Page - 74 - in JRFM - Journal Religion Film Media, Volume 02/02

74 | Alyda Faber www.jrfm.eu 2016, 2/2, 69–98 slightest details of accent and attitude”.24 Despite her attention to the finest shifts in “accent and attitude”, Weil sees this possibility as a supernatural gift without strong human participation. My perception of more-than-reciprocity, while indebted to Weil, has more in common with Kathryn Tanner’s sense of hu- man malleability open to radical transformation, through grace, through grace, as an expression of “natural” possibilities, and Kathleen Skerrett’s tender sen- sibility of the responsiveness in the flesh of one being to another when they share “images of reciprocity and self-respect and grace.”25 Weil, Tanner and Skerrett imagine these possibilities as emerging within persistent relations of domination, consistent with a vision of reciprocity and more-than-reciprocity in Wiseman’s films. Though it doesn’t necessarily have a theistic orientation in Wiseman’s films, this disposition of more-than-reciprocity with the dominated, humiliated and weak – whether in the style of filming his subjects, or the actions and attitudes of persons filmed – is the compelling vision of all of his work, witnessed in “the slightest details of accent and attitude”. In a quiet, yet disturbing way Wiseman creates an effect in viewers similar to the effect of Jesus’ parables described by Rowan Williams: they invite people to “decide for or against self-destruction, for or against newness of life, acceptance, relatedness.”26 Williams contends that the enigmatic language of parable is consistent with Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s call (in his letters from prison) for a non-religious language to proclaim the word of God for the renewal of the world. As is gradually becoming clearer to me, this means an acceptance of a life-giving, unpredictable unknown in the midst of everyday life: something that we usually resist. Eric Santner interprets, through Sigmund Freud and Franz Rosenzweig, God as such an unknown, “the name for the pressure to be alive to the world, to open to the too much of pressure gen- erated in large measure by the uncanny presence of my neighbour”,27 encoun- tered as a stranger, that is, without a program or plan of action. This is parable as lyric, a call to a responsiveness of more-than-reciprocity to that which we can acknowledge but not know, to use Stanley Cavell’s resonant distinction.28 Thom- as Merton interprets the synergies of faith and doubt in a similar but theistic way, as a life of bringing “the unknown into our everyday life in a living, dynamic and actual manner” that holds in abeyance our exciting and energizing efforts to explain, where the “unknown remains unknown.”29 Like parable, Wiseman’s filmic style brings the enigmatic everyday into focus, where the discounted or 24 Weil 1973, 143. 25 Tanner 2010, 1–57; Skerrett 2012, 242–244. For Tanner, “natural” means to live by God´s grace. 26 Williams 2000b, 41. 27 Santner 2001, 9. 28 Cavell 2002, 238–266. 29 Merton 1972, 136.