Contemplating Law,Film and Mennonites

I. Introduction

Hearing the word “Mennonites” can conjure up an image of sombrely dressed, plain Caucasian people, wearing head coverings, suspenders and long dresses, and driving black buggies. There are 2.1 million Mennonites worldwide and the largest concentration of them live in Canada. Mennonites are Protestant Christians with a very strong commitment to adult baptism and pacifism. Most Canadian and American Mennonites are indistinguishable from other citizens. However, some Mennonites still do dress distinctively and are therefore confused with Amish people, or the Pennsylvania Dutch in the USA, or with Hutterites in Canada, but they are in the minority. Today there are more Black Mennonites than White, due to missions in Africa, and there are even some famous Mennonites: JC Chasez, singer for N’SYNC; Henry Friesen, the endocrinologist who discovered Prolactin; Cindy Klassen, five-time Olympic medallist; Jonathan Toews, NHL hockey player; John Denver, folk singer; Dwight D. Eisenhower, thirty-fourth President of the United States; Malcolm Gladwell, bestselling author; Matt Groening, creator of The Simpsons; and the founders of the J.M. Smucker, Kraft Foods and Hershey companies. Despite this, however, Mennonites are underrepresented in legal literature and non-existent in Law and Film projects. In this article I will remedy that omission and undertake a Law and Film analysis of Carlos Reygadas’ contemplative, fictitious film, Stellet Licht or Silent Light. ¹

Carlos Reygadas is a well-regarded Mexican film director who was raised in the Catholic faith. Stellet Licht is the first film made in the medieval German/Prussian dialect, Plautdietsch, or Low German, and filmed in an Old Order (very conservative) Mennonite colony called Campos Menonitas in Cuauhtémoc, Mexico. I chose this film because it is unique and award-winning. Stellet Licht won the jury prize at Cannes in 2007, Time Magazine calls Stellet Licht a masterpiece, ² and in 2017 ³ and in 2019 ⁴ it was named one of the best films of the 21st century. The uniqueness of this film – that it is about Mennonites and is filmed in a medieval language – and that it has won prestigious awards, makes it an excellent choice for Law and Film analysis. It broadens the Law and Film canon, both in terms of films and in terms of groups of people studied. My close reading of Stellet Licht will provide insights into law, patriarchy and reconciliation ⁵ in a Mexican Mennonite community that readers will be able to take into their own worlds.

Mexican Mennonites are a “peculiar white minority” in Mexico, who deliberately separate themselves from the larger population, and are known for making cheese. ⁶ The most conservative Canadian prairie Mennonites emigrated to Mexico and Paraguay in the 1920s in search of religious and educational freedom. ⁷ They came for promised land and religious freedom, but “hardship followed, as subsistence farming combined with a burgeoning population and poor education.” ⁸ In Mexico they maintained their language, Plautdietsch, and their conservative dress, and do so to this day. Graybill and Arthur’s contention that dress is a way patriarchal authority and social control are maintained ⁹ is true for Mexican Mennonites. Today, there are approximately 100,000 Mennonites in Mexico and most are farmers. They are the ethno-religious group who feature in Stellet Licht.

In this article, I embark upon an ethnographically inspired Law and Film project of “reading” Carlos Reygadas’ 2007 film Stellet Licht. My goal is to draw conclusions about law, patriarchy and reconciliation. Twenty years ago, Chris Barker commented that “ethnography has become a code-word for a range of qualitative methods.” ¹⁰ I am not conducting an actual ethnographic study. Rather, I too use “ethnography” as a code word, and add “spirit,” “sensibility” and “posture.” Thus, my Law and Film project is undertaken in an ethnographic spirit because I want to try to understand Mexican Mennonites and law in context. Following Uwe Flick, ¹¹ I believe that descriptive, ethnographically-inspired Law and Film research is a specific research attitude. This attitude focuses more on the researcher’s reflective posture to the research question, than upon a specific technical approach; the attitude of the researcher toward the subject is most important. ¹² This is akin to a cultural legal studies sensibility. Ien Ang says a cultural studies sensibility is about how to know culture and the world. ¹³ It is an inter-discipline interested in cultural practices where negotiation over meaning happens, ¹⁴ and it is committed to serious engagement with cultural complexity. ¹⁵ Cassandra Sharp describes cultural legal studies as a practice that “facilitates the exploration of active and embodied connections of legal meaning, and the qualitative concern of ethnography is concentrated on details of life while connecting them to wider cultural processes and existence.” ¹⁶ R. Borofsky cautions that there is no one true account of a group of people, so he calls for a more multi-focused approach to ethnographies. ¹⁷ The impulse is to treat the group as a cultural whole, but Borofsky emphasizes the importance of understanding the intracultural diversity that exists within the group. An ethnographer is merely one interpreter of a group, and of course my words are my interpretation. And, they are my interpretation of a film, not an actual group. I choose which aspects of the film I will quote, memorialize or otherwise record, and which aspects I will ignore. This is a limitation in all Law and Film studies, including this article. I deliberately choose to focus on the scenes and images that best illustrate law, patriarchy and reconciliation in the film. Another scholar could choose to focus on completely different scenes that best fit with her interests. Then I write about my chosen scenes it in a way that might suggest, but is not meant to, that my reading is the “correct” reading of the film. In reality, it is but one interpretation. As I have previously made clear, “my method is neither scientific nor a coding process, but rather a drawing out of themes, images, and ideas.” ¹⁸ In an effort to approach the “more dialogic, multi-centric narratives” that Borofsky recommends, ¹⁹ readers should at the very least read my words alongside Reygadas’ film, in order to assess for themselves the connections I make to law, patriarchy and reconciliation.

