Journal articles on the topic 'Spiritual retreat centers'

This study aims to describe the aspects of wellness tourism development in Ubud. Adopted from Corbin theory (2006) which states the body, mind and spirit as part of the five dimensions of wellness, namely physical wellness, emotional wellness, social wellness, intellectual wellness, and spiritual wellness, authors would therefore to identify product wellness, wellness activities, wellness dimension and life cycle of development of wellness tourism in Ubud. This study uses qualitative research methods, starting with literature studies related research about wellness tourism and in-depth interviews with wellness service providers in Ubud. In this study, the authors reviewed the literatures and analyzed the information collected from eight wellness service providers. The eight informants are determined by considering the type of wellness service scale such as spa resorts, health resorts, retreat centers, and wellness centers, located in Ubud. The results showed that wellness tourism in Ubud had fulfilled aspects and dimensions of wellness. This is reflected from the identification which was resulted where the highest-demanded wellness products in Ubud, namely yoga retreats, meditation retreats, spiritual retreats, detoxes and spa resorts. While wellness activities in Ubud are considered more relevant to Balinese-Hinduism lifestyles such as customs, cultural-religion activities and valuable-local knowledge of Balinese herbs in which are part of the wellness experience offered in Ubud. While in the terms of phase of development, the current situation of wellness tourism stays in development phase.

Для рассмотрения ретрит туризма и разработки проекта ретрит парка выбран такой регион Российской Федерации, как Республика Алтай, являющаяся сокровищницей природных и культурно-исторических богатств. Мировой опыт показывает растущую роль рекреационного туризма в решении государственных задач по созданию условий для жизнеобеспечения деятельности человека, которая направлена на восстановление и развитие его сил, как физических, так и духовных в местах, не относящихся к месту постоянного проживания. Рекреационно-оздоровительный аспект положен в основу ретрит туризма, развитие которого в регионах Российской Федерации осуществляется через создание «ретритов» в различных формациях: ретрит парков, ретрит комплексов, ретрит и йога центров. Многовариативность ретрит туризма является площадкой для реализации долгосрочных проектов внутреннего и въездного туризма в регионах, которые могут стать существенным источником, как основного, так и дополнительного доходов населения. Ретрит туризм в России находится в стадии формирования, при этом активно развиваются оздоровительные, тематические и духовные ретриты. Актуальность работы с учетом ресурсов Республики Алтай заключается в том, что ретрит туризм, являющийся направлением рекреационного, а точнее, такой его разновидности, как оздоровительный, создает перспективы для развития внутреннего и въездного туристского потока; также алтайцы - невероятная смесь различных племён, благодаря чему у алтайских народов возникли свои, уникальные и неповторимые обычаи. To consider retreat tourism and develop a retreat park project, such a region of the Russian Federation as the Altai Republic, which is a treasury of natural, cultural and historical riches, was chosen. World experience shows the growing role of recreational tourism in solving state tasks to create conditions for the life support of human activity, which is aimed at restoring and developing his strength, both physical and spiritual, inplaces that are not related to the place of permanent residence. The recreational and health aspect is the basis ofretreat tourism, the development of which in the regions of the Russian Federation is carried out through the creation of "retreats" in various formations: retreat parks, retreat complexes, retreat and yoga centers. The diversity ofretreat tourism is a platform for the implementation of long-term projects of domestic and inbound tourism in theregions, which can become a significant source of both basic and additional income for the population. Retreattourism in Russia is in its infancy, and wellness, thematic and spiritual retreats are actively developing. The relevance of the work, taking into account the resources of the Republic of Altai, lies in the fact that retreat tourism,which is a recreational direction, or rather, such a variety of it as a wellness one, creates prospects for the development of internal and inbound tourist flow; Also, the Altaians are an incredible mixture of different tribes, thanks to which the Altai peoples have their own, unique and inimitable customs.

Do spiritual retreat centres have a role to play in fostering environmental awareness and action? Using an interpretive case study methodology, this research study explored the perspectives of staff members working at two religiously based spiritual retreat centres in Western Canada to explore this question and to determine how this is translated into practice through educational programming and daily operations. The findings reveal that while place based pedagogical approaches is relied upon as an entry way into environmental adult education, there is a realization that more overt programming, focused on the environment, is required to catalyze awareness and action in their retreatants. In addition, the level of alignment between espoused environmental values and operational practices played an important role in communicating, implicitly, each retreat centre’s level of commitment to fostering environmental citizenship.

TO THINK CHRISTIANLY: A History of L'Abri, Regent College, and the Christian Study Center Movement by Charles E. Cotherman. Downers Grove, IL: IVP Academic, 2020. 320 pages. Hardcover; $35.00. ISBN: 9780830852826. *How do Christians studying at secular universities, where religion is either ignored or attacked, achieve an integral Christian perspective on their areas of study and future careers? Charles Cotherman presents a first-rate history of one way that Christians have sought to answer this question, namely, in establishing Christian study centers on or adjacent to university campuses. *The Christian study center movement (CSCM) in North America arose to teach and guide Christians in how to think and behave Christianly in all areas and professions of life, by drawing upon the insights of biblical and theological studies. Cotherman defines such a study center as "a local Christian community dedicated to spiritual, intellectual and relational flourishing via the cultivation of deep spirituality, intellectual and artistic engagement, and cultivation of hospitable presence" (p. 8). He rightly contends that the roots of the CSCM movement are found in two institutions: L'Abri Fellowship in Switzerland (founded 1955) and Regent College in Vancouver (founded 1968). In Part 1, Innovation, he presents the history of these two institutions. *In chapter one, Cotherman gives an account of the birth and development of L'Abri under the leadership of Francis and Edith Schaeffer. As missionaries to an increasingly secular Europe, their encounter with its culture, art, and philosophical ideas led Francis to contextualize the gospel--as an evangelical Presbyterian minister rooted in the Reformed faith--in an intellectually honest fashion to people influenced by this culture. L'Abri's ministry was so effective because of two other equally important features: the practice of a deep spirituality amidst the rhythms of everyday life, and the practice of relationships in a hospitable community, both of which Francis and Edith were instrumental in shaping. As more people visited L'Abri and were helped in their faith or accepted the gospel, it became known in the wider evangelical Christian world. This gave rise to branches of L'Abri being established in other nations, and to Christians seeking to establish communities on university campuses that embodied L'Abri's intellectual, spiritual, and relational strengths. *In chapter two, Cotherman presents the history of the rise of Regent College and its progress toward financial and academic stability at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver. The first principal, James Houston, played a key role in attracting good faculty and in shaping the curriculum to educate laypeople in the Christian worldview for their secular careers. It provided students with a strong sense of community and vital spirituality. Regent also sought to be a witness to and partner with the university by purchasing property on the campus and by obtaining university affiliation. With the decline in enrollment for lay theological education in the 1970s, Regent survived by offering the MDiv degree (1978), attracting new students preparing for pastoral ministry. When other attempts at establishing Christian colleges and Christian study centers were initiated at other universities, Houston served to encourage and guide such ventures by drawing upon Regent's experience. *Inspired by the vision and community of L'Abri and by the success of Regent College, Christians ministering at other university campuses sought to establish "evangelical living and learning centers" on or near the campuses of state universities (p. 91). Part 2, Replication, gives an account of three such CSCM ventures: (1) the C. S. Lewis Institute (initially at the University of Maryland, later in downtown Washington, DC); (2) New College, Berkeley; and (3) the Center for Christian Study at the University of Virginia, Charlottesville. Cotherman also includes in this section a chapter on the history and progress of Ligonier Ministries under the leadership and teaching gifts of R. C. Sproul (initially in Pennsylvania, then in Orlando, Florida). Although originally modelled after L'Abri as a lay-teaching retreat center in a rural setting, Ligonier's move to Orlando marked a shift to a ministry focused on Sproul's teaching gifts in (Reformed) theological education that concentrated on video and print materials. The history of Ligonier is clearly the outlier here. Perhaps Cotherman includes it because it began as a retreat center for students, but it gradually became focused on general lay theological education, especially after its move to Orlando. *The three Christian university learning centers all began with grand visions of providing university-level education to aid students, studying at the large universities, in formulating a worldview to enable them to integrate their Christian faith with their academic and professional education. Although these three sought to become free-standing colleges with high-quality faculty, to teach courses during the academic year, and in summer study institutes, the challenges of raising funds, attracting full-time faculty, and finding permanent facilities resulted in all of them having to scale back their plans. The Lewis Institute turned its attention to relational learning, eventually establishing regional centers in eighteen cities; New College, Berkeley, became an affiliate, nondegree granting institution of the Graduate Theological Union, being the evangelical voice there; and the Center for Christian Study shifted its focus to being an inviting and hospitable place for study, formation, and relationships in its building on the edge of the campus. All three found that replicating a Regent College was a much more difficult project than they had originally thought. *Cotherman notes that all four attempts of the CSCM, in the late 1980s and early 1990s, ran into the new reality: American Christians were not willing to take a year off their careers to study for a nonaccredited diploma. Students were more interested in getting degrees that had financial payoffs. The most successful venture was the Center for Christian Study, which used the building it purchased as a hub for various Christian ministries at the university, and as a center for hospitality to Christian and non-Christian students. The Charlottesville Center became a catalyst for the formation of the Consortium of Christian Study Centers across North America. This included not only the three university centers mentioned above, but also numerous others that had arisen on university campuses. Many of the centers became convinced that "the path forward was more a matter of faithful presence through deeply rooted, engaged and hospitable relationships and institutions than it was about the apologetics or cultural bluster that had defined some aspects of the movement in its early days" (p. 252). *Cotherman's concluding chapter notes that the CSCM has largely focused on ministries of faithful presence and generous hospitality, with the goal of holistic flourishing at the universities that they serve. Such flourishing includes helping Christian students to cultivate the ability to think Christianly about current issues and their vocations as they engage the pluralistic ideologies, cultural practices, and neo-pagan practices on university campuses. Cotherman rightly observes that, while both L'Abri and Regent College inspired many to establish such centers, it was Regent that had played the prominent role as a model for those aiming to guide students and to interact with modern secular universities. L'Abri was focused around the unique community that the Schaeffers created and the giftedness of Francis and Edith, but L'Abri failed to interact with the wider academic world. In striving to be a Christian presence on campus, Regent was the appropriate model for the CSCM. *The details of the historical accounts in the book serve to remind the reader that, while grandiose visions and goals drove many in the movement, their reduced aspirations led to the CSCM being better suited to effective witnessing, appropriate educating, and faithful service to students and lay-people today. Any who would start such a Christian study center or who wonder how an existing one can survive should read this book and learn the lessons from the history of the ventures presented. Humility in one's plans and small beginnings are appropriate for any such ministry to avoid the mistakes of the centers presented. *While Cotherman touches on the rising antagonism to Christianity and Christians on university campuses, he fails to provide significant treatment of this new challenge that the CSCM faces. I think we can imply from this fine book that, as the CSCM movement adapted to the new realities in the latter part of the twentieth century, it can also adapt to the intensified attacks on the Christian faith in the twenty-first century. While the challenges ahead are great for Christian university ministries, Christian witness has the resources of the word of God, the wisdom of the Spirit, and the motivation of the gospel which continue to guide biblical discipleship and faithful witness. This historical survey by Cotherman can serve as an encouragement to campus ministry for our increasingly secularized western culture. *Reviewed by Guenther ("Gene") Haas, Professor Emeritus, Religion and Theology Department, Redeemer University, Ancaster, ON L9K 1J4.

