Framing Immanence in Carl Theodor Dreyer’s Ordet and Carlos Reygadas’s Stellet Licht

My article proposes the notion of the immanent frame to productively address film-theoretical and theological concepts at stake in Carl Theodor Dreyer’s Ordet (1955) and Carlos Reygadas’s Stellet Licht (2007). I believe my intervention to be significant for it shows how both films are not only related in their religious subject matter but negotiate it in formal terms through the notion of the immanent frame. Although both films have been analyzed alongside one another in the past, my article is the first to address the Mennonite migration history and notion of secularization (Taylor) to explain the function of the time-images (Deleuze) in Reygadas’s film. I show that its miraculous effects of “place- and timelessness” are based on a history of migration and colonization.