II. Stellet Licht

Stellet Licht is a film about an unfaithful Mennonite husband named Johan and what happens to his wife Esther and the other woman, Marianne, in his life. It has been described as a “tale of passion, betrayal, and redemption.” ²⁰ As mentioned, it is the first and only feature length film about Mennonites filmed in Plautdietsch. ²¹ J. Hoberman says, “Stellet Licht runs a leisurely 132 minutes, and Reygadas manages to imbue every moment with spiritual weight – or what one character calls “the pure feeling of being alive.” ²² The film is similar to Ordet, a 1955 Danish film made by Carl Theodor Dreyer and based upon Kaj Munk’s 1932 play. Cynthia Tompkinis notes that: “Special consideration is given to Dreyer’s influence on the Mexican director, that is, on minimalism in terms of mise-en-scène, character and camera movement.” ²³ Carlos Reygadas is known for making films with long sequences, slow rhythm, long shots into doorways and windows that only very slowly come into focus, and employing a contemplative style and non-professional actors. Rick Warner notes that global art cinema like Stellet Licht has a contemplative tendency, being pensive and minimalistic, emphasizing lags and physical surroundings more than dialogue. ²⁴ Reygadas takes a classical neorealist style, according to Niels Niessen, ²⁵ and communicates a sense of sublimity about the human condition through cinematic realism, ²⁶ according to Greg Watkins. Sheldon Penn says Reygadas’ film is in the melodramatic romantic tradition, ²⁷ providing the viewer with “paradoxical naturalism,” ²⁸ albeit “a naturalism of strangeness rather than familiarity.” ²⁹ It is a naturalism of strangeness because the film features Mennonites, a group we are not used to seeing on film. The cast of Silent Light are non-actors (in neo-realist, contemplative style). They are Mennonites from Mexico, Germany and Canada, including Miriam Toews, a multi-award-winning, famous Canadian novelist who grew up in the Mennonite community of Steinbach, Manitoba, and plays Esther in the film. ³⁰ Reygadas has said he prefers his casts “to be, rather than to perform” ³¹ and therefore he chooses non actors and works without a script. ³² Mary Corliss describes it as “characters behaving, however mutely, rather than acting.” ³³

Greg Watkins says:

Reygadas took a good two years to get to know the Mennonite community and to gain the trust needed to shoot there. The Mennonites of this conservative community forbid television and radio but were attracted to the idea of a movie being made in their community, in part out of growing concern for the preservation of their culture and language.” ³⁴

(Magdalene Redekop however counters that “the director’s camera sees the Mennonites but does not know them. . . .the community filmed remains inscrutable, somehow opaque.”) ³⁵ The extra features on the DVD show Reygadas working on dialogue with the actors before each take because he does not use a script. Reygadas tells the cast where to look, how to position themselves and what to say. Since many of them do not speak Spanish, Cornelio Wall, who plays protagonist Johan and does speak Spanish, translates the director’s words into Low German for the cast. (In real life, Wall works as a farmer, oil driller and radio DJ). “Mennonites have made substantial contributions to the arts, particularly in the field of creative literature in English, moving away from religious themes but maintaining an ‘ethnic’ connection with the traditions of their Mennonite inheritance.” ³⁶ However, it is not clear if Mennonite experts were consulted in the creation of Silent Light. The non-actor cast and small crew – only 11 people – worked painstakingly long hours taking minute direction from Reygadas to create a film that is “at once dramatically flat and strangely moving,” ³⁷ perhaps like Mennonites themselves.

Stellet Licht begins with a very long, six-minute sequence of a sunrise over a farm. All the viewer can hear is birds, bugs and cows. Rick Warner says the opening shot of the film is emblematic of contemplative cinema: cavernous sky, off-screen lowing of cows, the pulse of insects. ³⁸ It shows a cosmic environment that is both natural and cinematic, which again is stylistically and conceptually characteristic of contemplative cinema. The film also fits with Gilles Deleuze’s theory of the time image. ³⁹ Deleuze described time images as images or signs infused with time, that include both the past and the future. When we call time images up in our minds, they help us navigate the world because they stand for, and in relation to, images, and therefore also act as signs. Films that explore new potentials for both filmic and human consciousness, like Stellet Licht, also explore the time image. The first thing we see in Stellet Licht is a close-up of a ticking wall clock at 6:30 AM in the kitchen. The clock is used throughout the film as a sign or image of human consciousness. It helps us recognize, recollect and even dream because it is a Deleuzean time image. The family: father, mother and seven children (three girls, four boys), is seated at the kitchen table. The mother and daughters are wearing head coverings. “Usually, some form of head covering, because of its biblical foundation, is for such groups a symbol of both nonconformity and female subordination.” ⁴⁰ They all wait to eat their cereal while the father, Johan, makes a long, silent prayer. (In Ordet, the protagonist is called Johannes). The opening and this kitchen scene, like the entire film, are very slow, containing huge pauses and scant dialogue. The characters in this film are not expressive; they are low affect. Warner notes however that while Stellet Licht is slow it also “brings us into a heightened, more sensitive, and more thoughtful mode of engagement.” ⁴¹ The film is understated and quiet, as Mennonites are supposed to be. Indeed, the title of the film, Stellet Licht, translated directly is closer to Still or Quiet Light, not Silent Light. J. Hoberman says: “Given the filmmaker’s attention to ambient and off-screen sounds, Stellet Licht is far from silent. It is, however, profoundly still.” ⁴² Greg Watkins comments: “In marked distinction to mainstream movies, all of the sound heard in this film was recorded during the take (‘production sound’) or otherwise on the set (‘wild sound’). There is no dialogue replacement, Foley sound, or imported sound effects,” ⁴³ and throughout the film Reygadas uses natural light. ⁴⁴

