EMPTiNESS AND THE ABSOLUTE:
A take about the sublime in movies
Cinema; Aesthetics; Sublime; Emptiness; Absolute.
In some movies it seems like nothing happens. This conflict with mass cinema is a deliberate effort by filmmakers to achieve the imponderable of what haunts their characters and the world created. The imponderable is not within the reach of the figurative, otherwise it would no longer be endowed with its characteristic of ineffability. Thus, “nothing happens” is a stylistic choice of emptying for the amplification of the aesthetic senses of the film. The film perceives a world beyond its first sensory layer. The emptying we are talking about refers to Bergson’s nothingness, who understood that there was more to the idea of emptiness than to the idea of existence, since the first includes the second plus its negation. However, the stylistic choice for emptying goes beyond suggestibility: it establishes the presence of that imponderability impossible to be figured. The stylistic emptying then makes an ideological cut, presenting ineffable ideas that do not belong to analytical understanding, but to intuition. The latter is the field of cinematographic affection, the cosmos-creating machine that not only perceives but also feels the mishaps of the new world. These ideas are made present in this absolute immediacy, that is, in this immediacy that brings together the past and the present in a future that is being built. The absolute is the vital sap of a changing duration while it lives, released into its freedom. We conclude that the sublime is the feeling of presence of the imponderable idea, which is absolute.