The Vocation of the Cinephile
In his 1985 essay “The Contemplative Life,” Josef Pieper proposes that the true artist must begin as a contemplative, that is, must begin as one who sees reality clearly. This way of contemplating can be known by three characteristics. First, the true contemplative sees “intensively” beyond mere appearances into the depths of things, seeing what is not immediately obvious. Second, the true contemplative sees things with love, gazing in a way that affirms and accepts the object. Third, the true contemplative accepts that his thirst for the deepest things will not be fully satisfied even by the things he contemplates deeply.
What does this progressively deepening mode of seeing grant to the artist and to the work he subsequently undertakes? Something precious: the freedom to make that which does not “depict what everybody already sees,” but instead makes “visible what not everybody sees.” This natural kind of insight is further deepened by love, which affirms and accepts the object of its sight. Only in the gaze of love can things fully disclose themselves, because love accords them their true dignity as created beings, free of exploitation or “false idealization.”
But what of the third characteristic? Doesn’t love bond the contemplative and the object of his sight? In remarking upon this dynamic, Pieper notes a parallel to the love of parents who “can’t see enough” of their newborn child. In this phrase we hear delight, yes, but also a desire which is always unfulfilled—one can never “see enough” of what one loves. Against this type of love, he contrasts those artists “who all too hastily have ‘seen enough’; that is, those who are satisfied with the outward appearance of things,” and who are “content with contriving some smooth and crowd-pleasing yet shallow fabrication.” The only way out of this trap, implies Pieper, is to accept that the unquenchable love which animates the contemplative gaze onto finite things is really oriented to something infinite which exceeds them. Those who do not make this leap enclose themselves in a world which, by the very necessity of being an enclosure, no longer has real depth.
The beloved, then, captivates the gaze but cannot truly satisfy. In pleasing us, it only urges us onwards to that which is beyond itself. Thus, while the true contemplative’s gaze rests in the work of art, it does not terminate there. Neither does the artist's gaze terminate in what he makes in response to his vision, but in what lies beyond both sight and art: the ground of Being, Who is God Himself.
To speak of the traditional “arts of the beautiful” in this quasi-mystical manner is hardly controversial for a Catholic. But what of the cinema? For many, film is merely an art of amusement or instruction which does not approach the repose proper to works of beauty. Such an attitude corresponds with the viewer who does not see intensively—who does not see beyond the surfaces of things. For others, including many intellectually astute Catholics, cinema is a kind of secondary form of literature whose highest function is to convey abstract themes and principles in the garb of the senses. When cinema fails at fulfilling this assignment as expected, many cease searching at all for a different animating principle and simply reject the work as defective. This is akin to the viewer who looks without love; who does not take in and affirms totally the beloved. They may be seeing beneath the surface of the medium, but in expecting—in expectare or “looking out for”—one particular operation presumed to be a principle, these viewers miss out on possibly deeper and more essential movements.
Where does the filmmaker fit into this schema? What kind of contemplative would the filmmaker need to be in order to see and make real art well? It seems simple enough: the filmmaker would need to first be a kind of viewer who sees moving images intensively with love. But does such a type exist? If so, what wisdom does he or she have to tell us?
The Cinephile
The type of viewer we are speaking of is none other than the cinéphile. While the term has accrued various psychological, ideological, and historical nuances over its lifetime and its essential meaning remains contentious among cinema scholars, I intend to use the term in the simple ontological sense implied by its construction: the cinephile is a being who loves (philia) the moving (kine) image.
This basic sense has always been present but not necessarily activated or drawn out at all times. As the film historian Annie Fee has explained, the French press of the early 1910s coined the terms cinéphile and cinéphobe to distinguish the adversaries of a running political debate over whether to allow cinema a place in public life. But once cinema had won its victory, the term gradually came to demarcate certain kinds of viewers from others. The concept of the cinéphile as an unusually devoted filmgoer emerged into its mature form during the late 1940s and 50s during an explosion of movie-going, education, and discourse in France after the end of World War II. Cinephile currents, especially those of writers housed at the journal Cahiers du Cinéma, included passionately defending Hollywood films (traditionally held in contempt by the critical elite), critiquing the French film industry as decadent, and promoting ‘auteur theory’—the belief that the most significant films showed the personal mark of their directors. By the end of the 1950s, many of these cinephiles had begun making films themselves, and the concept of the cinephile as a special category of devoted moviegoers had spread far and wide to other nations. The term has remained more or less stable in this sense since then.