After breakfast, Johan tells his wife Esther that he loves her. She replies, “I know you do Johan.” When Esther and his children leave, Johan stops the clock and then cries alone at the kitchen table. When Johan stops the kitchen wall clock it is as if “regular” time stops, and we enter Deleuzean time; from this point forward in the film, it is difficult to discern how much time has passed. (Stopped clocks are also a feature in the contemplative film Ordet.) Warner explains that Stellet Licht moves through orders of time “that are no longer beholden to the action-oriented rhythms of popular cinema,” ⁴⁵ wherein time “unfastens from schemata of action.” ⁴⁶ In this way, the film itself does perceptual and mental work for us that Warner calls contemplative. ⁴⁷ When Johan regains his composure, he drives to a work site and confides in his friend Zacarias that he thinks Marianne is the better woman for him, not his wife Esther. So, the viewer learns that Johan, the head of a patriarchal, religious, Mennonite, farming family in Mexico, is having an affair with Marianne, another Mennonite woman in a neighbouring community. Filmmaker Reygadas said he “wanted something as timeless and placeless as possible for a love story.” ⁴⁸ Sheldon Penn says the isolation and difference of the Mennonite community produce “an otherworldliness that removes the story from ideological inscriptions of time and place.” ⁴⁹ This is important because with time and place “gone,” we can focus on “an aesthetic exploration of the real,” reimagine the relationship between people, landscape and time, ⁵⁰ and think about the implications of Johan’s affair.

Magdalene Redekop notes that Stellet Licht is made from a Mexican (Catholic) perspective, though it focuses on Mexican Mennonites. ⁵¹ In an interview, Reygadas was quoted, “I am not particularly interested in Mennonites. I like that they are so uniform, so monolithic. They are all dressed the same. They are archetypes.” ⁵² A Canadian Mennonite herself, Redekop’s question makes sense: “What are individual Mennonite viewers to make of Stellet Licht, positioned as we are on different diasporic threads of a complex history?” ⁵³ While the film received a standing ovation at Cannes, amongst some Plautdietsch-speaking Canadian Mennonites, there was laughter due to the absurd mistranslations in the subtitles. ⁵⁴ Greg Watkins puts it more practically and benignly as follows:

The homogeneity of the community allowed him [Reygadas] to avoid having to make decisions about the occupation, social status, etc., of the characters, compared, for example, to the telling of a similar story set in a modern urban environment. Indeed, there is a sense of purity and archetypal power that the movie has as a result of this setting. ⁵⁵

As a result, viewers are able to watch the triangle between Johan, Esther and Marianne and focus on the feelings, as opposed to the characters, and the visuals, as opposed to the dialogue (which is very sparse in any event). So, for example, when the clandestine, adulterous couple is seen kissing outside in the sunlight, “as with the earliest motion pictures, it’s the quality of the light that really holds you.” ⁵⁶ During this scene, we also see colourful dots on screen. These dots reveal that there is a camera present; it is made visible. Rick Warner describes this as one of the components of contemplative film, namely making the film medium manifest. ⁵⁷ He also notes the multi-coloured lens flares accompany expressions of love in this kissing scene. ⁵⁸ Niels Niessen notes: “More than to the presence of the filmmaker’s equipment, these spots testify to his refusal to protect the image from the abundance of light.” ⁵⁹ Manohla Dargis says, “this is also very much a film about that ordinary light that sometimes still passes through a camera and creates something divine. ⁶⁰ Strangely, seeing the medium of filming actually heightens our sense of being in this film’s world. In contemplative art cinema we are pulled into the film’s unfolding. This connects beautifully to Leiboff and Sharp’s explanation of how cultural legal studies scholars enfold and interweave diverse fields and genres within law and back again. Enfolding myriad fields and connecting the ephemeral with the actual is what cultural legal studies does and is also what happens in this film. In the beautiful, innocent, yet sensuous next scene, ⁶¹ where Johan and Esther bathe their children in a large pond, the kids look straight at the camera and so viewers absolutely know the camera is there. ⁶² We know we are being drawn in. Hoberman says, “Everything in this relatively chaste production is monumentally deliberate, from the human interactions to the stolidly bucolic representation of Mennonite domesticity to the extraordinary, wide-screen landscape shots that bracket the action.” ⁶³ The sun-dappled bathing sequence, like the rest of the film, has very little dialogue. Johan merely notes that Esther has “always been great at making soap.” ⁶⁴

In the next scene, Johan is visiting his father at his father’s dairy farm. (Interestingly, the men playing the roles are father and son in real life). Johan says to his father, “I need to talk to you. I fell in love with another woman.” His father wonders if Johan is joking and then suggests they go outside, where very strangely, though not completely impossible for northern Mexico, there is snow. (Again, our sense of time is jostled by and in this film). Johan reveals that his affair is almost two years long and that his wife Esther knows; “I have told her everything since the beginning.” This not only really informs the film’s first scene where Johan declares his love for Esther, it also suggests the level of pain that Esther bears on a daily basis.

