Tremendom in Film- Viewing

03/20
The student is often isolated in the academic environment, cornered by columns and brick buildings in a space lacking in natural greenery.

In this season, it is easy to become disconnected from a grounded state. Deadlines, looming exams, classes, projects, meetings, invoke a sense of chaos, overwhelming obligation to the institutions, and disillusionment from nature.

I have found that a worldview consistent with dismissal of the sacred in favor of insistence upon “spatial homogeneity” as someone describes is a passive default state.

As Rudolph Otto writes, the tremendom is not something innate, but something that must be awakened. One powerful way of awakening this sensitivity is viewing film.

As Dr. Redick discusess in Explorations in Media Ecology,

"Extending the effects of print media into the present, and combining those effects with the explosion of electronic and digital communication technologies open us to reinterpreting classic myths and discovering new meaning therein."

Awareness of the spaces where the sacred disrupts the profane at intersections of axis mundi empowers such an awakening, and awakening enables the unveiling of disillusionment.

The student can find solace in this and look to discover disruptions of “spatial homogeneity” consistent with Otto’s tremendom.

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