copyright 2025, Jump Cut: A Review of Contemporary Media,
Jump Cut, No. 63, summer 2025

Subjective experience, transcendence and narratives, and repressive institutions:
a phenomenological approach for Werner Herzog’s Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans (2009) and Luca Guadagnino's Suspiria (2018)

by Yannis Mitsou
 
This essay explores the depiction of police states, through Werner Herzog’s Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans (2009) and Luca Guadagnino’s Suspiria (2018), two cinematic depictions influenced by both modernist subjectivism (in the film noir tradition) and transcendental visual and narrative traditions. I use the term “transcendence” here not in its religious but in its existential connotations, exploring the tendency of an individual towards Otherness and by extension freedom, against the limitations of both inner and institutional repressive forces.

In Bad Lieutenant Herzog expresses otherness through visual motifs against the background of a sinking city (both literally—the action takes place in New Orleans after the Hurricane Katrina, and figuratively) and Guadagnino does so through the ambiguous idea of magic in Suspiria. Unlike Dario Argento’s original 1977 film, witchcraft for Guadagnino is to be understood as both a liberating political power and an institutional oppressive power, similar to fascism or rather neo-liberal regimes, if one takes into consideration the emphasis on individuality encouraged throughout the film. In contrast to the cathartic fire in the end of Argento’s film, Suspiria’s ending here indicates the institution survives and evolves into a guarding force similar to the Catholic Church (“We need guilt, Doctor. And shame. But not yours”). Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans, is again a variation on an older narrative, Abel Ferrara’s Bad Lieutenant. Herzog replaces the original’s religious emphasis with a guilt towards those oppressed in social reality—African Americans and a Mexican immigrant who appears in the first and the last scene and whose story frames the film.

What both films seem to share is their phenomenological emphasis on the senses, on corporeality as a way to approach social reality. Their political contradictions notably lie in their tendency to identify with the oppressing character or institution rather than the oppressed party. This comes through the narrative voice and is not without interest in itself.

Depictions of police states: the corporeal and the subjective

A man in a scarlet jacket has just been shot, in Louisiana during a confrontation. “Shoot him again’’ the main character insists, as the sound of a harmonica already gives us the sense of a subjective, vaguely surreal, experience. “What for?” one of the gangsters asks, slightly annoyed with the eccentric request. “His soul is still dancing,’’ Terence McDonagh (Nicolas Cage), the Bad Lieutenant, insists. Next to the dead body moves an apparently younger man representing the soul, in the same deep colored jacket and a mohawk, unconventional in appearance and passionate almost erotic in his freedom, powerful in a way we could never suspect the dead gangster to be. He is literally breakdancing, giving an air of spirituality and joyful celebration to the scene. Werner Herzog’s film is visually playing here not so much with the idea of mortality (the obvious interpretation) as with the motif of life as art, lived experience as a constant dance. What is the stance of the main character who apparently represents police corruption, brutality and abuse towards such an ideal?

In this scene the metaphysical aspects are carefully linked to subjective perception. In Luca Guadagnino’s Suspiria, on the other hand, irrationality takes the form of actual practice of witchcraft, seen objectively, as a historical phenomenon. It is linked from the very first image of the film to political action. On screen we see a girl approaching the safe space of her psychiatrists’ office, during a rainy afternoon, while an anti-capitalist protest in support of the Baader-Meinhof Group takes place, in 1977 Berlin. Later, gradually, as we shall see, witchcraft is linked to repression, the opposite tendency.

I look at these two films as representing a police state in a way influenced by both modernist subjectivism (in the film noir tradition) and transcendental visual and narrative traditions. I use the term “transcendence” here, not in its religious but in its existential connotations, exploring the tendency of an individual towards Otherness and by extension freedom, against the limitations of both inner and institutional repressive forces.

A quest for freedom dominates both film narratives and yet it is in their contradictions, thematical and ideological, that what they express becomes more vibrant, more personal to their creators. An implied threat lies at the heart of both film narratives. A threat we can describe as suspiciously familiar, taken not from the gothic tradition or the realm of fantasy, but directly from the world of everyday life, at least life as experienced by the socially conscious individual or the artistically inclined one. Giving priority to the senses is indeed a fascination the two narratives consistently share with their phenomenological concerns and their return to an existential idea of living intensely or “poetically.”

