Sublime Dreams

"Sublimity... produced at the right moment, tears everything up like a whirlwind, and exhibits the orator's whole power in a single blow." 

Longinus, On Sublimity  

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I must admit, this week’s discussion on the sublime, as well as the first group presentation using YouTube clips of examples of sublimity, was not only the most interesting class session so far, but also the one that made the greatest impact on me personally.

What I thought was the greatest point of discussion this week was the idea of something being sublime having vastly different explanations or set of examples for each individual person. For example, during our class discussion, one student mentioned that he couldn’t really see the sublimity in the clip from Akira Kurosawa’s film Dreams. Now, I’ve watched this movie before for a Introduction to Film class I took a few years ago, for which I did my final research paper on the New Wave moment in Japanese cinema, so I knew the context of just that short piece we watched during the presentation. Dreams is a series of eight short vignettes, which are based on stories and pictures actually dreamt by Kurosawa. Each shorter piece of the film incorporates particular New Wave elements – such as unresolved endings, little to no dialogue, and a focus on “showing” aspects of plot and character rather than “telling” – so there’s a greater emphasis on the “painterly” moments rather than a complex storyline.

Granted, I don’t think that movies were what Longius had it mind when he discussed sublime moments. Most of his arguments are based around aspects that have to do with spoken performance – i.e. great speeches and oratory moments that inspire and provoke the listener – or the great literature that moves the reader. For example, in On Sublimity, he raises the example of Sappho’s description of love, in which she says that “When I see you only for a moment, I cannot speak; my tongue is broken, a subtle fire runs under my skin; my eyes cannot see, my ears hum…. I am paler than grass; I seem near to dying; but all must be endured” (140). Longius points to this as a sublime moment because she “brings everything together – mind and body, hearing and tongue, eyes and skin” (140). She is using the written word to appeal to more than one facet of a reader/listener’s emotions, as well as invoking a number of different emotions rather than just a single one. Love is complex; it may make the sufferer giddy with joy, or burdened with longing, or depressed with heartbreak. Sappho, in just a short span, works to reference all these different feelings in order to describe to the reader the gut-wrenching, physical ache of being in love, and I agree that this is a sublime moment. Love is the disease that affects all men and women. Sublimity contains “much food for reflection… [it is] difficult or rather impossible to resist, and makes a strong and ineffaceable impression on the memory” (138) much in the same way that we could describe love.  

Returning briefly to Kurosawa’s Dreams and the clip with the little boy: within the right context (i.e. seeing the whole film rather than just the short section shown in class), I think it is a perfect example of a sublime moment. The other student in class claimed that the ending of the vignette “Sunshine Through the Rain” where the little boy walks off through a field of flowers to the rainbow couldn’t really be considered sublime because it didn’t really elicit any emotion for him. True, flowers, rainbows and an innocent in awe of nature are all cliché aspects of film meant to try to conjure up emotional responses from the audience members and I agree that just seeing that short piece perhaps isn’t enough to create such a moment that would be “sublime”. However, the little boy has been sent to that field in order to beg forgiveness from the fox spirits of the woods, after disobeying his mother’s orders not to watch their ceremony. She claims that he either must kill himself or seek out the foxes, and the last image of this small boy, laden by the fear he must feel on going out in the woods alone, walking off to rectify his impulsive actions is troubling, emotional and – dare I say it – sublime because it shows us the power of forces larger than our individual selves. I see the rainbow and I don’t immediately think “cliché” – I like to think “redemption, rejuvenation and restoration of honor”. And I think those actions say something about being human and making mistakes. To see a little figure in that great field walking towards the unknown – whether it’s his death or salvation – extorts strong emotional responses that are impossible to ignore.  

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