The Cathedral (Ricky D'Ambrose, 2021) (Patreon)

Often we follow filmmakers who show continued promise, but for whatever reason are unable to bring their talent and vision to the next level. So it's incredibly gratifying when all the pieces come together and a "subject for future research" (to borrow Sarris's phrase) achieves the breakthrough that all previous works have been suggesting was on the way. Ricky D'Ambrose's The Cathedral is such a work, one that maintains the director's basic formal vocabulary but weds it to a set of personal memories that many (especially those of us from a particular couple of generations) will immediately recognize. 

On Twitter, I somewhat offhandedly called The Cathedral a semi-rethink of Linklater's Boyhood, but made in the "transcendental style" that Paul Schrader described in his book of the same name. Although D'Ambrose doesn't appear to take much inspiration from Tarkovsky, whose operatics would surely sink a project like this, he shows an obvious affinity for Ozu and especially Bresson. Like the former, D'Ambrose makes stark use of character close-ups shot straight on, at a direct 180-degree angle to the lens. And D'Ambrose borrows from Bresson's intensive minimalism, often conveying a dramatic event with a truncated gesture, the hands or legs doing something ordinary, while off-screen audio suggests a story-world much larger than the frame can contain.

But where Bresson did all he could to suppress overt emotion, D'Ambrose is more than willing to embrace the palpable textures of humanity. The Cathedral is obliquely autobiographical, its young subject Jesse Damrosch an avatar for the writer-director. Jesse is played by Robert Levey II at twelve years old, and William Bednar-Carter at seventeen, but unlike Boyhood, which centered its lead character's subjectivity, The Cathedral often places Jesse at the eye of the storm, a figure capable of sustaining various forms of identification. This approach works in tandem with D'Ambrose's frequent use of news clips -- the Pan Am Lockerbie bombing, the Gulf War, Clinton's first State of the Union address, etc. -- to position Jesse in a shared cultural timeline. He is all of us, but he also occupies a unique set of circumstances.

The major conflict of The Cathedral has to do with Jesse's father Richard (Brian d'Arcy James), someone who clearly strove to be a self-made man but lacked the necessary savvy and intuition. Taking over his father's printing business, Richard is sidelined by desktop computing and the death of personalized offset printing, and he becomes more and more bitter as he sees his solvency slip away. His relationship with Jesse, as well as with Jesse's mother (Monica Barbaro) and her family, isn't exactly narrativized. Rather, it's recalled and presented in flashpoints, moments of eruption and disappointment. Punctuating these memory shards with the news clips, as well as certain repeated gestures (e.g., waiters placing plates on a banquet table, and removing them), D'Ambrose delineates how a childhood is often recalled: a shouting match or a breakup, but also an ordinary movement, or the specific play of light through curtains.

Although The Cathedral is an accessible work of narrative fiction, it partakes of certain strategies more closely associated with the avant-garde. D'Ambrose's tone is miles away from that of Yvonne Rainer, but the two of them share a commitment to treating personal stories objectively, as material to mold through addition and subtraction. And in the scene that may be the conceptual passkey to The Cathedral, Jesse presents a family snapshot to his art class. It's a picture of his mother and aunt in his father's bedroom, before his parents' separation. Jesse (and by extension, of course, D'Ambrose) subjects this ordinary photo to a formal reading, clarifying that these objective details are inseparable from the emotional impact the image has on him. 

This deconstruction-of-affect has obvious connections to Roland Barthes' book Camera Lucida, which in turn links The Cathedral to other filmmakers who have used cinema to interrogate the visceral impact of photography, such as Hollis Frampton, Agnès Varda, and Sophy Romvari. And, as you watch The Cathedral with this problematic in mind, one sees just how D'Ambrose and regular cinematographer Bart Cortright stage the film's primary events -- a wedding, a Christmas get-together, a graduation party -- with the awkwardness of still images, the actors carefully dispersed around the frame and behaving stiffly, as if a "perfect shot" were being mentally imbued with life. "The catherdral," it seems, is the image itself, the way it allows our minds to construct idols and icons, and eventually tear them down.