a leader.
 
This sense of waiting is an entreaty – to be filled up, to be loved, to be led. In the film,
this is a moment in which we are entreated to look and listen. We are invited to feel with
the image before us. So, in response to the emptiness – or the immensity – of the
moving water, we are next placed immediately in another scene: a hospital, a woman in
labour, her husband at her side. The camera – an inanimate thing – is unsteady. In its
movement, it reveals the urgency of this scene of birth, of imminent death. It begins in
slow motion without synchronous sound; as the tempo increases, sound comes into being
with the mother’s cries in pain. Her husband wraps his hand around her head, caressing
her hair; the doctor’s hand then moves her hair away from her face as well. The young
girl’s voice returns to direct us, to hold us first in this scene and then as we move
between it and the ocean and back again: And he came on the back of the whale, a man
to lead the people, our ancestor. Paikea. But now we were waiting for the firstborn of the
new generation … for the boy who would be chief. As we return to the scene of labour, the
wife’s condition becomes increasingly urgent, and the husband looks startled, bereft,
helpless nearly to the point of being absent from the scene (and in a cut to his face filling
the frame alone, he is in a sense absent from her). She does not look at him or at the
doctor. Finally we see nothing but the mother’s face in extreme close-up; now the camera
takes the place of those hands that moments before caressed her. It moves towards her,
without actually touching her. Its absence – at least its lack of touch – is our absence; we
can only witness her last breaths as she utters her child’s name: ‘Paikea. Paikea’. In
response to her entreaty, the child’s face appears as the mirror opposite to its mother:
her mouth is open as if to cry but instead is just starting to take breath. This image is
vast in its immensity and its intimacy of being. Watching it, my own breath stops,
stutters. The girl’s voice returns as the camera moves from the child’s mouth to its eye,
opening wide: There was no gladness when I was born. My twin brother died and took our
mother with him.
 
And this is the story of the film, its rhythms: an emptiness that needs to be filled.

 
  

In Rhythmanalysis – a meditation on rhythms and patterns in space, of time, of thought –

   
Henri Lefebvre describes the alternating movement between pleasure and pain:

Pleasure and joy demand a re-commencement. They await it; yet it escapes. Pain
returns. It repeats itself, since the repetition of pleasure gives rise to pain(s). 11. Henri Lefebvre (trans. Stuart
Elden), Rhythmanalysis: Space, Time
  However, joy and pleasure have a presence, whereas pain results from an absence   and Everyday Life (London:
(that of a function, an organ, a person, an object, a being). Joy and pleasure are, Continuum, 2004), p. 12.
they are being; not so suffering. (11)

Pain is most evident in the loss and thus the absence of life. Certainly, that is the case as    
Whale Rider opens. But, at the same time, pain and absence are enacted together in the
presence of Paikea (Keisha Castle-Hughes). She does not exist as the thing that her
grandfather Koro (Rawiri Paratene) wanted; she is a reminder of that which is not there
(a boy, a future male leader). This pain of absence is inscribed on her body before us: in
her tears, for instance, as she asks her father, ‘Why doesn’t he want me?’; or as she
recites a speech in honour of her grandfather Koro who is, at that moment, absent from
the space of the audience.
 
Yet her grandfather is also there before us, in the scene which alternates with Paikea’s
speech. In fact, the sequence begins with Koro hearing the cry of the whales, then shifts
to a children’s dance performance, Paikea front and center. In her speech that follows,
Paikea tells us the story of her ancestors and the contemporary expectations: ‘But I was
not the leader my grandfather was expecting, and by being born I broke the line back to
the ancient ones, but it wasn’t anybody’s fault. It just happened’. And she is answered by
her grandfather on the beach, who looks at an immensity of trapped whales between
sand and water and asks: ‘Who is to blame?’ We return to Paikea, as if to answer his
question, but she says, ‘We can learn that if the knowledge is given to everyone, then we
can have lots of leaders, so that everyone will be strong, not just the ones that have been
chosen. Because sometimes, even if you’re the leader and you need to be strong, you can
get tired...’ Crying, she finishes her speech, ending with the ancestor Paikea’s chant.
Certainly these alternating scenes, with their alternating dialogue, are rhythms as well,
ones which – as a call and response – demand a return to Paikea’s imagination of the
future. In these scenes and those that follow, pain repeats itself, and then joy re-
commences.