One common problem today is the lack of a Third Place gathering place that is a place other than home (First Place) and an office (Second Place), so that Third Place is made as a place for people to gather, feel calm, and avoid the saturation of daily habits, namely first place and second place issues that exist today in daily activities that cause people to become unproductive, namely the problem of stress, without us knowing, now the problem of stress has been experienced by anyone, not affected by age, because there are many stressors , so that it is a problem that is experienced by everyone, and can be one of the targets that must be overcome to create people who have good lifestyles and productive in doing something, the design goals of this project itself are also made to address current global issues , starting from the region that is most affected by the issue of stress, because it has many things becoming a trigger for someone to become stressed, this can create a project that can be a place for people to gather and overcome the issues of stress that affect this life together, this stress issue can also be overcome by changing the stressed population to join the Wellbeing or welfare program individuals, according to the CDC (Centers for Disease Control and Prevention), Wellbeing can improve physical and spiritual health based on the results of positive activities carried out by an individual or group that is continuously carried out, so that it can have a big impact such as, the habits of someone who will do good activities, application of 5 ways to wellbeing is a theory used to improve one's life habits for the better, and this can be maximized with programs related to activities in nature based on the book The Tao of Architecture, the method used is also based on typology methods, by applying design based on common formations that can be fun, and soothing to relieve the stress of visitors, and the Spatial Relations method used to provide a unique design that does not yet exist from combining the formation of healing patterns, with a pleasant pattern formation. Therefore the Retreat can have a pleasant and interesting impact on the community to carry out positive activities to make the population have a better life. A place that has many natural elements has a function to calm a person, so that person can become calm. Abstrak Salah satu masalah yang umum saat ini adalah kurangnya tempat berkumpul Third Place yaitu tempat selain rumah (First Place) dan kantor (Second Place), sehingga Third Place dibuat sebagai tempat orang berkumpul, merasa tenang, dan terhindar dari kejenuhan kebiasaan sehari hari, yaitu first place dan second place isu yang ada saat ini dalam kegiatan sehari hari yang menyebabkan orang menjadi tidak produktif, yaitu masalah stress, tanpa kita sadari, saat ini masalah stress sudah dialami oleh siapa saja, tidak terpengaruh oleh umur, karena terdapat banyaknya faktor faktor pemicu stress, sehingga hal itu merupakan masalah yang dialami oleh semua orang, dan dapat menjadi salah satu target yang harus diatasi untuk menciptakan manusia yang memiliki pola hidup baik dan produktif dalam mengerjakan sesuatu, tujuan desain proyek ini sendiri juga dibuat untuk mengatasi isu global yang ada saat ini, dimulai dari kawasan yang paling merasakan pengaruh isu stress ini, karena memiliki banyak hal yang menjadi pemicu seseorang menjadi stress, hal ini dapat menciptakan proyek yang dapat menjadi tempat orang untuk berkumpul dan mengatasi isu stress yang mempengaruhi kehidupan ini secara bersama sama, isu stress ini juga dapat diatasi dengan cara mengubah penduduk yang mengalami stress untuk mengikuti program Well being atau kesejahteraan individu, menurut CDC (Centers for Disease Control And Prevention), Well being dapat meningkatkan kesehatan jasmani dan rohani berdasarkan hasil dari kegiatan positif yang dilakukan oleh suatu individu atau kelompok yang terus menerus dilakukan, sehingga dapat memberikan dampak besar seperti kebiasaan seseorang yang akan melakukan kegiatan kegiatan yang baik, penerapan 5 ways to well being merupakan teori yang digunakan untuk memperbaiki kebiasaan hidup seseorang menjadi lebih baik, dan hal ini dapat dimaksimalkan dengan program yang berhubungan dengan aktivitas di alam berdasarkan buku The Tao of Architecture, metode yang digunakan juga berdasarkan metode tipologi, dengan cara menerapkan desain berdasarkan bentukan bentukan umum yang dapat menyenangkan, dan menenangkan untuk meredakan stress pengunjungnya, dan metode Spatial Relation yang digunakan untuk memberikan desain unik yang belum ada dari penggabungan bentukan bentukan pola healing, dengan pola bentukan yang menyenangkan. Oleh karena itu tempat Retreat dapat memberikan dampak kesan menyenangkan dan menarik masyarakat untuk melakukan kegiatan kegiatan positif untuk menjadikan penduduk menjadi memiliki hidup yang lebih baik. Tempat yang memiliki banyak unsur alam memiliki fungsi untuk menenangkan pikiran seseorang, sehingga pikiran seseorang dapat menjadi tenang.

