In Search of the Transcendent

What is the transcendent? One early sense appears in Augustine, who speaks of self-transcendence: “We came to our own minds, and went beyond them, that we might arrive at that region of unfailing plenty.” Long before Kant, and long before Eliade’s hierophanies, it troubled the first mystics and theologians; it still troubles us today. In the modern age, cinema has often proved the most eloquent instrument, and the most fitting refuge, for those who sought to express the attainment of that “unfailing plenty.” Film became the ideal meeting point of religion and metaphysics.

The classic cinema of the 20th century raised transcendent film to one of its greatest heights — in Dreyer, Bresson, Pasolini, Tarkovsky, Rohmer, Malick, and Reygadas — while leaving open the question of who stands before us: religious filmmakers, philosophers, Marxists, or mystics.

The curated programme In Search of the Transcendent is devoted to discovering new names. It matters less whether they inherit a great tradition or follow entirely their own path; what matters is that they are open to the search for the ineffable, the enigmatic, and the sacred, and their films take us beyond the borders of this world alone.

Five films are presented in this section. Among them, three Russian premieres and one world premiere. The map is wide — Mexico, Iran, Syria, Israel, and Russia. These may take the form of an enlightened gnostic parable by a Damascene pupil of Artur Aristakisyan, inspired by the 16th saying of the apocryphal Gospel of Thomas; a Latin American metaphysics of violence from a follower of Carlos Reygadas; a Kabbalistic story of the resurrection of an ultra-Orthodox student; a ritual meditation on life and death at a brickworks in the midst of a hellish “nothing,” in the spirit of Béla Tarr; or, finally, a magical journey into the mountains of North Ossetia in search of a “magic land” that can raise the dead.

Sergey Dyoshin