***
 
Repetition in Whale Rider invokes difference; for Lefebvre, such alterity is essential to
rhythm. In this way, ‘rhythm implies a certain memory’; it ‘preserves both the measure
that initiates the process and the recommencement of this process with modifications,
therefore with its multiplicity and plurality’. (12) This is the rhythm, too, of The Thin Red
Line, especially the daydreams of Jack Bell (Ben Chaplin) of his wife Marty (Miranda Otto)  
back home; his memories become our own, in their repetition across the film. His reveries
12. Lefebvre, p. 79.
begin before the soldiers embark from their ship and continue as they land and climb the
hill. His third reverie comes amidst an ascent. As the US troops seem to be in a holding
pattern on the grassy hill below a substantial Japanese rampart, a soldier suddenly  
appears in a crazed frenzy, having lost a dozen men. Refusing to be touched, he escapes
the group he enters into and appears alone in a medium close-up, centre screen. Taking a  
handful of the earth, he slowly drops it before him, muttering, ‘Dirt. We’re all just dirt’.  
Following this desperate moment, Jack is ordered to climb the hill alone to gauge the  
enemy’s position. He looks towards us; with a cut, he moves sideways, from right to left,
across the screen; with another cut, he moves from the centre forward, his back to us;  
and with another, he emerges in the grass, moving towards us again. Into his movement
across the grassy hill comes an image of Jack’s back to us, his wife’s head buried in his  
neck and shoulders, as they glide in an embrace. The cuts in this scene are similarly
directional to those of Jack’s manoeuvres on the hill: their hands and faces crawl across  
the screen, towards and away from each other’s bodies. Then from a shot of a curtain
waving away from an open window, we cut to another scene: Jack’s wife beckons him to
follow her into the ocean, her voice-over asynchronously calling him, ‘Come out, come
out where I am’. And here again we cut to an imperceptible body moving impossibly fast
through the grass. With one more cut, Jack faces us again, and our view shifts to what he
sees on the hill.
His reconnaissance complete (he has spied five guns in a Japanese bunker), the film
pauses again, almost exactly midway. A series of images of soldiers at semi-rest ensues:
first we see Witt (Jim Caviezel), the near-central figure in a film that largely refuses such
character-driven mooring, in conversation with Sgt Welsh (Sean Penn), who insists that,
in spite of what he might believe, Witt has ‘only this world’. Next we see another soldier
erupting on a hillside, challenging his own imminent death (is it the one who held the dirt
in his hands, moments before?). And then we cut to Jack, lying in the grass. His head
against the ground, we might envision Woolf’s flower (‘part earth; part flower’), as if Jack
himself were bred of the earth. And in this connection to the natural world begins another
reverie which seems a recommencement of the last one. His own voice now beckons his
wife across time and space: ‘We. We together. One being’. He grasps her from behind.
Their bodies move like the rhythm of breath itself, fluttering towards one another and
   
away, his hands near breasts, heart, lungs, the very site of her breathing; with the refusal
of contact a kiss would bring, they sustain an infinite state of desire. Together they are
suspended in a rhythm of intimate being – held together at the forearms and below the
waists yet simultaneously leaning away from one another. In fact, in that movement of
leaning away is their very suspension together. The space between and around them is
immensity, the intimacy of their being. Jack exhorts: ‘Flow together like water, ‘til I can’t
tell you from me’. We leave them for a moment, returning not to the battlefield but the
sky above it, until Jack whispers, ‘I drink you. Now, now’, and we see his wife in the bath,
her back to us, Jack’s hand caressing her. ‘Now’ returns us to the grassy hill again, to be
followed by a shot of Staros, wearily eating his dinner from a can, looking upwards at the
moon, as his own voice-over whispers, ‘You’re my light, my guide’, itself a return to his
earlier prayer: ‘Let me not betray you, let me not betray my men’.
    