Seen from the outside, a cinephile is a kind of film viewer who has moved out of the mode of enjoying films as means to certain ends—entertainment, information, political indoctrination, moral instruction, social occasions—and into loving films as ends themselves. The cinephile no longer loves a film solely because of some good it delivers, but because it is good, itself. In this sense, then, cinephiles share a kinship with aesthetes of other arts like music, painting, and poetry. The beloved objects of these enthusiasts need no extrinsic justification; the art’s existence is justification enough.
What is the source of this extraordinary enjoyment? In an analysis of the 1950s French cinephile scene, the late film scholar Paul Willemen called attention to the “discourse of revelation” which permeated the period, a discourse with deep roots in existentialism and Catholic personalism. What was being revealed? For some, nothing less than the soul itself. But regardless of metaphysical or political commitments, the common ground between cinephiles of left and right, Catholic or Marxist, was a sense of seeing, if only fleetingly, some deeper insight into reality through the cinema. Where the parties diverged was in putting that insight to work: for the Marxists, it meant a deeper commitment to using cinema to expose the illusions of capitalist societies and to foment political change; for the personalists, it meant making cinema which more closely expressed the real presence of the person behind the image. Cinephilia, then, on all sides fueled a quest for essences, for hewing more closely to the fabric of things. In the words of Susan Sontag, cinema “was both the book of art and the book of life.”
For the natural cinephile, embracing cinema’s intrinsic worth brings forth a deep awareness of poietic forms which are proper to the moving image arts. The cinephile thus awakened will begin expanding his boundaries of experience as widely as he can, so as to drink the essence of cinema wherever it may be found. This typically constitutes two planes of action. First, there is the ‘vertical’ plane of aesthetics, which entails seeking a higher, deeper, and more exquisitely felt contact with the perfection of form. As with any aesthete, this entails a quest for more rare and subtle forms of beauty. Second, there is the ‘horizontal’ plane of knowledge, of catholicity, which seeks to discover and unite all possible genres of cinema under the roof of one’s own understanding. The ordinary mode of cinephilia is a constant voyage into the unknown sea of both form and content.
The Christian Cinephile
The Christian cinephile shares this quest, but not without considerable challenges. In some expressions of cinematic vision, the moving image presents itself as though at odds with Christian life, especially where it is used to lionize immoral acts and promote antichristic values. The Christian cinephile cannot simply seek out every thing caught by the cinema, because some of those things will be poisonous to the life of the soul. Here one thinks of images that do violence to human dignity, like pornography or ultraviolence, or to God, as with blasphemy or glorification of the occult.
The Christian cinephile’s first challenge, then, is simply the challenge of any Christian navigating the world: he must always remember, sometimes with great effort, that he cannot belong to the cinema because he first belongs to God. He cannot give himself over completely to desire for the moving image and must accept that there are images which he is not permitted to indulge for the sake of his eternal good. The Christian cinephile who consents to his littleness in this regard will never feel completely at home at the cinematheque or fully united to his confreres for whom cinema has become a religious passion. While enjoying and sharing a great measure of cinema’s licit riches, he will remain a well-meaning stranger among so many of like mind and heart.
