Chapter Ten Modern Art, Music, Literature, and Films
Modern pessimism and modern fragmentation have spread in three different ways to people of our own culture and to people across the world. Geographically, it spread from the European mainland to England, after a time jumping the Atlantic to the United States. Culturally, it spread in the various disciplines from philosophy to art, to music, to general culture (the novel, poetry, drama, films), and to theology. Socially, it spread from the intellectuals to the educated and then through the mass media to everyone.
In spreading socially, modern pessimism left isolated a certain age group of the middle class which still thought in the old ways. Though many in the group had no sufficient base for doing so, nevertheless through inertia they continued to act as though values did exist for them. But as their children were educated, the children were injected with the new thought, and the generation gap came into being. Members of the new generation saw that many of their parents had no base for the values that they said they held. Many of their parents were governed only by a dead tradition; they acted largely out of habit from the past.
As time has gone on, people in Western culture have become surrounded by an almost monolithic consensus. That is to say, the same basic dichotomy—in which reason leads to pessimism and all optimism is in the area of nonreason—surrounds us on every side and comes to us from almost every quarter. In the various disciplines, the first place this perspective was taught was in philosophy, of which we have already spoken at length. Then it was presented through art, then through music, then through general culture, and finally through theology.
After philosophy proper, the second vehicle was art. In art the way was prepared by a curious twist in the way naturalists were painting. The viewer comes to the painting and in one way sees what the artist pictures, but in another way asks himself, “Is there any meaning to what I am looking at?” The art had become sterile.
The breakthrough came with the Impressionists Claude Monet (1840–1926) and Pierre Auguste Renoir (1841–1919), who were soon followed by Camille Pissarro (1830–1903), Alfred Sisley (1839–1899), and Edgar Degas (1834–1917), all of them great artists. These men painted only what their eyes brought them, but this left the question as to whether there was a reality behind the light waves reaching the eyes. They called it “following nature.” After 1885 Monet carried this to its logical conclusion, and reality tended to become a dream. We could think of Monet’s series of poplar trees, for example, Poplars at Giverny, Sunrise (1888), now in the Museum of Modern Art in New York (see ), and Poplars at Epte (1890), now in the Tate Gallery in London. As reality tended to become a dream, Impressionism as a movement fell apart. With Impressionism the door was opened for art to become the vehicle for modern thought.
Plate 50 Claude Monet, Poplars at Giverny, Sunrise, 1888, oil on canvas, Museum of Modern Art, New York. “. . . reality tended to become a dream.”
Then came the post-Impressionists who attempted to solve the problem by trying to find the way back to reality, to the absolute behind the individual things. They felt the loss of universals, tried to solve the problem, and in the end they failed. It is not that these painters were always consciously painting their philosophy of life, but rather that in their work as a whole their worldview was often reflected. The great post-Impressionists were Paul Cézanne (1839–1906), Vincent van Gogh (1853–1890), Paul Gauguin (1848–1903), and Georges Seurat (1859–1891).
These men had great talent as painters, and some of their paintings have great beauty. To read the letters of Vincent Van Gogh is to weep for the pain of this sensitive man. But we must also stress their place in culture, as art became the vehicle for modern man’s view of the fragmentation of truth and life.
As philosophy had moved from unity to fragmentation, this fragmentation was also carried into the field of painting. The fragmentation shown in post-Impressionist paintings was parallel to the loss of a hope for a unity of knowledge in philosophy. It was not just a new technique in painting. It expressed a worldview. Cézanne reduced nature to what he considered its basic geometric forms. In this he was searching for a universal which would tie all kinds of particulars in nature together. Nonetheless, this gave nature a fragmented, broken appearance. In Bathers (c. 1905, now in the National Gallery in London), there is much freshness and vitality, much in the balance of the picture as a whole (see ). However, in this painting Cézanne brought the appearance of fragmented reality not only to his painting of nature but to man himself. Man, too, was presented as fragmented.
Plate 51 Francis Schaeffer while filming in front of Paul Cézanne’s Bathers in the National Gallery, London. “. . . a fragmented, broken appearance.” Photo by Mustafa Arshad.
