Paper short abstract:

The early 20th century avant-garde's theories emphasize cinema's capacity to restore the experience of ritual and the sacred that was suppressed by modern rationality. This paper aims to reflect upon the representation of ritual in contemporary cinema (Alonso, Weerasethakul, Klotz).

Paper long abstract:

Since its invention, cinema oscillates between the representation of ritual and ritualization. Approaching cinema from the perspective of ritual implies thinking moving images as points of fixation of reality that aim to transform it more than simply reproduce it. The early 20th century avant-garde's theories emphasize cinema's capacity to restore the experience of ritual and the sacred that was suppressed by modern rationality. The link between the capacity of cinema to transfigure reality, ritual and myth was examined by several filmmakers in their theoretical production. The discovery of experimental psychology and ethnology - particularly, Lévi-Bruhl's "L'Âme primitive" (1927) - leads Eisenstein to formulate his theses on the "prelogical" thought and the "pathos". Also Epstein reflects on the animistic dimension of cinema as an "hypnotic machine". For Rocha, cinema must be able to "put everything into trance" (Deleuze).

Approaching this theoretical background and adopting a transversal historical perspective, this paper aims to reflect upon the representation of ritual in contemporary cinema (Lisandro Alonso, Apitchapong Weerasethakul, Nicolas Klotz, among others), examining in parallel the formal intersections between the sphere of material reality and the 'supernatural'. In other words, by suppressing the clear separation between the material and the ritual spheres, the film forms of this "corpus" suggest the hypothesis of cinema, besides representing ritual, becoming itself a ritual, a cinema-ritual.