Page - 94 - in JRFM - Journal Religion Film Media, Volume 02/02

94 | Alyda Faber www.jrfm.eu 2016, 2/2, 69–98 of being in the world.”52 The capacity to perceive this requires a religious sensi- tivity to the ways in which everyday practices shape persons – whether those practices are shopping, worship, modes of travel, work, food preparation and so on – routines of human relating that appear in Wiseman’s films in the “slightest details of accent and attitude”.53 Conceptual ideas are quite powerless against such formative practices; usually unnoticed, these practices require “engage- ment in a set of counter-practices through which our bodies acquire the vitality of better possibilities.”54 In Wiseman’s films, reciprocity between “peers”55 (the effect of parable on the listener, and Wiseman’s films on the viewer) and more- than-reciprocity are not ideas but images of transformed relations. These sen- sual images remain elusive, an ever-renewable responsiveness to the unknown in the midst of life: call it the soul, the neighbour as stranger, God. Parable forms capabilities (again, not information) for proximity to the un- known, patience with the unknown, bearing frustration in relation to the un- known: parable bears witness to the unknown. Wiseman’s films open up the space of parable as aural and visual perplexity. At the same time, the films observe the social incitement to explanation, the excitements of abstraction, rationalisation, deliberation, argumentation, which for Wiseman bear risks of social regimentation and domination. His films patiently register the layered sounds and appearances of inequality as it emerges, whether in human-to-hu- man or human-animal relations. The social dynamic is usually one in which there is a plan or process into which these humans and animals must fit. The most often cited example of this comes from High School (1968), in which the Dean of Discipline tells a student who protests unfair punishment that being a man means learning to take orders. In the stream of cattle headed for slaughter, there is one who runs in the opposite direction, away from the steady walk to the kill site, but it is soon turned around and made to join the others. In the stream of fish, one gets caught in a gate as the others flow by, but eventually it is released and discarded. In the courtroom, the hospital or factory assembly lines, people and things are regimented into “the army of the upright”. 56 With his lyric portraiture, Wiseman envisions a radically egalitarian possibil- ity within the given social world of persistent hierarchies and domination. He invites the viewer into an “erotic … speechlessness”57 of animal presence with other humans or animals, so that the physical cues of openness or resistance within relations matter more than any social status – in the scene that opens 52 Skerrett 2005, 189. 53 Weil 1973, 143. 54 Hauerwas/Coles 2011, 178. 55 Wayne Booth cited in Crossan 1973, 2. 56 Woolf 2008, 104. 57 Lilburn/Zwicky 2010, 145.