Both directors consider living consciously closely related to artistic experience with the perception of life, the ordinary, read as a creative act in itself. I use the term living consciously here as Andrei Tarkovsky defines it in his Sculpting in Time: Poetry, in this context, is not to be understood as a genre of literature but rather as a dynamic way for the individual to approach reality and reconcile themself with it, through trust in memory and through an active sensitivity to the outside world.[1] [open endnotes in new window] Another approach, not radically different but more focused on semiotics and the formal aspects of the idea of “poetry” is one suggested by Pier Paolo Pasolini in his essay Cinema of Poetry, which he first read in Italian in June 1965 at the first New Cinema Festival at Pesaro. Pasolini’s memorable description of the world of signs, by extension of cinema in itself, as a world of “memory and of dream” (Pasolini, 1976) clearly offers an understanding of poetic experience as expressed in the visual explorations of these two films.

The political connotations of such a seemingly individualistic exploration may often seem enigmatic. Yet phenomenology would reconcile the observer with the world of everyday life, through an emphasis on the flesh. That is a concern expressed notably by Maurice Merleau- Ponty, who carefully and repeatedly links visual perception with creativity and even artistic production, art with life. Here he offers a valuable theoretical context in my reading of the two films. Without negating the quest of a subject, phenomenology gives emphasis to an intended interaction with otherness and seeks meaning in this procedure, not in some pre-determined realm of reality, nor in the eye of the beholder. Works like Phenomenology of Perception (1945)share with Suspiria and Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans an emphasis on the flesh [2] as a means to experience oneself and a belief in lived experience as a reconciliation between the subject that observes and the world as the object of this observation. My main argument is that in both films, a desired transcendence is achieved through the flesh, through the conscious focus of both the narrative structure and the imagery on the human body. The need for the artist to observe and inhabit the world poetically, in the literal verbal sense, is creatively a natural extension of this corporeal priority. Corporeality and transcendence, an emphasis on sensual reality and a desire to exceed it, structure both films.

My understanding of violence is influenced by the ideas of Hannah Arend, whose book On Violence (1970) seems particularly close to what is depicted in Suspiria. We need to understand violence to understand the police state but that is not approached literally in Guadagnino’s or Herzog’s narrative choice. In these films violence does not necessarily coexist with the power structures; [3] sometimes it is narrated as repressive force, other times associated with either personal or social revolt. In the context of the two films, what distinguishes violence from its traditional framing is the Bacchic, ecstatic element attributed to it.

Although Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans precedes Suspiria by nine years, here I follow a thematic rather than chronological approach. Thus Guadagnino’s film, with its more operatic form and relatively conventional structure, will be the first to be discussed. The essay concludes with the more consciously philosophical exploration of similar themes, performed under a different cultural light by Herzog. Some open questions to explore are related to the nature of the relation between corporeality and transcendence in the two films:

• In the absence of a literal police force in Suspiria (the presence of an unsuccessful officer whose humiliation has more to do with the depiction of medieval male sexual fears about femininity) is it safe to perceive Witchcraft, historically often persecuted, as a similar force? Is it institutional in nature, in the context of the plot of the film?
• Is sensuality, as a common motif between the two films, liberating or misleading? Could it even be perceived as repressive?
• What exactly is the relation between corporeality and transcendence in the context of the two films? Not only as theoretical concepts, but also as narrative choice.
• What is the importance of storytelling in Bad lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans? Is it related to dream imagery?
• Is the fact that both films depict characters who could be described as authority figures as artistically sensitive and conscious in their thirst for lived experience ideologically charged in itself? How does this characterization influence the two films’ understanding of power structures and the actual possibility of a repressive police state?

Such questions are interrelated and to explore them constitutes my interpretive attempts rather than absolute declarations. What they seem to share as a philosophical concern is their thematic communication and their phenomenological concern about the relations between subjectivity and otherness.

Transcendental self-expression and artistic creation in Luca Guadagnino’s Suspiria

Suspiria closely links transcendental self-expression and artistic creation, two concepts visually expressed through the depiction of a highly ritualistic dance: Volk, a Bacchic performance that replaces the (limited as a screen presence) classical ballet of the original Dario Argento 1977 film. Deprived of the directly religious or metaphysical connotations associated with this term in Christian existentialism,[4] transcendence” here is to be understood as a conscious attempt of a subject to approach otherness—in Suspira, the enigmatic American Susie Bannion (Dakota Johnson), a stranger in Berlin. Her intended movement towards self-achievement and expression is also directly linked with the creation of new realities, thus “poetry” in its literal sense of making or constructing new aspects of life. Artistic production is linked to lived experience. Albert Camus, when describing some archetypal “absurd heroes”, focuses on the actor, the individual that redefines and re-invents itself, through performance, every night. (Camus, The Myth of Sisyphus 1942), 73. In this light, the performative aspects of life are not an escape from reality but an active participation in it.

