The Vocation of Cinema: A Newsletter
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The Vocation of Cinema is a monthly essay series that explores a philosophy of cinema using resources from the Catholic intellectual tradition. Our basic questions will include:
What is cinema? The perennial question…
What might be the ‘vocation’ - the unique calling or mission - of cinema among the arts?
What are the particular relationships of truth, goodness, and beauty to cinema?
We’ll also explore questions which relate to the practice of knowing, judging, and loving works of cinema - also known as cinephilia:
What is cinephilia?
What is aesthetic judgement and what is ‘taste’ in the context of cinephilia?
What are the vices and virtues unique to cinephilia as an activity?
This project is founded on close engagement with a host of philosophers, film theorists, and historians including Andre Bazin, Etienne Gilson, Jacques Maritain, Thomas Elsaesser, St. Thomas Aquinas, Paul Willemen, Josef Pieper, Eric Rohmer, and Erwin Panofsky. Some topics we’ll be exploring at the crossroads of these thinkers include:
Reconsidering Bazin’s ontology of photography in the context of the 20th c. French Catholic intellectual revival
Revisiting the ‘sin’ of perspective in Western painting
What might a ‘cinema of leisure’ look like?
Finally, this series will examine the relationship of cinema to the life of the Church, including close readings of papal documents (!) on cinema and art. Topics might include:
The uses of servile and contemplative cinemas
Could cinema ever participate in the liturgy?
Filmmaking as ‘total gift of self’
Ok, but why on earth are you doing this? Don’t you have a job?
The Vocation of Cinema is an outgrowth of my own attempts to find a robust Catholic philosophy of cinema to study and absorb, and coming up largely empty-handed. In fact, while the crises of modern art spurred several brilliant Christian philosophers of the 20th century to write extensive discourses on questions of beauty, form, poetry, and painting, the subject of cinema, while it hasn’t been ignored outright by the Church, has never received a comprehensive philosophical treatment from the most gifted minds working in Her service. Further, as far as I can see, neither has an attempt been made to extensively theorize an understanding of cinema from the Aristotelian-Thomistic tradition.
I believe that something along these lines is needed now, more than ever, to encourage filmmakers, cinephiles, critics, and scholars to embrace the fullness of cinema’s vocation among the arts, and to joyfully accompany it according to its particular applications in their own artistic and intellectual pursuits. For filmmakers and artists, it means taking hold of the freedom and the confidence to make and to make beautifully. For cinephiles, critics, and scholars it means integrating one’s quest for cinema into the flourishing of the whole human being. My hope is that this attempt at a philosophical exploration will prove helpful to anyone approaching cinema as an art that is beautiful, meaningful, and life-changing. Cinema is worthy of our time and attention. It is worthy of our contemplation and cultivation.
In addition to a monthly keystone essay on one of our main topics, I intend to release short columns, when possible, about what I’m currently reading and watching, as well as share links of interest and updates on my own filmmaking. I’ll also make an effort to do a mailbag issue on occasion, should reader feedback arise.
My greatest - my only - hope for The Vocation of Cinema is that it will help other filmmakers, cinephiles, and fellow travelers integrate their love of cinema into the proper flourishing of the whole human person. Let us, together, begin to imagine and discover cinema at its very best.
See you over on Substack. :)