Page - 75 - in JRFM - Journal Religion Film Media, Volume 02/02

Film, Parable, Reciprocity | 75www.jrfm.eu 2016, 2/2, 69–98 ignored appeals of the weak are made visible and audible, and relations of dam- aged or compromised reciprocity are disrupted with a vision and a practice of more-than-reciprocity, as we see in his films National Gallery (2014), Near Death, Primate (US 1974), Belfast, Maine (US 1999), Meat (US 1976) and Juve- nile Court (1973). LYRIC PORTRAITURE30 Portraiture is the most resonant and enigmatic strategy in Wiseman’s films for evoking reciprocity and more-than-reciprocity within subtle power dynamics of strong and weak, and even those who appear as equals. Andrew Delbanco con- tends that Wiseman “is not primarily a social commentator or an investigator of this or that institution … He is a portraitist, and his favourite genre is the double portrait.”31 These portraits often show a person or a group in a subordinate role to an authority figure/group, and the gestural, aural, postural and other cues that reveal dominance and submission, but equally persistently how these hi- erarchies are undone in film’s structure (and sometimes also the content, as in Near Death [1989]). Again and again we see these portraits and hear hectoring, pleading, advising, insulting, listening, teaching and counselling in exchanges that either intensify the inequality or bridge it in some way, on a spectrum rang- ing from cruelty to indifference to compassion. The structures of inequality vary, and overlap, and include (1) authority of office, of the law, military, church, medical profession, government; (2) social circumstances of poverty, aging, dis- ability, lack of education, racism; (3) extreme power differentials in interspe- cies relations: hunting, trapping for fur, vivisection, factory meat production; (4) benign and less benign hierarchies of art, education or rehearsals for various kinds of performances. I begin my consideration of more-than-reciprocity that emerges within relations of inequality with a recent Wiseman film, National Gallery (2014), which explores unequal relations in a playful manner. In National Gallery (2014), shot at the National Gallery in London, portraits are numerous: gallery patrons, staff, and representational paintings. With the shot/reverse-shot structure conventionally used to film conversations, the paintings are often filmed in close-up without the frame visible, the silent ex- pressive portraits appearing to meet, or look away from, the silent expressive- ness of gallery visitors looking at them (fig. 2). In the first narrative sequence of the film, a woman describes a medieval paint- ing of haloed saints for a group in the gallery, suggesting that a picture takes on qualities of what it represents, for instance, just as we might resist tossing darts 30 I owe this term to Jon LeBlanc, developed in conversation about this essay. 31 Delbanco 2010, 94.