A link between phenomenological and existential readings of the term transcendence is to be sought exactly in this balance, this blurring of barriers between art and life. Luca Guadagnino’s body of work, echoing both Victorian aestheticism and Luchino Visconti’s operatic emphasis on the appearance of things as an ideal in itself, consciously follows this visual and thematic tradition. Here an intended transcendence would liberate the subject from barriers set by outward forces and, at the same time, re-create or re-interpret reality through art. Dance, in its emphasis on movement and t corporeal experience and a similarity to flight, perfectly summarizes these ideas.  

Witchcraft for Guadagnino seems to me, first and foremost a stand-in for this tendency to fulfill oneself and live everyday reality in artistic terms. Destructive, sensual and healing at the same time, Volk, the ritual dance of the Witches gives rise to realizing the need for a conscious self-fulfillment. Thus, for the participants at least, it becomes a political act in itself.

At the same time, it should be noted that in Suspiria, transcendence, a key existentialist concept, is often a contradictory force. Contradictory, in the sense that the film, both visually and thematically, depicts it as both as empowering and repressive. It is empowering in its depiction as an erotic, archaic and yet politically relevant force, alluding to both Sartrean ideas and a passionate belief in subjectivism suggested by 18th century romanticism. It is repressive in its actual regulation in the plot.

Repressions and contradictions in Suspiria

In contrast to the fairy tale, dream-like openness of Argento’s Suspiria, Guadagnino’s Suspiria presents transcendence as one more step in a search for a selected “family” that replaces the conservative placing at birth, the search for a group of individuals that share the same ideology and mentality. Berlin, and by extension, the educated, cosmopolitan, politically palpating and culturally sensitive Europe of the 1970s, is to be understood as the antithesis to the religious fanatism of the U.S. Amish community that Susie grew up with. In particular, the eroticism of the Dance Academy is carefully contrasted to the close-mindedness of the smaller community. And yet this liberating journey leads not to absolute freedom but to the formation of a new social structure, an actual institution that “guards” society’s dreams and fears through violence, thus exemplifying a human tendency towards cruelty: What appears as a feminist, politically conscious and artistically sensitive commune is also to be understood as a spiritual, not overtly religious cult, founded on a concept of guilt, as clearly and verbally expressed by Susie in the epilogue :

“We need guilt, Doctor. And shame. But not yours.”

The film is ambivalent in its stance towards an apparently repressive institution. Violence seemingly is the means to achieve fulfilment, a choice implied throughout the film and clearly expressed in the climactic Sabbath scene.

In Argento’s original movie this repressive, violent aspect of the Dance Academy is expressed through a declared, passionate repression against the autonomy of the young female students’ bodies and by extension against individuality. That was Argento’s main thematic concern and primal interpretation of the concept of witchcraft. In contrast, the more liberating associations attributed to the ritualistic performative act of Volk, not present in the original 1977 film, seem to resonate with Guadagnino’s conscious return to various personal themes and motifs: the eroticism, the emphasis on the sensual corporeal experience and an operatic intensity of feeling.

In contrast to the original Suspiria, the film takes up the platonic and neo-platonic tradition of love-as-pedagogy and teaching as an erotic communication; themes whose queer associations had already been explored by Guadagnino in Call Me by Your Name (2017). The development of a relationship between an older homosexual lover (erastes) and a younger “receptive” one (eromenos), a constant motif in Greek myth, is re-interpreted and echoed in Suspiria as a dual scheme of ritualistic teaching in the sharing of a common liberating, erotic experience in the bonding that develops gradually between Susie and Madame Blanc (Tilda Swinton).The intense relationship between the two women is depicted as both erotic and pedagogical, exactly like the affair between Elio and Oliver in Call me by your name. Personal liberation is associated with communication and sensuality.

An inevitable elitism or contempt for those uncultivated and unable to participate in this powerful liberating dynamic like Caroline (Gala Moody,) the victim of a curse, is also evident in the narrative. Transcendence for Guadagnino, for all its existential theoretical roots, is not only related to personal self-expression but also clearly elitist in character, linked with a kind of personal sensitivity shared between kindred spirits that excludes those unable to participate in it—thus the importance of the creation of protective erotic bonds as a motif.

