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Ethics of Inscrutability:Ontologies of Emptiness inBuddhist FilmLina VercheryPublished online: 01 Apr 2014.

To cite this article: Lina Verchery (2014) Ethics of Inscrutability: Ontologies ofEmptiness in Buddhist Film, Contemporary Buddhism: An Interdisciplinary Journal, 15:1,145-163, DOI: 10.1080/14639947.2014.890356

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ETHICS OF INSCRUTABILITY:

ONTOLOGIES OF EMPTINESS IN

BUDDHIST FILM

Lina Verchery

This paper explores one of the unique features of the filmic medium, famous elaborated

by Stanley Cavell: namely, that film allows us to see what is not there. Laying out a

comparative study of ontologies of emptiness – that is, techniques whereby films show

us what is not there – this paper develops a methodological and ethical position by

bringing ontologies of emptiness into dialogue Buddhist notion of sunyata. I suggest

that developing a hermeneutic of seeing what is not there moves us away from the

reductionist tendencies that come with seeking totalizing knowledge. This forces us to

rethink the modes of signification we assume to be operative in filmic language, and to

consider the ethical implications of signification itself.

One does not create by adding, but by taking away.

Robert Bresson, Notes on the Cinematographer

Much of the current scholarship on Buddhism and film is dominated by two

paradigms: using Buddhism to interpret film and using film to understand

Buddhism (Blizek 2009; Blizek and Desmarais 2008). The former approach adopts

Buddhism as an interpretive lens to be projected onto films, whether or not these

films are ostensibly ‘Buddhist’ in theme or content (see Sluyter 2005; Fielding

2008). Scholars have criticized, however, that this interpretive approach can be

difficult to defend. With a vast diversity of traditions comprised within the

umbrella term ‘Buddhism’, we are left wondering, along with Michele Desmarais,

what form of Buddhism to use as the basis for our interpretation. ‘If we decide that

one tradition encapsulates the “real Buddhism”, we fall into the fault of

essentialism . . . [If] we accept that all things have Buddha-nature, then every film

also possesses it’ (Desmarais 2009, 156). In the end, when using Buddhism as a lens

for film interpretation, we are faced with the same problem that plagues the fields

of Buddhist Studies and Religious Studies more generally: each time we attempt

to define our object of study—in this case, ‘Buddhism’—we run the risk of

reductionism. As Cantwell Smith (1963), Masuzawa (2005), and others have

Contemporary Buddhism, 2014Vol. 15, No. 1, 145–163, http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/14639947.2014.890356

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pointed out, this is a serious methodological problem in the study of religion. All

too often, the data scholars ‘find’ tend to be determined by their theories, rather

than the reverse. If we come to the study of religion with a narrow definition of

what Buddhism is, our investigations will undoubtedly confirm what we already

believe to be true.

The alternative approach—namely, using film to understand Buddhism—

attempts to avoid these problems by selecting films that depict Buddhist themes

and content, and using them as a pedagogical aid to learn about how Buddhism

exists in the world, like how one might watch a documentary for its educational

value. Richard Carp discusses this approach, noting that ‘films are wonderful

classroom enhancements’ because they

provide students with views of religion: Rituals, daily practices, architecture,

pilgrimages, and even the sweep of religious history all appear in living color in

these vivid and impressive displays . . . In class, these films extend the

information we can present about religion, and they often engage students and

motivate them to conversation more effectively than readings. (Carp 2008, 177)

Despite attempting to avoid the difficulties of the first model, the selectivity of

this approach succumbs to the same problems. By beginning with the

assumption that certain kinds of themes and content are ‘Buddhist’ and then

screening films that illustrate such content, this approach reinforces

preconceived ideas of what religion is. This approach also fails to question

the assumption that films depicting Buddhist practices, cultures or lifeworlds

can actually teach us anything about Buddhism.1 Many reformers within the

Buddhist tradition itself caution against this simplistic view, carefully

distinguishing between the outward forms of Buddhist cultural life and the

real buddhadharma (for an example, refer to the opening critique advanced by

Payutto (1995), in his work, Buddhadhamma). While, as pedagogues, it is not

our position to say what ‘real’ Buddhism or buddhadharma is, it is nevertheless

our responsibility to formulate critical theories about religion that at least

match the sensitivity of the critical apparatus already emic to the traditions we

study.2

Lastly, this approach adopts an unfortunately utilitarian view of film. It

implicitly assumes a standpoint of epistemological realism—that is, the

notion that the ‘Buddhism’ in a film reflects some aspect of ‘Buddhism’ in

the world—a view that has come under critical scrutiny (see Russell 1999;

Verchery 2012). This approach privileges film’s didactic and informational

content over the many other, often more significant ways in which film

language works and teaches. While much informational content could just as

well be conveyed in written form, the medium of film has unique features

that allow it to function in a qualitatively different register than the written

word, as noted by Watkins (1999) and Cho (1999). To relegate the

pedagogical value of film to an illustrative function—that is, as an audio-

visual complement to written materials—is to miss out on the true value of

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the medium. The latter, in my view, is closer to something like Ricoeur’s

(1992) idea of narrative identity; that is, a locus of learning and

experimentation that lies between the descriptive and the prescriptive,

moving from the merely didactic to the properly ethical.