This article attempts to reveal the prospects of yoga tourism in Nepal. Yoga is gaining popularity worldwide due to its inherent quality to transform a person from illness to wellness. This is the reason yoga tourism is studied in academia under the umbrella term of wellness tourism. There are potentialities how Nepal can be one of the best destinations for yoga tourism. Nepal is spiritually saturated country being the birthplace of Gautama Buddha and playground of Lord Shiva, the Yogishwara. At the same time, Nepal is a Himalayan country including the highest mountain, Mt. Everest. The cultural heritage is another attraction. The simplicity of people attracts tourists who aim to learn yoga practices while visiting places for refreshment. This article has dealt about how yoga tourism is spreading, what are its theoretical and philosophical background, prospects and potentialities and so on. The major methodology applied in this article is library research, case studies and visiting actual places where yoga tourists from all over the world gather. Yoga retreat survey has revealed actual scenario of yoga tourism. Historicity of yoga philosophy is uncovered using original Classical Sanskrit Cannons. A sample survey identified yoga retreat centers in Kathmandu, the facilities available and potential aspects of tourism and income generation. The finding section documented the actual problems and prospects faced by the hosts, i.e., travel agencies, owners of yoga retreat centers, hoteliers, and yoga masters. The research has reached in conclusion: if right policies and facilities are generated, Nepal will gain a new identity as best destination for yoga tourism in the world. There are potentialities to develop internal yoga tourism as well. One can visualize Nepal being famous and prosperous from yoga tourism and Nepalese people gaining health, wealth and wellbeing by living yogic lifestyle and collecting reputation as yoga masters by guiding tourists into yoga life.

The research project "New Faces of the Folk Church – Lived Religion, Spiritual Practices and Theological Legitimacy" aims at investigating everyday spiritual activities laypeople engage in within an ecclesial institution, the Evangelical-Lutheran Church of Sweden, and how these practices are linked to notions about religion and health. In this article we give an account of our preliminary findings. In a netnographic survey of the websites of the parishes in the diocese of Stockholm, counting all activities except services and concerts, we found that there is a plethora of new activities going on which have emerged during the last fifty years. Many of these activities were geared towards community building, and 15 percent of them fall into the category of holistic practices. Such practices, comprising of, for example, meditiation groups, yoga classes, and dance, can be found in eight out of ten parishes. Our material indicates that the church has quadruple functions: (1) theological, (2) life cycle related, (3) ordinary community building, and (4) holistic everyday spiritual practices. These new spiritual practices were first offered in exclusive settings like retreat centres, but have now moved into ordinary parish life, accessible to all parishioners. Some of the practices, like zen meditation and yoga, have been contested but are now broadly accepted. In the next step of the project, we will conduct interviews and participatory observation to investigate how these practices are integrated in individuals' lives, as well as how they are negotiated and legitimized on the institutional level.

Sarah Moss’s novel The Fell (2021), set during the second lockdown in Britain, is an instance of fiction’s engagement with the ongoing Covid-19 pandemic. Written in the midst of the calamity, the novel presents events from the limited perspective of an individual whose personal crisis is intensified by her enforced isolation and confinement. Spanning only one night, the story recounts the protagonist’s quarantine-breaking walk on the hills of the nearby Peak District as her way of coping with the overwhelming situation. This article analyses the character’s retreat into nature as her instinctive reaction to societal pressures. Drawing on Frédéric Gros’s A Philosophy of Walking and Henry David Thoreau’s essay Walking, this article centres on the trope of walking in Moss’s novel, positing that the heroine is an incarnation of Thoreau’s “walker errant.” It is argued that for Kate communing with nature, perceived as a site of otherness and an ever-renewing cycle of life and death, is vital for her spiritual balance, but it has also become a survival strategy during the current crisis.

This research paper aims to explore the cultural adaptation and practice of yoga in Japan. It investigates the historical development of yoga in Japan, examining how it was introduced and integrated into Japanese culture. The paper also delves into the cultural influences that shaped the adoption and evolution of yoga in the country, both from traditional and modern perspectives. Furthermore, it examines the role of yoga in Japanese religious and spiritual traditions, highlighting the syntheses between yoga and Zen Buddhism. The study also explores the incorporation of yoga as a form of physical exercise in Japanese society, examining its impact on health, fitness, and body culture. Additionally, it investigates the connection between yoga and Japanese martial arts, analyzing the integration of mind-body practices. The paper further investigates the integration of yoga in Japanese education, exploring its inclusion in school curricula and its effects on students. It also examines yoga retreats and centers in Japan, analyzing them as spaces for spiritual growth and personal transformation. Moreover, the research paper explores the different styles and methods of yoga practiced in Japan, examining adaptations, innovations, and variations. Finally, it discusses the social and cultural impacts of yoga on Japanese society, including community building, wellness movements, and lifestyle trends. Through this comprehensive exploration, the paper provides valuable insights into the cultural adaptation and practice of yoga in Japan, shedding light on its unique manifestation in the country's rich cultural tapestry.

When the COVID-19 pandemic drastically altered how people lived their lives, many called it a “wake up call.” Within the global Muslim community, many shared the sentiment that the coinciding of the lockdown with Ramadan presented an opportunity for khalwa (spiritual retreat and reflection). Although Muslim religious leaders sought to frame the Islamic tradition’s wisdom in light of the pandemic, much of this remained theoretical and abstract. The pandemic’s extended impact revealed that Muslim families lack guidance on how to employ the resources found in the Qur’ān and Sunnah practically for their own well-being and resilience. This paper outlines how one Muslim mental health professional and his network of colleagues responded to this crisis by tending to the well-being needs and collective trauma of Muslim families in the U.S. using online webinar platforms to address increased anxiety, family conflict, depression, and existential grief. A detailed framework of an Islamic psychology used as a psycho-educational tool to orient families to indigenous Islamic tools for building resiliency and decreased anxiety is also presented. From this user-friendly theoretical framework, a daily routine of psychological, physical, and contemplative exercises is mapped out and was amended to comply with the particular resources and restrictions imposed by the pandemic. The tools offered, while grounded in the Islamic tradition, provide contemporary and pragmatic solutions that many Muslims have used to build resiliency and engage with the dīn (Islamic religion) in a transformational, rather than a simply transactional, way during these trying times.

Of late, there has been a growing interest in retreat among clergy and members of congregations in the Dutch Reformed tradition in South Africa. The article investigates the relevance of the monastic traditions for this growing interest in Reformed circles. It focuses on aspects of retreat such as the role of holy places in the monastic traditions (e.g., monasteries, cathedrals, retreat centers) and the experience of silence, solitude, regeneration, divine presence and spiritual formation. Proceeding from an epistemological reflection on the subject as described in a previous article, the aim of this article is to explore the “action of retreat” as a narrative research journey and pilgrimage in order to investigate the relevance of the Benedictine, Franciscan and Taizé monastic-mystic traditions (seen as an associative/mystic spirituality) for retreat in the Dutch Reformed tradition (which is seen as a disassociative/rational/ dogmatic spirituality).

AbstractThe present study examined the safety and efficacy of the ceremonial use of ayahuasca in relation to reports of heightened life event reexperiencing under psychedelics. The study examined (1) the prevalence of specific types of adverse life event reexperiencing, (2) characteristics predictive of reexperiencing, (3) the psychological character of reexperiencing, and (4) the impact of reexperiencing on mental health. Participants were recruited from three ayahuasca healing and spiritual centers in South and Central America (N = 33 military veterans, 306 non-veterans) using self-report data at three timepoints (Pre-retreat, Post-retreat, 3-months post-retreat). Reexperiencing adverse life events under ayahuasca was common, with women showing particularly high probability of reexperiencing sexual assault, veterans reexperiencing combat-related trauma, and individuals with a self-reported lifetime diagnosis of post-traumatic stress disorder exhibiting a substantively higher prevalence of reexperiencing. Reexperiencing was associated with states of cognitive reappraisal, psychological flexibility, and discomfort during ceremonies, and participants who reexperienced adverse life events exhibited greater reductions in trait neuroticism following their ceremonies. Clinical implications of these results for the application of psychedelics to mood and stress disorders are discussed.

