Silent Light: Miracles and Mennonites

Miracles are by nature quite natural occurrences. Or as G.K. Chesterton phrased it, “The most incredible thing about miracles is that they happen.” What makes miracles so exceptional is that they often occur in the most commonplace situations: while driving a car you witness a woman walk placidly across the freeway without being hit; or while breakfasting, you receive a telephone call from a man who claims to be your lost brother; or when walking through a half-deserted park and gazing at the shapes of clouds, you see streaked against the sky the descent of a falling meteor. That a pumpkin should propagate another pumpkin and not a coach or a bag, asserts Chesterton, is miracle enough; otherwise, you haven’t really considered a pumpkin for what it is.

That the day breaks open as indubitably and as serendipitously as any hen’s soft egg does for our breakfast, goes a long way to downplay the contingency on which the sun invites our speculations; the morning is accepted as a matter of fact, rather than as a matter of miracle: our hope is unnecessarily neutralized. Yet if the break of day were the dawn of all time, and if light’s silence were thickened with the murmur of awakening consciousness, then would not our eyes suggest to us that creation — life breathing anew each and every morning — were as profound a miracle as the first day of Genesis? Carlos Reygadas‘ latest film is not a film treating of religion, but it is a film that treats of miracles: everyday miracles like that of the birth of a new day, or the birth of difficult refractory human loves. The miracle of the harvest, and the miracle of repentance.

If, in John Donne‘s words, “Light hath no tongue, but is all eye; if it could speak as well as spy,” then it would with its seeing speak volumes. Reygadas’ Silent Light — which premiered at Cannes 2007 and won the Grand Jury Prize at the competition — begins with that exactly: the miraculous phenomenon of the break of day. We see the night-sky capped with stars, we hear the chirping of crickets, and here and there the dark outlined branches of trees; then, as the camera fixates on the horizon, the slow pulse of dawn crawling up magnificently, irrepressibly. We see the peeking sunlight line the shapes of trees, of pastures and cornfields and faraway distances, with color and volume; we hear the terrible bellowing of ancient creatures, monsters awaking in an alien world that revolves in fearful symmetry.

It is to the director’s credit that these ancient creatures which so fearfully bellowed at the rising sun turn out to be just cows and bulls in their pens; the world that we believed was an exotic lost continent, turns out to be an ordinary farmland. Reygadas, by fixing our attention on the unreckoned cadence of a world — our world — coming to life, estranges its once familiar harmonies from us, induces in us an inexpressible fear of its sounds and fauna; the earth we thought we knew appears to us utterly foreign. This is the film’s first miracle, when God said, “Let there be Light.” And it was silent.

Stellet Licht

If in the beginning was the Word, so too in Reygadas’ primal conception of the film stood Carl Theodor Dreyer‘s 1955 masterpiece Ordet (danish for “the word”). In a nutshell, Silent Light is a film about the spiritual and ethical torment that a Mennonite man named Johan endures as he falls in love with a woman who is not his wife; his torment springs from the pure Mennonite love he cannot fail to bear his wife Esther, by rite of law and tradition, and it is doubled by the carnal love he holds for Marianne, an unmarried Mennonite woman, who in him inspires an emotional connection he can’t escape. In a nutshell, Ordet is about the divisions that religious cavil and secularism cause in two families who are forced to come to terms with the disputed love a young couple — from both sides of the family — bear each other; the film also circles around the pivotal character of a seminary student who believes he is Jesus Christ (he loses his ‘reason’ after reading too much Kierkegaard).

Scene from "Ordet"

Both films are united by the final act: Reygadas had evidently watched Ordet and was moved by it sufficiently to have borrowed its denouement (and even some key images, like the resetting of a wall clock at a funeral, as a way to signal the symbolic recommencement of life); the director indeed perceived many similarities in the dry and sober Christian households depicted in Dryer’s film, with the strongly religious community life and household of the Mennonites he chose as his subjects. Lastly, the rhythms of the two films have what film critic Chris Fujiwara describes as the “difficulty of slowness“. This aesthetic and patient slowness that so dominates the rhythms in Silent Light and Ordet, presents us a “gleaming ordinariness” in which the hidden fullness of life’s minor motions overtakes our sensibilities and wakes us to the small and strange splendors that would ordinarily escape our notice:

The smoothness and deliberateness of the camera movements give us a unique sense about the reality of the film’s world, the sense that everything is both happening for the first time and happening in eternity.

