Looking, seeing

A frame can surprise you with an element you didn’t realise was there. A new way of seeing is poignant and powerful

ON GOOD FRIDAY recently, I found myself desultorily watching a film called Risen. Another movie of no particular distinction, except that this belonged to a peculiar genre — the Easter Weekend biopic. The difference was this — Risen is not about Christ’s life and death, but, as the title suggests, what happened afterwards. On Friday, he was crucified. On Monday morning, his disciples, visiting the cave in which he’d been buried, found the rock covering the grave had been displaced; the body was gone. From this arose the legend that Christ had “risen”. To counter this, the priests who had condemned Christ claimed his followers had stolen the body.

The timings of the appearance of the risen Christ are contradictory. Some of them seem almost simultaneous; others are separated by a week. But it’s evident he was spotted many times. Recognition was invariably belated or retrospective. The most famous of the encounters has to do with two disciples walking to Emmaus, discussing, in fact, reports of the missing Christ, when they’re joined by a third man. This man is intent on walking on as they approach Emmaus, but is persuaded by the two disciples to break journey and eat.

It is while breaking bread at table that the men realise they are with Christ.

Perhaps the most beautiful pictorial representation of this instant of realisation is Rembrandt’s, mainly because of the painting’s restraint. Rembrandt wasn’t a bad painter, but he was a sublime draughtsman, and this work is closer to drawing than to oil painting in its simplicity and subtlety. Consequently, it’s attuned to the spiritual but momentary, miraculous but absurd, nature of its subject. It also eschews the sort of Hollywood fanfare that accompanies sightings of the Christ, parodied by the Coen Brothers in Hail, Caesar!

I went to a Protestant school in Mumbai; so I was naturally uninterested in Christianity. As with most Bengalis, Christmas was to me an opportunity for secular celebration. It’s only now that I feel deeply that it is perhaps the story of the resurrection that’s the most moving of the many stories about Christ, because, in it, he’s at once intimate and unfamiliar, tantalising and difficult to pinpoint. No obvious glory accompanies his return to life; Christ remains a man glimpsed among men.

That he’s only partly acknowledged is the most beautiful element of the narrative. Even before I’d given some thought to the story’s impact on me, I was aware of its possibilities from these lines in The Waste Land: “Who is the third who always walks beside you? / When I count, there are only you and I together / But when I look ahead up the white road / There is always another one walking beside you...” T.S. Eliot is referring to the explorer Ernest Shackleton’s reminiscence about an expedition in the Antarctic, when, at the end of their tether, the men were deluded into thinking there was an additional person among them. In an unprecedented convergence, Eliot conflates Shackleton’s observation with the walk to Emmaus.

While watching Risen, I found myself distracted by thoughts of photography. It was Sergio Larrain I was thinking of. Larrain is a great favourite of mine; his pictures of the derelict Chilean port, Valparaíso, taken in the sixties, can be studied repeatedly. But Larrain first came to my attention because of the story about his pictures of the Notre Dame Cathedral in Paris. After developing the photos, he found a couple in them he had no idea he was photographing. They were unwittingly captured in the frame. Julio Cortázar based his short story ‘The Devil’s Drool’ on this anecdote; Michelangelo Antonioni then took his cue from Cortázar’s tale when making his film, Blow Up. Set in South London, Blow Up is about a trendy photographer taking pictures in Marion Park which, when they’re developed, turn out to have a couple in them — a man is shooting a woman. This revelation leads to a quest that, evocatively, ends up nowhere.

Photography is the first art form that doesn’t so much represent reality as contain its impress. A photograph is proof that something happened. Yet, Larrain’s pictures of the Notre Dame (like Antonioni’s film) tell us that reality comprises not only what’s there, but what you hadn’t known, until later, was present.

Larrain isn’t, like Henri Cartier-bresson, enshrining a “decisive moment” in time. He’s pointing to what can’t be fully understood when first encountered. Both he and Antonioni are exploring a “way of seeing” whose lineage goes back to the resurrection and the curious sightings of Christ. Something has entered the frame that’s material but uncanny; it’s difficult to categorise, but it gives the picture a radical significance.

Roland Barthes’ short book on photography, Camera Lucida, states that the photo has two properties. The first Barthes calls the “studium”. This could be defined by the conventional subject of the photo — what we instantly recognise as its content. In a studio portrait, it’s the family or person in the frame, in a journalistic photo, it’s the bit of news the picture encapsulates. The second property is, for Barthes, what translates the photo into the realm of the aesthetic-spiritual; it gives it an unsuspected power. He calls it the “punctum”. It’s a detail in the photo that may be unrelated to its principal content but which, once noticed, can’t be ignored.

While defining it, Barthes’ language has a subterranean undertow that echoes the bewilderment at the sightings of Christ, of not knowing him at first, and then of recognition: the “punctum is that accident which pricks me (but also bruises me, is poignant to me)”. Once spotted, it’s transformative, but the source of its influence can’t be fully accounted for: “In order to perceive the punctum, no analysis would be of any use to me...” The meaning of the sighting may not be immediately plain: “Nothing surprising, then, if sometimes, despite its clarity, the punctum should be revealed only after the fact, when the photograph is no longer in front of me and I think back on it.”

This refers us back to the anomalous period of transit in which Christ was seen and fitfully identified — the brief time between his crucifixion, appearance, and final vanishing.

Amit Chaudhuri is a novelist, essayist and musician. His new novel is ‘Friend of My Youth’