A second challenge for the Christian cinephile is the crisis of Christian filmmaking: there is no “thick” culture of genuinely beautiful Christian cinema to be found, but only scattered outliers throughout film history. The problem is complex but one of its contributing factors is simple enough: Christian film industries have taken it upon themselves to oppose mainstream cinema’s values while attempting to retain its crowd-pleasing poetics. Thus do we see sanitized romantic comedies, adventure films, and Bible stories which bear a resemblance to ‘real’ movies but creak as both drama and spectacle. In consequence, despite the best intentions of many Christ-loving artists, we have ended up with a film culture that is known for its lack of real beauty, which is to say, its lack of form. Thus do we see a kind of inversion of the moral problem; here the Christian cinephile is permitted to see anything, but chooses not to because he cannot bear it. Here too, the Christian cinephile lives like a stranger among his own people.
Visual Noise
The deepest challenge for the Christian cinephile, however, is not purely moral or formal but philosophical: many contemplatives remain unconvinced of cinema’s intrinsic value. A glimpse of this posture can be found in an earlier Pieper essay written in 1952, “Learning How to See Again.” Here, Pieper rightly decries a decline in modern man’s ability to see properly, that is, a decline of “the spiritual capacity to perceive the visible reality as it truly is.” Citing the overstimulating morass of twentieth-century visual culture, he exhorts the reader to flee the “visual noise” of modern media
…which just like the acoustical counterpart, makes clear perception impossible. One might perhaps presume that TV watchers, tabloid readers, and movie goers exercise and sharpen their eyes. But the opposite is true. The ancient sages knew exactly why they called the ‘concupiscence of the eyes’ a ‘destroyer.’ The restoration of man’s inner eyes can hardly be expected in this day and age—unless, first of all, one were willing and determined simply to exclude from one’s realm of life all those inane and contrived but titillating illusions incessantly generated by the entertainment industry.
Pieper’s terms for the moving images of his time are not flattering. They recall the Church Fathers’ condemnations of the Roman circuses, games, and bawdy theater shows which were such a constant threat to the integrity of their flocks. His comments also echo the stern wariness which many religious authorities displayed towards the cinema during its first decades, when its extraordinary ability to fascinate and excite audiences seemed poised to unleash social and moral chaos.
But most distressingly, his critique is not pinned on morality or psychology, which a cinephile could dismiss by pointing to this or that film. Instead, Pieper seems to consider the moving image fundamentally suspect in its very modality; all of it is so much noise. He describes moving images as inane, contrived, titillating, and illusory: a litany of lack. The modern entertainment—the modern spectacle, we might say—is signified more by what it lacks than by anything it is.
Inanity at its root means ‘empty’(inanis). The empty work of art lacks content, which is to say, signification or meaning. Contrivance refers to making in an improvised way: finding (in Old French: controver) things and cobbling them together. The contrived work has a kind of form that creaks, its parts never wholly subsumed into the whole. It lacks the quality of being wholly one in itself; in other words, it lacks integrity.
For the modern reader, titillating evokes the concept of erotic arousal, but literally means ‘tickling.’ Tickling is an act which lacks completion: a touch which demands involuntary response without offering repose, and which proffers misery when unceasing. Perhaps the better term for this is ‘restless.’ Finally there is ‘illusion,’ the false image, which hardly needs explanation but for one detail: its base meaning, illudere, has to do with “playing at,” with mockery. The illusory image is not simply ‘false’ in a clinical sense of not conforming to reality. It is in its very essence contemptuous of reality.
What is a cinephile to do with this? He is tempted to argue back: you aren’t watching the right films! But he knows, deep down, that the question isn’t so much which films to watch or what they prove (for such exercises always end fruitlessly on the terrain of taste), but how to make sense of the shared reality which both cinephile and philosopher claim to inhabit.
We could take the easy way out and appeal to the history of cinema. Hindsight suggests that Pieper made his judgment too soon. After all, he wrote at a time when the moving image had not yet been widely accepted by the intellectual classes of the West, whether Christian or not, as something more than trivial entertainment. On the production side, the 1950s saw a flourishing in Europe of spiritually aware and humanist dramas by Rossellini, Bresson, Bergman, and Fellini. This subgenre effectively invented the modern ‘art film;’ a misnomer in some ways, but one legitimately grasping to describe hybrid genres of cinema intended to explore (at least initially) profound questions of existence, suffering, and faith. We might excuse Pieper for not yet having seen the most truly significant films of that time. By the end of the decade, the landscape had shifted irrevocably in favor of cinema as a serious art, a recognition which included the approbation of official Church documents.