From this point onward one could either move to the extreme of an ultranatural naturalism, such as the photo-realists, or to the extreme of freedom, whereby reality becomes so fragmented that it disappears, and man is left to make up his own personal world. In 1912 abstract Expressionist painter Wassily Kandinsky (1866–1944) wrote an article entitled “About the Question of Form” in The Blue Rider saying that, since the old harmony (a unity of knowledge) had been lost, only two possibilities remained—extreme naturalism or extreme abstraction. Both, he said, were equal.
Gertrude Stein (1874–1946), an American author living in Paris, was important at this time. It was at her home that many artists and writers met and talked of these things, hammering out in talk the new ideas—many of them long before they personally became famous. Picasso initially met Cézanne at her home.
Pablo Picasso (1881–1973) brought together the fragmentation of Cézanne along with Gauguin’s concept of the noble savage, and he added the form of the African masks which had just become popular in Paris. With this mixture he painted Les Demoiselles d’Avignon (1907). This painting, now in the Museum of Modern Art in New York, marked the birth of “modern art” (see ).
In great art the technique fits the worldview being presented, and this new technique of fragmentation fits the worldview of modern man. The technique expressed well the concept of a fragmented world and fragmented man. What David Douglas Duncan (1916–2018) says in his book Picasso’s Picassos (1961) about a certain set of Picasso’s pictures in Picasso’s private collection is in a way a summing up of much of Picasso’s work: “Of course, not one of these pictures was actually a portrait but his prophecy of a ruined world.” It was a complete break with the art of the Renaissance, which had been founded on man’s humanist hope. In Les Demoiselles d’Avignon people were made to be less than people; the humanity had been lost.
Plate 52 Top, Pablo Picasso, Les Demoiselles d’Avignon, 1907, oil on canvas, Museum of Modern Art, New York. © Estate of Pablo Picasso/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. Bottom, Francis Schaeffer with film crew at the Museum of Modern Art, New York.“. . . expressed well the concept of a fragmented world.” Photos by Mustafa Arshad.
But it is fascinating that Picasso could not really live with this loss. When he fell in love with Olga, and later Jacqueline, Picasso did not consistently paint them in a fragmented way. Rather, at crucial points in their relationship, he painted them with all his genius as they really were with all their humanity. He had many mistresses, but these were the two women he married. It is interesting that Jacqueline kept one of these paintings in her private sitting room. Duncan says of this lovely picture, “Hanging precariously on an old nail driven high into one of La Californie’s [Picasso and Jacqueline’s home] second floor sitting room walls, a portrait of Jacqueline Picasso reigns supreme. The room is her domain. . . . Painted in oil with charcoal, the picture has been at her side since shortly after she and the maestro met. . . . She loves it and wants it nearby.” Then too, when Picasso painted his children when they were young, he also often departed from his broken, fragmented technique.
Note that I am not saying that humanity or gentleness is never present in the techniques of modern art, but that as these techniques advanced, humanity was increasingly fragmented—as we shall see, for example, with Marcel Duchamp. The artists carried the idea of a fragmented reality onto the canvas. But at the same time, being sensitive men, the artists realized where this fragmented reality was taking man, that is, to the absurdity of all things.
Hans Arp (1887–1966), an Alsatian sculptor, wrote a poem which appeared in the final issue of the magazine De Stijl (The Style), which was published by the De Stijl group of artists led by Piet Mondrian and Theo van Doesburg. Mondrian (1872–1944) was the best-known artist of this school. He was not of the Dada school, which accepted and portrayed absurdity. Rather, Mondrian was hoping to paint the absolute. Hans Arp, however, was a Dadaist artist connected with De Stijl. His poem “Für Theo Van Doesburg,” translated from the German by Ina Rohrer, reads:
the head downward
the legs upward
he tumbles into the bottomless
from whence he came
he has no more honour in his body
he bites no more bite of any short meal
he answers no greeting
and is not proud when being adored
the head downward
the legs upward
he tumbles into the bottomless
from whence he came
like a dish covered with hair
like a four-legged sucking chair
like a deaf echotrunk
half full half empty
the head downward
the legs upward
he tumbles into the bottomless
Dada carried to its logical conclusion the notion of all having come about by chance; the result was the final absurdity of everything, including humanity.
