God Exists in Cinema and Nowhere Else

I decided to interview Dumont in order to engage with a leading cinematic artist whose artistic viewpoint has resonance with my own research, which is concerned with creating artistic expression that shifts away from the dominance of cultural information towards experiential art. In this interview ‘God’ acts as a metaphor for sublimity in the Lyotardian sense of representing the unrepresentable, a notion that informs my own research in both sound and film art. I admire the work of Dumont due to his capacity to acknowledge the ‘spiritual’ a notion that in the early 21c tends to create a feeling of embarrassment when voiced in the context of discussions of cultural productions. The ‘spiritual’ sounds old fashioned today and has done for some decades, but that does not mean that ‘God is dead’ in the context of the arts. Dumont is one of only two filmmakers to be awarded the Grand Prix at Cannes twice. The other is Andrei Tarkovsky. Dumont's direction in cinema is influenced by his background in Greek and Western Philosophy. In common with Tarkovsky his attentions have moved closer to spiritual, mystic and religious notions within his cinema – both at a narrative and a formalist level.