These historical facts do nothing to help us in the end, because the goodness which the cinephile defends is not essentially beholden to changing conditions, even if its beauty is spilled forth more clearly in one historical period versus another. The treasure of the cinephile is to be found in every era of cinema’s history, because it derives from contact with something deeper than historical contingency. What the cinephile finds true about cinema today, which goes down to its deepest roots, must have also been true then.
We might also argue that Pieper’s assessment of the moving image—inane, contrived, titillating, and illusory—does not imply a condemnation of the moving image per se, but only those moving images crafted by the entertainment industry. Presumably there are better images to be found elsewhere than the mainstream. Here again, history will not be our friend, for at the time of Pieper’s writing, not many alternative options existed or could be easily found. To love cinema in 1952 meant to love the products of industries, rather than individuals. The doctrine of auteurism, that films derive their essential being from one author, was still a few years away from mature explication. If Pieper had alternative forms of cinema in mind as he wrote, why did he not indicate them as exceptions?
Further, we cannot dismiss that the moving image, then and now, is frequently to be found in the service of motives that range from the trivial to the wicked. The entertainment industries of Pieper’s time were not less crass in their aims than our own today, even if they were much more restrained in terms of what they could show. Their primary end was the accumulation of wealth, and they made sure to obtain it through all means of ‘noise’ flung at the common man through advertising, the cult of the movie star, and maximal spectacles in the picture houses. There is no doubt that in the seventy years separating us from Pieper’s critique, the crisis has deepened exponentially.
Finally, even the most positive account of cinephilia must admit the danger of such a great volume of images, shallow or not, vying for our attention. In the present day, Pieper’s concern about the ubiquity of ‘noise’ is more vindicated than ever. We live awash in literal and figural torrents of “content” emanating from every screen. Even the cinephile, who supposedly limits himself to only the best cinema, stands, as Belen Vidal notes, on the brink of “cinephagia”—we no longer love so much as devour. The modern image-regime is, to borrow from St. Augustine, so enthralled and upheld by the vice of curiosity, of the disordered appetite for useless knowledge, that it is difficult to imagine any cinephile successfully transcending such conditions.
Moreover, the dominant modes of spectacular moving images which fuel the economy of curiosity are not meant to be contemplated, which is to say, loved. Spectacles sought by curiosity, Paul Griffiths reminds us, suffer only a glance before being discarded. Is this not what we see at the multiplex? Images made only for glancing: bombastic and deafening events heavily augmented by computer-assisted compositing and animation. Can any of this be redeemed? The modern regime of visual-effects–driven filmmaking in Western cinema would seem to be the very essence of a ethos founded on the fascination of “concupiscence of the eyes,” for it operates with a confidence that there is no longer any image too improper, too unimaginable, too unreal to realize for our delectation. Perhaps both cinephile and filmmaker, if they desire to avoid the destruction of their inner eyes, ought to find a new vocation entirely.
Cinephilia and Spectacle
An aside: we have already touched a couple of times on the term ‘spectacle.’ The question of ‘spectacle’ in cinema offers a fascinating angle on a mystery which haunts the cinephile: the absolute dominance of the ‘shallow’ film in film culture. This fact haunts and even burdens the cinephile because while he may enjoy spectacular films as much as the next person, his mode of loving cinema, being conditioned by a desire to go deeper, may well require a summary rejection of these surface-dwelling films—if indeed they are as shallow as often assumed. One question, then, is whether the “spectacular” is a necessarily shallow quality, or something more.
The meaning of ‘spectacle’ is layered: its basic sense, from specter, means simply an object of sight, while its historical and cultural meaning, which we have received more or less intact from the Romans, is to do with ‘showing,’ particularly of a public means—theatrical exhibitions, games, circuses, and so on. With this in view, it is not unreasonable that many have reflexively analogized mainstream cinema, especially its most vulgar and bombastic types, to the Roman spectacles so vehemently censured by the Church Fathers.