In this paper, I take up one of the unique features of the filmic medium,

famously elaborated by Stanley Cavell: namely, that film allows us to see

what is not there. Although this maxim has been discussed in the field of

Film Studies, the fullness of its methodological and ethical ramifications when

brought into dialogue with Buddhist notions of impermanence and emptiness

has not yet received full attention. In what follows, I lay out a comparative

study of what I am calling ontologies of emptiness, that is, techniques

whereby films show us what is not there. This project has two aims. The first

is to study ontologies of emptiness as a formal element of cinematic form,

just as one might approach mise-en-scene, composition, sound design and

editing. On this level, ontologies of emptiness have no necessary connection

to Buddhism; they are a pervasive feature of film language, observable in

many films regardless of religious or cultural background. Becoming aware of

what these techniques are and how they work makes us better viewers and

film critics.

On a second level, my intention is to develop a methodological and

ethical position by bringing ontologies of emptiness into dialogue with

Buddhist notions of sunyata (emptiness, Ch. kong, 空). I suggest that developing

a hermeneutic of seeing what is not there3 moves us away from the reductionist

tendencies that come with seeking totalizing knowledge. This forces us to

rethink the modes of signification we often assume to be operative in filmic

language, and to consider the ethical implications of signification itself. This

leaves us asking what kind of knowledge we seek to gain from our study of

religion and of film, and what kind of ethical responsibility comes with the

acquisition of such knowledge.

In what follows, I do not propose any necessary or causal connection

between Buddhist notions of emptiness and ontologies of emptiness in film.

Rather, I am heuristically examining these two categories side by side because

I believe that, in dialogue with each other, they reveal insights we might not see

by examining each independently. In other words, this is not an attempt to

project Buddhist notions of emptiness onto films, as in the ‘using Buddhism to

interpret film’ approach discussed above; nor is it an attempt to better

understand Buddhist notions of emptiness through an explanatory appeal to film,

as in the ‘using film to understand Buddhism’ model. Rather, this comparative

approach attempts a side-by-side examination of ontologies of emptiness found

in both films and Buddhist sources in order to better understand the possibilities

and limits of signification. In other words this comparative approach might be

summed up by paraphrasing Bresson’s (1986) famous statement about the task

of the filmmaker, and adopting it as the goal of our comparative study of

ETHICS OF INSCRUTABILITY 147

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Buddhism and film: namely, the task of making visible what, without comparison,

might perhaps never have been seen.

Signifying silences

It is difficult to get at the meaning of silence, for, though a kind of power is

signified through its quality, the power of silence is so unlike the power of words

that we have no words to express it. (Charles Long 1986, 60).

Presensing absence is a longstanding Buddhist trope. In some ancient

Indian Buddhist art, the Buddha is thought not to be depicted anthro-

pomorphically but through various images of absence: an empty throne

surrounded by disciples, a horse with no rider, an ornate parasol with no one

underneath.4 The idea of depicting the Buddha or the dharma through absence

finds its linguistic correlate in several famous instances of soteriologically

pregnant silences, such as Mahakasyapa’s flower or the famous silence of

Vimalakirti. As Francisca Cho (1999, 184) points out, however, these absences

are not merely absences in the conventional sense (as in a lack of something);

rather, ‘absence must be signified in order to be soteriologically effective’. That

is, these absences make that which is not present conspicuously absent.

Mahakasyapa and Vimalakirti are not silent because they have nothing to say;

they are silent because their silences signify more than what words could

express. These are, in other words, signifying silences; they are ontologically-

present absences.5

The Buddhist tradition is rich with literature, theory, art and doctrine that

thematizes the ontology of emptiness and its signifying power. In what follows,

I draw on some of these semiotic theories to help us examine ontologies of

emptiness in film. I propose three models through which what is unseen is

made present: Showing Nothing by Showing No Thing, Showing Nothing by

Showing Everything, and Showing Nothing by Showing Showing. Each model

pushes us to challenge conventional understandings of signification in film; that

is, the prevalent notion that films are to be understood in terms of what they

mean. Drawing on the important work of David MacDougall (2006), Cho

elaborates on this point.

The meaning we find in what we see is always both a necessity and an obstacle.

Meaning guides our seeing. Meaning allows us to categorize objects. Meaning is

what imbues the image of a person with all we know about them. But meaning,

when we force it on things, can also blind us, causing us to see only what we

expect to see or distracting us from seeing very much at all (MacDougall, quoted

in Cho 2008, 118).

As we will see, ontologies of emptiness enable us to see what isn’t there by

disrupting the straightforward relationship of signifier and signified. The ethical

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and methodological issues raised by this new orientation toward the mechanics of

signification will be taken up in the last part of this paper.

Showing Nothing by Showing No Thing

In Transcendental Style in Film, Paul Schrader (1972) describes the aesthetic

of what he calls Zen art. Like the celebrated shrimp paintings of Qi Baishi—which

are famous for the way blank spaces between the lines give the images their

form—Schrader (1972, 27) notes that ‘emptiness, silence, and stillness are positive

elements in Zen art, and represent presence rather than the absence of

something’. I call this principle Showing Nothing by Showing No Thing (henceforth

simply called No Thing). Like the Buddha’s empty throne, this mode of signification

consists in showing emptiness (nothing) through a deliberate and calculated

depiction of absence (no thing). In this way, absence is instantiated as a positive

presence; that is, as emptiness. We can find several examples of how this principle

is deployed in film through sound, image and editing.

