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Public Lecture: film and philosophy cinema as crisis of faith

Prof. Cauchi’s talk will undertake to think cinema as a crisis of faith, in three steps. First, he shall genealogically connect cinema to the crisis of faith in the 19th century through engagements with the work of Charles Taylor, Wilfred Cantwell Smith, and Soren Kierkegaard.

Second, he will examine the relationship of the cinematic medium to the viewer through engagement with elements of both Stanley Cavell’s film ontology. Finally, in two linked sub-steps, he will re-contextualize Cavell’s analyses of his two privileged genres (remarriage comedies and unknown woman melodramas), both of which, Cauchi claims, are conditional upon and reflect a crisis of faith; following that, he suggests that this crisis is more self-consciously reflected upon in a small group of films he only half-seriously calls “melodramas of miraculous remarriage.” Two of these shall be briefly examined: Carl Theodor Dreyer’s Ordet (Word, 1955) and Carlos Reygadas’s Stellet Licht (Silent Light, 2007).

In these films, couples’ relationships (fidelity) are challenged and reaffirmed through, and as, a miracle. These miracles, like others in cinema, immediately put the viewer into a crisis of faith about whether to accept as credible, believable, or trustworthy the impossible acts projected, a situation that merely heightens and discloses the condition that every viewer of every film is in.

Prof. Mark Cauchi is Associate Prof.in the Department of Humanities and in the Graduate Program of Social & Political Thought at York University in Toronto. His work examines the precarious intersections and genealogies of secularity and religion in philosophy, politics, art, and film.

He is the editor of Cinema and Secularism (Bloomsbury 2024), co-editor with John Caruana of Immanent Frames: Postsecular Cinema between Malick and von Trier (SUNY 2018), and author of articles in the journals Film-Philosophy, Journal for the Continental Philosophy of Religion, Political Theology, Idealist Studies, Levinas Studies, Angelaki, and others.