This elitist element becomes apparent in the ending. In the 1977 film, Susie (Jessica Harper) laughs, devoid of any feelings of guilt, in the rain, as the Institution is burnt to the ground. In 2018’s Suspiria the institution is carefully preserved. After all, “We need guilt (…) And shame”. If something is implied in Susie’s laughter in Argento’s last shot, it is that we don’t need guilt of any kind. The later film’s insistence on a notion of guilt is tied to the need for moral guidance and protection. The film even gives a positive light to what could be described as a repressive institution–even if based on apparently progressive concepts like the return to ecstatic corporeality and artistic sensitivity, political awareness and an existential focus on lived experience.

Before I turn attention to Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans (2009) I would mention the importance of two key thematic elements that lie at the heart of Luca Guadagnino’s Suspiria. As we shall see, both films share these elements in developing a theme about the balance between corporeality and transcendence. The political factor, that is, the presence of violent institutions and power structures, seem interwoven with these motifs.

The first motif is that of the ecstatic dance. Dance is seen as a political radical act because of the priority it gives to the human body (what Camus calls “the “revolt of the flesh"[5]) and because of the ideal of intense lived experience it expresses. In film we can see both the liberating Bacchic aspects of dance and its political connotations in the ecstatic dance of a street jester (Rolan Bykov) in an iconic scene in Tarkovsky’s Andrei Rublev (1966).The jester—whose tongue is later ripped out as a punishment for his heretic song, mirroring in a dark way Rublev’s later vow of silence—seems to embody pre-Christian ideas in a Christian world as he gives expression to secret, sometimes even menacing, yearnings through his Bacchic dance. At the same time, he is an undoubtedly modern creation, echoing once more Camus’ ideal of the artist as the perfect manifestation of the absurd. And he’s clearly a politically important figure in his existential self-expression and later persecution. The whole concept of the ecstatic dance returns in Suspiria and will find a clearly transcendental incarnation in Herzog’s film, where it will be linked more directly to spiritual yearning (“His soul is still dancing!”).

The second motif that the films share is the importance they place on dreams and dream structures. Dreams’ relation to existential and phenomenological readings of art, architecture and reality has usefully been explored by Juhanni Pallasmaa (Pallasmaa, 2008). In these two films, approaching life visually, as a dream, takes us to back to a belief in experiencing the word primarily through the senses; by extension, a return to cinema in itself.

A transcendental process: sensuality, dream elements and
perception of life in Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans

Like Suspiria, Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans, apparently takes direct inspiration from an older film, Abel Ferrara’s Bad Lieutenant (1992) despite Werner Herzog’s unconvincing claims to the contrary. The plot similarities are apparent. Similar to the two versions of Suspiria, the films differ in their concept of guilt. Ferrara’s narrative is built around the idea of an intended redemption and, in a Dostoyevskian tradition, it ties this journey to a lonely individual wandering in a hostile environment. Ferrara’s idea of redemption is religious (Catholic); thus, it takes for granted a platonic or neo-platonic conception that the world of the flesh is an illusion and gradual redemption comes through escaping flesh’s numerous temptations and will lead towards interiority and self-discovery.

Werner Herzog’s spirituality can be interpreted as mystical or even sensual, ecstatic, built on the experiences of the body and of everyday perception. Perception in itself, is to be understood as a corporeal process. Guilt plays undoubtedly an important role in Herzog’s worldview as well, but it is linked more to a need for a conscious participation in everyday life, an existential call for living authentically, rather than to a traditional moral system.

The very first shot of Herzog’s film is the image of a snake, swimming alone in dark, dirty waters. Very soon we will come to realize the action takes place in an abandoned police station in a post hurricane Katrina, deserted New Orleans. Visually though, this image in itself, nature invading a previous urban environment, a lonely serpent that struggles to find its way in unknown waters, summarizes the film’s narrative and thematic structure.

The first action of Terence McDonagh (Nicholas Cage) is indeed a traditionally “good” deed, saving a drowning Mexican prisoner, an act that will result in McDonagh’s subsequent injury and later gradual physical and mental downfall. The incident will also frame the film, as McDonagh will meet that person again in a final reconciliation. That ending is notably absent from the original script but here is one of his numerous encounters with socially oppressed people, notably the five illegal immigrants from Senegal, whose murder by the local mafia initiates the plot.

The film blurs dream and reality, subjectivity and participation in existing social structures, as well as trust in intuition over rationality. Such blurred psychic spaces clearly play a role in in the spoon incident, a childhood memory shared with Frankie (Eva Mendes) about quixotic quests and unfulfilled promises. Again, this is a scene added by Herzog, not present in the William M. Finkelstein screenplay.

