Aesthetic Experience

A rather interesting debate has been taking place on the blog of Bryan Appleyard. This isn’t, strictly speaking, about film, because Appleyard generally has a wider remit (although he has done an interview with Catherine Deneuve in the Sunday Times today). Basically his theory is that the world is divided into those who have had a transcendental aesthetic experience - an intense engagement with art which takes you beyond what you have previously thought or realised - and those who haven’t. If you have, the argument goes; you are more likely to have an open mind about the existence of God, with the ultimate logic that a ‘militant atheist’ can not have one. Have I had such an experience? I realise I’ve quoted a lot from David Thomson recently (and so will give him a rest for awhile), but does this mean the same as his account in The New Biographical Dictionary of Film of first watching Blue Velvet:

‘The occasion stood as the last moment of transcendence I had felt at the movies – until The Piano. What I mean by that is a kind of passionate involvement with both the story and the making of a film, so that I was simultaneously moved by the enactment on screen and by discovering that a new director (David Lynch) had made the medium alive and dangerous again.’

If so, then the answer is yes - many times. The last one was seeing Max Ophul’s Le Plaisir (1952). In the film, a group of prostitutes travel from Paris to a small town in France for their Madam’s niece’s first communion. The villagers welcome them with open arms and generosity and kindness as if they were old friends. In the middle of the ceremony, as the congregation watch the girls go through the ritual and the church is filled with music, the prostitutes start to cry. In doing so, they start a ripple and everyone else sitting in the pews also starts to cry. It is a deeply moving moment; rich in its complexity, for the tears are not for any one thing. The prostitutes are crying out of regret for their choices in life, but also in gratitude for the way they have been treated. The rest cry with love for the young girls taking part, but also a sadness at what seems like the passing of childhood. Ophuls uses his famous camera movement to great effect in evoking the emotion of the scene.

The fact that this sequence takes place in a church is incidental and doesn’t seem to be proof of God one way or another. Indeed it occurs to me that you can feel this ‘transcendence’ and at the same time be pretty sure that he/she/it doesn’t. The reason why the scene is so affecting is that what Ophuls shows us feels like a truth about human beings; that we can be happy, sad, flawed, beautiful all at the same time. You don’t have to be religious or deny the value of science to acknowledge that.