Cinema of Transcendence, Cinema as Transcendence: Kundun

Abstract

During the play of colours that, near the close of The Last Temptation of Christ, figures the death of Jesus of Nazareth, there appear silhouettes of filmstrip edged with sprocket holes. Regarded by Christopher Sharrett the film’s ‘most self-reflexive’ gesture (1989: 29), the silhouettes, which complement the reflexive intimations of Jesus sitting, watching Magdalene like a cinema spectator, are besides of a piece with the material problematizing of the transcendental that informs The Last Temptation of Christ, in particular as they occur at the moment, from a religious perspective, of Jesus’s heavenwards ascension. Both the play of colours and the silhouettes of filmstrip resulted from the use of a ‘faulty’ camera to shoot Jesus’s crucifixion (Sangster 2002: 169). That the images were nevertheless included within the film invites consideration of the representation of the religious and spiritual within Martin Scorsese’s filmmaking.