III. Law and Patriarchy

Carol Greenhouse has written about how an ethnographic sensibility can reveal how ideas of social value are hidden or knowable “under, beside or without the law.” ⁶⁵ Esther’s pain is certainly hidden, as is Johan’s affair, since it deeply transgresses Mennonite “law.” Yet in this film, we do not see any law. The law is hidden, yet Stellet Licht provides a partial reckoning with law, or least a contemplation of it. The back of the film’s DVD cover says: “Against the law of God and man he falls in love with another woman.” Law is invoked from the very first glance at the movie’s DVD case, but never mentioned in the film. The first scene featuring people, the family at breakfast, clearly shows the law of the father prevails. The entire family sits in obedient silence, while Johan prays. There are deep structures of inequality at play in this Mennonite community and in this particular family. And, these structures are so normalized, they are almost invisible. Religion and culture have always been used to constrain women, their bodies, their dress and their demeanour. ⁶⁶ And, since “women are not the major players in determining the construction, interpretation and application of laws” ⁶⁷ in this Mexican Mennonite community, religion, culture and law all work together, through men, to constrain them. More than twenty years ago Austin Sarat drew our attention to the “ubiquitous presence of tropes of fatherhood in popular cultural iconography about law,” noting “fatherhood becomes one of the key terms through which law is mythologized.” ⁶⁸ Sarat says: “In the Judeo-Christian tradition, the story of Abraham and Isaac is a paradigmatic exemplification of the law’s claims and its powers, of the presentation of law as the father but also the father as law.” ⁶⁹ This is what we see in Stellet Licht. In Stellet Licht, the father, Johan, the religious and legal head of his family, goes to confess his ‘crime’ to his own father, who is also a preacher. This is a father before the law, a father as law, and law as the father. The myriad associations of paternity and legality can neither be missed nor separated. As Cornelius J. Dyck notes, in Mexico, all Mennonite Colony life is under the control of the church, ⁷⁰ which is run by men. Interestingly, Roger Ebert says: Carlos Reygadas’ film “involves people who deeply hold their values and try to act upon them, and yet who do not seem to be zealots. (It says much about the Mennonites that their clergy are unpaid.) In fact, the film never mentions the word ‘Mennonite,’ there are no church services, and all the characters act from their hearts and not simply their teachings.” ⁷¹ The religion in Stellet Licht is quieter than we might expect.

So too is the law. The power and religion that fathers and preachers exercise in Stellet Licht is legal authority, and it is quieter than we might imagine. Jerome Frank suggests that law, like religion, is a projection of a widely shared human need for certainty and security and law can be thought of as a father-substitute. ⁷² Here, the preacher-father is the law. He tells Johan that the affair is the devil’s work. Johan replies that he thinks it’s God’s doing and he does not want his father to tell his mother. The clock chimes. (The clock, as in Ordet, is everywhere). As Hoberman says, “Stellet Licht has a ceremonial quality and an elemental worldview, with Johan wondering whether his love for Marianne is the work of God or Satan.” ⁷³ Johan is confused; Cynthia Fuchs says Johann cannot fathom either Esther or Marianne. “He remains mired in his own aspirations and contemplations. Silent Light does not explain his lack of understanding, but posits it as representative, even symptomatic, of needs and questions that are essentially human. Or maybe just masculine.” ⁷⁴ And that is the thing. They are all Johan’s needs, and they are all masculine. Esther’s feelings and needs are not considered. Neither are Marianne’s. The women are left out, as is Johan’s mother, who will not be told. The law of the father and the Mexican Mennonite community is the law of men.

Johan’s father clearly represents patriarchal religious law, but he surprises us in his response to his transgressing son. He speaks with the authority of God, the Mennonite Church, patriarchy and fatherhood, and yet, Johan’s father does not respond how religious law would. Johan’s father does not condemn him. He does not quote scripture. The pastor does not really even admonish his adulterous son. How is this possible? Postmodern popular culture work demonstrates the contingency of law because results often depend on non-legal factors such as luck, race or gender. ⁷⁵ Luck and gender are prominent forces in Stellet Licht. Johan’s adultery is not punished because he is lucky enough to be the male child of the pastor. Instead of expressing shock or condemnation, Johan’s father makes an analogous confession. He admits to having had an affair in his youth. He was married to Johan’s mother, so he forced himself to stop his affair. He tells Johan, “the excitement existed only with me. It was my need to feel.” Instead of denunciation, Johan receives good advice and empathy. His father says two very important things to him: “if you don’t act quickly, you’ll lose them both” (referring to Marianne and Esther), and “your mother and I will support you.” This is amazing in the context of a religious Mennonite community that vehemently believes that adultery is a sin and sometimes requires wrong-doers to stand up in front of the entire congregation to confess and ask for forgiveness. Instead of reciting the law of the church or the Bible, indicating the sinfulness of infidelity, Johan’s father dispenses practical advice, “if you don’t act quickly, you’ll lose them both.” Instead of condemning Johan to hell, Johan’s father preaches reconciliation and love; “your mother and I will support you.” The law in this film is gentle and more forgiving than might ever have been guessed. The preacher exhibits gendered forgiveness, not punishment, and offers support. His legal “ruling” is clandestine and unreported – neither Johan’s mother nor the community will know.

Clifford Geertz laid the foundation for legal anthropology’s insight that different local legal sensibilities can exist beneath the “actual” law we think they have. ⁷⁶ We may think Mexican Mennonites are more conservative than Stellet Licht depicts them, at least where male transgressors are involved. Mexican Mennonite religion/law would suggest it should be, but the film shows us something different beneath the surface. Marilyn Strathern’s work reveals that if we are often surprised by what our relatives do, we may also be surprised by what relations tell us about the world we live in. ⁷⁷ Those familiar with Mennonites would be very surprised by this conservative Mennonite pastor’s non-judgemental response to his son’s adultery. North American Mennonites would be astonished by the nonchalant response by this Mexican Mennonite minster. Mennonites are raised to believe sex outside of heterosexual marriage is sinful – their actual law – but this pastor demonstrates a different, local, legal sensibility. The relation between the pastor and Johan, the father-son relationship, tells us something about how the world of Mexican Mennonites may work and that exceptions can be made. In the filmic interchange between father and son, preacher and penitent, we see love and care. What do these filmic relations about law, patriarchy and reconciliation tell us? Beyond the obvious “you can’t judge a book by its cover,” we also learn not to trade nuance for simplicity. What appear to be dogmatic, conservative, simple Mennonites may actually be something different. We see love and care in what we thought were extremely strict, sombre people. Stellet Licht encourages us to see differently and to contemplate. We, as cultural legal scholars or law and film scholars, can demonstrate our empathy and care about people’s lives under law. We care how culture and how law are lived and how they structure everyday experience. Stellet Licht gives us insight into how law, patriarchy and reconciliation might coexist and live in a Mexican Mennonite community. Collis and Bainbridge state that film is not just a place where law is represented; it is a place where law is practiced and legitimized. ⁷⁸ In this filmic community, law is legitimized as the law of the father. And, surprisingly, that law appears to be kind and caring, at least to men.