The man who perhaps most clearly and consciously showed this understanding of the resulting absurdity of all things was Marcel Duchamp (1887–1969). He carried the concept of fragmentation further in Nude Descending a Staircase (1912), one version of which is now in the Philadelphia Museum of Art—a painting in which the human disappeared completely (see ). The chance and fragmented concept of what is led to the devaluation and absurdity of all things. All one was left with was a fragmented view of a life which is absurd in all its parts. Duchamp realized that the absurdity of all things includes the absurdity of art itself. His “ready-mades” were any object near at hand, which he simply signed. It could be a bicycle wheel or a urinal (see ). Thus art itself was declared absurd.
Plate 53 Marcel Duchamp, Nude Descending a Staircase, No. 2, 1912, oil on canvas, Philadelphia Museum of Art. © Artist Rights Society (ARS), New York/ADAGP, Paris/Succession Marcel Duchamp. “. . . the human disappeared completely.” Photo by Mustafa Arshad.
Plate 54 Marcel Duchamp, Bicycle Wheel, 1913, Philadelphia Museum of Art. One of his “ready-made” series. “. . . any object near at hand.” Photo courtesy of Philadelphia Museum of Art. © Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York/ADAGP, Paris/Succession Marcel Duchamp.
The historical flow is like this: the philosophers from Rousseau, Kant, Hegel, and Kierkegaard onward, having lost their hope of a unity of knowledge and a unity of life, presented a fragmented concept of reality; then the artists painted that way. It was the artists, however, who first understood that the end of this view was the absurdity of all things. Temporally these artists followed the philosophers, as the artists of the Renaissance had followed Thomas Aquinas. In the Renaissance it was also philosophy, followed by the painters (Cimabue and Giotto), followed by the writers (Dante). This was the same order in which the concept of fragmented reality spread in the twentieth century. The philosophers first formulated intellectually what the artists later depicted artistically.
Jackson Pollock (1912–1956) is perhaps the clearest example in the United States of painting deliberately in order to make the statement that all is chance. He placed canvases horizontally on the floor and dripped paint on them from suspended cans swinging over them (see ). Thus, his paintings were a product of chance. But wait a minute! Is there not an order in the lines of paint on his canvases? Yes, because it was not really chance shaping his canvases! The universe is not a random universe; it has order. Therefore, as the dripping paint from the swinging cans moved over the canvases, the lines of paint were following the order of the universe itself. The universe is not what these painters said it is.
Plate 55 Top, reenactment of one of Jackson Pollock’s methods of painting “by chance.” Bottom, Pollock, Convergence, 1952, oil on canvas, Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo, New York. © Pollock-Krasner Foundation / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. “. . . painting deliberately in order to make the statement that all is chance.”
The third way the idea spread was through music. This came about first in classical music, though later many of the same elements came into popular music, such as rock. In classical music two streams are involved: the German and the French.
The first shift in German music came with the last Quartets of Beethoven, composed in 1825 and 1826. These certainly were not what we would call “modern,” but they were a shift from the music prior to them. Leonard Bernstein (1918–1990) speaks of Beethoven as the “new artist—the artist as priest and prophet.” Joseph Machlis (1906–1998) says in Introduction to Contemporary Music (1961), “Schoenberg took his point of departure from the final Quartets of Beethoven.” And Stravinsky said, “These Quartets are my highest articles of musical belief (which is a longer word for love, whatever else), as indispensable to the ways and meaning of art, as a musician of my era thinks of art and has to learn it, as temperature is to life.”
Beethoven was followed by Wagner (1813–1883); then came Gustav Mahler (1860–1911). Leonard Bernstein in the Norton Lectures at Harvard University in 1973 says of Mahler and especially Mahler’s Ninth Symphony:
Ours is the century of death and Mahler is its musical prophet. . . . If Mahler knew this [personal death, death of tonality, and the death of culture as it had been] and his message is so clear, how do we, knowing it too, manage to survive? Why are we still here, struggling to go on? We are now face to face with the truly ultimate ambiguity, which is the human spirit—the most fascinating ambiguity of all. . . . We learn to accept our mortality; yet we persist in our search for immortality. . . . All this ultimate ambiguity is to be heard in the finale of Mahler’s Ninth.