Straddling the simplistic divide between documentary and fiction,

Uruphong Raksasad’s Agrarian Utopia depicts the daily rhythms of a family of

farmers working in the Thai countryside. At one point in the film, the flow of

everyday agrarian activities is interrupted by a Buddhist funeral procession in the

distance. As monks clad in bright yellow robes cross the screen, the soundscape

suddenly drops away. Up to this point, the soundtrack had been naturalistic, so

masterfully executed and engineered that the viewer could easily forget to even

notice it. When the soundtrack abruptly stops, however, the effect is jarring; much

more jarring than any noise could be. Not only are we are suddenly reminded of

the mediated and artificial nature of the film itself, but we are thrown into an

alternate reality: namely, the disorienting landscape of death and nothingness, a

silence which cuts into the banal routines to which we have gradually grown

accustomed. This silence produces a qualitative break in the film, allowing the

undercurrent of mortality to erupt into the everyday. This silence functions as

much more than the mere absence of sound; it is a powerful signifier revealing

that death has undergirded the agrarian utopia all along, even if up until this point

we could not hear its imposing silence.

Instantiating emptiness also occurs on the visual level, frequently through the

use of framing and composition. Here Schrader’s discussion of the one-corner

painting style, popular in Song China, can serve as a good illustration. In this style,

one paints ‘only one corner of the canvas, leaving the remainder blank. The

emptiness, however, is a part of the painting and not just an unpainted background’

(Schrader 1972, 28). Like the one-corner style, films can show what is not there by

creating images in which empty space dominates the frame. Bae Yong-Kyun’s

masterful Why Has Bodhidharma Left for the East presents several examples. In

addition to its shots of skies and landscapes—which instil a sense of open space—a

remarkable example is a sequence in which one of the title characters, a young boy

named Haejin, nearly drowns after accidentally falling into a pool. After a panicked

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struggle in the water, Haejin abruptly stops flailing and discovers he can float if he

stays still. In addition to conveying a salient point about nonattachment—namely, if

one gives up attachment to life, death loses its control over the mind—the framing

of this shot is significant. At themoment when Haejin abandons his struggle, we cut

to an overhead shot of him floating serenely towards the top of the frame. Save for

Haejin’s small body, the frame is dominated by still water that reflects the sky.

Although there is not much information in this frame, its composition creates an

uncanny sense that Haejin is not merely floating, but flying, through a kind of ether

that is not quite water, not quite sky. Even though nothing is said and very little

happens, through composition this sequence conveys Haejin’s literal and

metaphorical ascension into a new understanding of life and death. Without

didactically telling the viewer this, the emptiness of the frame creates an

overdetermination of meaning. Thus, it is paradoxically this scarcity of information

that allows the image to signify much more than the merely literal.

Finally, the editing rhythm of a film is a powerful means of showing what is

not there. Editing is all about working with viewers’ expectations, and fulfilling or

resisting those expectations. The films of Yasujiro Ozu feature relatively little

dialogue and, one might say, not much really happens. The cutting style is quite

deliberate and formulaic (see Richie 1963–64), there is very little camera

movement, and the camera tends to linger on characters for the entire duration of

their action, rather than cut to B-roll or use off-screen dialogue. This, combined

with Ozu’s meticulous attention to the seemingly banal details of everyday life,

creates a slow, meditative rhythm. The slow pace of Ozu’s films impose their

timing on us, denying us the escape and distraction of fast cutting and excessive

drama. Although, as viewers, we may crave action, Ozu does not show it to us; he

gives us only the subtle outward ripples that intimate waves of concealed inner

emotion. Thus, despite the sense that throughout his films not much happens,

from within this understated and calculated pace, a surprising fullness ultimately

emerges. As Richie puts it, Ozu’s films come to acquire a kind of universality: it is as

though ‘the whole world exists in one family. The ends of the earth are no more

distant than outside the house’ (Richie, quoted in Schrader 1972, 19). Thus,

through his consistently slow and deliberate pace, Ozu denies viewers any direct

glimpse of the overwhelming emotions underlying the serene veneer of his

characters; yet, paradoxically, it is this very restraint that heightens, rather than

obfuscates, the drama’s emotional tension.

Showing Nothing by Showing Everything

While the No Thing model is perhaps the aesthetic most readily associated

with Buddhism, there are other ontologies of emptiness in film that have

resonance with Buddhist ideas. We might say that the reverse of the No Thing

model is the Everything model. Parallel to the Buddhist tradition of ‘signifying

silences’ discussed above, Buddhism also developed a kind of antinomian

approach to signification. Unlike the technique of using silence to get beyond

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language, this model uses language to get beyond language—a notion

sometimes illustrated by the idiom, ‘mounting the bandit’s horse to pursue him’

(see Hori 2003, 55). This consists in the deliberate use of absurdity, nonsense or

antinomian discourse in order to demonstrate, and transcend, the limits of

significatory language and rational thought.

The notion of using language to get beyond language is operative in several

important films. Many of the classic surrealist films, such as Luis Bunuel’s L’Age

D’Or, include absurd imagery, illogical dialogue and non-linear narratives—all of

which make it difficult to deciphermeaning, instead pushing the viewer to engage

with the film on a level other than that of rational signification. Guvnor Nelson’s

experimental work, My Name is Oona, deconstructs the significatory potential of

referential language. As the utterance ‘My name is Oona’ is repeated over and

over, the sentence loses its meaning and gradually becomes a jumble of non-

referential sounds, more reminiscent of music than of words. This use of

repetition, in other words, pushes language—or at least language’s ability to be

meaningful—to its limits, thereby transforming it into something entirely new.