Perhaps the problem with love, whether Jack’s for his wife or Staros’ for his soldiers, is
that it illuminates an emptiness waiting to be filled: an entreaty. (It is an entreaty
vocalised in the repetition of words uttered by Jack and his wife: ‘come out, come out’,
‘we, we’, ‘now, now’. And it is another kind of entreaty in the echo of the soldier’s
announcement of ‘dirt, dirt’ or Staros’ ‘my light, my guide’.) The sensation of loving
someone or something responds to that entreaty and, in its insistence, our bodies feel
fuller – of breath, of blood, of that which moves through us. The Thin Red Line, like Whale
Rider, makes visible this emptiness, and the hope of it being filled. But our returns to the
possibility of fulfillment are a recommencement of both sadness and satisfaction, and this
is the rhythm of desire. As such, we feel, with the film, the register of an inseparability of
being with the world.    
 
*******
 
Film theory rooted in the 1970s and since, developed through psychoanalytic and
ideological analysis in particular, enabled us to see the processes of identification
designed by classical Hollywood film. Based therefore in questions of power – the
spectator’s unconscious sense of power in relation to the image and the cinematic
apparatus’ power over the spectator – this theoretical approach, still relevant today, locks
us in a struggle with the image. Films like The Thin Red Line or Debra Granik’s Winter’s
Bone (2010) offer other possibilities.

Unlocked from the inflexibility of classical continuity style, these films explore the   13. Kracauer, p. 58.  

experience of perception itself. In so doing, they enable a different identity: not with the
film (or its apparatus) but in relation to it and its images. In Theory of Film, Kracauer
suggests that film ‘aims at transforming the agitated witness into the conscious observer’.
(13) In linking together the natural and social worlds, enabling a psychophysical
correspondence, these new instances of cinematic realism suggest something other than
a model of control over our agitation. That is, in our emerging consciousness, we might
recognise and enact a spectatorship based instead on a model of compassion. This is a
compassion not just for characters (although that may be part of it), but also simply for
being in the world.

Like Whale Rider and The Thin Red Line, Winter’s Bone is an entreaty, if not an outright
demand, for such compassion. In it, teenager Ree (Jennifer Lawrence) attempts to locate
her errant, meth-cooking father in order to save her family’s house. The law cannot help
her; that is the very structure that has threatened to foreclose on her home and kick her
family out if her Dad does not resurface. Her mother is emotionally lost, so protection of
the younger brother and sister is left to Ree. The film moves with her as she crosses
through the desolate space of the Ozarks in order to find evidence of her father’s life or
death. At the house of her Uncle Teardrop (John Hawkes), she sits with him at his kitchen
table as he tends to his gun, nonchalantly using it to scratch his head before setting it
down on the Lazy Susan, which he then spins about as if playing a child’s game. He
stands up and takes a spin around the table himself. Ree asks if he knows where her
father is; he tells her it is her father’s business if he does not want to be found. She
   
pleads, matter-of-factly, ‘Listen’. And, in response, he whirls towards her and grabs her by
the neck. In the span of barely twenty seconds, the film cuts eleven times, situating
Teardrop over Ree in an act of terrifying violence. These cuts, with each shot in extreme
close-up, quicken the violence. Ultimately the camera lands on his hands at the back of
her head, her blonde hair slipping through his fingers just after he utters ‘No’. In this
rapid series of images, Teardrop’s movement and the film’s editing of it together create a
complex web, a multi-directional force which repeatedly reveals Ree at his mercy,
seemingly under him from six different angles. As he finally moves away from his helpless
niece, he stands for a second in the middle of the room, amidst a surprising ray of light –
the smoke from his cigarette blowing upwards and away. A moment later, Ree is outside
again in the empty landscape, with the desolation of the open space a welcome relief
from the cluttered and violent interior of the preceding scene.
  