Notice how closely this parallels . This is modern man’s position. He has come to a position of the death of man in his own mind, but he cannot live with it, for it does not describe what he is.
Then came Schoenberg (1874–1951), and with him we are into the music which was a vehicle for modern thought. Schoenberg totally rejected the past tradition in music and invented the “twelve-tone row.” This was “modern” in that there was perpetual variation with no resolution. This stands in sharp contrast to Bach who, on his biblical base, had much diversity but always resolution. Bach’s music had resolution because as a Christian he believed that there will be resolution both for each individual life and for history. As the music which came out of the biblical teaching of the Reformation was shaped by that worldview, so the worldview of modern man shapes modern music.
Among Schoenberg’s pupils were Alban Berg (1885–1935), Anton Webern (1883–1945), and John Cage (1912–1992). Each of these carried on this line of nonresolution in his own way. Donald Jay Grout (1902–1987) in A History of Western Music speaks of Schoenberg’s and Berg’s subject matter in the modern world: “. . . isolated, helpless in the grip of forces he does not understand, prey to inner conflict, tension, anxiety and fear.” One can understand that a music of nonresolution is a fitting expression of the place to which modern man has come.
In Introduction to Contemporary Music Joseph Machlis says of Webern that his way of placing the weightier sounds on the offbeat and perpetually varying the rhythmic phrase imparts to his music its indefinable quality of “hovering suspension.” Machlis adds that Karlheinz Stockhausen (1928–2007), and the German Cologne school in general, take up from Webern with the formation of electronic music which “generates, transforms and manipulates sounds electronically.” Stockhausen produced the first published score of electronic music in his Electronic Studies. A part of his concern was with the element of chance in composition. As we shall see, this ties into the work of John Cage, whom we will study in more detail below. But first let us look at the French stream.
The French shift began with Claude Debussy (1862–1918). His direction was not so much that of nonresolution but of fragmentation. Many of us enjoy and admire much of Debussy’s music, but he opened the door to fragmentation in music and has influenced most of the composers since, not only in classical music but in popular music and rock as well. Even the music which is one of the glories of America—black jazz and black spirituals—was gradually infiltrated.
It is worth reemphasizing that this fragmentation in music is parallel to the fragmentation which occurred in painting. And again let us say that these were not just changes of technique; they expressed a worldview and became a vehicle for carrying that worldview to masses of people which the bare philosophic writings never would have touched.
John Cage provides perhaps the clearest example of what is involved in the shift in music. Cage believed the universe is a universe of chance, and to express this he produced music by chance. He tried carrying this out with great consistency. For example, at times he flipped coins to decide what the music should be. At other times he erected a machine that led an orchestra by chance motions so that the orchestra would not know what was coming next. Thus there was no order. Or again, he placed two conductors leading the same orchestra, separated from each other by a partition, so that what resulted was utter confusion. There is a close tie-in again to painting; in 1947 Cage made a composition he called Music for Marcel Duchamp. But the sound produced by Cage’s chance music always turned out to be sheer noise. Some of his music was composed only of silence (interrupted only by random environmental sounds), but as soon as he used his chance methods sheer noise was the outcome.
But Cage also showed that one cannot live on such a base, that the chance concept of the universe does not fit the universe as it is. Cage is an expert in mycology, the science of mushrooms. And he himself said, “I became aware that if I approached mushrooms in the spirit of my chance operation, I would die shortly.” Mushroom picking must be carefully discriminative. His theory of the universe does not fit the universe that exists.
All of this music by chance, which results in noise, makes a strange contrast to the airplanes sitting in our airports or slicing through our skies. An airplane is carefully formed; it is orderly (and many would also think it beautiful). This is in sharp contrast to the intellectualized art which states that the universe is chance. Why is the airplane carefully formed and orderly, and what Cage produced utter noise? Simply because an airplane must fit the orderly flow lines of the universe if it is to fly!