International Society for Krishna Consciousness (ISKCON) in Ukraine faces different kinds of challenges – practical as well as spiritual – since the war in Donbas had been started. The practical challenge deals with taking care of fellows believers from war areas. The spiritual concerns what the community stand for in the conflict. The response on the first one was the foundation of “Ukrainian Vaisnava Refugee Fund” which provides temporal shelter for the refugees and makes the premises in Vaishnava retreat centers ready for the cold season. Concerning the second challenge – ISKCON claims principal and conscious detachment from the war. One could not expect different positions from this religious organization taking to account its theological particularities of the religion. Firstly, Vaishnavism claims a strong division on material and spiritual (transcendental) worlds so that worldly deals including wars treated less important and valuable. Secondly, the Hindu imagination on time implies that Earth is facing the period of degradation (kali yuga) when wars are inevitable and no one can influence it, so there is no point in active participation in them. Thirdly, Vaishnavism does not think about its position on war as on the detachment rather it claims the different type of participation which derives from the understanding of its mission in any conflict which differs from missions of other religious organizations. The mission of ISKCON in the war not to take one or another side but transform the quality of ignorance (tama-guna) into the quality of goodness (sattva-guna) which is reached by transcendental, not worldly methods. Therefore, any ISKCON charity project does not deals with the help one or another side of the conflict directly but strive to be universal and provide help irrespective to war affairs. As a result of this position only two ways of charity was possible for the Krishnaites in a wartime – the project “Food for life. Donbas” and taking care of abandoned cows in the conflict zone. However, the individual position of devotee could differ from organization’s one. Usually it depends on his or her personal experience or background, especially before coming to Krishna’s consciousness. There are devotees who follow pro-Ukrainian position as well as those who follow pro-Russian, thus Vaishnavas’ attitude to the conflict reflects, in general, the Ukrainian population attitude to it on particular territories. It does not mean that devotees on the Ukrainian territories are all pro-Ukrainian and those who are on the uncontrolled territories are all pro-Russian. Both positions exist on the both sides from the frontline. But because of curtain reasons one or another position is louder on one side from the frontline and almost silent on another. It could be concluded that Vaishnavas accepted the spiritual challenge successfully on both collective and individual level. As field work has shown ISKCON avoided inner conflicts and schism on the political ground. Furthermore, Ukrainian Vaishnavas have not lost the connection with their fellow believers on the uncontrolled territories. Moreover, they also have not lost the good relationships and connections with Russian fellow believers. Though the intensity of such contacts decreased drastically it is more due to technical reasons connecting with the difficulties on the borders. Regarding ISKCON yatras on the uncontrolled territories of Donbas and in Crimea they are facing difficulties with selflegalization due to strict religious laws.