The Act of Seeing With One’s Own Eyes, Stan Brakhage’s 32-minute silent film

depicting a series of autopsies, undercuts the power of signification by visually

and conceptually dismantling the integrity of the human body, along with any

possible referent we attach to it, such as ‘person’, ‘self’, or ‘human’. First, we should

note that the film provides no context, no dialogue, no narrative; we are simply

confronted with the dismemberment of the human form in a setting that

deliberately denies us the comfort of meaning or explanation. As Bart Testa

observes,

In addition to its inherently gruesome subject matter and unflinching directness,

it seems to offer nowhere to hide from its raw literalness. We can readily imagine

watching another equally explicit movie of autopsies; but very likely we will also

imagine that such a film would allow us to slip behind verbal explanations of the

pathologists’ procedures, analyses or the cause of death, or perhaps some moral

argument that necessitates showing such images. (Testa 1998, 270)

One of the extraordinary features of The Act of Seeing, however, is that while it

denies us the comfort of explanation, it simultaneously resists moving into

abstraction. While there are moments when, for a split-second, the viewer might

attempt to see in an abstract way—to see only colour, texture or movement

instead of human bodies—Brakhage constantly and relentlessly brings us back to

a literal awareness of what is being shown.

Brakhage times and paces the shots, and frames sequences, so none remains

long enough or repeats often enough to desensitize the viewer. We are never

allowed to get used to the film’s imagery, to watch it as part of a procedural

routine, and so not see it. The act of seeing, its shock and troubling power, is

constantly renewed (Testa 1998, 277).

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Thus, denying us recourse to explanation or acclimatization, The Act of

Seeing does not merely confront one with death and the impermanence of the

body; it pushes these to their limit. The film is not merely a glimpse of death but a

(literal) deconstruction of it; the body in its pure materiality is cut apart until every

locus of recognition or signification is dismantled. What was a face is no longer a

face, what was a person is no longer a person. The effect of this is reminiscent of

the meditations on the body in the Mahasatipatthana Sutta. There, the monk is

instructed to mentally review each constituent of the body with the same

detachment as one would use in examining the contents of a sack of grain.

Again, a monk reviews this very body from the soles of the feet upwards and

from the scalp downwards, enclosed by the skin and full of manifold impurities:

‘In this body there are head-hairs, body-hairs, nails, teeth, skin, flesh, sinews,

bones, bone-marrow, kidneys, heart, liver, pleura, spleen, lungs, mesentery,

bowels, stomach, excrement, bile, phlegm, pus, blood, sweat, fat, tears, tallow,

saliva, snot, synovic fluid, urine.’ Just as if there were a bag, open at both ends,

full of various kinds of grain such as hill-rice, paddy, green gram, kidney-beans,

sesame, husked rice, and a man with good eyesight were to open the bag and

examine them (Walshe 1987, 337).

The practice of contemplating these various elements is designed to cultivate

detachment from the body as a meaningful entity. That is, by deconstructing the

body into each of the individual constituents listed above, the whole is destroyed.

There is no longer a ‘body’ to speak of; there is merely an agglomeration of

substances. Thus, in contrast to the No Thingmodel, this approach does not draw

attention to an absence but, rather, fixates attention on a locus of overdetermined

meaning—in this case, the body—and breaks it apart until it is utterly

unrecognizable. This is like using language to transcend language: one delves into

the thing to such an extreme that fullness turns into its opposite, until there is

there is no longer any thing left to hold onto. At the end of this process, we are left

seeing what is not there: the conspicuous absence of the reified object, whose

deconstruction confronts us with an irreconcilable dissonance between mean-

ingless parts and the memory, like a fleeting afterimage, of the now-vanished

referent.

Showing Nothing by Showing Showing

The two ontologies of emptiness discussed above are, in a sense, opposites:

in the No Thing model, what is absent is made present through deliberate

attention to absence, thereby making it conspicuous. In the Everything model,

what is absent is made present through an immersion, ad absurdum, into fullness,

thereby turning fullness into its opposite. Another model by which films can show

what is not there is self-reference, a trope that also finds parallels in Buddhist

textual sources.

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Self-reference is deployed, to various degrees of subtlety, in numerous films.

These range from apparent examples—such as William Greaves’ Symbiopsycho-

taxiplasm, Charlie Kaufman’s Synecdoche New York and Marc Forster’s Stranger

Than Fiction—to more subtle instances of self-reference, as in Wim Wenders’

Lisbon Story, some films of Andrei Tarkovsky or the so-called ‘breaking of the

fourth wall’ in Akira Kurosawa’s One Wonderful Sunday or Lars Von Trier’s Breaking

the Waves (see Watkins 1999 for a salient discussion of the latter). Lisbon Story,

which was originally conceived as a documentary about the city of Lisbon,

Portugal, is full of reflections on the process of filmmaking and the connection

between film and reality. The film’s cast, moreover, is made up of fictional

characters as well as real-life artists playing themselves. The overall effect of this is

not just a blurring of the boundary between documentary and fiction, but also

between the world inside the film and the world outside the film. That is, as a film

about the process of filmmaking itself, each plot development is not merely part

of the story but is simultaneously a comment on the act of storytelling itself.