We might conclude that vulgarity and artlessness is of the essence of spectacle, but this leaves the cinephile in an awkward place. Why? Because we have already committed to the notion that the cinephile is by necessity open to the fecundity of cinema wherever he finds it, without privileging genre or other categories that, when used to define cinema’s essence, stray from their duties.
The poetic meaning of spectacle which we receive from Aristotle gives us a different angle to work with. Aristotle’s term, opsis, means ‘sight,’ or ‘appearance’ and is closely associated with ‘face’ (óps). Its meaning in the context of tragedy, however, has to do with various kinds of material and special effects—the appearances—which enhance a play’s performance: costumes, masks, props, sound effects, and so on. And while opsis is counted as an essential part of performing a play, Aristotle does not consider it absolutely essential to the play itself as a work of poetry, for if the play is simply read, the reader misses nothing through the absence of stage effects.
What happens, though, if opsis becomes the animating principle of a drama? What if the appearances are the reason for the show? Such an outcome would constitute a total inversion of order, elevating the least essential over the most essential. Would we not consider such a work truly superficies in essence, a work made to be ‘on the face’ of things? Aristotle makes room for this possibility when he considers how some poets indeed attempt to “arouse” (tickle!) catharsis “by spectacular means,” which is to say, by “extraneous aids.” In the Aristotelian framework, though, such an outcome is far less proper than if it had arisen naturally, organically as it were, from the inner structure of the work. A poet using spectacular means to evoke pity and fear runs the risk of falling into the “monstrous”—shaping things from without, rather than within, he creates a kind of purely awful spectacle for its own sake: a spectacle with no end to serve but itself.
Perhaps, then, we might reframe Pieper’s critique of the moving image as a critique of the moving image ruled by opsis. This is not, however, in order to separate the goats of cinema from the sheep, for it remains to be explained how a cinephile might see and love both the real, substantial moving image and the opsis-ruled image as well.
What is the way forward? Can a reconciliation be made between the vision of the cinephile and the wisdom of the philosopher? Following Pieper’s lead, we must enter into a deeper examination of the way a cinephile sees and loves. Does the cinephile see reality, or is he deluded?
The Three Epiphanies of Cinephilia
We have already noted that cinephiles see and love the cinema for itself. One pertinent question, then, is whether the cinema deserves to be loved for itself. Can it bear this love? A further reflection by Pieper will be of aid for us here. In his 1953 essay “Work, Spare Time, and Leisure,” he lays out criteria for understanding whether an activity is meaningful in itself:
“Whenever in reflective and receptive contemplation we touch, even remotely, the core of all things, the hidden, ultimate reason of the living universe, the divine foundation of all that is, the purest form of all archetypes…whenever and wherever we thus behold the very essence of reality—there is an activity that is meaningful in itself taking place.”
If an encounter with cinema can be shown to touch the core of things, then the cinephile stands on sturdy ground. But what of the means by which he obtains this good? Later in the same essay, Pieper notes that the activity which is meaningful in itself “cannot be accomplished except with an attitude of receptive openness and attentive silence.” It can only be obtained as a freely accepted gift. Does the inner structure of the cinephile’s love follow this pattern?
I would like to propose that the cinephilic journey unfolds through three epiphanies which progressively swim deeper into the apprehension of reality. The first and most common way corresponds to the apprehension of the form of a film. It is a kind of apprehension of the excellence with which a film reaches its intended end: At a certain point, the cinephile sees deeply into the operations of a work and begins to understand how it ‘works’ at what it wants to do. The discovery of well-made form initiates a traditional epiphany of beauty, akin to the pleasure of discovery found in all of the arts of the beautiful.
Again, the love which this way of seeing calls forth is not in response to the end being achieved (though it may rejoice also in that) but to the realization of cinema’s vast potential and capacity for excellence in reaching it. It prizes those operations which it perceives as unique to the cinema, and loves seeing them carried out. In beholding these operations, the cinephile is granted a window into the consciousness of a filmmaker: he begins to think poietically,* thinking about how to make, of how to do this and not that.