The 2000s have been a lively decade for cities. The Worldwatch Institute estimated that 2007 was the first year in human history that more people worldwide lived in cities than the countryside. Globalisation and new digital media technologies have generated the seemingly paradoxical outcome that spatial location came to be more rather than less important, as combinations of firms, industries, cultural activities and creative talents have increasingly clustered around a select node of what have been termed “creative cities,” that are in turn highly networked into global circuits of economic capital, political power and entertainment media. Intellectually, the period has seen what the UCLA geographer Ed Soja refers to as the spatial turn in social theory, where “whatever your interests may be, they can be significantly advanced by adopting a critical spatial perspective” (2). This is related to the dynamic properties of socially constructed space itself, or what Soja terms “the powerful forces that arise from socially produced spaces such as urban agglomerations and cohesive regional economies,” with the result that “what can be called the stimulus of socio-spatial agglomeration is today being assertively described as the primary cause of economic development, technological innovation, and cultural creativity” (14). The demand for social justice in cities has, in recent years, taken the form of “Right to the City” movements. The “Right to the City” movement draws upon the long tradition of radical urbanism in which the Paris Commune of 1871 features prominently, and which has both its Marxist and anarchist variants, as well as the geographer Henri Lefebvre’s (1991) arguments that capitalism was fundamentally driven by the production of space, and that the citizens of a city possessed fundamental rights by virtue of being in a city, meaning that political struggle in capitalist societies would take an increasingly urban form. Manifestations of contemporary “Right to the City” movements have been seen in the development of a World Charter for the Right to the City, Right to the City alliances among progressive urban planners as well as urban activists, forums that bring together artists, architects, activists and urban geographers, and a variety of essays on the subject by radical geographers including David Harvey, whose work I wish to focus upon here. In his 2008 essay "The Right to the City," Harvey presents a manifesto for 21st century radical politics that asserts that the struggle for collective control over cities marks the nodal point of anti-capitalist movements today. It draws together a range of strands of arguments recognizable to those familiar with Harvey’s work, including Marxist political economy, the critique of neoliberalism, the growth of social inequality in the U.S. in particular, and concerns about the rise of speculative finance capital and its broader socio-economic consequences. My interest in Harvey’s manifesto here arises not so much from his prognosis for urban radicalism, but from how he understands the suburban in relation to this urban class struggle. It is an important point to consider because, in many parts of the world, growing urbanisation is in fact growing suburbanisation. This is the case for U.S. cities (Cox), and it is also apparent in Australian cities, with the rise in particular of outer suburban Master Planned Communities as a feature of the “New Prosperity” Australia has been experiencing since the mid 1990s (Flew; Infrastructure Australia). What we find in Harvey’s essay is that the suburban is clearly sub-urban, or an inferior form of city living. Suburbs are variously identified by Harvey as being:Sites for the expenditure of surplus capital, as a safety valve for overheated finance capitalism (Harvey 27);Places where working class militancy is pacified through the promotion of mortgage debt, which turns suburbanites into political conservatives primarily concerned with maintaining their property values;Places where “the neoliberal ethic of intense possessive individualism, and its cognate of political withdrawal from collective forms of action” are actively promoted through the proliferation of shopping malls, multiplexes, franchise stores and fast-food outlets, leading to “pacification by cappuccino” (32);Places where women are actively oppressed, so that “leading feminists … [would] proclaim the suburb as the locus of all their primary discontents” (28);A source of anti-capitalist struggle, as “the soulless qualities of suburban living … played a critical role in the dramatic events of 1968 in the US [as] discontented white middle-class students went into a phase of revolt, sought alliances with marginalized groups claiming civil rights and rallied against American imperialism” (28).Given these negative associations, one could hardly imagine citizens demanding the right to the suburb, in the same way as Harvey projects the right to the city as a rallying cry for a more democratic social order. Instead, from an Australian perspective, one is reminded of the critiques of suburbia that have been a staple of radical theory from the turn of the 20th century to the present day (Collis et. al.). Demanding the “right to the suburb” would appear here as an inherently contradictory demand, that could only be desired by those who the Australian radical psychoanalytic theorist Douglas Kirsner described as living an alienated existence where:Watching television, cleaning the car, unnecessary housework and spectator sports are instances of general life-patterns in our society: by adopting these patterns the individual submits to a uniform life fashioned from outside, a pseudo-life in which the question of individual self-realisation does not even figure. People live conditioned, unconscious lives, reproducing the values of the system as a whole (Kirsner 23). The problem with this tradition of radical critique, which is perhaps reflective of the estrangement of a section of the Australian critical intelligentsia more generally, is that most Australians live in suburbs, and indeed seem (not surprisingly!) to like living in them. Indeed, each successive wave of migration to Australia has been marked by families seeking a home in the suburbs, regardless of the housing conditions of the place they came from: the demand among Singaporeans for large houses in Perth, or what has been termed “Singaperth,” is one of many manifestations of this desire (Lee). Australian suburban development has therefore been characterized by a recurring tension between the desire of large sections of the population to own their own home (the fabled quarter-acre block) in the suburbs, and the condemnation of suburban life from an assortment of intellectuals, political radicals and cultural critics. This was the point succinctly made by the economist and urban planner Hugh Stretton in his 1970 book Ideas for Australian Cities, where he observed that “Most Australians choose to live in suburbs, in reach of city centres and also of beaches or countryside. Many writers condemn this choice, and with especial anger or gloom they condemn the suburbs” (Stretton 7). Sue Turnbull has observed that “suburbia has come to constitute a cultural fault-line in Australia over the last 100 years” (19), while Ian Craven has described suburbia as “a term of contention and a focus for fundamentally conflicting beliefs” in the Australian national imaginary “whose connotations continue to oscillate between dream and suburban nightmare” (48). The tensions between celebration and critique of suburban life play themselves out routinely in the Australian media, from the sun-lit suburbanism of Australia’s longest running television serial dramas, Neighbours and Home and Away, to the pointed observational critiques found in Australian comedy from Barry Humphries to Kath and Kim, to the dark visions of films such as The Boys and Animal Kingdom (Craven; Turnbull). Much as we may feel that the diagnosis of suburban life as a kind of neurotic condition had gone the way of the concept album or the tie-dye shirt, newspaper feature writers such as Catherine Deveny, writing in The Age, have offered the following as a description of the Chadstone shopping centre in Melbourne’s eastern suburbChadstone is a metastasised tumour of offensive proportions that's easy to find. You simply follow the line of dead-eyed wage slaves attracted to this cynical, hermetically sealed weatherless biosphere by the promise a new phone will fix their punctured soul and homewares and jumbo caramel mugachinos will fill their gaping cavern of disappointment … No one looks happy. Everyone looks anaesthetised. A day spent at Chadstone made me understand why they call these shopping centres complexes. Complex as in a psychological problem that's difficult to analyse, understand or solve. (Deveny) Suburbanism has been actively promoted throughout Australia’s history since European settlement. Graeme Davison has observed that “Australia’s founders anticipated a sprawl of homes and gardens rather than a clumping of terraces and alleys,” and quotes Governor Arthur Phillip’s instructions to the first urban developers of the Sydney Cove colony in 1790 that streets shall be “laid out in such a manner as to afford free circulation of air, and where the houses are built … the land will be granted with a clause that will prevent more than one house being built on the allotment” (Davison 43). Louise Johnson (2006) argued that the main features of 20th century Australian suburbanisation were very much in place by the 1920s, particularly land-based capitalism and the bucolic ideal of home as a retreat from the dirt, dangers and density of the city. At the same time, anti-suburbanism has been a significant influence in Australian public thought. Alan Gilbert (1988) drew attention to the argument that Australia’s suburbs combined the worst elements of the city and country, with the absence of both the grounded community associated with small towns, and the mental stimuli and personal freedom associated with the city. Australian suburbs have been associated with spiritual emptiness, the promotion of an ersatz, one-dimensional consumer culture, the embourgeoisment of the working-class, and more generally criticised for being “too pleasant, too trivial, too domestic and far too insulated from … ‘real’ life” (Gilbert 41). There is also an extensive feminist literature critiquing suburbanization, seeing it as promoting the alienation of women and the unequal sexual division of labour (Game and Pringle). More recently, critiques of suburbanization have focused on the large outer-suburban homes developed on new housing estates—colloquially known as McMansions—that are seen as being environmentally unsustainable and emblematic of middle-class over-consumption. Clive Hamilton and Richard Denniss’s Affluenza (2005) is a locus classicus of this type of argument, and organizations such as the Australia Institute—which Hamilton and Denniss have both headed—have regularly published papers making such arguments. Can the Suburbs Make You Creative?In such a context, championing the Australian suburb can feel somewhat like being an advocate for Dan Brown novels, David Williamson plays, Will Ferrell comedies, or TV shows such as Two and a Half Men. While it may put you on the side of majority opinion, you can certainly hear the critical axe grinding and possibly aimed at your head, not least because of the association of such cultural forms with mass popular culture, or the pseudo-life of an alienated existence. The art of a program such as Kath and Kim is that, as Sue Turnbull so astutely notes, it walks both sides of the street, both laughing with and laughing at Australian suburban culture, with its celebrity gossip magazines, gourmet butcher shops, McManisons and sales at Officeworks. Gina Riley and Jane Turner’s inspirations for the show can be seen with the presence of such suburban icons as Shane Warne, Kylie Minogue and Barry Humphries as guests on the program. Others are less nuanced in their satire. The website Things Bogans Like relentlessly pillories those who live in McMansions, wear Ed Hardy t-shirts and watch early evening current affairs television, making