Though Fujiwara is writing only of Ordet, his description fits those dimensions and phlegmatic velocities that space out Reygadas’ Silent Light.

Silent Light is Reygadas’ third major film. His first, Japón (2002), opened to positive reviews, and prognosticated a career of provocative abstract films for the Mexican director. Japón came on the heels of the Mexican new wave that had hit Hollywood shores in the works of Alfonso Cuarón, Alejandro González Iñárritu, and Guillermo del Toro. Reygadas’ second film, Battle in Heaven (2005), pushed the limits that were already strained by Japón even further; Battle in Heaven depicted even more graphic sex scenes — all of which were unstaged and perceptibly real — which drove some of the market Japón had wooed away.

Scene in "Battle in Heaven"

If Reygadas was seen as a director of overly libidinous and abstract sensibilities — and if he appeared as one thoroughly indifferent to the marketability that his compatriots exhibited in their Hollywood success — then it was Silent Light which proved some of his critics wrong and demonstrated Reygadas’ willingness to forgo his usual dependence on raw sexual imagery and focus on the less provocative, but no less meditative aspects of his art.

It has been sufficiently documented that a truly great artist sometimes reaches a peak in his or her trajectory when all former difficulties in creation are erased; rather than easily speed down the side of the mountain the artist has climbed — toward convenient and listless productions — the superior artist will fabricate new obstacles, new mountains to cross, if only to maintain the courage and insight that great art requires. Reygadas is not yet a great artist, and he certainly has miles and miles to go before he can approach Dreyer’s mastery; but in selecting the subject and characters for Silent Light, and in securing his work on the foundation of that danish master’s aesthetic system, Reygadas has assembled for himself a beneficial handicap that diminishes his faults as an artist and magnifies his virtues.

I earlier noted that the beginning of the film seems to introduce us to a world that appears ancient and foreign: it is something like watching the beginning of a movie involving dinosaurs at the dawn of time. Once we realize that we are in a world contemporaneous to our own, the strangeness (and the silence and the slowness) still do not rub off. We are greeted by a large blond-haired Mennonite family praying silently around a table for their early sunrise breakfast. The effect is one of ritual, and the act of prayer is seen as one taking place on the domestic (familial) and eternalized (private) plane; the family members are all quiet, themselves listening to themselves, or, like the youngest children, gaping in cherubic bewilderment at the willful act of prayer:

To Reygadas the Mennonite community is another world, and it was for this reason he chose to document it; not merely to investigate their way of life, but more especially to determine how the problems of sex and human nature afflict them as beatifically, and as naturally, as they do the worldly and the secular. It may be to the astonishment of some viewers who have never traveled through northern Mexico that the Mennonite community that the film draws upon is located in Mexico and not in Germany or elsewhere (the characters speak in a german-netherlandish dialect called Plattdeutsch); by evidence of the terrain and their norteño accents, somewhere probably in the state of Chihuahua, where the largest Mexico-based Mennonite communities have resided since the 1920s.

Three Mennonite women in "Silent Light"

In an interview Reygadas confessed that though the subject of the Mennonites greatly attracted him, he was discouraged enough by their resistance of his proposals to film them on site, that he nearly abandoned the film project. Reygadas, as was his custom, wanted the liberty to film some sensual scenes in support of the love affair at the heart of the film, and the Mennonites, suspecting he would scandalize their lifestyle with the sexuality at play, flatly refused to carry on with the production. It wasn’t until the director found the lead actor Cornelio Wall (a local Mennonite radio D.J. who was not afraid to play the part) to take the role of the conflicted Johan, that Reygadas settled upon the correct measure to finish the film. The film thus boasts no nudity, nor are its scenes of sensuality in any way as graphic as those in his previous films; yet the same themes and messages that populated Japón and Battle in Heaven are intact with no loss of power in Silent Light. If the pact Reygadas made with the Mennonites to respect the purity and decorum of their community had frustrated and restricted some of his aesthetic inclinations, the same pact helped refine the essential character of his meditations, and separated what was so obnoxious and profane in him from what was cinematically reverential.

As such, Silent Light is unquestionably Reygadas’ best film to date.