We find a similar propensity for self-reference in the Lotus Sutra, where we

frequently read about various Buddhas preaching the ‘Lotus Sutra’. This use of

self-reference raises the question of what, exactly, the ‘Lotus Sutra’ is. That is, when

one reads in the Lotus that the Buddha is about to preach the ‘Lotus Sutra’, it

would appear that that which is about to be preached is, in fact, the very text we

are reading—in which it says that the Buddha is about to preach the Lotus Sutra!

This kind of self-referential loop could, in principle, go on ad infinitum. Several

commenters have tried to explain this curious feature of the text. Carl Bielefeldt

(2009, 65) says that the Lotus Sutra is like a

medium without a message—that is, a work that has no message apart from the

celebration of its own importance . . . In the midst of what seems an almost

paranoid self-preoccupation, the reader may indeed begin to wonder if there is a

self apart from the preoccupation.

While it is true that the Lotus praises itself and encourages veneration and

devotion from its readers, as is common in much Mahayana literature,

understanding the text’s self-referentiality exclusively as a mechanism for self-

aggrandizement borders on reductionism. We might, however, recast

Bielefeldt’s description of the Lotus as a medium without a message in terms

of a signifier without a referent. That is, through its circular self-reference, the

text creates a void within itself. By constantly pointing to itself as a

conspicuously absent referent, the text draws our attention to the limitations

of signification itself.6

Like the aforementioned examples of self-reference in film, which draw

attention to the mediated nature of film by blurring the boundary between the

inside and outside of the film, this circular trajectory prevents us from ever settling

on a final, graspable referent; instead, our attention is ceaselessly drawn back to

the mechanism of signification itself. In other words, self-reference casts doubt on

conventional signification (and its reliance on the binary of signifier-signified) by

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making the process of signification its own ultimate referent. Like the Lotus Sutra,

which makes its signification process circular to highlight the emptiness at the

heart of signification itself, self-reference in film shows what is absent by drawing

our attention to the mediated nature of film itself. The film, in other words, has no

referent apart from itself: the mediated process of cinematic representation is—to

borrow McLuhan’s (1964) famous idiom—both the medium and the message.

Ethics of inscrutability

The wish for total intelligibility is a terrible one. (Stanley Cavell 1979, 59).

Considering the variety of ways that films show what is not there is

important not merely because it makes us better viewers and critics, but also

because it has methodological and ethical implications that extend beyond the

study of film or Buddhism. In discussing this issue, let us return to the tension

with which this essay began: namely, the two-pronged problem of using

Buddhism to understand film and using film to understand Buddhism. As

discussed, one of the problems with the former approach is that it requires that

we already know what Buddhism is in order to map it onto our interpretation of a

film. Each time we approach data with a predetermined notion of what we are

going to find, we miss the opportunity of being surprised; we shut ourselves off

from the possibility of the transformatively new. In short, we deny ourselves the

opportunity of learning.

On the other hand, when we use film to learn about Buddhism—or to learn

about anything for that matter—we face the same problem we face with any

second-order reflection on the world: namely, how can we trust the arguments

being made and what kind of knowledge are they designed to produce? Just as

scholarly arguments conform to certain rhetorical conventions in order to be

persuasive, films, too, deploy (or resist) certain filmic conventions in order to

produce a response in an audience. While this is the source of the rich

psychological and affective power of art, it can become a problem when the

purpose of watching a film is to learn about a supposed object—such as

‘religion’—as it exists in the world. As Carp (2008, 177) warns regarding the use

of ethnographic films in the classroom, ‘as seductive as these materials are, they

obfuscate religion and the religions even as they present them with impressive

realism’. Quoting Catherine Russell, Carp goes on to explain that the danger of

these films lies precisely in their realism, in the seamless invisibility of their

artfulness. ‘Cinematic techniques create the illusion that “as a scientific

instrument of representation, ethnographic film assumes that the camera

recorded a truthful reality, ‘out there’—a reality distinct from that of the viewer

and filmmaker”’ (Russell, quoted in Carp 2008, 178). If, following Carp and

Russell, we reject the standpoint of epistemological realism—that is, the notion

of a one-to-one correspondence between film and reality—we are left asking

what, if anything, does film show us? If the film’s arguments are signs but we do

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not know what they are supposed to signify, then in what sense can a film be

said to be meaningful?7

This is a real and important question. Although it does not lend itself

to any easy answers, the productivity of the question does not lie so much

in the search for a definite solution as it does in the call to re-evaluate what

we mean by ‘knowledge’. Although it is our discussion of film that has raised

this epistemological conundrum, I suggest that the ambivalence and

ambiguity of film also offer resources for how we might begin to critically

engage it.

The Inscrutability of the Face

Many film critics and philosophers have taken up the motif of the human

face as a locus of ethical and epistemological deliberation. Studies have shown

that infants are hard-wired from birth to recognize faces, a propensity that leads us

to see faces even in inanimate objects, a phenomenon called pareidolia. Yet, the

face is simultaneously one of the most opaque, subtle and unreadable parts of the

body. It is the principle site of four of the five sense organs—making the face an

important interface between the world and our perceptions of the world—and its

many orifices make it a permeable boundary zone between inside and outside.