While Herzog does not abandon his documentary influences (seen in the highly ritualistic funeral sequence), more memorable are dream-like situations and spoken questions (“Do fish have dreams”?) that give the film an air of sadness. For example, the inclusion of a child’s poem next to the first crime scene (“my friend is a fish,he lives in my room, his fin is a cloud he see me when i sleep”) seems to tie together the narrative’s dominant motifs. In their combination, they often give the feeling of a fever dream to what otherwise could be perceived as a script full of predictable action and succession of events and generic conventions. Those motifs are:

• animalistic motifs associated with the ecstatic. Herzog makes various visual references to fish, alligators, snakes, and even iguanas.
• return to childhood and its courageous feelings of amazement as a poetic, artistically sensitive way to approach otherness. The child’s phenomenological focus on observation.
• water, giving the environment a constant, literal fluidity. The motif of a sinking town in a noir environment perhaps has roots in Chinatown (Roman Polansky,1974), where we have the opposite motif: the lack of water, the idea of a thirsty city (‘’Los Angeles is dying of thirst”).

The plot also structures events around hallucinogens and other psychedelic drugs, but that seems to me like an excuse for the inclusion of powerful surreal visuals rather than a realist depiction of a modern urban environment. On the contrary, the film’s archaic, ritualistic, irrational elements seem to allude to an intended ecstatic flight, an intended transcendental process.

Physicality and poetic fantasy in Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans.   
Herzog’s social conscience.

As I observe Terence McDonagh’s existential journey, I would like to draw attention to moments that help us clarify the film’s ideological and philosophical focus. It has a scheme of corporeality and transcendence that I already discussed in relation to Suspiria, and it uses those themes in a way that differentiates it the plot about male anxiety and a religious pilgrimage towards salvation traced in Ferrara’s 1992 Bad Lieutenant.

In contrast to Ferrara’s Christian existentialism, according to which transcendence allows escape from the limitations of the human body, Herzog links observation of the world to corporeal experiences, in particular through the film’s emphasis on physical pain, absent in the original script. It is McDonagh’s back pain, not in a symbolic but literal dimension, that motivates the plot. This physicality is also found in the erotic relationship between the two main characters, tender, built on verbal communication, earthy (and devoid of Ferrara’s tying sexuality to sin). Herzog then ties that eroticism to the more complex phenomenological notion of sensuality which lie at the heart of the film. Poetic fantasy (The question “Do fish have dreams?”, a Quixotic search for the spoon) are linked here with artistic production and such fantasy is carefully implied as the natural culmination of a policeman’s search. 

Of course, violence and identification with the state, as negative forces, are also part of police investigation. The difference between Suspiria and Bad Lieutenant when it comes to depicting police work and power structures in general depends on the fact that for Herzog police violence is a Dionysian, destructive aspect of transcendental experience, haunting rather than reassuring, important as a liberating step towards the self-fulfillment of the already tormented subject, rather than a gift for society as a whole. It is definitely related to individual experience, not something to be actively sought and protected by a collective institution.

Do the two films offer any possibility for revolt or resistance? Suspiria depicts acts of political violence, not necessarily in a negative light, yet understands them, stately, as ways for self-expression rather than as possible alternatives or threats to the status quo:

“She wanted to live her beliefs. Who doesn't admire that? And there's so much to change in the world. If she wants to live in a cellar filling bottle with petrol, that's her choice. And who won't be heartbroken if she's shot by police”.

The ideological role of the Dance Academy is never too clear. For example, are the witches, even the Blanc fraction to be understood as progressive spirits or regressive in their identity and intentions? That plot development makes the film’s political stance even more enigmatic. Overall, the ecstatic dance and the sensuality it stands for, depicted as a way to communicate with the world, is seen as a personal, rather than social, possible revolt. Bad Lieutenant, more unapologetically and in accordance with the subjectivism of both film noir and existentialism, once more seems to deny such a political possibility outside the realm of inner life. And yet, the film’s social consciousness makes such contradictions appear intentional, relevant to the natural limitations of the main character.

