Page - 72 - in JRFM - Journal Religion Film Media, Volume 02/02

72 | Alyda Faber www.jrfm.eu 2016, 2/2, 69–98 PARABLE While the analogy of a novelistic technique is fitting for Wiseman’s work, I consider his films to be parable-like in their structure and lyric address. In a companion piece to this essay, “Silence-effects: Frederick Wiseman’s Films as Parables”,11 I began to develop this analogy by comparing the silence of par- able with Wiseman’s “silent” films. What I call the “silence of parable” draws out the insight of parable scholars and theologians that parable exists on “the edge of language and the limit of story”.12 I have learned from Jan Zwicky to read as lyric both parable and Wiseman’s films. Both foster fugitive moments of acute, wondering and even painful responsiveness to the world, a fleeting capacity to live without a why or, in Zwicky’s phrase, in “the erotic embrace of speechlessness”13 that opens out into more-than-reciprocity. Parable is unsto- ry.14 The parables of Jesus witness to the more-than-reciprocity of the empire of God, not as a project to implement in society, but as shared images that shape our sensibility and our relations in new directions.15 Parables disrupt the logical, causal, and linear explanation of story, of myth.16 John Dominic Crossan notes, however, “it is not possible to live in parable alone. To live in parable means to dwell in the tension of myth and parable.”17 In other words, it is possible to distinguish myth (narrative) and parable (lyric) conceptually but not practically. Everyday speech mixes the two, and some works “employ both lyric and narra- tive structures”.18 Wiseman’s aesthetic in his films about public or private institutions reveals this tension between myth (story) and parable (lyric). Narrative sequences in- clude film subjects’ attempts to explain the values and practices of the institu- tions explored in the films, which imply a broader understanding of the world (myth). Yet these sequences also create lyrical “silence-effects” with the ab- sence of extra-diegetic music, long sequences without dialogue or with very minimal dialogue, the lack of voice-over narration and lack of questions for the film subjects. Certain types of sequences and images are repeated in all of Wise- man’s films (traffic montages; corridors; single, double and group portraits; close-ups of faces, bodies, hands) without an overarching explanatory narrative 11 Faber 2015, 138–152. 12 Crossan 1975, 46. 13 Lilburn/Zwicky 2010, 145. 14 This neologism plays with the recent proliferation of un-things: an ungame, for instance, is a non- competitive game without winners and losers. I use the term to amplify my point about parable as lyric rather than story. 15 See Williams 2000a. 16 Zwicky 2006, 87–105. Zwicky’s contrast of lyrical witness and narrative explanation is particularly resonant for me when considering Wiseman’s work. 17 Crossan 1975, 60 (italics in the original). 18 Zwicky 2006, 100.