Cavell (1979, 158) describes the mysterious ‘innerness’ of the face and its uncanny

ability to straddle familiarity and unfamiliarity. He remarks that the frequent use of

unknown actors in the films of Dreyer and Fellini, for example, ‘serves both to

invite and to refuse the imposition of imagination’ (Cavell 1979, 159). That is, in its

familiarity, the face invites us to identify, imagine and empathize; yet, at the same

time, its inscrutable particularity and irreducible uniqueness call our attention to

the qualitative gap that divides each individual from another. In other words, the

face fascinates ‘exactly because it calls incompatible realities to itself which vie for

my imagination’ (Cavell 1979, 158). For Cavell, the most crucial point is that films

must allow the inherent ambivalence of the face to play out to its fullest; its

polysemy must not be flattened by pedantic, deterministic or reductive

interpretations, for ‘the inherent ambiguity and mystery of the human face is

denied in presenting a context which forces one definite interpretation upon us’

(Cavell 1979, 158). This is perhaps most famously illustrated by the ‘intense facial

asceticism’ (Cardullo 2009, xii) that characterizes the films of Robert Bresson. The

minimal facial expressions and understated emotional displays by the actors in

Bresson’s work give the face an opacity and depth that cannot be readily

apprehended. In the words of Cardullo (2009, xii), this enables the viewer to

‘connect not with a character’s surface appearance but with the core of his being,

his soul’.

Levinas also takes up the motif of the face in the context of ethics. For

Levinas, the face—specifically the face that gazes at me (qui me regarde)—is the

locus of ultimate responsibility toward the Other. Using the double-entendre of

the French verb regarder—namely, c�a me regarde as implying both ‘to be looked

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at’ but also ‘to be concerned with’—Levinas (1989, 86) writes, ‘whether [the Other]

regards me or not, he “regards” me’. In other words, the ethical implication of the

face is that to look and be seen is also to be concerned with, to be responsible for.8

The most striking characteristic of the face, for Levinas, is not merely that it

beckons one towards ethical responsibility for the Other, but that despite the

intimacy that we typically associate with the human face, that which beckons is

not an intimate face but an infinite one. This notion of the infinite is directly tied to

Levinas’ critique of the totalizing impulse of the Western epistemological tradition

and its ‘attempt at universal synthesis, a reduction of all experience, of all that is

reasonable, to a totality wherein consciousness embraces the world, [and] leaves

nothing other outside of itself’ (Levinas 1985, 75). Knowledge is, in other words, a

desire for mastery, for a totality in solitude that is the opposite of infinity with the

Other. Knowledge, Levinas writes,

is by essence a relation with what one equals and includes, with that whose

alterity one suspends, with what becomes immanent, because it is to my

measure and to my scale . . . There is in knowledge, in the final account, an

impossibility of escaping the self; hence sociality cannot have the same structure

as knowledge . . . The most audacious and remote knowledge does not put us

in communion with the truly other; it does not take the place of sociality; it is still

and always a solitude. (Levinas 1985, 60)

Thus, for Levinas, the only truly ethical standpoint is to be in relation with an Other

whose absolute alterity is infinite and irreducible, defying the totalizing impulse of

knowledge. Knowledge, in Levinas’ sense, is incompatible with the face, with the

human, and most fundamentally with ethics. I propose that one of the ways film

helps us learn is by training us first to tolerate, then to engage with this kind of

ambiguity and polysemy. The inscrutability of the face is, thus, a metaphor for the

distinct ways in which film challenges our simplistic models of signification,

meaning and knowledge. To borrow Cho’s (2008, 119) excellent phrase, film

encourages us to refuse ‘certainty of meaning in favor of a meaningful

uncertainty’.

The Self-destructive System

Signifying is worse than lying. (Charles Long 1986, 1).

In his critique of the totalizing impulse in Western intellectual history,

Charles Long reprises many of the concerns raised above. Long (1986, 58)

argues that the Western heritage of signification—which includes the writing of

history and the conquest of knowledge—is bound up with ‘extreme

nationalism, divisiveness, colonialism, conquest, and so on’. This is the inherent

danger of totalizing knowledge; namely, the use of knowledge as a weapon that

sanctions the dominance of knowers over that which, or those who, are known.

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In response to this problem, Long prescribes a turn away from the heretofore

privileged notions of speech, knowledge, and totality, toward a hermeneutic of

silence that critically revaluates the signification process itself. We must re-

examine history, he says, by paying attention to the silences—to those peoples

present ‘not as voices speaking but as the silence which is necessary to all

speech’ (Long 1986, 58)—and adopt a ‘philosophical orientation that sees all

language as enveloped in silence’ (Long 1986, 61). That is, speech and silence

are co-dependent; one cannot exist without the other. And yet, like the notion

of sunyatasunyata or the pregnant silence of Vimalakirti, true silence is not

merely the absence of speech. Rather, silence in its positive valence undergirds

both silence (in the relative sense) and speech. Silence, in this sense, is the kind

of infinitude which is the basis of, but not reducible to, all possibilities of

knowing.

Without words there can be no silence, yet the sheer absence of words is not

silence. Silence forces us to realize that our words, the units of our naming and

recognition in the world, presuppose a reality which is prior to our naming and

doing (Long 1986, 60).

Although developed by Long in the study of history and post-colonial theory, this

hermeneutic of silence, which affirms silence as a necessary part of the

signification process, is relevant for our project insofar as it brings us full circle to

the initial topic of this paper: namely, how can one signify silence? How can one

show the unshowable?