The next scene is the family threshing their corn fields. Johan, like Johannes in Ordet, is a farmer. Esther also farms with her children and husband, and brings them tacos for lunch. At lunch Johan says he has to do to a delivery for Marianne. Esther tells him then he can take all the younger kids along because they need to go to the dentist. I assumed that having the children along was Esther’s way of ensuring nothing would happen between her husband and Marianne, but I was wrong. The kids are left with a man in a van (alarming in my Canadian context), watching black and white French TV, while Johan and Marianne have sex in a room at the back of a restaurant. When they are finished, Marianne says, “That was the last time Johan.” She also says, “poor Esther.” Johan agrees that they will stop seeing each other. He says, “peace is stronger than love,” and after they have given each other up, “there will be pain, then peace, then such happiness as we have never known.” Peter Bradshaw notes that “in the midst of his agony, Johan asks his lover, and us, to imagine a future after their love has ceased, and to have faith in it.” ⁷⁹ A solitary red cedar leaf falls in their room. At this point, if the reader thinks s/he may watch the film, it is time to stop reading this article and watch, for what follows will definitely spoil the movie. Not only will I give away the ending, but the viewer’s opportunity to ever feel the ending will be lost, and the feeling that the ending engenders is key to the entire experience of the film.

Johan and Esther are driving alone in their car during a rainstorm. They are responding to an errand of Marianne’s and Esther calls Marianne a “damn whore.” This is the strongest language in the entire film. Johan’s completely insensitive reply is, “It’s hard for her too Esther.” Then Johan admits, “I saw her again. I tried with all my might, but failed.” Then Esther says, “Poor Marianne,” which seems an inconceivable expression of sympathy. Suddenly Esther has terrible chest pain. She is in far more pain than Johan and the viewer realize. Esther leaves the car in a pelting rainstorm and leans against a tree (a red cedar?) and cries. She is sobbing uncontrollably. Her heart is breaking. When Johan finally goes to find her, she is lying on the ground. Esther has suffered a heart attack. She is dead, and Johan screams. The film medium is manifested here too; we see the rain on the camera lens when Esther dies. ⁸⁰

In this film, death, like law, is a world of men. We see Esther’s death through Johan’s eyes. Johan weeps alone at the tree and again in the male doctor’s arms. Then the viewer watches the preparation of Esther’s body through a window. When the camera comes inside, we see Esther laid out on her back on a table, covered in a white sheet up to her neck, in a serene, white room. (This scene is eerily similar to the final scene of Ordet, where the woman’s body is also laid out in a white room for mourners to visit). Esther’s body is laid out by men and then surrounded by men: her sons, brother, and father-in-law stand around her, all wearing black, while Johan kneels beside her to say goodbye. Esther’s brother and son kiss her forehead and leave the room. Johan’s father, the pastor, tells Johan, “She’s at peace now.” Johan replies, “Now everything is broken Dad.” The pastor replies, “The enemy is implacable.” Johan says, “It’s not the Devil or anyone else. It’s me.” Johan is correct. However, his father the pastor tells him, “You are nothing in the face of this Johan. It was all written beforehand.” The idea that a male God had a plan all along and Esther should be sacrificed in it for Johan’s desires is repugnant. The suggestion that the men had no control over this story and that it was pre-ordained stretches credulity. The sexism and patriarchy of law in Stellet Licht is palpable.

IV. Reconciliation

The path toward reconciliation begins when Johan leaves the white room and the house of mourning with his friend Zacarias. Suddenly, Marianne drives up. She and Johan walk around the back of the house and stand together. Johan tells her he wants to turn back time. Marianne says, “that’s the only thing in life we can’t do,” and she hugs him. While hugging him, Marianne sees the sun, and she uses her hand to block it. Or, perhaps she is not blocking the sun, but rather touching its light and gathering strength from it? Marianne stands with her hand raised while Johan weeps on her shoulder. When she puts her hand down, she knows what to do. Rick Warner says Marianne has visionary power “that is potentially ours, too.” ⁸¹ Marianne tells Johan, “I’d like to see Esther once before she’s buried.” Johan does not reply; he just brings her into the house, and Marianne passes by a whole row of female mourners who watch Marianne enter the white room alone. It is unclear to the viewer whether these mourners and other members of the Mennonite community know about Johan and Marianne’s affair. ⁸² When Marianne enters the white room, she stands silently and looks at Esther. In this scene the white sheet on top of Esther has been lowered and is tucked in around Esther’s waist, leaving her chest, abdomen and hands visible. Marianne kneels next to Esther and stares at her. Then she leans over and kisses Esther on the mouth, letting her lips linger for a while. When Marianne straightens up, one of her tears rolls down Esther’s cheek. There is no sound at all. The camera focuses on Esther’s face for a long time. Suddenly, Esther’s bonnet ribbons move under her chin as she swallows. Then Esther’s eyelids flutter and her eyes open. Her lips gently smack and part. She swallows and blinks. Esther is alive. The first words out of her mouth are, “poor Johan,” and a tear escapes her eye. Marianne smiles. A tear runs down Marianne’s face as well and she says, “Johan will be all right now.” Esther turns her head slightly toward Marianne. They look at each other and Esther says, “thank you Marianne.” The sparse yet potent words exchanged between these remarkable women are riveting. They demonstrate sympathy for Johan above all else and thanks and appreciation to one another. We see and feel the forgiveness, the self-sacrifice on both Esther and Marianne’s parts, and their reconciliation. Marianne tells Esther’s two daughters to “come here and say hi to Mommy.” Esther greets both her daughters, none of whom are surprised. There has been a miracle: raising a woman from the dead, but her resurrection seems natural. There is no jubilant celebration because the miracle is normal. It is life, resurrection and reconciliation and it is imbued with women and girls. Any religious dimension is notable by its absence. The reconciliation of Esther and Marianne through a kiss, tears, and forgiveness is extraordinary. The power has decidedly moved away from Johan and the male figures, to the women. The news of Esther’s resurrection is delivered by her daughter. “What neither law nor fatherhood can do – namely, recuperate or transform itself – can be done.” ⁸³ It can be done by women. The viewer feels happiness, not incredulity. Reconciliation has occurred.

