Programme 1

Cinema Before 1300
Jerome Hiler, 2023, 100 min

Gazing at the stained glass in the cathedrals of Reims, Chartres, Le Mans, Soissons, Poitiers, Evreux, Troyes, Paris, Bourges, Rouen, Sens, Canterbury, Brabourne, Oxford or York conjured up a similar revelation for Jerome Hiler as his discovery of cinema as a child: “The spontaneous expression of darkness shone like light, which in turn was the essence of human, animal or plant life.” The film-maker, who had been making stained glass himself for a while by then, did not get to travel to Europe until the 1990s. He took a 35 mm Nikon with him to snap the famous stained glass. These slides would accompany Cinema Before 1300, an illustrated talk on this popular and devotional art, presented at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, the University of Princeton, the Art Gallery in Toronto or at the Harvard Film Archive. His initial presentation on stained glass was re-written and recorded, expanding and transforming the talk into a film.   

On his journey through the first 100 years leading to the zenith of coloured glass windows, Hiler sketches out both the history of Antiquity (represented) and the Middle Ages, a time when technical and scientific, architectural and philosophical, economic and social interests converged to create “the first and most advanced form of mass communication the world had ever known.” Cathedrals were the community centres to which thousands of spectators flocked every day to be amazed by the new colours and secrets of glass: the stained glass presented sequential scenes using the windows to tell stories and sunlight to illuminate them. 

As Hiler explains at the beginning of Cinema Before 1300, in the early 12th century, darkness was finally separated from negation, bringing it closer to spiritual, timeless aspects and forms of devotion. In turn, light was understood to be an opening to a greater plane of consciousness, where the mind is awakened through the senses (claritas). Thanks to Abbot Suger, architects were allowed to open up large spaces in the walls. The depth of the colours, the absorption of the sun and the gem-shaped drawings nevertheless preserved the darkness of the interiors, maintaining a similar experience for the film-maker as lowering the lights in the movie theatre to make the spectators open their eyes: “darkness [essential discontinuity] is the sacred environment shared by the cinema and stained glass.”

Francisco Algarín Navarro