Cinema's power to represent animate life, and produce a profound impression of reality, warrants and supports its other fascinating capacity, namely, to fabricate frank yet appealing illusions. In certain instances, audiences may respond to the fantastic creations as if to a new reality. Cinematic realism thus raises questions about the nature of belief and reality that are of perennial, yet acutely contemporary, interest in film history. A genre of the spiritual film—distinct from religious films that rely on traditional sources of religious authority—explores these questions of being and the limits of the knowable. Recent film criticism has inadequately responded to this genre. Film studies has aligned itself in various ways behind Walter Benjamin's call for an iconoclasm that would sever art's connections with cultic traditions and contribute to social progress. The consequent suppression, or translation to secular terms, of films' spiritual aspirations comes at great cost. Complex works that address spiritual topics in form and content, such as Lars von Trier's Breaking the Waves (1996), are treated as evidence by a self-affirming and secularizing critical method. In neglecting the central concerns of such films, critics are complicit with the worst features of modernity. A criticism that evades an open engagement with the limits of the knowable becomes instrumental; a criticism geared exclusively toward demystification ultimately produces reification. A more proper analytic response is to attend to the ways in which such films produce experiences, and call for responses, at the edge of the knowable. Such an approach begins with abandoning methodological certainty; the spiritual film demands an alignment of perception that cannot be contained by a predetermined goal. This aesthetic response may contribute to an open-ended ethical self-fashioning and may protect critical discourse from itself by preventing the standardization of cultural experience.
Today the mind is not part of the weather. -Wallace Stevens, "A Clear Day and No Memories" C ontemporary memory's greatest difficulty lies not in its weakness but in its strength: rather than an amnesiac disappearance of memory, recent technological developments promote an artificial and debilitating abundance of memory. The novel's traditional mediation of public and private experience may easily be understood as the negotiation of public and private memory, in the sense not only of recording but of accounting for the past and of forming it into meaningfulness. Novels may symptomatically register the strains under which memory operates while also intervening in the construction and appreciation of memory forms that transform consciousness more widely.For both of these reasons I elaborate my proposal regarding memory's superabundance in contemporary culture with a reading of Richard Powers's novel Galatea 2.2. In it narrative forms of memory confront the seemingly limitless power of artificial intelligence to simulate the distinctly human: the self-conscious experience of memory, the ability to appreciate aesthetic objects, the tragic awareness of temporality. In Powers's novel different models of memory compete for primacy. On the one hand, a model of total storage and infinite recall carries on the Western dream of reproducing the real in order to master it. On the other hand, a model of partiality and selectivity is foregrounded that resembles Jean-François Lyotard's notion of postmodern pragmatics: the self-legitimation of narrative that bolsters sociality and affirms agency by embracing forgetfulness. Galatea 2.2 treats a
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