Donald Spence and many others have drawn useful distinctions between narrative truth and historical truth. ⁸⁴ Narrative truth is that feeling we have that Stellet Licht is a good story; we feel happy, not sceptical, about the ending. As Magdalene Redekop points out, there is value in “just being with others in a place where we make believe together.” ⁸⁵ Historical truth, on the other hand, asks whether the story of Stellet Licht is accurate, which of course it is not, since people do not awake from the dead. Cultural legal method and law and film method are not mired in a search for historical truth or accuracy. We are not fixated on whether the film “got it right.” From a Law and Film perspective, that does not matter, because we care more about meaning. Richard Sherwin convincingly argues that it is narrative truth, the better story, that is usually believed. ⁸⁶ Our stories weave themselves into our culture and help us make sense of our lives. ⁸⁷ Jeanne Gaakeer says, “our local cultural imaginations and scripts are themselves narratives we live by,” ⁸⁸ and M.E. Montoya says narrative is “a mediating force in the re/construction of personal and collective identities.” ⁸⁹ We know this to be true. Cultural legal studies and law and film embrace a multiplicity of possible narratives and methods but always take as essential that, “narrative truth, the truth of a well told story, is the type of truth that conveys meaning.” ⁹⁰

So, what are the meanings of Stellet Licht’s story? What is the meaning of Esther’s resurrection? Does it restart the entire community’s life, and put it back on its “normal” course? What other consequences does the reconciliation between Esther and Marianne have? Outside of the white room, where the mourners are sitting, Johan’s father winds the stopped clock, sets the time, and re-starts the clock. The ticking of the clock coincides with the new life in the white room and it is the only sound. (The whiteness of the room, the miracle, the cinematic style, and the clock all come directly from Ordet). Anita, Esther’s youngest daughter, comes out of the white room smiling, saying “Dad, Mum has woken up!” (Again, as with Ordet, “it is impossible to say where its representation of a religious community ends and its expression of divine substance begins.”) ⁹¹ Importantly, what Law and Film reveals is that that does not matter. John Story argues that “representation does not stand at one remove from reality, to conceal or distort, it is reality.” ⁹² In that way then, film and life have merged. In some significant ways, the distinction between fiction and reality has become less and less important. ⁹³ This is part of Law and Film’s contribution to postmodern theory and to law.

Marianne leaves the house, and Johan goes into the white room with Anita. We know he is watching his elder daughter and wife talk, but we do not see him and he says nothing. A hopeful butterfly flies up and out the room’s window (instead of a lonely, downward-falling leaf) and then the camera cuts to the bucolic fields where once again we see the camera’s multi-coloured dots of light which signify love. The film ends similarly to how it began; instead of a long developing sunrise, we watch a long sunset. Ever so slowly, the sun sets, the screen fades to black, and all we see are the pricks of stars in the night sky. Greg Watkins says, “the movie is book-ended with remarkable single-take, partially time-lapsed shots of a sunrise and a sunset.” ⁹⁴ Peter Bradshaw says, “on finally fading to black, it leaves behind on the blank screen, as if on the inside of a closed eyelid, a shimmering sense of having looked into something overwhelmingly powerful.” ⁹⁵ The movie is like a fable. When it ends we wonder, did it really happen? Sheldon Penn says, “the bookending of the film with a star-filled sky invokes a cosmic or universal contextualization of the story that goes before, not in order to underline the exceptionality of the ‘miracle’ but to confirm that it is ordinary.” ⁹⁶

This is the key piece for my analysis of Stellet Licht. The miracle is ordinary. It is believable. So too is the women’s reconciliation. Much of our daily existence and even the fact that we exist, is unknowable and miraculous, so why not a resurrection? Sheldon Penn puts it this way: “The spectator believes in the characters in their milieu, not because they are ‘true’ in word and deed but because their incompletion – a kind of coming into being in the world – promises authenticity.” ⁹⁷ The film feels authentic, even though it has a miracle at the end. Even though we see the operations of film-making throughout Stellet Licht (they are oft made manifest so we know it is a movie), we still feel, at the end, that we have actually seen a miracle filmed. The film’s machinations form part of the story; they are “on a continuum with the immanent, earthly realm where the miracle happens” ⁹⁸ and they increase both our intimacy with it and our belief in it. The film’s processes become the substance of reflection. And, upon reflection, we feel that the miracle simply does not contradict the rest of the film. In another film we might never buy Esther awakening. In Stellet Licht, we do. Roger Ebert says: “It is Reygadas’ inspiration to set this film among a people whose ways are old and deeply felt, and to cast it with actors who believe in those ways. To set it in ‘modern times,’ most places in today’s world would make it seem artificial and false.” ⁹⁹ In this movie, it feels real. The film is convincing. A resurrection and reconciliation amongst Mexican Mennonites is somehow believable. Peter Bradshaw says the film has a “terrific kind of self-possession, and shows a ringing confidence in the luminous strange world it inhabits.” ¹⁰⁰ The miracle and Marianne’s reconciliatory power feel real, and so we believe.