In their own ways, each thinker discussed in this paper touches upon the

limitations of signification in the interpretation of film. Schrader (1972, 7), for

instance, describes transcendental art ‘at its best [as] a self-destructive process’.

That is, in order to point beyond itself—beyond the trappings of its own

signification—transcendental art must destroy itself. This is the same move

that forms the basis of using language to get beyond language, as often

expressed in popular maxims like discarding the raft after fording the river, or

Wittgenstein’s (1963, 51) call to use his ideas as ‘steps to climb beyond them’.

In his own way, Cavell also understands the limits of signification. In describing

the ineffability of the self, he writes, the ‘knowledge of the self as it is always

takes place in the betrayal of the self as it was’ (Cavell 1979, 160). That is, the

moment the self has been named, the self has already changed. As the

character of the Writer in Tarkovsky’s Stalker puts it: ‘all these empirical things:

if you name them, their meaning disappears, melts, vaporizes.’ Words (and

images) are fundamentally inadequate to express the dynamism of the way

things really are; because reality is always changing, the moment a thing has

been represented, it has already been lost. The only solution, then, is a self-

destructive system; that is, a model of signification that accounts for the limits

of signification itself.

Here again, Buddhist semiotic theory offers a valuable theoretical stance. As

Cho explains,

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the sign is entirely arbitrary, not just in relation to what it signifies (which is the

standard semiotic wisdom) but in terms of its efficacy for bringing about the

experience of otherness . . . What Chan [Zen] wisdom specifically adds is that if

the sign is semantically valorized and clung to, then its cultic power is often

destroyed. In that case, the sign itself must be destroyed.

Thus, the way to make absence present is to draw attention to the arbitrariness

and limitations of signification. Each of our ontologies of emptiness does this in

its own way. The Showing Nothing by Showing No Thing model undercuts the

conventional model of signifier and referent by replacing the latter with absence

itself. The Showing Nothing by Showing Everythingmodel pushes referentiality to

its logical brink, deconstructing the signifier until it becomes meaningless. The

Showing Nothing by Showing Showing model reveals the inner workings of

signification by turning its power against itself. None of these models follow the

conventional process of making a referent ‘known through the demonstration of

a language that stands for objects’ (Long 1986, 61). Rather, ontologies of

emptiness work because they deploy the kind of ‘showing in silence which is

necessary for speech and all the objects to which speech refers’ (Long 1986, 61).

Ontologies of emptiness, in other words, allow signification to point beyond

itself, opening possibilities of learning that transcend the category of

knowledge.

Concluding remarks

By way of conclusion, let us consider how we might reorient our notion of

knowledge in response to the foregoing discussion of ontologies of emptiness.

The question, restated, is what can we learn by watching films? A first proposal I

have made in this paper is that film’s proclivity for ambiguity and polysemy can

train us to valorize multiplicities of meaning over totalities of knowledge. For, in

the end, the kinds of inscrutabilities presented in film reflect the human

experience of inscrutability in life itself. As Cavell (1979, 156) remarks,

The discontinuities in the environment of a film are discontinuities not of space

but of places. You do not discontinuously go from one place to another . . . You

are given bits of the world, and youmust put them together into those lives, one

way or another, as you have yours . . . I think everyone knows odd moments in

which it seems uncanny that one should find oneself just here now, that one’s

life should have come to this verge of time and place, that one’s history should

have unwound to this room, this road, this promontory.

In other words, film presents us with a kind of unintelligibility that resonates with

the unintelligibility of life itself and, thus, paradoxically becomes existentially

intelligible.

A second critical point raised by the study of Buddhism and film is the

dynamism of our subject position as interpreters (of film and of the world). Just as

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we find ourselves enmeshed in a hermeneutic circle between theory and data, we

must appreciate that as interpreters of film, our human experience is mirrored in

art while also being constituted by it. Here, Long’s (1986, 51) remark about the

human subject in history is relevant: ‘for the interpreter will discover that one’s

being is mirrored in the reality of life and history and simultaneously created in the

moment of interpretation’. Interpretation is never neutral or unidirectional. We

must be careful, therefore, neither to overestimate nor underestimate the role we

play in constituting the world through our interpretation of it.

Lastly, we see that our fundamental responsibility as interpreters must

include a hermeneutics of silence—that is, an awareness of the limits of

interpretation and knowledge, and a humble appreciation for the infinitudes that

exist outside of ourselves. This awareness guards against reductionism while also

giving positive valence to that which we do not know. The latter, then, should be

understood not as a dark area awaiting the light of our inquiry, but as a

fundamental part of the human condition. What we do not know is not merely an

epistemological issue, but also an ontological one. As Long (1986, 61) remarks,

Silence does not mean absence; rather, it refers to the manner in which a reality

has its existence . . . It means silence is a fundamentally ontological position, a

position which though involved in language and speech exposes us to a new

kind of reality and existence.

Ontologies of emptiness, then, are a crucial part of how we exist and how we

understand that existence. For everything we can know, we must also appreciate

all we do not know. Only then is our knowledge meaningful.

NOTES

1. It is interesting to note that although the film Why Has Bodhidharma Left for the

East has received extensive analysis and commentary from academics as a

quintessentially ‘Buddhist’ film in both form and content (Cho 1999; Brinson 2004;

Blizek 2009), the film’s director, Bae Yong-Kyun, has denied that it is a film about

Buddhism at all. He insists, ‘the central interest of this work is absolutely not Zen

in of itself’; rather, Bae Yong-Kyun considers the role of Zen to merely be that of a

background, an ‘environment’ (A Milestone Film, 4).

