Page - 21 - in JRFM - Journal Religion Film Media, Volume 06/01

Indeed, film scholar Dudley Andrew has suggested Ricoeur’s relevance for interpre- tation in film theory,8 and Alberto Baracco has demonstrated Ricoeur’s phenome- nological hermeneutic in film-philosophy. Similar to Andrew and Baracco, I apply Ricoeur to film-theology to explore how these parables might be doing theology via cinema.9 Ricoeur considers all parables as having a narrative structure, or emplotment. In his Time and Narrative, Ricoeur’s hypothesis centers on the narrativity of human temporal reality, suggesting that we make meaning and interpret all our experienc- es through narrative – all reality is storied in time. In crafting his hermeneutical cir- cle – what he describes as an “endless spiral” of interpretation10 – Ricoeur describes three levels or modes of mimesis: mimesis 1 (prefigured time), mimesis 2 (configured time), and mimesis 3 (refigured or transfigured time).11 Applied to cinema, mimesis 1 , or the world behind the film, entails a pre-understanding or “practical understand- ing” of the nature of narratives, what a filmgoer understands of the structural, sym- bolic, and temporal dynamics of the emplotted story.12 Mimesis 2 , the world of the film, is the mode of emplotment, bringing together the individual elements of the story – characters, events, actions, descriptions – and integrating them within the framing structure of narrative, transforming a succession of events into a meaning- ful whole. Finally, mimesis 3 , the world in front of the film, marks the intersection of the film-world with the life-world of the audience.13 This stage is referential in that the film-world is discernible and applicable to everyday life; it is where the film po- tentially transforms our perspective and praxis. Ricoeur asserts that parables are stories which could have actually occurred to people in everyday life yet contain a peculiarity or eccentricity. This peculiarity is not due to fantastical or magical elements, but precisely because of the parable’s realism. As Ricoeur puts it, parables depict “the extraordinary within the ordinary”.14 This quality “remains a fantastic of the everyday, without the supernatural, as it appears in fairy tales or in myths”.15 Ricoeur sees a narrative structure underlying this pecu- liarity: “Parables are ordinary stories whose entire metaphorical power is concen- trated in a moment of crisis and in a denouement that is either tragic or comic.”16 Such is the paradox of the parabolic structure: it begins in an ordinary manner, one 8 Andrew 1984, 180–187. 9 Baracco 2017. 10 Ricoeur 1984, 72. 11 Ricoeur 1984, 53. 12 Ricoeur 1984, 54–56. 13 Ricoeur 1984, 71. 14 Ricoeur 1995, 60. 15 Ricoeur 1981, 167. 16 Ricoeur 1981, 167. Emphasis in original. 20 | Joel Mayward www.jrfm.eu 2020, 6/1, 17–36