Stellet Licht powerfully envelops its viewers in its ending, making them realize they have been enveloped from the very beginning of the film. Warner terms this emblematic of the contemplative mode of Reygadas’ film. Warner describes a generalized dispersion of the miraculous resurrection ¹⁰¹ that is dedicated to keeping it on an ordinary plane, to making it just a normal part of the everyday. ¹⁰² The miracle is inscripted in the ordinary. ¹⁰³ Stellet Licht attunes the viewer to a way of seeing the world that is contemplative, through a miracle that is “radically immanent in its effects and implications.” ¹⁰⁴ In other words, the miracle is the opposite of transcendent. It is earthly or immanent. Immanence refers to the idea of the divine being present in our material world. This is something for law to contemplate, since law typically thinks of divinity as separate from or outside our material world – in other words, as transcendent. Immanence, however, is the opposite of transcendent, so this film’s immanent miracle is firmly of the earthly, legal world, which suggests reconciliation can occur in our legal world.

V. Conclusions

What to make of this realistic, yet fantastic film, that postulates that miracles can happen? Niels Niessen says, “Stellet Licht operates on two registers simultaneously, the one realist and diachronic, and the other miraculous and synchronic.” ¹⁰⁵ This leads to the idea of miraculous realism – something for viewers to contemplate. As we make our way through this very slow movie, our senses are enlivened and we see anew. ¹⁰⁶ We contemplate law, film, Mennonites and a miracle. Warner says, “these miracles aren’t simply offered to our gaze; they are the very event of our becoming able to see and think differently, impossibly.” ¹⁰⁷ This is of course the promise of taking a Law & Film approach – the ability to think differently. Niessen says, “Stellet Licht does not merely give the representation of a miracle; that is to say, show its effects. Instead, it becomes it.” ¹⁰⁸ The viewer’s perspective on the film and on life changes. This is how Stellet Licht is connected to cultural legal studies – because both want us to see law and life differently.

In an interview, director Reygadas stated that “reality is a miracle.” ¹⁰⁹ Even the ordinary is inexplicably miraculous, leading Sheldon Penn to say, “for the director then, the scene [Esther’s resurrection] is a cinematic statement of faith in love and the impossible.” ¹¹⁰ Frederic and Mary Ann Brussat posit, “Reygadas challenges us to see how grace can transform our lives in ways that touch the heart and go beyond reason.” ¹¹¹ And certainly beyond law. However, while Esther’s coming back to life is wonderful, inexplicable, full of grace and miraculous, it is not a feminist story of reconciliation, resistance or uprising. Esther needs a miracle, and it is patriarchal, even though Marianne bestows it. Peter Bradshaw says, “the ambiguously visionary miracle that Reygadas creates for the end of his movie, a miracle that occurs as a result of a form of spiritual meeting between the women: [is] a meeting that is very much the work of a male director.” ¹¹² Travis Kroeker describes the scene as a “scandalous resurrection scene with the lover mediating the miracle to the wife,” which could support “a phallocentric moralism” wherein proper love finds itself in a restored patriarchal family supported by a patriarchal church. ¹¹³ The movie “might also be seen as an isolated erotic and artistic male fantasy.” ¹¹⁴ We need to contend with all of this conflicting imagery. How do we balance our happiness that Esther is not dead, with the weirdly ordinary miracle of her resurrection? How do we reconcile the feeling of peace the ending bestows, with our aversion to the film’s intense patriarchy? Law and Film analysis allows us to do this through contemplation.

In this article, I have tried to enfold law and film to connect the ephemeral with the actual, which is contemplative work. Similarly, viewers of Stellet Licht must be prepared to be contemplative because the film often eschews dialogue or action in favour of contemplation. “The technique seems less a matter of letting a scene speak for someone’s internal state than a suggestion that what’s going on – emotionally or spiritually – transcends that internal state altogether.” ¹¹⁵ In art cinema such as Stellet Licht we are pulled into the film’s unfolding. Similarly, Leiboff and Sharp argue that cultural legal studies enfolds and interweaves diverse fields and genres within law and back again. ¹¹⁶ The doing, the enfolding, and the working out what is going on is what Leiboff and Sharp say marks out cultural legal studies. ¹¹⁷ Such contemplation also marks out Law and Film. Gilles Deleuze describes contemplation like this: “Contemplation itself does nothing, and yet, something is done through it, something completely novel.” ¹¹⁸ I suggest that close contemplation “can be brought to bear on both the work of the film and the ongoing relationship it tries to uphold with the viewer.” ¹¹⁹ In so doing, we learn about law, patriarchy and reconciliation.

How law, patriarchy and reconciliation are contemplated into thought is the generative work of Stellet Licht. The film lets us feel we are contemplated into a world and that “we can be made to see in such a way, almost in spite of ourselves, is nothing less than miraculous.” ¹²⁰ Warner explains that Deleuze’s work shows how Stellet Licht invites the viewer to a world where the spiritual and the earthly are connected. ¹²¹ This is done through the miracle at the end of the film. We believe it; the film convinces us “through another register.” ¹²² A new relation between humans and the world, strange but believable, is created. Stellet Licht retrains our perceptions of law, patriarchy and reconciliation by drawing us into a particularly intense way of looking, seeing, and listening. If we look, see and listen differently, we might be able to work with law and patriarchy differently. When we so contemplate, we actively interpret and construct legal meanings in response to film, and we can culturally re-imagine law and reconciliation between people.