Sir Archibald Russell (1904–1995) was the British designer for the Concorde airliner. In a Newsweek: European Edition interview (February 16, 1976), he was asked: “Many people find that the Concorde is a work of art in its design. Did you consider its esthetic appearance when you were designing it?” His answer was,
When one designs an airplane, he must stay as close as possible to the laws of nature. You are really playing with the laws of nature and trying not to offend them. It so happens that our ideas of beauty are those of nature. Every shape and curve of the Concorde is arranged so it will conform with the natural flow as conditioned by the laws of nature. That’s why I doubt that the Russian supersonic airplane is a crib of ours. The Russians have the same basic phenomena imposed on them by nature as we do.
Cage’s music and the worldview for which it is the vehicle do not fit the universe that is. Someone might here bring in , and so will not repeat the discussion here. The universe is not what Cage in his music and Pollock in his painting say it is. And we must add that Cage’s music does not fit what people are, either. It has had to become increasingly spectacular to keep interest; for example, a nude cellist has played Cage’s music under water.
A further question is: Is this art really art? Is it not rather a bare philosophic, intellectual statement, separated from the fullness of who people are and the fullness of what the universe is? The more it tends to be only an intellectual statement, rather than a work of art, the more it becomes anti-art.
The fourth vehicle for these ideas is what I will call general culture. By this, I mean poetry, the novel, drama, and cinema. In the Anglo-Saxon world, the introduction in poetry came with T. S. Eliot’s (1888–1965) “The Waste Land,” which was published in 1922. Here he matched a fragmented message to a fragmented form of poetry. The end of the fifth (and last) section of “The Waste Land” reads:
Le Prince d’ Aquitaine à la tour abolie.
These fragments I have shored against my ruins
Why then Ile fit you.
Hieronymo’s mad againe.
Datta. Dayadhvam. Damyata.
In this poem he opened the door to modern poetry the way Picasso opened the way to a fragmented concept of life in his painting Les Demoiselles d’Avignon. It is interesting that later when Eliot became a Christian, his form of writing, although it did not become “old-fashioned,” did change. We will pick up elements of general culture later in this chapter, especially the uniquely twentieth-century art form—the cinema. Popular music, such as some elements of rock, brought to the young people of the entire world the concept of a fragmented world—and optimism only in the area of nonreason. And poetry, drama, the novel, and especially films carried these ideas to the mass of people in a way that went beyond the other vehicles we have considered.
All of this gives us today an almost monolithic consensus, an almost unified voice shouting at us a fragmented concept of the universe and of life. And as it comes at us from every side and with many voices, it is difficult not to be infiltrated by it. We and our children now get this message from every side—from art, music, general culture, modern theology, the mass media, and often even comic books. Perhaps cinema, especially in the 1960s, proclaimed this message in a way that spread it most widely. But in order to understand its unique contribution we must first consider other developments in philosophy.
Formal philosophy, as such, has tended to sicken, if not die, for modern people. As we have seen, modern modern science put aside the epistemological base of early science—this early base being that, because the world was created by a reasonable God, man can find out about the universe by reason. Then, when this Christian base was abandoned, scientists tried to make the philosophy of positivism their philosophic base for knowing.
Positivism had been worked out in the first half of the nineteenth century by the French philosopher Auguste Comte (1798–1857) and was developed as the base for science by Herbert Spencer (1820–1903). Related to John Locke’s (1632–1704) empiricism, positivism is a naive philosophy which basically says that you look at an object and there it is. The data which reaches you through your senses enables you to know the object in a straightforward and uncomplicated way.
But some years ago people began to realize that science did not really look at an object with total objectivity. In the Journal of the Franklin Institute (1936) Albert Einstein pointed out that man makes choices out of the multitude of sense data which comes to him. In other words, there is a subjective element involved in the scientific process. Michael Polanyi (1891–1976), who retired from Manchester University in 1958 and since that time had taught in many universities, in his book Personal Knowledge: Towards a Post-Critical Philosophy (1958) destroyed the naive view of positivism. Polanyi pointed out that the observer is always there and always makes the conclusions, and he is never entirely neutral.
And with this, positivism is no longer a viable base for knowing. In science a man arranges the experiment; he has a grid in his thinking into which he fits his observations and makes the conclusions. The positivism I knew when I was younger, which was so very, very strong in the universities of Europe and America, is now dead. No longer are those holding this view so sure of the relationship between themselves and the object they are observing.