2. Not only should our scholarly theories strive to match the sophistication of the

critical theories of the communities we study, but it is desirous to learn from (not

merely to learn about) the latter. As Cho (1999, 180) eloquently states: ‘I turn to

Buddhism as the source of my theory making rather than as the object of

ideological clarification. In other words, Buddhism is the instrument of my analysis

rather than its target . . . My use of Buddhist sources is more than an effort to

interpret Buddhist practice through the lens of its own theories. It is a claim about

the efficacy of the Buddhist theory qua theory, whatever the context of practice’.

This use of ‘Buddhist theory qua theory’—and not, we must add, qua Buddhist

theory—is a critical corrective we need for approaching theory-making in general.

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Under the pretext of ‘cultural relativism’, academia has all too often limited the

relevance of Buddhist theory to ‘Buddhists’, ‘Buddhism’, or ‘Asia’. The thinly veiled

racism that underlies this practice becomes obvious when we consider how the

ideas of an Aristotle or a Marx are frequently considered timeless and not

culturally-specific.

3. By stating that ontologies of emptiness function as a kind of hermeneutic lens

enabling us to see what is not there, mymeaning is not, of course, that theymake us

literally see things that are utterly unconnected to the context of signification—as

in extreme cases of psychosis or delusion—nor that they encourage the equally

delusional view of seeing all things as nothing at all, in the nihilistic sense. Rather, a

hermeneutic of seeing what is not there is a cultivated attentiveness to how

particular modes of representation can deliberately point to an absence or

emptiness, thereby effectively presensing (making present) the absence, thus

giving it a positive valence as a ‘present absence’, rather than a negative valence as

an absence per se. Structurally, this echoes the famous Buddhist affirmation that

form is not merely empty, but that emptiness is also form.

4. For more information on debates surrounding the purported aniconism of

ancient Buddhist art, see Linrothe (1993) and Huntington (1990).

5. For the remainder of this paper, the term absence will be used to refer to the

notion of absence-as-lack (absence in its negative valence), while emptiness will

refer to absence in its positive valence. We might draw a parallel here to the

Mahayana distinction between sunyata (emptiness) and sunyatasunyata

(emptiness of emptiness). The former is emptiness in the relative sense; that is,

emptiness which exists as the opposite of form (what I am herein calling absence).

The latter is emptiness on the ultimate level; that is, the emptiness that is the basis

of both emptiness and form (what I am herein simply calling emptiness).

6. In his discussion of the Lotus Sutra’s many parables, William LaFleur supports this

point, remarking that the ‘surprising feature of [the parables] in the Lotus is that they

are simultaneously the vehicle and the tenor of that vehicle. In a very important

sense, the parables of the Lotus are about the role and status of parabolic speech

itself. They are what I would call self-reflexive allegory; that is, their trajectory of

discourse behaves like a boomerang’ (LaFleur quoted in Leighton 2007, 27).

7. An extreme articulation of this problem is given by Bill Nichols (1991), here

quoted by Testa (1998, 270): ‘To give substance to the conventional claim made

for documentaries—that they make a literal representation of a truth (even if the

claim is made only by the label “documentary,” “direct cinema,” or “nonfiction”)—

documentary films need images to be evidential. But evidence of what? Of the

films’ arguments, Nichols says. Critics often claim that documentary film images

present viewers with images of “the world.” This distinguishes them from fiction

films, which show aspects of “a world,” one built up by the fiction. “The literalism

of documentary centres around the look of things in the world as an index of

meaning” (Nichols 1991, 27). When the documentarian places images into a

structure of exposition, explanation or argument, the images become evidence of

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certain facts of the world . . . . “Every cut of edit,” says Nichols, “is a step forward in

an argument” (1991, 29).’

8. For a salient discussion of the ethical dimensions of seeing and voyeurism in film,

see Watkins (1999).

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FILMOGRAPHY

1971. The Act of Seeing With One’s Own Eyes, Dir. Stan Brakhage.

1930. L’Age D’Or, Dir. Luis Bunuel.

2009. Agrarian Utopia, Dir. Uruphong Raksasad.

1996. Breaking the Waves, Dir. Lars Von Trier.

1994. Lisbon Story, Dir. Wim Wenders.

1969. My Name is Oona, Dir. Guvnor Nelson.

1947. One Wonderful Sunday, Dir. Akira Kurosawa.

1979. Stalker, Dir. Andrei Tarkovsky.

2006. Stranger Than Fiction, Dir. Marc Forster.

1968. Symbiopsychotaxiplasm, Dir. William Greaves.

2008. Synecdoche New York, Dir. Charlie Kaufman.

1989. Why Has Bodhidharma Left for the East?, Dir. Bae Yong-Kyun.

Lina Verchery is a filmmaker and doctoral candidate in Buddhist Studies at

Harvard University, with a secondary focus in Anthropology of Religion and

Ethnographic Film and Video. Her films include South Bland Street (Sensory

Ethnography Lab, 2013), In Ordinary Life (Sensory Ethnography Lab, 2013),

and La Trappe/The Trap (National Film Board of Canada, 2008).

Address: Barker Center, Religion, Harvard University, 12 Quincy street, 4th fl.,

Cambridge, MA, 02138. Email: linaverchery@fas.harvard.edu

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