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He heard a low and seemingly very distant sound, but singularly grand and im-
pressive, unlike anything he had ever heard, gradually swelling and increasing as
if it would have a universal and memorable ending.
–Henry David Thoreau, Walden
The extraordinary within the ordinary, such is the logic of meaning in the parables.
–Paul Ricoeur
Touching the Transcendent
Closing my eyes, I remember emerging from the theater into the blue-and-grey
evening in downtown Vancouver, BC, after experiencing Upstream Color (Shane
Carruth, US 2013), my whole body transfixed and transfigured adjacent to my wife;
we were hand in hand, both of us in silent wonder at what we had just witnessed.
The film felt baptismal in its immersive soundscape and provocative images, as if we
had dipped into the currents of an eternal river and emerged awakened and dripping
with fresh perspectives. As we drove home, neither of us was entirely sure what we
had just encountered, but we knew we had briefly touched the transcendent.
Subjectivity, memory, and the invisible connections between individuals’ identi-
ties are all conspicuous themes within Upstream Color’s narrative. These themes
are also observable in Shane Carruth’s debut film, Primer (US 2004), a low-budget
indie film which pushes the boundaries of narrative coherence via its convolut-
ed-yet-cohesive consideration of time travel. The two engineers at the heart of this
film wrestle with what it means to act with prescience as they play God, becoming
eternal while ordinary humans in a blurring of physics and metaphysics.
In this article, I contend that both Primer and Upstream Color are sci-fi cinematic
parables per philosopher Paul Ricoeur’s description of parable as “the conjunction
of a narrative form and a metaphorical process”.1 These films’ imaginative fictitious
narratives incorporate extraordinary elements within realistic settings of mundane
everyday life, re-orienting the audience by way of disorientation as the parabolic
narrative-metaphor addresses the limits of human experience, ultimately offering
a glimpse of the transcendent. Interpreting these two films through a Ricoeurian
parabolic hermeneutic addresses their mutual transcendence in and through time
and narrative via their striking visual and auditory aesthetics, the use of montage in
their nonlinear narratives, and the depiction of invisible relational connections be-
1 Ricoeur 1975, 30.
18 | Joel Mayward www.jrfm.eu 2020, 6/1, 17–36
JRFM
Journal Religion Film Media, Band 06/01
- Titel
- JRFM
- Untertitel
- Journal Religion Film Media
- Band
- 06/01
- Autoren
- Christian Wessely
- Daria Pezzoli-Olgiati
- Herausgeber
- Uni-Graz
- Verlag
- SchĂĽren Verlag GmbH
- Ort
- Graz
- Datum
- 2020
- Sprache
- englisch
- Lizenz
- CC BY-NC 4.0
- Abmessungen
- 14.8 x 21.0 cm
- Seiten
- 184
- Kategorien
- Zeitschriften JRFM