There is another profound objection to positivism, namely, that on the basis of this philosophic system there is no reason for certainty that the data reaching the observer is really data and not just illusion. This was no problem when Christianity was the basis, with a view of the universe as created by a God of reason, and people created by the same reasonable God to live in that universe. But without the Christian base, what assurance do people have that what reaches them through the senses corresponds to what is “out there”? Humanism in the Renaissance had not been able to find a way to impart meaning and value to the individual things, the particulars. By the time of the death of positivism, humanism had no base for certainty in knowing.
Interestingly, the artists had seen the problem before the philosophers and scientists, for positivism was parallel to Impressionism. As we have said, the Impressionists painted what they saw, but this left the question of whether there was reality behind the light waves reaching their eyes. Monet took the next step in 1885 and reality tended to be obscured. Thus there was a time when the artists were ahead of both philosophers and scientists. Without the Christian base, neither artists nor philosophers nor scientists had a base which would bear the needed weight in the area of how we can be sure we can know.
What then has happened to science? In brief, science, as it is now usually conceived, has no epistemological base—that is, no base for being sure that what scientists think they observe corresponds to what really exists. It should be noted, however, that even though they have no such base in their own system, yet in both science and day-by-day knowing, there is a correspondence between the external world and ourselves, for God indeed made the subject and object to be in a proper relationship, just as our lungs fit this atmosphere on the earth. Thus, men can go on learning about the universe. But the point is that the humanist has no base for knowing within his own philosophic system. His optimism about knowing the external world is weakened.
In this setting modern modern science tends increasingly to become one of two things: either a high form of technology, often with a goal of increasing affluence, or what I would call sociological science. By the latter I mean that, with a weakened certainty about objectivity, people find it easier to come to whatever conclusions they desire for the sociological ends they wish to see attained.
One example is Edmund Leach (1910–1989), a Reith Lecturer and well-known teacher of anthropology at Cambridge University. In The New York Review of Books Leach said that in the past there have been two views of evolution: either that all men came from the same starting place, or that there were different starting places and different starting times from prehuman biological forms. This second concept usually carries with it the idea that the races which are the oldest are the most advanced. Leach said that he chose the first concept because the second led to racism. Speaking of this second concept, he said that “this view of race is utterly useless for any purpose whatsoever except for ammunition for deplorable political causes.” This is what I would call sociological science: choices being made on the basis of the sociological consequences that would result. With the weakening of certainty about knowing the objective, external world, the ideal of objectivity in science is weakened.
This is parallel to a change among the news makers. As their concept of truth becomes more relative, the ideal of objectivity in the news columns in contrast to the editorial pages is increasingly diminished. Thus, the loss of a philosophic base for truth and the certainty of knowing has the practical result of making for a sociological science and a sociological news medium—both available for use by manipulators. And this is especially potent with science because of the almost “religious” belief that people have developed about the objectivity—and thus the certainty—of the results of science.
Returning to philosophy as such, after positivism, came linguistic analysis. This is a philosophy that deals with the analysis of language. Two philosophies were then dominant: existentialism and linguistic analysis. But to me neither are philosophies; both are anti-philosophies.
Existentialism deals with the big questions, but separates the attempted answers from reason, placing them in the area of nonreason. By contrast, linguistic analysis examines language on the basis of reason—only to discover gradually that analysis of language leads neither to values nor to facts. Language leads only to language, and linguistic analysis thus never gets to the big questions. Consequently, existentialism and linguistic analysis are both antiphilosophies in that neither gives the basis people need for the answers to the big and fundamental questions. Not only do they not give the answers people need, but each in its own way generates confusion about meaning and values. There were other less influential philosophies as well, but they gave no more definitive answers. Formal philosophy had left a vacuum.
The important concepts of philosophy increasingly began to come not as formal statements of philosophy but rather as expressions in art, music, novels, poetry, drama, and the cinema—those things we spoke of as general culture earlier in the chapter. As an example, Sartre’s and Camus’s existentialism came not so much through formal philosophical statements as in their novels. Consider Sartre’s Nausea (1938), and Camus’s The Stranger (1942) and The Plague (1947), and also Simone de Beauvoir’s (1908–1986) L’Invitée (1943).