much of the lack of self-awareness of those who would simultaneously acquire Buddhist statues for their homes and take budget holidays in Bali and Phuket while denouncing immigration and multiculturalism. It also jokes about the propensity of “bogans” to loudly proclaim that those who question their views on such matters are demonstrating “political correctness gone mad,” appealing to the intellectual and moral authority of writers such as the Melbourne Herald-Sun columnist Andrew Bolt. There is also the “company you keep” question. Critics of over-consuming middle-class suburbia such as Clive Hamilton are strongly associated with the Greens, whose political stocks have been soaring in Australia’s inner cities, where the majority of Australia’s cultural and intellectual critics live and work. By contrast, the Liberal party under John Howard and now Tony Abbott has taken strongly to what could be termed suburban realism over the 1990s and 2000s. Examples of suburban realism during the Howard years included the former Member for Lindsay Jackie Kelly proclaiming that the voters of her electorate were not concerned with funding for their local university (University of Western Sydney) as the electorate was “pram city” and “no one in my electorate goes to uni” (Gibson and Brennan-Horley), and the former Minister for Immigration and Citizenship, Garry Hardgrave, holding citizenship ceremonies at Bunnings hardware stores, so that allegiance to the Australian nation could co-exist with a sausage sizzle (Gleeson). Academically, a focus on the suburbs is at odds with Richard Florida’s highly influential creative class thesis, which stresses inner urban cultural amenity and “buzz” as the drivers of a creative economy. Unfortunately, it is also at odds with many of Florida’s critics, who champion inner city activism as the antidote to the ersatz culture of “hipsterisation” that they associate with Florida (Peck; Slater). A championing of suburban life and culture is associated with writers such as Joel Kotkin and the New Geography group, who also tend to be suspicious of claims made about the creative industries and the creative economy. It is worth noting, however, that there has been a rich vein of work on Australian suburbs among cultural geographers, that has got past urban/suburban binaries and considered the extent to which critiques of suburban Australia are filtered through pre-existing discursive categories rather than empirical research findings (Dowling and Mee; McGuirk and Dowling; Davies (this volume). I have been part of a team engaged in a three-year study of creative industries workers in outer suburban areas, known as the Creative Suburbia project.[i] The project sought to understand how those working in creative industries who lived and worked in the outer suburbs maintained networks, interacted with clients and their peers, and made a success of their creative occupations: it focused on six suburbs in the cities of Brisbane (Redcliffe, Springfield, Forest Lake) and Melbourne (Frankston, Dandenong, Caroline Springs). It was premised upon what has been an inescapable empirical fact: however much talk there is about the “return to the city,” the fastest rates of population growth are in the outer suburbs of Australia’s major cities (Infrastructure Australia), and this is as true for those working in creative industries occupations as it is for those in virtually all other industry and occupational sectors (Flew; Gibson and Brennan-Horley; Davies). While there is a much rehearsed imagined geography of the creative industries that points to creative talents clustering in dense, highly agglomerated inner city precincts, incubating their unique networks of trust and sociality through random encounters in the city, it is actually at odds with the reality of where people in these sectors choose to live and work, which is as often as not in the suburbs, where the citizenry are as likely to meet in their cars at traffic intersections than walking in city boulevards.There is of course a “yes, but” response that one could have to such empirical findings, which is to accept that the creative workforce is more suburbanised than is commonly acknowledged, but to attribute this to people being driven out of the inner city by high house prices and rents, which may or may not be by-products of a Richard Florida-style strategy to attract the creative class. In other words, people live in the outer suburbs because they are driven out of the inner city. From our interviews with 130 people across these six suburban locations, the unequivocal finding was that this was not the case. While a fair number of our respondents had indeed moved from the inner city, just as many would—if given the choice—move even further away from the city towards a more rural setting as they would move closer to it. While there are clearly differences between suburbs, with creative people in Redcliffe being generally happier than those in Springfield, for example, it was quite clear that for many of these people a suburban location helped them in their creative practice, in ways that included: the aesthetic qualities of the location; the availability of “headspace” arising from having more time to devote to creative work rather than other activities such as travelling and meeting people; less pressure to conform to a stereotyped image of how one should look and act; financial savings from having access to lower-cost locations; and time saved by less commuting between locations.These creative workers generally did not see having access to the “buzz” associated with the inner city as being essential for pursuing work in their creative field, and they were just as likely to establish hardware stores and shopping centres as networking hubs as they were cafes and bars. While being located in the suburbs was disadvantageous in terms of access to markets and clients, but this was often seen in terms of a trade-off for better quality of life. Indeed, contrary to the presumptions of those such as Clive Hamilton and Catherine Deveny, they could draw creative inspiration from creative locations themselves, without feeling subjected to “pacification by cappuccino.” The bigger problem was that so many of the professional associations they dealt with would hold events in the inner city in the late afternoon or early evening, presuming people living close by and/or not having domestic or family responsibilities at such times. The role played by suburban locales such as hardware stores as sites for professional networking and as elements of creative industries value chains has also been documented in studies undertaken of Darwin as a creative city in Australia’s tropical north (Brennan-Horley and Gibson; Brennan-Horley et al.). Such a revised sequence in the cultural geography of the creative industries has potentially great implications for how urban cultural policy is being approached. The assumption that the creative industries are best developed in cities by investing heavily in inner urban cultural amenity runs the risk of simply bypassing those areas where the bulk of the nation’s artists, musicians, filmmakers and other cultural workers actually are, which is in the suburbs. Moreover, by further concentrating resources among already culturally rich sections of the urban population, such policies run the risk of further accentuating spatial inequalities in the cultural realm, and achieving the opposite of what is sought by those seeking spatial justice or the right to the city. An interest in broadband infrastructure or suburban university campuses is certainly far more prosaic than a battle for control of the nation’s cultural institutions or guerilla actions to reclaim the city’s streets. Indeed, it may suggest aspirations no higher than those displayed by Kath and Kim or by the characters of Barry Humphries’ satirical comedy. But however modest or utilitarian a focus on developing cultural resources in Australian suburbs may seem, it is in fact the most effective way of enabling the forms of spatial justice in the cultural sphere that many progressive people seek. ReferencesBrennan-Horley, Chris, and Chris Gibson. “Where Is Creativity in the City? Integrating Qualitative and GIS Methods.” Environment and Planning A 41.11 (2009): 2595–614. Brennan-Horley, Chris, Susan Luckman, Chris Gibson, and J. Willoughby-Smith. “GIS, Ethnography and Cultural Research: Putting Maps Back into Ethnographic Mapping.” The Information Society: An International Journal 26.2 (2010): 92–103.Collis, Christy, Emma Felton, and Phil Graham. “Beyond the Inner City: Real and Imagined Places in Creative Place Policy and Practice.” The Information Society: An International Journal 26.2 (2010): 104–12.Cox, Wendell. “The Still Elusive ‘Return to the City’.” New Geography 28 February 2011. < http://www.newgeography.com/content/002070-the-still-elusive-return-city >.Craven, Ian. “Cinema, Postcolonialism and Australian Suburbia.” Australian Studies 1995: 45-69. Davies, Alan. “Are the Suburbs Dormitories?” The Melbourne Urbanist 21 Sep. 2010. < http://melbourneurbanist.wordpress.com/2010/09/21/are-the-suburbs-dormitories/ >.Davison, Graeme. "Australia: The First Suburban Nation?” Journal of Urban History 22.1 (1995): 40-75. Deveny, Catherine. “No One Out Alive.” The Age 29 Oct. 2009. < http://www.smh.com.au/opinion/society-and-culture/no-one-gets-out-alive-20091020-h6yh.html >.Dowling, Robyn, and K. Mee. “Tales of the City: Western Sydney at the End of the Millennium.” Sydney: The Emergence of World City. Ed. John Connell. Melbourne: Oxford UP, 2000. 244–72.Flew, Terry. “Economic Prosperity, Suburbanization and the Creative Workforce: Findings from Australian Suburban Communities.” Spaces and Flows: Journal of Urban and Extra-Urban Studies 1.1 (2011, forthcoming).Game, Ann, and Rosemary Pringle. “Sexuality and the Suburban Dream.” Australian and New Zealand Journal of Sociology 15.2 (1979): 4–15.Gibson, Chris, and Chris Brennan-Horley. “Goodbye Pram City: Beyond Inner/Outer Zone Binaries in Creative City Research.” Urban Policy and Research 24.4 (2006): 455–71. Gilbert, A. “The Roots of Australian Anti-Suburbanism.” Australian Cultural History. Ed. S. I. Goldberg and F. B. Smith. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1988. 33–39. Gleeson, Brendan. Australian Heartlands: Making Space for Hope in the Suburbs. Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 2006.Hamilton, Clive, and Richard Denniss. Affluenza. Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 2005.Harvey, David. “The Right to the City.” New Left Review 53 (2008): 23–40.Infrastructure Australia. State of Australian Cities 2010. Infrastructure Australia Major Cities Unit. Canberra: Commonwealth of Australia. 2010.Johnson, Lesley. “Style Wars: Revolution in the Suburbs?” Australian Geographer 37.2 (2006): 259–77. Kirsner, Douglas. “Domination and the Flight from Being.” Australian Capitalism: Towards a Socialist Critique. Eds. J. Playford and D. Kirsner. Melbourne: Penguin, 1972. 9–31.Kotkin, Joel. “Urban Legends.” Foreign Policy 181 (2010): 128–34. Lee, Terence. “The Singaporean Creative Suburb of Perth: Rethinking Cultural Globalization.” Globalization and Its Counter-Forces in South-East Asia. Ed. T. Chong. Singapore: Institute for Southeast Asian Studies, 2008. 359–78. Lefebvre, Henri. The Production of Space. Trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith. Oxford: Blackwell, 1991.McGuirk, P., and Robyn Dowling. “Understanding Master-Planned Estates in Australian Cities: A Framework for Research.” Urban Policy and Research 25.1 (2007): 21–38Peck, Jamie. “Struggling with the Creative Class.” International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 29.4 (2005): 740–70. Slater, Tom. “The Eviction of Critical Perspectives from Gentrification Research.” International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 30.4 (2006): 737–57. Soja, Ed. Seeking Spatial Justice. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 2010.Stretton, Hugh. Ideas for Australian Cities. Melbourne: Penguin, 1970.Turnbull, Sue. “Mapping the Vast Suburban Tundra: Australian Comedy from Dame Edna to Kath and Kim.” International Journal of Cultural Studies 11.1 (2008): 15–32.

