Page - 93 - in JRFM - Journal Religion Film Media, Volume 02/02

Film, Parable, Reciprocity | 93www.jrfm.eu 2016, 2/2, 69–98 tice. Can they be heard in this context any more than animal distress in Primate (1974)? After the verdict is heard, Robert asks, “But why must they lie? Why?” (JC 85). A man insists that in ten years the matter can all be erased, to which Robert replies, “An injustice has been done” (JC 85). Alongside the rational and pragmatic deliberations of the judge and lawyers, the sequence keeps in play “democratic noise”: the aurality in all the participants’ reasoning, their coughs, averted glances and gestures that express emotion. The power differential here is weighted in the judge’s favour: his speech is supported by the coercive pow- ers of the state that may incarcerate or even kill citizens. Within this intense exchange, however, Robert pleads questions of truth and justice that will reso- nate with some viewers along with the conviction that he is telling the truth, but this carries little weight with those who have been tasked to end deliberations and to make a decision (largely based on pragmatic assessments). Robert is coerced into going the way the judge and counsel have set out, but the camera records his protest, going his own idiosyncratic way against the common sense of counsel and the judge. More-than-reciprocity emerges in the art of the film where it does not exist socially, amplified by the style of filming the judge’s and Robert’s visual proximity, aural cues and references to questions much larger than the parties present. In so doing, the film opens up the space of parable, unsettling the resolution arrived at in the court. CARCASSES AS DRESSES Transporting parable into the visual and aural medium of film, as I’ve done in this essay – parable as aural image – accentuates the formative capacity of im- ages to shape a vision, to form capabilities, while remaining elusive and enig- matic. It may also push Jesus’ parables out of the bored familiarity with which they are sometimes greeted by religious practitioners. While the visual art of cinema can’t entirely escape the “language game of information”,50 Wiseman, in a move away from didacticism, shifts his film style toward aural and visual “democratic noise” for an effect of visceral sensation and shock consistent with the way scholars characterise the effect of parables. Furthermore, whatever Wiseman’s own views on religion, the structure of his films (and some content) consistently evokes – within the public sphere of social institutions – a religious vision and practice of reciprocity and more-than-reciprocity with a neighbour. The films catch what political liberalism misses: the need, within democracies, for “comprehensive doctrines of life, relation, and purpose”51 that have the po- tential to resist “a strong technological destiny that deactivates religious ways 50 Ludwig Wittgenstein cited in Crossan 1973, 3. 51 Skerrett 2005, 190.