Bruno Dumont's Cinema

When thinking about an earlier generation of auteur filmmakers like Ingmar Bergman, Robert Bresson, Carl Dreyer, Roberto Rossellini, and Andrei Tarkovsky, one is struck by the intensity of their fascination with religious themes and questions. Perhaps it was their proximity to the death knell—sounded only decades earlier by Nietzsche's madman—announcing the demise of God that placed these questions at the forefront of their imagination. But time does not seem to have diminished the compulsion to respond to the significance of the proclamation of a certain conception of the death of God. ¹ A newer generation of cineastes seems just as engrossed by similar concerns. Despite the increasingly secularized cultural landscape of the last three decades, as one finds in regions like Western Europe, we have nevertheless witnessed the release of religiously inflected films by important filmmakers like Krzysztof Kieślowski, Terrence Malick, Lars von Trier, and the Dardenne brothers. Much has already been written about the religious aspects of these particular filmmakers. One noteworthy contemporary auteur, however, whose work is thoroughly preoccupied with religious questions, and yet has not always received the same critical attention, is the French director Bruno Dumont. The reason for that may have something to do with Dumont's uncompromising philosophy of art. His films deeply divide audiences between those who admire his minimalist aesthetic craft and those who are frustrated by his unwillingness to provide his audiences with any interpretive key. Dumont's cinema, I argue, deserves the attention of anyone interested in the interstices of religion, secularism, and art. His paradoxical stance—an atheist who is haunted by religion—represents a refreshing alternative to the one-dimensional views of many religious fundamentalists and their equally stifling counterparts, the New Atheists—two groups that receive disproportionate attention in our shallow media-saturated culture. Eschewing the dogmatism that beguiles so many on either side of the divide, Dumont prefers to linger on liminal and even, I dare say, spiritual experiences that resist simple classification. He forcefully attests to Julia Kristeva's claim that a secular humanist culture intent on purging itself of the sacred runs the risk of undermining the psychic coherence of its subjects by drawing them closer to the edges of an existential void. Indeed, the power of Dumont's cinema may well come from its intent of showing us that we have already crossed that threshold.