For Concentricity II, we've connected two films that don't quite offer duelling duets as much as parallel paths. Our compass is obsession – the beginning and end of all directional lines. This concentricity recommends a hopefully-generative pairing of films whose inevitable finales reveal our basest external incitements toward obsession. 

I didn't arrive at this pairing naturally, through spontaneous inspiration, but instead through overwrought review. I knew in this issue I wanted to discuss Steven Spielberg’s masterpiece, one of The Great American movies, Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977). Encounters, a seminal film in my obsession obsession, is a perfect flag bearer for the figural Ley Line. But it’s so dense and sprawling and thematically rich – what to pair it with?

In the spirit of spontaneous connection and free-flowing association, I mechanically opened my list of every movie I’ve ever seen and began auditing them. It took surprisingly little time to arrive at the perfect match – Powell & Pressburger’s A Canterbury Tale (1944).  

What unites this odd couple? Besides my affection, Encounters and Canterbury are both pilgrimages. The films’ characters are propelled by an implacable magnetism. They plod along their respective American and British roads in a spiritual fervor – albeit quite different ones. What does it mean to be drawn towards something greater than yourself? What does it mean to give yourself over to a greater power? Encounters and Canterbury plot very different routes to very different Meccas – but you’ll find in both films a deep relationship between religious desire and the physical land as well a divine reverence for monument and spectacle. (And as a bonus, sly little easter egg to SPIRAL MANIFESTOS Vol II, both movies contain numerous subtle references to another world-historical sequel – World War II.)

A Canterbury Tale, set contemporaneously during World War 2, follows three young characters caught up in the war effort – a British soldier, an American soldier, and a young British woman conscripted into farming. The three become unlikely friends following a strange encounter in a train station on the way to Canterbury. Embroiled in a quaint countryside mystery, the three befriend the town’s residents and gradually reveal their own hopes, dreams, and fears. Continuing their journey, the trio travel alongside the Pilgrims’ Way toward Canterbury Cathedral, where they may find that some of their prayers are answered. 

Close Encounters of the Third Kind, befitting its era, is a much more secular religious affair. It follows another strange union – a man and a woman who have experienced a close encounter, an alien sighting. Following visions in their head of Devil’s Tower in Wyoming, the two dodge government conspiracies to doggedly pursue the truth of extraterrestrial visitors. With their respective motivations, the two relentlessly follow their obsessions west. Their journey ends on the far side of Devils Tower, where their zealotry is rewarded with the divinity of bright lights and esoteric technology. 

Our concentric films’ pilgrimages track their travelers’ march along magnetic lines toward ultimate fate & transcendence. Together, these films are a conversation on spiritual desire – what it means to look upward and wrestle with the heavens. Encounter’s religion is technology & imagination. Canterbury’s religion is hallowedness & historicity. Of course for both films their otherworldly impetuses are thinly veiled metonyms (intentionally or not) for the cinematic arts. They understand the magnetic force of imagery, of spectacle, of monument. They evoke their iconographic forebears – the temple, the frontier, the worn path & the pilgrimage. And finally, they arrive at their destination, back to where imagery and sound are the primordial languages. At the end of the line are our most primal sensuous emotions, drawing the most devout onward.