Stellet Licht gives law and film and cultural legal studies scholars the contextualization and meaning making potentialities to think about law, patriarchy and reconciliation differently. We can think about the law of the father and how it is manifested in different societies, contemplate miraculous realism, and to try to understand the power of women working together. In so doing, however, viewers, especially those unfamiliar with tight, ethno-religious communities, must be careful to avoid ethnocentrism. ¹²³ We must be careful not to uncritically view Stellet Licht as “the truth” about Mexican Mennonites; the film is most certainly not a documentary. Many scholars have pointed to the lack of indigenous voices in cultural legal studies scholarship and the distortion of marginalized people. Mexican Mennonites are not indigenous people, but they are marginalized. In reading Stellet Licht we must be cognizant of stereotypical truths the film might hold to be self-evident. ¹²⁴ For example, it is possible that Esther suffers distortion of image through what is presented in Stellet Licht and what is omitted, ¹²⁵ so Margaret Russell’s advice to talk back to the deceptions and omissions of legal and cultural texts ¹²⁶ may be warranted. Teresa de Lauretis acknowledges popular culture’s power to inflict psychic harm. ¹²⁷ In the extra features on the DVD, a Mennonite woman expresses her intense guilt over allowing Reygadas to use her home for filming because Mennonites have always shunned publicity. We simply do not know if Mexican Mennonites (or other Mennonites) or Mennonite women in particular feel harmed by Reygadas’ film.

Films such as Stellet Licht are agents through which encounters between culture and law are played out. In contemplative art cinema such as Stellet Licht, we are pulled into the film’s unfolding. Just as Stellet Licht enfolds myriad fields and connects the ephemeral with the actual, so does a cultural legal approach to Law and Film. Law and Film pulls from myriad fields to better think about the shape of law and what we can learn from law that looks different from the law we know. Small ethno-religious communities, such as the Mexican Mennonite community, are novel sites for thinking about the application of cultural legal methods, because their law is different from the law we know. Benjamin Woo says cultural studies is helpful because it brings more voices into dialogue. ¹²⁸ By moving outside the Law and Film canon, I have given readers a chance to consider other voices, voices of those they are unlikely to have heard before. The vast majority of Stellet Licht viewers, as well as readers of this article, will have never encountered an Old Order or very conservative Mennonite. The referential function of a cultural legal approach invites us to take these voices further; Esther, Johan and Marianne can help us contemplate and learn about ourselves. It is not just conservative Mennonites whose identities are shaped by unconscious assumptions of law – this is true for all of us. Watching Reygadas’ film and reading this article can inspire viewers and readers to contemplate themselves, law, patriarchy and reconciliation anew. Edensor describes this as the power of cultural symbols – “ideas about their import may be shared, but they can be claimed by a multitude of different identities for various purposes.” ¹²⁹

Through a Law and Film analysis of Stellet Licht, we can contemplate how law and patriarchy unconsciously work in all our lives. As Sharp, Leiboff, Fornäs, Ang, Woo, Warner and many others observe, we actively interpret and construct meanings in response to Stellet Licht, and we can apply those meanings elsewhere. Stellet Licht reveals how law and patriarchy in a closed ethno-religious community structure relations, communities and reconciliations, even when law is never mentioned or invoked. When we examine Reygadas’ infidelity story in a remote Mexican Mennonite community we see that law permeates everything, though it is completely unspoken. Religion also runs through everything in the film, though no reference is made to the Mennonite church or its official beliefs. Even Johan’s father, the pastor, does not specifically invoke law or religion when discussing infidelity with his son. Viewers may have never contemplated love triangles in conservative Mennonite farming communities, or that a deeply religious minority group could tolerate (male) infidelity, or that forgiveness and resurrection are possible. The film shows us humanity and reconciliation in a new way.

Law, religion and culture are completely interwoven for the Mexican Mennonite characters in this film. All of the people in their remote community, including Esther, Johann and Marianne, simply know how to act. Edensor describes culture and identity being shaped by “‘second nature,’ the barely conscious set of assumptions about the way ‘we’ think and act.” ¹³⁰ The insular community, the “we” in Stellet Licht, know what to do, say, acknowledge and disavow. Their law, their religion, and their culture are interchangeable and influence their every thought and move, without ever having to be articulated. We may think this is because they are an isolated, not highly educated, ethno-religious community, but cultural legal analysis demonstrates this “second nature” influence of law and culture on us too. Sarat and Kearns say that “law operates largely by influencing modes of thought rather than by determining conduct in any specific case.” ¹³¹ This is true for all of us. In Stellet Licht, we just see it more clearly.

Taking the unspoken influence of law in Reygadas’ film one step further, we can analyse how law is contemplated into culture. This is the generative work of Stellet Licht, and also the generative work of Law & Film. Cultural legal studies and law and film both care how culture and law are lived, how they structure everyday experience, and how people actively participate in their constitutive practices, often without even knowing they are doing so. Leiboff and Sharp put it this way: “The place of law matters enormously; but who we are matters even more, as we create and shape the law that each of us imagines and embodies.” ¹³² The representational nature of Mexican Mennonite law and culture intersects in the everyday, and in the miraculous. Stellet Licht attunes us to a way of seeing the world that is contemplative, through a miracle that is realistic. The fact that we can believe the miracle occurred, means that we can conceive of our world and its laws differently. A strange, new relation between people, culture, the world and law could exist. This is something radical for law to contemplate, and something for scholars to continue to investigate.