Photograph by Gonzalo Echeverria (2010)The Screen would light up. They would feel a thrill of satisfaction. But the colours had faded with age, the picture wobbled on the screen, the women were of another age; they would come out they would be sad. It was not the film they had dreamt of. It was not the total film each of them had inside himself, the perfect film they could have enjoyed forever and ever. The film they would have liked to make. Or, more secretly, no doubt, the film they would have liked to live. (Perec 57) Over the years that I have watched and thought about Jean-Luc Godard’s films I have been struck by the idea of him as an artist who works with the moving image and perhaps just as importantly the idea of cinema as an irresolvable series of problems. Most obviously this ‘problematic condition’ of Godard’s practice is evidenced in the series of crises and renunciations that pepper the historical trace of his work. A trace that is often characterised thus: criticism, the Nouvelle Vague, May 1968, the Dziga Vertov group, the adoption of video, the return to narrative form, etc. etc. Of all these events it is the rejection of both the dominant cinematic narrative form and its attendant models of production that so clearly indicated the depth and intensity of Godard’s doubt in the artistic viability of the institution of cinema. Historically and ideologically congruent with the events of May 1968, this turning away from tradition was foreshadowed by the closing titles of his 1967 opus Week End: fin de cinema (the end of cinema). Godard’s relentless application to the task of engaging a more discursive and politically informed mode of operation had implications not only for the films that were made in the wake of his disavowal of cinema but also for those that preceded it. In writing this paper it was my initial intention to selectively consider the vast oeuvre of the filmmaker as a type of conceptual project that has in some way been defined by the condition of doubt. While to certain degree I have followed this remit, I have found it necessary to focus on a small number of historically correspondent filmic instances to make my point. The sheer size and complexity of Godard’s output would effectively doom any other approach to deal in generalities. To this end I am interested in the ways that these films have embodied doubt as both an aesthetic and philosophical position. There is an enduring sense of contentiousness that surrounds both the work and perceived motives of the filmmaker Jean-Luc Godard that has never come at the cost of discourse. Through a period of activity that now stretches into its sixth decade Godard has shaped an oeuvre that is as stylistically diverse as it is theoretically challenging. This span of practice is noteworthy not only for its sheer length but for its enduring ability to polarise both audiences and critical opinion. Indeed these opposing critical positions are so well inscribed in our historical understanding of Godard’s practice that they function as a type of secondary narrative. It is a narrative that the artist himself has been more than happy to cultivate and at times even engage. One hardly needs to be reminded that Godard came to making films as a critic. He asserted in the pages of his former employer Cahiers du Cinema in 1962 that “As a critic, I thought of myself as a filmmaker. Today I still think of myself as a critic, and in a sense I am, more than ever before. Instead of writing criticism, I make a film, but the critical dimension is subsumed” (59). If Godard did at this point in time believe that the criticality of practice as a filmmaker was “subsumed”, the ensuing years would see a more overt sense of criticality emerge in his work. By 1968 he was to largely reject both traditional cinematic form and production models in a concerted effort to explore the possibilities of a revolutionary cinema. In the same interview the director went on to extol the virtues of the cine-literacy that to a large part defined the loose alignment of Nouvelle Vague directors (Chabrol, Godard, Rohmer, Rivette, Truffaut) referred to as the Cahiers group claiming that “We were the first directors to know that Griffiths exists” (Godard 60). It is a statement that is as persuasive as it is dramatic, foregrounding the hitherto obscured history of cinema while positioning the group firmly within its master narrative. However, given the benefit of hindsight one realises that perhaps the filmmaker’s motives were not as simple as historical posturing. For Godard what is at stake is not just the history of cinema but cinema itself. When he states that “We were thinking cinema and at a certain moment we felt the need to extend that thought” one is struck by how far and for how long he has continued to think about and through cinema. In spite of the hours of strict ideological orthodoxy that accompanied his most politically informed works of the late 1960s and early 1970s or the sustained sense of wilful obtuseness that permeates his most “difficult” work, there is a sense of commitment to extending “that thought” that is without peer. The name “Godard”, in the words of the late critic Serge Daney, “designates an auteur but it is also synonymous with a tenacious passion for that region of the world of images we call the cinema” (Daney 68). It is a passion that is both the crux of his practice as an artist and the source of a restless experimentation and interrogation of the moving image. For Godard the passion of cinema is one that verges on religiosity. This carries with it all the philosophical and spiritual implications that the term implies. Cinema functions here as a system of signs that at once allows us to make sense of and live in the world. But this is a faith for Godard that is nothing if not tested. From the radical formal experimentation of his first feature film À Bout de soufflé (Breathless) onwards Godard has sought to place the idea of cinema in doubt. In this sense doubt becomes a type of critical engine that at once informs the shape of individual works and animates the constantly shifting positions the artist has occupied. Serge Daney's characterisation of the Nouvelle Vague as possessed of a “lucidity tinged with nostalgia” (70) is especially pertinent in understanding the way in which doubt came to animate Godard’s practice across the 1960s and beyond. Daney’s contention that the movement was both essentially nostalgic and saturated with an acute awareness that the past could not be recreated, casts the cinema itself as type of irresolvable proposition. Across the dazzling arc of films (15 features in 8 years) that Godard produced prior to his renunciation of narrative cinematic form in 1967, one can trace an unravelling of faith. During this period we can consider Godard's work and its increasingly complex engagement with the political as being predicated by the condition of doubt. The idea of the cinema as an industrial and social force increasingly permeates this work. For Godard the cinema becomes a site of questioning and ultimately reinvention. In his 1963 short film Le Grand Escroc (The Great Rogue) a character asserts that “cinema is the most beautiful fraud in the world”. Indeed it is this sense of the paradoxical that shadows much of his work. The binary of beauty and fraud, like that of faith and doubt, calls forth a questioning of the cinema that stands to this day. It is of no small consequence that so many of Godard’s 1960s works contain scenes of people watching films within the confines of a movie theatre. For Godard and his Nouvelle Vague peers the sale de cinema was both the hallowed site of cinematic reception and the terrain of the everyday. It is perhaps not surprising then he chooses the movie theatre as a site to play out some of his most profound engagements with the cinema. Considered in relation to each other these scenes of cinematic viewing trace a narrative in which an undeniable affection for the cinema is undercut by both a sense of loss and doubt. Perhaps the most famous of Godard’s ‘viewing’ scenes is from the film Vivre Sa Vie (My Life to Live). Essentially a tale of existential trauma, the film follows the downward spiral of a young woman Nana (played by Anna Karina) into prostitution and then death at the hands of ruthless pimps. Championed (with qualifications) by Susan Sontag as a “perfect film” (207), it garnered just as many detractors, including famously the director Roberto Rosellini, for what was perceived to be its nihilistic content and overly stylised form. Seeking refuge in a cinema after being cast out from her apartment for non payment of rent the increasingly desperate Nana is shown engrossed in the starkly silent images of Carl Dreyer’s 1928 film La Passion de Jeanne d’Arc (The Passion of Joan of Arc). Godard cuts from the action of his film to quote at length from Dreyer’s classic, returning from the mute intensity of Maria Faloconetti’s portrayal of the condemned Joan of Arc to Karina’s enraptured face. As Falconetti’s tears swell and fall so do Karina’s, the emotional rawness of the performance on the screen mirrored and internalised by the doomed character of Nana. Nana’s identification with that of the screen heroine is at once total and immaculate as her own brutal death at the hands of men is foretold. There is an ominous silence to this sequence that serves not only to foreground the sheer visual intensity of what is being shown but also to separate it from the world outside this purely cinematic space. However, if we are to read this scene as a testament to the power of the cinematic we must also admit to the doubt that resides within it. Godard’s act of separation invites us to consider the scene not only as a meditation on the emotional and existential state of the character of Nana but also on the foreshortened possibilities of the cinema itself. As Godard’s shots mirror those of Dreyer we are presented with a consummate portrait of irrevocable loss. This is a complex system of imagery that places Dreyer’s faith against Godard’s doubt without care for the possibility of resolution. Of all Godard’s 1960s films that feature cinema spectatorship the sequence belonging to Masculin Féminin (Masculine Feminine) from 1966 is perhaps the most confounding and certainly the most digressive. A series of events largely driven by a single character’s inability or unwillingness to surrender to the projected image serve to frustrate, fracture and complexify the cinema-viewing experience. It is however, a viewing experience that articulates the depth of Godard’s doubt in the viability of the cinematic form. The sequence, like much of the film itself, centres on the trials of the character Paul played by Jean-Pierre Léaud. Locked in a struggle against the pop-cultural currents of the day and the attendant culture of consumption and appearances, Paul is positioned within the film as a somewhat conflicted and ultimately doomed romantic. His relationship with Madeleine played by real life yé-yé singer Chantal Goya is a source of constant anxiety. The world that he inhabits, however marginally, of nightclubs, pop records and publicity seems philosophically at odds with the classical music and literature that he avidly devours. If the cinema-viewing scene of Vivre Sa Vie is defined by the enraptured intensity of Anna Karina’s gaze, the corresponding scene in Masculin Féminin stands, at least initially, as the very model of distracted spectatorship. As the film in the theatre starts, Paul who has been squeezed out of his seat next to Madeleine by her jealous girlfriend, declares that he needs to go to the toilet. On entering the bathroom he is confronted by the sight of a pair of men locked in a passionate kiss. It is a strange and disarming turn of events that prompts his hastily composed graffiti response: down with the republic of cowards. For theorist Nicole Brenez the appearance of these male lovers “is practically a fantasmatic image evoked by the amorous situation that Paul is experiencing” (Brenez 174). This quasi-spectral appearance of embracing lovers and grafitti