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82 A Body of Vision characters.... but it has those—where it's not only romantic comedy, it's also the play of the mind, too, in dealing with...." Broughton was interrupted at this point, but I think it is possible to formulate a reasonable conjecture about what he intended to say, and it has everything to do with a sense of the goodness of the natural world. At least since his 1963 proposal to the Ford Foundation (and as late as his 1977 volume on filmmaking, Seeing the Light), Broughton has argued that real comedy reflects wisdom, the capacity to see life whole—to not brood over those events that inflict pain and to take all that comes as elements within a greater whole, the true grandeur and mystery of which outreaches the limits of our radically circumscribed domain of experience. In his Ford Foundation proposal (which included an outline for The Golden Positions that placed it among a suite of celebratory films to be called Unclassifiable Wonders) Broughton criticized the trends in experimental filmmaking of the time for "joylessness," for having "precious little wit," and for offering so little for the mind. A film of this sort, by far the most common sort of experimental film, he suggested, is characterized by an absence of breadth, breadth of vision and of understanding. There is usually ample cleverness, personal misery, and aggressive novelty. But ultimately art is only interesting in so far as it seeks to illuminate the real mysteries of human existence. It is not a matter of new techniques, it is a matter ofmore meaningful themes. This I take as a serious challenge.57 He continues with somewhat greater specificity: What needs picturing, I conclude, are vital images that can connect man to the wholeness of which he is a part and make him feel the experienceof his own microcosm within the glorious dance of the cosmos.... What is really lacking in films is maturity and wisdom. Poets [Broughton had described his life-work as poetry and indicated that he would like to return to filmmaking]like philosophers are concerned with the suchness of things, the meanings in life, the continuity and paradoxes of existence. Film-making has rather shied away from such concerns . I am, humbly, somewhat wiser than I was ten years ago [when he had completed his previous film]. Therefore, gentlemen, I propose: Film as philosophy Film as religious joy Film as living myth Film as a pursuit of wisdom Film with real Zen in it.58 Some time later, in "Zen in the Art of Cinema," Broughton was to set out what he meant by "Zen": The Films of James Broughton 83 Zen is a way of letting things happen. Andletting them be.... Zen points directly at the thing itself.... Zen has nothing to do with bright ideas. It is seeing the transcendental in the commonplace. Except that there is no commonplace. Every thing is uncommon. To the true poet, nothing is trivial. "If he breathes into anything that was before thought small, it dilates with the grandeur and life of the universe," said Whitman, who breathed into grass. Zen is poetry in action. It is the reality one creates out of what already exists.59 The Zen qualities of Broughton's films counterbalance their Oz qualities. While Oz is the triumph of the imagination, Zen is seeing things for what they really are. While Oz is the wise spirit of the child, Zen is the wise spirit of the mature individual. While Oz represents the world remade by imagination , Zen accepts things just as they are. While Oz is inward directed, Zen is outward directed. This Zen sense, as Broughton characterizes it, is what his straightforward, observational approach attempts to capture. There is a potential danger in Broughton's straightforward, non-manipulative , non-grasping, observational approach. Broughton's films can seem artless , for in one sense of that word they are: they do not engage in trickery of any sort. And if one is not prepared to assent to the gift of beauty of the other, to appreciate the beauty of autonomous being by apprehending it through love, the films can seem a bit silly. But as the legendary critic and filmmaker Jonas Mekas pointed out, the problem lies with how much, not how little, Broughton really demands of his viewers. Mekas is commenting on This Is It (1971), but the remark can be generalized to include all of Broughton's later work...

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