In ‘The Dialectics of Outside and Inside’, the final chapter of The Poetics of Space, Gaston    
Bachelard describes a ‘mixture of being and nothingness’, and the threat of our 14. Bachelard, p. 218.
banishment from ‘the realm of possibility’. About this mixture – between inside and  
outside – Bachelard asks: ‘In this drama of intimate geometry, where should one live?’
15. Editors' Note: For the best and
(14) Granik’s film, like Malick’s and Caro’s, is itself a form of ‘intimate geometry’. We live clearest discussion of the ambiguities
between the images before us, caught in the interstitial spaces between Teardrop’s violent and problems involved in attributing
movements towards Ree. As he holds her blonde hair in his hand, that space between his voice-overs to specific characters in the
film, see Jeremy Millington, ‘Critical
fingers is another emptiness that demands to be filled. And, in this moment, we can Voices: Points of View In and On The
imagine an alternative response to her uncle’s ‘No’, perhaps the help that she needs. In Thin Red Line’, CineAction, no. 81
(2010), pp. 28-38.  
effect, we drop our hands as Woolf describes doing as she fought her brother. Is that not
the ‘good of film experience’? 16. In ‘The Cinema Seen from Etna’,
Jean Epstein writes: ‘One of the
  greatest powers of cinema is its
animism. On screen, nature is never
Certainly such imaginative possibilities also exist between the characters of The Thin Red inanimate. Objects take on airs. Trees
Line and the landscape they inhabit: the fingers that glide along the leaves of grass, the gesticulate. Mountains, just like Etna,
hands that grasp and let go of the dirt they hold, Witt’s sharing of his water with a leaf by convey meanings … The grass in the
meadow is a smiling, feminine genie.
the stream. In the midst of a horrifying raid on a Japanese camp two-thirds through the Anemones full of rhythm and
film, an American soldier’s voice (which one?) (15) asks: ‘This great evil – where did it personality evolve with the majesty of
planets’. Epstein (trans. Stuart
come from? ... What sea, what root did it grow from? ... Does it help the grass to grow Leibman), ‘The Cinema Seen from
and the sun to shine? Is this darkness in you, too? Have you passed through this night?’ Etna’, in Sarah Keller & Jason N. Paul
(eds), Jean Epstein: Critical Essays
In seeming response, we see an American soldier, Dale (Arie Verveen), threaten a dying and New Translations (Amsterdam:
Japanese prisoner (Kengo Hasuo), calmly announcing, ‘I will sink my teeth into your liver’. Amsterdam University Press, 2012),
pp. 289-90.
A few minutes later, the voice-over returns: ‘War don’t ennoble men. It turns ‘em into
dogs. Poisons the soul’. We see again the threatening soldier, now alone in the frame,
holding the teeth he had taken as a spoil of battle; after a quick flashback to the earlier
scene and the Japanese soldier’s entreaty, he tosses the teeth onto the ground and
begins to sob. Rain pours over him; he grips his upper arms as if he could hold himself,
comfort his own undulating body while he cries. Dirt, leaves, rain: these are like the
inanimate things Woolf suggests ‘one leant to’ and thus ‘felt they expressed one; felt they
became one; that they knew one, in a sense were one’. (16) Such expression exists as
these natural elements of the world come into contact with the soldiers’ bodies, together
creating another intimate geometry. We inhabit this space, too, attempting to fill the
voids that the visual and aural webs inherently and endlessly design.

Staring at the moving images, locked in our seats, do we sense the emptiness between
our bodies and the screen? (Do we sense the same between the image and the words
with which we attempt to do it justice?) Our potential love for the image is the entreaty to
fill these empty spaces. Nearly inanimate before the images ourselves, we are in turn
moved by the film – say, by a young girl’s cries for love and justice, a soldier’s cries in the    
rain. We may feel now, now that those images, as Woolf describes above, ‘felt they
expressed one; felt they became one; they they know one, in a sense were one’. Together
with the image and with the world before us, we are suffering and joy, stillness and
movement.

The author offers thanks to Geoff Sanborn and Claudia Steinberg for reading drafts of this
essay and for their suggestions for its rhythms; to Nate Brennan for his conversation with
me about Malick, and his questions which helped form the end of this essay; to Girish
Shambu for the welcoming opportunity to write this piece in the first place; and to the    
members of my ‘Cinema and Everyday Life’ class in the spring of 2013 at Amherst
College, who read these texts and watched these films with me and who, in their own
endless intelligence, sustained me for those four months of our work together.

from Issue 4: Walks    

© Amelie Hastie and LOLA August 2013.

Cannot be reprinted without permission of the author and editors.
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