The Varieties Of Cinematic Experience
Judson Memorial Church, New York
20-22 June 2025
Gwendolen Cates, Nina Danino, Julie Dash, André Daughtry, Mark Dean, Hirokazu Kore-eda, Anthony Padgett, Julie Sexeny
exhibited works:
Curated by SB Rodriguez Plate for APRIL →
From 20-22 June, the The Varieties of Cinematic Experience film festival-symposium will bring together filmmakers, writers, religious leaders, educators, artists, and enthusiasts, raising questions about why we seek cinematic experiences, and how these experiences move beyond the screen and become embodied in communal and spiritual ways. Collectively, the group will creatively and critically examine how we receive cinematic works in community and how our environment affects the viewing experience.
Artist talk for The Varieties of Cinematic Experience in Judson Memorial Church:
My first experience of the art of cinema was around the age of four or five, when I saw The Wizard of Oz projected outdoors on a portable screen under an African night sky. The image was dwarfed by the stars, but the experience was intensely powerful, and I have never forgotten it. I have remained a friend of Dorothy, and eventually became a video artist. I used to say that video was an impoverished medium, because it was not film; but it too can have a power beyond its scale, particularly when combined with music (thus it can become operatic as well as cinematic). Of course, we are now in an era of digital convergence, where such distinctions of media have become blurred. But the memory of these sources remains, and informs the content of my work to this day. A lot happened to me along the way, some of which I ‘forgot’, and the struggle to recover these memories has informed my practice also.
So the focus of this festival is empathy and embodiment in cinema, and I would like to reflect a little on these themes in relation to this work, before opening up for discussion.
First of all, in terms of embodiment, or what we might perhaps call corporeality, or materiality, I would like to say that Twister is not a film, but a video, even though much of its source material originated on film.
Now, this may be an outdated distinction, given that most cinema today is both shot, edited, distributed, and projected digitally. But what came before is not necessarily superseded by what comes after. This is one of the key insights of trauma theory; ‘the body keeps the score’, as the saying goes, and that is registered particularly here as Dorothy’s body is repeatedly thrown up in the air and down again. But she survives and eventually makes her way out of the fallen house… not to arrive in the wonderful Land of Oz, but back into the storm of our imperfect world, where it seems she must fend for herself. But she does so with a broken kind of grace, and eventually finds her way home again.
Another material distinction between video and cinema is that video art in galleries can sometimes be presented in ambient light, while cinemas are usually dark. Moreover, in a cinema, there is an expectation that the audience will attend for the duration of a timed screening, while in a gallery installation, individuals usually choose how long to stay, as when viewing paintings. I believe this different kind of agency affects not just the material experience of the work, but the kind of identification one may establish with the work, and its content.
Another term for identification is empathy, which refers to imaginatively engaging in the experience of others. Between two subjects this may involve a direct correspondence, but with art the experience is mediated. Thus an artist can identify with their subject, and then produce an artwork with which a viewer might in turn identify; but this is not a given. Viewers may not identify either with the experiences portrayed, nor the artistic language by which they are addressed. This is the work of the artist of course — or perhaps we might say, ‘the task of the translator’, for there is another reason that people sometimes don’t empathise with an artwork; not because they do not recognise the experience being expressed, but precisely because they do recognise it, but do not wish to be reminded.
This is particularly the case where traumatic subject matter is involved. So it is necessary to mediate experience, as art. Otherwise we could just point to the experience directly, like a news report, or a clinical analysis. In this sense at least, therefore, art, whilst material, is also symbolic.
The 20th century American theologian Paul Tillich defined a symbol as a sign that participates in the reality towards which it points. This can in turn be related to the 4th century African theologian Augustine of Hippo’s definition of a sacrament as ‘an outward and visible sign of an inward and invisible grace’. Now this latter reference might be seen as only to be relevant to sacred art — but what defines that? Or rather, what is not sacred art?
Yesterday, Micah [Busey] referred to artists as prophets. I certainly prefer that to the notion of artists as priests, where art is supposed to be the new religion. I still think religion should be the new religion. And as such I believe in the priesthood of all believers. The problem with the notion of artists as priests, at least in the modernist sense, is that it was elitist; the avant garde were a kind of spiritual elite, who would guide humanity into the next level of the Theosophist enlightenment.
But in terms of artists as prophets, certainly the original Hebrew prophets were artists, as we understand that term in the modern sense, to describe those not just working with form, but content — and in their case, difficult content, that some did not wish to be reminded of, which is why they killed the prophets and stoned those who were sent to them.
However, if we wish to recognise the reality of God, we need to first recognise — to identify with, and empathise with — the reality of our own embodied experience, and if that experience involves trauma, then we cannot avoid it in this process.
