The Illuminated Room

Nathaniel Dorsky, Threnody (still), 2024. Courtesy of Nathaniel Dorsky.

This week we share an excerpt from Nathaniel Dorsky’s Devotional Cinema (Tendril Editions, 2025), a book that has become a touchstone for thinking about the perceptual and spiritual dimensions of film. In "The Illuminated Room," Dorsky turns to the history of vision, from medieval illumination to Renaissance perspective, to locate cinema between inner life and the visible world. 1

We view films in the context of darkness. We sit in darkness and watch an illuminated world, the world of the screen. This situation is a metaphor for the nature of our own vision. In the very process of seeing, our own skull is like a dark theater, and the world we see in front of us is in a sense a screen. We watch the world from the dark theater of our skull. The darker the room, the more luminous the screen.

It is important to understand what we’re participating in, to realize that we rest in darkness and experience vision. Many people take vision as a given and don’t realize that they are actually seeing.

Throughout history, there have been many different ideas about where vision takes place. The art of various eras seems to indicate this. In the Middle Ages there was a sense that the source of illumination wasn’t necessarily outside ourselves but that we were perhaps the source of that light, that our human experience might be compared to a luminous bubble suspended in darkness. Stained glass windows of that period were an expression of this, an echo of our self-luminosity. The cathedrals were dark, vast caverns with stained glass windows forming the surface of a world, a world of suspended illumination. There was no external world as such. After spending an extended period of time in the Cathedral of Notre-Dame at Chartres, for instance, one begins to see the world in that way. Upon exiting the cathedral we find ourselves attuned to this view, and see the visual world as self-luminous and resting on a profound vastness, the mysterious darkness of our own being.

During the Renaissance this idea of vision shifted and we began to understand the world as something more objectively outside ourselves. Cathedral windows became progressively more clear; the internal vastness vanished from the psyche and we began to understand the seen world as an objectively observed world, a total world. It is quite a change. We peer out toward a vanishing point. There is a new sense of science.

Where does vision take place? It is an age-old question. Is everything mind or is everything not mind? It is interesting to think that everything we see might be only an aspect of the mind. Sometimes I actually experience this: turning my head to look around, I realize that what I’m seeing is just an image field shifting, an aspect of my own brain. But then I can experience the opposite and say no, the world is really out there and I’m here looking at it. It’s really there and is not dependent on my seeing it.

But beyond these two extremes is our normal daily experience. We simply see. We cannot describe it but only experience it. Film, insofar as it replicates our experience of vision, presents us with the tools to touch on and elucidate that experience. Viewing a film has tremendous mystical implications; it can be, at its best, a way of approaching and manifesting the ineffable. This respect for the ineffable is an essential aspect of devotion.

When cinema can make the internalized medieval and externalized Renaissance ways of seeing unite and transcend themselves, it can achieve a transcendental balance. This balance point unveils the transparency of our earthly experience. We are afloat. It is a balance that is neither our vision nor the belief in exterior objectivity; it belongs to no one and, strangely enough, exists nowhere. It is within this balance that the potential for profound cinema takes place.

Less visionary cinema is imbalanced toward one or the other of these two ways of seeing. One imbalance assumes that the world is out there and you are going to photograph it. In this case there is no view whatsoever; the subject matter seems somehow just to exist. That the film is even a film is somewhat arbitrary. We see these movies every time we get on an airplane, or wander desperately into our local multiplex. This form of film ignores the very substance it is made of. There is certainly no awareness of the formal dignity of existence that we have been speaking about.

The other imbalance occurs when there is nothing but the view of the filmmaker, when nothing in the film is really permitted to exist in its own right. This single-mindedness eliminates the possibility of any autonomy within the film; the film has no ability to respond or resonate within itself. The filmmaker’s vanity dominates and controls. There is no freedom, no air to breathe. How often we experience this at a first-run art house or avant-garde venue.

These imbalances distort what life actually could be for humans. They are an inversion of the hierarchy of vision, language, and concept, a hierarchy that, if balanced properly, can sublimely inform our daily experience. That is, first we are in visual space, and then, within that three-dimensional context, we speak and declare. This space allows us to both see and feel the world more clearly—our heart softens and opens and our intuition is in place.

Films have the potential to mirror this clarity, but all too often represent spoken-language ideas rather than recognizing that concepts or spoken language are ornaments in the context of visual space. The ornament of language can point out, direct, specify, and describe the world, but it doesn’t see the world. Many films suffer from this distortion. Sometimes it is quite obvious. For instance, the syntax of the television-style documentary film, like that of the evening news, often turns the visual vitality of the world into mere wallpaper in support of spoken information. I think if Dante were writing the Inferno today, the first ring of Hell would be a large circular desk of newscasters.

There is an extremely subtle but significant difference between an image that is in itself a manifested act of seeing and one that uses vision to represent the world. One partakes in the living present and appreciates the world as something actually seen, while the other is secondary, a muted copy of the world. Many films are delicately subservient to an idea or theme and consequently the images are never allowed to exist as themselves. They illustrate a scripted, written reality or concept. Even if they are visual, they are self-consciously so. They represent another form, a literary one, rather than manifesting directly as vision. This subtle distortion of the vision-language hierarchy violates the primordial strength of what cinema has to offer. It flattens our reality and flattens out cinema. It is a far cry from the primordial ground of the illuminated room and the need for film to respect reality—the reality of being in the dark theater of our skull, observing incandescence.