The Constant Factor (dir. Krzysztof Zanussi, 1980)

Contains all of that beautiful gentle blue light, early morning pastels, and infinite hues of white characteristic of a lot of 70s-80s European cinema (Rohmer, Pialat et al.). Contains beautiful shallow focus shots of faces, bodies between social layers of others.

In A Secular Age, Charles Taylor characterises the "world of our ancestors" as an "enchanted world," the "world of spirits, demons, and moral forces" (26). It is the world "charged with the grandeur of God" as Gerard Manley Hopkins would have it. But it is at the very least the world charged with something, animated, invested, enchanted.

Those textures of light are hauntings of the enchanted world. Snow on weary graves, with small lit candles are such signs too. Old Polish women and their confident, commanding talk of fate likewise; a kind of mystical mechanics.

Bureaucracy squashes it, efficient and corrupt technocratic squash it too. Even mathematics in its abstract sense of beauty (nevertheless "disappointing" in the words of the film's professor) has it if treated as a kind of complete theory of life.

Witold searches in the city, searches amongst the mountains, searches in the halls of knowledge for the eternal source of enchantment the denial of which he resists over and over.