Miraculous Realism: Spinoza, Deleuze, and Carlos Reygadas’s Stellet Licht

The screen is not a support, not like a canvas; there is nothing to support, that way. It holds a projection, as light as light

—Stanley Cavell, The World Viewed¹

The crystal is expression. Expression moves from the mirror to the seed.

—Giles Deleuze, Cinema 2: The Time-Image²

A Certain Spirit

Only by representing the miraculous can the cinematic image achieve true immanence; that is, become one with representation, with its immanent miracle. Such was my initial, and perhaps overly idealist, thought upon having watched Carlos Reygadas’s 2007 film Stellet Licht/Silent Light (Mexico, France, the Netherlands, Germany), one of these rare films that can be seen many times but felt only once. The idea of immanent miracle I take from Alessia Ricciardi, who in her 2007 article “Immanent Miracles: From De Sica to Hardt and Negri” develops the concept in her reading of Vittorio de Sica’s Miracolo a Milano/Miracle in Milan (1951, Italy). At the end of this film, one of the many films that has been said to mark the end of Italian neorealism, Toto, the chosen one, leads the poor of Milan’s shantytown to the promised land, where “good morning really means good morning,” by bestowing the brooms of the city’s street sweepers with his magical power. Ricciardi writes,

Ultimately . . . Miracle in Milan may be said to allegorically depict, in the final flight of the poor, the paradoxical capacity of neorealist film to convert pessimism into an act of immanent faith, as a miracle can only emerge from a contingent and immanent perspective. Perhaps this is the reason why many critics regard Miracle in Milan as the last neorealist film, as a kind of apotheosis of the form that makes explicit neorealism’s claims not to realism but to faith and belief in the world.³

In this essay, I will employ the paradoxical concept of the immanent miracle to discuss cinema’s own magical aspirations to redeem reality. I will analyze the implications of cinema’s desire to realize the impossible and to reveal the world. What is an image that strives to be one with its object of representation? How does one recognize this miracle through which cinema aspires to become the world? And does the miraculous, as Ricciardi suggests, necessarily imply an escape from immanence, and from realism? These are the kinds of questions that I will address throughout my discussion of Stellet Licht, which I will read in conjunction with Benedict de Spinoza’s Ethics (posthumously published in 1677). Yet I won’t treat Reygadas’s film as a direct expression of Spinoza’s theory of immanence, because to label Stellet Licht as a “Spinozist” text would exclude other, more mystical interpretations of this film. Nor will I use Spinoza’s elaborate treatise on the emotions as an analytical tool to dissect the moral dilemma of Stellet Licht’s protagonist, a Mennonite farmer—because Johan’s problem is too classical for that: he has lost his heart to a woman other than his wife, the mother of his children. Still, Reygadas’s film shares a certain spirit with Spinoza’s philosophy. Not only would it be a mistake to conceive of Spinoza as a secular thinker, as Spinoza was offended by being called an atheist,⁴ but many of Spinoza’s friends and protectors were Mennonites.⁵ I therefore suggest that the miraculous time-image that is Reygadas’s film proves productive for an understanding of Spinoza’s third type of knowledge or intuition, especially in terms of the temporality that this knowledge, the blueprint of the immanent miracle, involves.

The concept of the time-image is of course drawn from Deleuze’s two Cinema books, which are both concerned with images of time. Whereas the movement-image, the subtitle of Cinema 1 (1983), refers to an indirect representation of time in which time is subjugated to movement, the time-image, the subtitle of Cinema 2 (1985), presents a direct, immediate image of time. Though Deleuze makes clear from the very beginning that his project “is...