It would be easy to begin talking about Dietrich Brüggemann’s Stations of the Cross in terms of what it presents on the surface. It is a harsh, examined critique of fundamental Catholicism, or, more broadly, the dangers inherent in an austere religiosity of any kind. The film has plenty to say about those issues, and it does so consummately. But its power lies under its surface. Stations of the Cross is a stark and beautiful corrective that serves as a testament to the transformative powers of both film and liturgy.
Noticeable from the first frame is Brüggemann’s formal approach. Following the framework of the titular Catholic devotional, the film is told in fourteen sequences. Each is meant to mirror the fourteen stations of Christ’s journey to his death. The scenes are expressed through tableau with the camera fixated as a still frame. Instead of a modern cinematic rhythm where dynamic camera movements and editing room acrobatics reign, tableau deals in the rhythms of patient theater. Lighting, blocking, actors’ movements, and setting are the primary modes of expression. When Brüggemann does eventually move his camera, it is certainly jarring. But those movements come later in the film when the framework has been well-established. It’s a way to reposition the tableau as the stakes of the narrative heighten.
The film’s story is fairly straightforward. Maria is a 14-year-old girl with a deep-abiding love for Jesus, yet her fervor is cultivated through the ascetic zeal of her fundamentalist Catholic upbringing. (Her family attends the Society of St. Paul denomination, which broke away from the Pope and Vatican after the Second Vatican Council.) The film centers its conceit around Maria’s impending confirmation. We observe interactions with her priest/teacher as Brüggemann initiates us into the rigor of this brand of the Christian faith. Her mother is a staunch believer, a histrionic woman wound so tightly by the functions of her faith that she constantly looks past those she loves–especially Maria.
The tete-a-tete between Maria and her mother is the primary stressor of the film. It’s the place where the tension of Maria’s authentic belief and that belief’s particular indoctrination is most severe. Maria is constantly bruised by the fear and penalties of her mother and her sect. As a Protestant, I have never truly understood the phrase “Catholic guilt” until I witnessed it at full rage in Maria’s life.
The imposition of the liturgical stations as a framework to understand this slice of Maria’s life adds a sense of inevitability to the film. We watch her in this rigid spiritual landscape where tableaux and dogma grip her. Cinematographer Alexander Sass’s 2.35:1 anamorphic framing seems to promise freedom at the margins of Maria’s life yet the rite of her Savior’s death looms over each act and reaction. Thus Brüggemann’s film serves as a way to understand the predetermined nature of human’s sacrifice as the audience witnesses Maria’s journey to understand the same. How does one truly live as Jesus did? Should we yearn for sainthood? If Christ is the final sacrifice, how are his followers to “take up their crosses?” The conundrum of sacrifice and saintliness weighs heavy on Maria, Brüggemann, and upon us as well.
As the film progresses, the structure of the film is layered in a way that each sequence builds and deconstructs prior expectations and knowledge. This is a film about surfaces, about anticipation, about preconceptions. Maria’s tale is richer through the discovery of a first viewing. But it’s also a film that will relinquish more of itself in subsequent viewings. It’s akin to liturgy that way.
The tableau of Stations of the Cross guts the modern cinematic form to get to the medium’s more primal days when cinema still had firm roots in theater. In doing this, this work not only resounds within the history of film but grabs ahold of its liturgical roots. Each scene is an extended take where characters move and transform. This is a milieu where physical objects are icons and words spoken conduct the world. These “living pictures” are like liturgical acts in that they are pregnant with anticipation. When the camera is still, the frames themselves are alive with life, and because this film has the structural conceit of a traditionally-known liturgy, it has an inherent sense of longing.
With each scene of Maria’s life, we understand more about its parallels to Jesus’ path. This forced perspective makes us reexamine our own position to Him as well. It’s a hyper-literal way of imposing religion and spirituality upon a human life, yet the approach clarifies how humans are meant to stand in relation to the divine. If this is cinema as liturgy then it witnesses that the Christian’s call to sacrifice is not founded on pure austerity. The way of the cross is wholly unique to Jesus. He was the One who was called to atone for sin through execution. His redemptive action was in anticipation of a world where the austere is cast aside, where His kingdom reigns and beauty is redeemed.
This truth is harrowingly echoed in a scene with Maria walking with her family by a luscious, pastoral landscape. Instead of basking in the beauty of nature, Maria declares she’d like to sacrifice the beautiful view. The sentiment is strange coming from her mouth, like an inhuman utterance where words are divorced from meaning. What she tragically doesn’t understand–and what moves her through life’s liturgy– is that the stations of the cross are a claim that Jesus was sacrificed so that beauty wouldn’t have to be. Jesus’ payment means that pleasure and beauty and goodness are something to be had and possessed here and now. In its bleak truths, Stations of the Cross seems to be affirming that declaration as well.