Another Herzog film, Cobra Verde (1987), closes with a lyrical promise of a future awakening of those who are oppressed, a promise visually linked to the ecstatic. Even if such a clear statement is not to be found on the melancholy vibes of the journey depicted in Bad Lieutenant. the priority placed on perception and a concern for otherness, two concepts the film is built on, built steadily towards advocating authentic living and social sensitivity. The question, ‘’Do Fish have dreams?’’, this desire to come in terms with unsuspected dreams of other entities can be interpreted as the complete opposite of the “need for guilt and shame” declared by Susie in Suspiria. Guilt for Herzog is to be understood in its social rather than religious associations. It’s not a goal in itself, nor a unifying factor that holds society together, as Susie implies; Bad Lieutenant’s guilt encourages him to live consciously and come in terms with otherness.

Final thoughts: corporeality, transcendence and the police state

Corporeality and transcendence, as relative rather than opposite forces, express a phenomenological emphasis on the flesh and a desire to define oneself in relation to the world of everyday life. It’s not necessarily an opposition to the world, but clearly an agonizing approach. Reconciliation with the environment is actually suggested in both films, even if the two filmmakers understand such “reconciliation” in different ways. This kind of reconciliation is violent but necessary for Guadagnino, the only way to approach an aestheticist poetic quality of life in a hostile climate. For the more optimistic Herzog, it is melancholy, but creative, poetic in itself.

The police state in Suspiria is more powerful than ever. Not in the sense of actual state power but in symbolic representation, as a necessary way to guard one’s dreams and inner fears. Suspiria fantasizes an educated, sensitive elite, nevertheless built on surveillance and violence, that gives expression to personal needs and even helps empowering artistic inclinations to find fulfilment. The positive light under which violence is glorified, the contempt for the weaker, and the ecstatic romantic iconography (destruction as art) seem to evoke Susan Sontag’s Fascinating Fascism, written in 1974, during the period where the film takes place. And yet a question mark remains when it comes to ascertaining the moral stance of the film—Is Susie to be perceived as a positive heroine after all? Or an enigmatic figure not unlike Patricia Highsmith’s charming and yet destructive individuals? For me, this ambiguity makes the above often contradictory themes and motifs complicated and fascinating, rather than dogmatic.

In Bad Lieutenant: Port of call New Orleans understanding a police state is once more linked to ecstatic dance, experiencing reality as a dream, and a journey towards self-discovery. Not unlike Antonioni’s Blow-up, the narrative and the protagonist’s wandering don’t necessarily lead to an answer but rather indicate the openness of possibilities in the world. Irony here is even clearer than it is in Suspiria. And both films use a narrative about the necessity of violence not as a joyful resolution but with an unmistakable air of sadness. 

Collectively the two texts share a phenomenological emphasis on the senses, on corporeality as a way to experience reality, and they consciously avoid giving concrete answers in the fundamental questions they raise. And yet one feels a certain freedom that is consistent to their mythic quality. It’s found in this openness, this acceptance of contradictions, even political contradictions, or this clear tendency to identify with the oppressing character or institution, rather than the oppressed party. That’s a vital part of both the social structure and their narrative world. The films depict the threat of a police state, or even, to borrow the term from Sontag, the fascinating hypnotic aspects that such a state could well present in other contexts. Here that threat is linked to a quest for subjective experience. That motif unites these two stories, seemingly so different in their aesthetic references. Under such a light, the two films' often contradictory but always palpating visual and theoretical themes; their call for freedom and the phenomenological sensitivity they focus on as well as the importance they give to the human body; what they state, and what they choose not to state; what they imply—all these become even more relevant to us in times of both subjective anxieties and constant social concern.

Notes

References

Arendt, H. (1970). On Violence. New York: Harcourt Brace Javanovich.

Camus, A. (1942) The Myth of Sisyphus. London: Penguin Modern Classics.

Kierkegaard, S.(1983/ 1843). Fear and Trembling/Repetition : Kierkegaard's Writings, Vol. 6. Princeton: Princeton University Press; Revised ed.

Merleau-Ponty, M.(1962) Phanomenology of perception. New York: Routledge.

Pallasmaa, J. (2008). The architecture of image: existential space in Cinema. London and New York: Rakennustieto Publishing.

Pasolini, P. P. (1976). The Cimema of Poetry. Movies and Methods, Volume 1, University of California Press, pp. 542-558.

Rolli, M. "Immanence and transcendence." Bulletin de la Societe Americaine de Philosophie de Langue Francais- Volume 14, Number 2., Fall 2004.

Tarkovsky, A. (1989)Sculpting in Time. Austin, Texas: University of Texas Press.

Whal, J.(2017) Transcendence and the Concrete: Selected Writings. New York: Fodham University Press.