Especially in the 1960s the major philosophic statements which received a wide hearing were made through films. These philosophic movies reached many more people than philosophic writing or even painting and literature. Among these films were The Last Year at Marienbad (1961) by Alain Resnais, The Silence (1963) by Ingmar Bergman, Juliet of the Spirits (1965) by Federico Fellini, Blow-Up (1966) by Michaelangelo Antonioni, Belle de Jour (1967) by Luis Buñuel, and Hour of the Wolf (1967) by Ingmar Bergman. They showed pictorially (and with great force) what it is like if man is a machine and also what it is like if man tries to live in the area of nonreason. In the area of nonreason man is left without categories. He has no way to distinguish between right and wrong, or even between what is objectively true as opposed to illusion or fantasy.
Plate 56 Movie posters from Blow-Up, Silence, and Hour of the Wolf. “. . . the major philosophic statements which received a wide hearing were made through films.
A good example is Antonioni’s Blow-Up (1966). The advertisement for the film read: “Murder without guilt, love without meaning.” Antonioni was portraying how, in the area of nonreason, there are no certainties concerning moral values, and no human categories either. Blow-Up had no hero. Compare this with Michelangelo’s David—that statement of humanist pride in the Renaissance. Man had set himself up as autonomous, but the end result was not Michelangelo’s David, but Antonioni’s nonhero. All there is in the film is the camera which goes “click, click, click,” and the human has disappeared. The main character snaps pictures of individual things, particulars. One might point out, for example, the models he snaps; all their humanity and meaning are gone.
After a scene in which clowns play tennis without a ball, there is at the end of the film a reverse zoom shot in which the man who is the central character disappears entirely, and all that remains is the grass. Man is gone. Modern people, on their basis of reason, see themselves only as machines. But as they move into the area of nonreason and look for their optimism, they find themselves separated from reason and without any human or moral values.
Some of the films of this period went even further as, for example, Juliet of the Spirits (1965), The Last Year at Marienbad (1961), Hour of the Wolf (1967), and Belle de Jour (1967). They were saying something even more profound: for modern people, as they leap into the area of nonreason to try to find optimism without reason, not only are there no human or moral categories but there is no certainty, no categories upon which to distinguish between reality and illusion.
Bergman provides a clear case here. In 1963 he directed The Silence. In a filmed interview he said he had come to conclude that God is dead; therefore there is only silence in the universe. Thus, he made this film. Then followed Hour of the Wolf (1967) where one cannot tell the difference between what is real and what is fantasy. Was what was presented really happening or was it in the mind of one of the characters? This same problem was involved in the films Juliet of the Spirits (1965), The Last Year at Marienbad (1961), and Belle de Jour (1967). One could view these films a hundred times and there still would be no way to be sure what was portrayed as objectively true and what was part of a character’s imagination. If people begin only from themselves and really live in a universe in which there is no personal God to speak, they have no final way to be sure of the difference between reality and fantasy or illusion.
But Bergman (like Sartre, Camus, and all the rest) cannot really live with his own position. Therefore in The Silence (1963), the background music is Bach’s Goldberg Variations. When he was asked in the filmed interview about music, he said that there is a small holy part of the human being where music speaks. He added that as he was writing The Silence he had the Goldberg Variations playing in his house and that this music interfered with what was being set forth in that film.
On the Christian base it is possible to know why music speaks. Man is not the product of chance. Man is made in the image of God, and on this basis, it is understandable why music is music to man. On the basis of revelation—the Bible and the revelation of God through Christ—there is not ultimate silence in the universe, and there are certainties of human values and moral values and categories to distinguish between illusion and fantasy. And there is a reason why man is man. But not for these modern people with a humanist position.
These philosophic films have spoken clearly about where people have come. Modern people are in trouble indeed. These things are not shut up within the art museums, the concert halls and rock festivals, the stage and movies, or the theological seminaries. People function on the basis of their worldview. Therefore, society has changed radically. This is the reason—and not a less basic one—that it is unsafe to walk at night through the streets of many of today’s cities. As a man thinketh, so is he.