Page - 73 - in JRFM - Journal Religion Film Media, Volume 02/02

Film, Parable, Reciprocity | 73www.jrfm.eu 2016, 2/2, 69–98 structure, and with the spare characterization of film subjects that “portraits” suggest – a parable-like non-didactic, non-directive cinema. I compare Wiseman’s style and the effect on the viewer in different se- quences of his films and develop these interpretations through a discussion of parable, reciprocity, and more-than-reciprocity in order to flesh out the spe- cific aesthetic strategies at play in his films. I argue that the effect of the play between myth and parable in Wiseman’s films (or in his terms, the “abstract” and the “literal”19) is an elusive yet galvanising vision of more-than-reciprocity that opens up the space of parable, the enigmatic everyday, in his work. The viewer is not directed toward any particular action, but disturbed by visceral responsiveness – bewilderment, curiosity, pain, sadness, wonder, joy – seeing and hearing people and animals that social practice consigns to invisibility and silence. At the same time, people with social prestige – like the director of the National Gallery in the scene described in the first paragraph of the essay, the medical staff in Wiseman’s Near Death (US 1989), the judge in Juvenile Court (US 1973), among others – are filmed in ways that complicate their public stat- ure. RECIPROCITY AND MORE-THAN-RECIPROCITY In classic liberal theory, rooted in antiquity, reciprocity can be understood as justice wherein equal persons mutually consent to limits to their actions in rela- tion to each other.20 Simone Weil’s essay “Implicit Forms of the Love of God” re- counts a tragic sense of reciprocity’s limits, given “facts of radical inequality”21 and “all that the strong can impose upon the weak.”22 She notes that Thucy- dides dramatises such force in the Athenians’ war with Sparta when they meet the resistance of the neutral island of Melos. The Athenians destroy the city, kill all the men and sell the women and children into slavery, claiming that justice as reciprocity is negotiated between equals, whereas “if one is strong and the other weak, that which is possible is imposed by the first and accepted by the second.”23 They appeal to a law of “mechanical necessity”: the strong can take advantage of the weak in every way, treat them like things, like slaves. Next to this, Weil considers an indirect love of God as more-than-reciprocity in response to the neighbour, “behaving exactly as though there were equality when one is the stronger in an unequal relationship. Exactly, in every respect, including the 19 Hamacher/Wiseman 2015. 20 Rawls 1999, 190–224; Skerrett 2005. 21 Williams 2000a, 78. 22 Weil 1973, 142. 23 Weil 1973, 141.