Summary: My title refers to Wallace Stevens’ poem ‘the Man With The Blue Guitar’, in general and to these lines in particular: They said, ‘You have a blue guitar You do not play things as they are.’ The man replied, ‘Things as they are Are changed upon the blue guitar.’ And they said then, ‘But play, you must, A tune beyond us, yet ourselves. These lines seem to me to sum up the dilemma facing anyone attempting to communicate a sense of the sacred (which is how I would gloss ‘religious communication’) in a society like Australia, a settler society whose foundations lie in late the late eighteenth and then an increasingly neo-Benthamite and neo-Darwininian Britain with the kind of ambivalent attitudes to religion expressed in Stevens’ poem. The evidence suggests that religious language and religious institutions have relatively little currency but that a need for some sense of the sacred, some mysterium tremednum et fascinans and is being expressed in various ways in the arts. In this paper I would like to examine the work of film maker Paul Cox whose films seem to me to concern themselves with this mystery.
