Approximations: Cinema «and» Christianism Cinema’s Faith and Movement. From João Mário Grilo to Pier Paolo Pasolini

Abstract

This study questions the modality of the relation between cinema (gr. Kī́nēma, "movement") and Christianism. The argument comprehends two moments, two distinct understandings of the relation between the named spheres: 1) the analysis of João Mário Grilo's The Eyes of Asia (1996). In this regard, we follow the structure of a movement reduced to a medialogical exercise: the reproduction of the metaphysical heritage that Christianity accepts and aggravates, subjecting the existentiell to a narrative body that accomplishes itself in the unity / identity of a sole God, i.e., in a crystallization, a suspension of movement. 2) the analysis of the film Il Vangelo Secondo Matteo (1964), by Pier Paolo Pasolini. We argue that the film builds itself upon an incompatibility between cinema and God, that is to say, upon the a-theological call that cinema bears, according to Pasolini. However, more than the indication of a pure absence, the absence or the death of the God of Christianism, it is a question of an emptying, of a God that empties itself in and as human figure, in memoriam (gedenken, andenken) of the kénōsis that Paul of Tarsus announces in the Epistle to the Philippians (2: 6-11). Cinema and Christianism, being and movement, interweave, here, one and the same question, the question of a figure's fidelity to the unpredictable tear of a call (Anspruch), i.e., of what comes and who comes from nowhere, unprecedented and without exemple, each time radically new.