writing is echoed in the following sequence where Paul once again leaves the theatre, this time to fervently inform the largely indifferent theatre projectionist about the correct projection ratio of the film being shown. On his graffiti strewn journey back inside Paul encounters an embracing man and woman nestled in an outer corner of the theatre building. Silent and motionless the presence of this intertwined couple is at once unsettling and prescient providing “a background real for what is being projected inside on the screen” (Brenez 174). On returning to the theatre Paul asks Madeleine to fill him in on what he has missed to which she replies, “It is about a man and woman in a foreign city who…”. Shot in Stockholm to appease the Swedish co-producers that stipulated that part of the production be made in Sweden, the film within a film occupies a fine line between restrained formal artfulness and pornographic violence. What could have been a creatively stifling demand on the part of his financial backers was inverted by Godard to become a complex exploration of power relations played out through an unsettling sexual encounter. When questioned on set by a Swedish television reporter what the film was about the filmmaker curtly replied, “The film has a lot to do with sex and the Swedish are known for that” (Masculin Féminin). The film possesses a barely concealed undertow of violence. A drama of resistance and submission is played out within the confines of a starkly decorated apartment. The apartment itself is a zone in which language ceases to operate or at the least is reduced to its barest components. The man’s imploring grunts are met with the woman’s repeated reply of “no”. What seemingly begins as a homage to the contemporaneous work of Swedish director Ingmar Bergman quickly slides into a chronicle of coercion. As the final scene of seduction/debasement is played out on the screen the camera pulls away to reveal the captivated gazes of Madeleine and her friends. It finally rests on Paul who then shuts his eyes, unable to bear what is being shown on the screen. It is a moment of refusal that marks a turning away not only from this projected image but from cinema itself. A point made all the clearer by Paul’s voiceover that accompanies the scene: We went to the movies often. The screen would light up and we would feel a thrill. But Madeleine and I were usually disappointed. The images were dated and jumpy. Marilyn Monroe had aged badly. We felt sad. It wasn't the movie of our dreams. It wasn't that total film we carried inside ourselves. That film we would have liked to make. Or, more secretly, no doubt the film we wanted to live. (Masculin Féminin) There was a dogged relentlessness to Godard’s interrogation of the cinema through the very space of its display. 1963’s Le Mépris (Contempt) swapped the public movie theatre for the private screening room; a theatrette emblazoned with the words Il cinema é un’invenzione senza avvenire. The phrase, presented in a style that recalled Soviet revolutionary graphics, is an Italian translation of Louis Lumiere’s 1895 appraisal of his new creation: “The cinema is an invention without a future.” The words have an almost physical presence in the space providing a fatalistic backdrop to the ensuing scene of conflict and commerce. As an exercise in self reflexivity it at once serves to remind us that even at its inception the cinema was cast in doubt. In Le Mépris the pleasures of spectatorship are played against the commercial demands of the cinema as industry. Following a screening of rushes for a troubled production of Homer’s Odyssey a tempestuous exchange ensues between a hot-headed producer (Jeremy Prokosch played by Jack Palance) and a calmly philosophical director (Fritz Lang as himself). It is a scene that attests to Godard’s view of the cinema as an art form that is creatively compromised by its own modes of production. In a film that plays the disintegration of a relationship against the production of a movie and that features a cast of Germans, Italians and French it is of no small consequence that the movie producer is played by an American. An American who, when faced with a creative impasse, utters the phrase “when I hear the word culture I bring out my checkbook”. It is one of Godard’s most acerbic and doubt filled sequences pitting as he does the implied genius of Lang against the tantrum throwing demands of the rapacious movie producer. We are presented with a model of industrial relations that is both creatively stifling and practically unworkable. Certainly it was no coincidence that Le Mépris had the biggest budget ($1 million) that Godard has ever worked with. In Godard’s 1965 film Une Femme Mariée (A Married Woman), he would once again use the movie theatre as a location. The film, which dealt with the philosophical implications of an adulterous affair, is also notable for its examination of the Holocaust and that defining event’s relationship to personal and collective memory. Biographer Richard Brody has observed that, “Godard introduced the Auschwitz trial into The Married Woman (sic) as a way of inserting his view of another sort of forgetting that he suggested had taken hold of France—the conjoined failures of historical and personal memory that resulted from the world of mass media and the ideology of gratification” (Brody 196-7). Whatever the causes, there is a pervading sense of amnesia that surrounds the Holocaust in the film. In one exchange the character of Charlotte, the married woman in question, momentarily confuses Auschwitz with thalidomide going on to later exclaim that “the past isn’t fun”. But like the barely repressed memories of her past indiscretions, the Holocaust returns at the most unexpected juncture in the film. In what starts out as Godard’s most overt reference to the work of Alfred Hitchcock, Charlotte and her lover secretly meet under the cover of darkness in a movie theatre. Each arriving separately and kitted out in dark sunglasses, there is breezy energy to this clandestine rendezvous highly reminiscent of the work of the great director. It is a stylistic point that is underscored in the film by the inclusion of a full-frame shot of Hitchcock’s portrait in the theatre’s foyer. However, as the lovers embrace the curtain rises on Alain Resnais’s 1955 documentary Nuit et Brouillard (Night and Fog). The screen is filled with images of barbed wire as the voice of narrator Jean Cayrol informs the audience that “even a vacation village with a fair and a steeple can lead very simply to a concentration camp.” It is an incredibly shocking moment, in which the repressed returns to confirm that while memory “isn’t fun”, it is indeed necessary. An uncanny sense of recognition pervades the scene as the two lovers are faced with the horrendous evidence of a past that refuses to stay subsumed. The scene is all the more powerful for the seemingly casual manner it is relayed. There is no suspenseful unveiling or affected gauging of the viewers’ reactions. What is simply is. In this moment of recognition the Hitchcockian mood of the anticipation of an illicit rendezvous is supplanted by a numbness as swift as it is complete. Needless to say the couple make a swift retreat from the now forever compromised space of the theatre. Indeed this scene is one of the most complex and historically layered of any that Godard had produced up to this point in his career. By making overt reference to Hitchcock he intimates that the cinema itself is deeply implicated in this perceived crisis of memory. What begins as a homage to the work of one of the most valorised influences of the Nouvelle Vague ends as a doubt filled meditation on the shortcomings of a system of representation. The question stands: how do we remember through the cinema? In this regard the scene signposts a line of investigation that would become a defining obsession of Godard’s expansive Histoire(s) du cinéma, a project that was to occupy him throughout the 1990s. Across four chapters and four and half hours Histoire(s) du cinéma examines the inextricable relationship between the history of the twentieth century and the cinema. Comprised almost completely of filmic quotations, images and text, the work employs a video-based visual language that unremittingly layers image upon image to dissolve and realign the past. In the words of theorist Junji Hori “Godard's historiography in Histoire(s) du cinéma is based principally on the concept of montage in his idiosyncratic sense of the term” (336). In identifying montage as the key strategy in Histoire(s) du cinéma Hori implicates the cinema itself as central to both Godard’s process of retelling history and remembering it. However, it is a process of remembering that is essentially compromised. Just as the relationship of the cinema to the Holocaust is bought into question in Une Femme Mariée, so too it becomes a central concern of Histoire(s) du cinéma. It is Godard’s assertion “that the cinema failed to honour its ethical commitment to presenting the unthinkable barbarity of the Nazi extermination camps” (Temple 332). This was a failure that for Godard moved beyond the realm of doubt to represent “nothing less than the end of cinema” (Brody 512). In October 1976 the New Yorker magazine published a profile of Jean Luc Godard by Penelope Gilliatt a writer who shared the post of film critic at the magazine with Pauline Kael. The article was based on an interview that took place at Godard’s production studio in Grenoble Switzerland. It was notable for two things: Namely, the most succinct statement that Godard has made regarding the enduring sense of criticality that pervades his work: “A good film is a matter of questions properly put.” (74) And secondly, surely the shortest sentence ever written about the filmmaker: “Doubt stands.” (77)ReferencesÀ Bout de soufflé. Dir. Jean Luc Godard. 1960. DVD. Criterion, 2007. Brenez, Nicole. “The Forms of the Question.” For Ever Godard. Eds. Michael Temple, James S. Williams, and Michael Witt. London: Black Dog, 2004. Brody, Richard. Everything Is Cinema: The Working Life of Jean-Luc Godard. New York: Metropolitan Books / Henry Holt & Co., 2008. Daney, Serge. “The Godard Paradox.” For Ever Godard. Eds. Michael Temple, James S. Williams, and Michael Witt. London: Black Dog, 2004. Gilliat, Penelope. “The Urgent Whisper.” Jean-Luc Godard Interviews. Ed. David Sterritt. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1998. Godard, Jean-Luc. “Jean-Luc Godard: 'From Critic to Film-Maker': Godard in Interview (extracts). ('Entretien', Cahiers du Cinema 138, December 1962).” Cahiers du Cinéma: 1960-1968 New Wave, New Cinema, Reevaluating Hollywood. Ed. Jim Hillier. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1986. Histoires du Cinema. Dir. and writ. Jean Luc Godard. 1988-98. DVD, Artificial Eye, 2008. Hori, Junji. “Godard’s Two Histiographies.” For Ever Godard. Eds. Michael Temple, James S. Williams, and Michael Witt. London: Black Dog, 2004. Le Grand Escroc. Dir. Jean Luc Godard. Perf. Jean Seberg. Film. Ulysse Productions, 1963. Le Mépris. Dir. Jean Luc Godard. Perf. Jack Palance, Fritz Lang. 1964. DVD. Criterion, 2002. La Passion de Jeanne d’Arc. Dir. Carl Theodor Dreyer. Film. Janus films, 1928. MacCabe, Colin. Godard: A Portrait of the Artist at 70. London: Bloomsbury, 2003. Masculin Féminin. Dir. and writ. Jean Luc Godard. Perf. Jean-Pierre Léaud. 1966. DVD. Criterion, 2005. Nuit et Brouillard. Dir Alain Resnais. Film. Janus Films, 1958. Perec, Georges. Things: A Story of the Sixties. Trans. David Bellos. London: Collins Harvill, 1990. (Originally published 1965.) Sontag, Susan. “Godard’s Vivre Sa Vie.” Against Interpretation and Other Essays. New York: Picador, 2001. Temple, Michael, James S. Williams, and Michael Witt, eds. For Ever Godard. London: Black Dog, 2004. Une Femme Mariée. Dir. and writ. Jean Luc Godard. Perf. Macha Meril. 1964. DVD. Eureka, 2009. Vivre Sa Vie. Dir. and writ. Jean Luc Godard. Perf. Anna Karina. 1962. DVD. Criterion, 2005. Week End, Dir. and writ. Jean Luc Godard. 1967. DVD. Distinction Series, 2005.