The Face of Time - POV - Aarhus Universitet

A Danish Journal of Film Studies 97
know anything. Our understanding has encountered a limit, a
question that cannot be answered, an enigma that cannot be solved.
Is there really no answer? Couldn't we, in principle at least, find
some kind of reason that would motivate what we have just seen,
say, in psychological or political terms? Perhaps, but I believe that
by refusing to give these kinds of "answers" the film points out that
in the end they would all be insufficient. We cannot fully deal with
the enigma of the hanging scene in terms of knowledge and
understanding. By refusing all answers, keeping alive the question,
the enigma, the film brings forth another dimension, a deeper
dimension that could be called ethical.
The word "ethical" in this context refers to the special way the
term has been used by the French philosopher Emmanuel Levinas.
The key moment in the thinking of Levinas is the encounter with
another person, the Other (autrui). The Other as truly other cannot
ultimately be understood or appropriated. It is true that we can
name or define the people we see in Wind as "men" or "women" or
"peasants" or "the hangmen" or "the bystanders" or "the victims." But
with these terms we cannot ultimately grasp who these people are.
There is always something that escapes our ability to understand
and to appropriate, to explain. According to Levinas, it is precisely
this aspect in the Other that opens the ethical dimension.
Levinas calls the Other as other the Face. The Face, he says,
speaks an ethical demand that can be expressed with the biblical
formula "Thou shalt not kill." In terms of knowledge and
understanding (or, as Levinas prefers to say, in ontological terms)
the Other can indeed be defined as such and such, and even killed.
But not ethically. Even if the Other was destroyed, annihilated, the
ethical demand would remain, keeping the mind troubled. When