Page - 16 - in JRFM - Journal Religion Film Media, Volume 02/02

16 | Isabella Guanzini www.jrfm.eu 2016, 2/2, 15–32 ANTI-GNOSTIC BELIEF IN THE WORLD Gilles Deleuze maintains that cinema has an essentially “Catholic quality” be- cause of its “special relationship with belief”1 and its mise-en-scène of the link between human beings and the world. He agrees with Rossellini’s conviction that the less human the world becomes, the more it is cinema’s duty to produce belief in a possible relation between human beings and the world, because eve- ryone is involved in the production of the world. The act of believing unfolds new horizons in history and makes the creation and expansion of life possible, allowing singularities to come together and to build a common world. Conse- quently, to believe not in a different reality but in a possible relation between subjects and reality, to believe in life, in humanity and in love has to become the main issue of cinema (and of philosophy) for Deleuze. This belief has collapsed, however, together with the revolutionary faith in a possible transformation of the world. The link between subjects and world has gradually been broken, leaving both in an undefined state of suspicion and suspension. The modern fact is that we no longer believe in this world. We do not even believe in the events which happen to us, love, death, as if they only half concerned us. … The link between man and the world is broken. Henceforth, this link must become an object of belief: it is the impossible, which can only be restored within a faith. Belief is no longer addressed to a different or transformed world. Man is in the world as if in a pure optical and sound situation. The reaction of which man has been dispossessed can be replaced only by belief. Only belief in the world can reconnect man to what he sees and hears. … Restoring our belief in the world – this is the power of modern cinema (when it stops being bad).2 The problem of belief has changed its sense, ceding place to a still more ur- gent question that has surfaced. The new problem seems, at first, not to be related to believing or not believing in God, but rather to believing in this world and in this life in all its possibilities, intensities and movements. It is the ques- tion of believing in the immanent quality of the material world, in its infinitely productive, connective and affective tension in view of a possible “production of the common”.3 The exhaustion and lassitude of this belief deprive subjects of their capability to encounter the world, to sustain experiences, to react to everyday violence and to respond to events in order to transform them. The modern suspicion and mistrust of the world continue to permeate the relations between experience and subject, deconstructing the physical presence and the 1 Deleuze 1997, 171. 2 Deleuze 1997, 171–172. 3 Hardt/Negri 2004, 196–202.