In sum, we might call this experience the epiphany of form. It is the most accessible to reason and will: once tasted, anybody can advance easily in it because it requires only an attentive gaze on the operations of given films, and the will to seek out a wide variety of films.
A second way of seeing intensively involves a kind of apprehension of substance, or more precisely, of signification. Again, this has little to do with the achievement of the objective end of a film, like a story being told or information dispensed. Rather, this way of seeing stumbles upon the real signifying potential of a given moment of film. In a flash of revelation, the cinephile sees a whole collection of possible meanings clustered within the object.
The Catholic existentialist film theorist André Bazin explains this dynamic by noting a key difference between cinema and literature: literature acts directly upon the imagination through words, while cinema must reach the imagination through real sensible things. Because of this extra step, the use of comparison—the use of “like”—which is so necessary to make a metaphor work in writing, “has no equivalent in cinematic syntax.” The sensible object will always be a complete image with no grammatical access to being reconstituted as a symbol. If a filmmaker sees a potential metaphor in an object he is filming, he has no real way to unfailingly bring that symbolic image to life as a film image, because to grasp a symbol requires a movement of the imagination, which no film can guarantee—it can only suggest. In every sense, the filmmaker is at the mercy of the viewer to make the necessary connection on his own.
But what if a filmmaker doesn’t choose a certain association? What if he lets the image be? What if this is not a defect of cinema, as many have thought, but its most vital strength? Because cinema is a visual medium, it bears an astonishing ability to re-present its objects in a state of suspended potency with all of their potential associations intact. Unlike the novelist, Bazin argues, the filmmaker is free to let things be things without insisting upon a particular symbolic value, while still preserving the potentiality of metaphor inherent in things. To drive the point home, he focuses on a moment in André Malraux’s war film L’espoir (1940) in a chemist’s shop where the camera dollies in on acid slowly dripping into a bottle:
“The intellectual symbolism of this image can lend itself to long commentaries, but the crystalline noise of the drops sounding in the dramatic silence of the room, the waves of their impact on the liquid… the very form of the object vaguely evocative of an hourglass, all these details among which the writer would choose and which he would surround by comparisons, are given to us in a raw state charged with meaning by way of the multiple potentials of metaphors. Since we have spontaneously felt these symbols, it matters little that they only crystallize in our minds upon later reflection.”
In short, the object handled lightly and lovingly by the filmmaker retains its “density” as a real thing, as something brimming with potential meaning. This epiphany of substance, this “spontaneous” feeling of symbols, is nothing less than an epiphany of the poetic potential of things, and therefore of cinema as a poetic art. This realization cannot be forced on the viewer, only discovered. In this sense, it is also a deeper epiphany of form, for it sheds light on a certain type of prudence—both restraint and relaxation—which is necessary in order to successfully re-present the symbolic richness of real things. Finally, this way of seeing can also be learned, after a fashion, through patient and repeated effort to place oneself in a receptive mode. Like all virtues, it will be difficult at first. Like all virtues, it will eventually become pure joy.
The third and deepest manner of seeing, however, is impossible to learn or to teach. And yet it is no rare thing: wherever cinephilia thrives you will find some variation of it—a kind of gift which bubbles up from within the film. This gift is an intuitive experience of a moment which dazzles the inner eyes of the cinephile. We say dazzle, because unlike the previous stages of cinephilic epiphany, the third sense does not offer itself to the imagination for further insight, but overwhelms it. There is nothing for the cinephile to do but to behold; to drink.
What do we mean? Again, we must thank Paul Willemen, who cannot be accused of being a Christian metaphysician, for putting it most perfectly and succinctly when he suggested that the cinephilic experience coheres in a “realization that what is being seen is in excess of what is being shown.” Through the image unfolding the cinephile perceives a depth of activity and presence which exceeds, or overflows, the bounds of what is actually visible. The heart of the cinephilic epiphany, then, is the disclosure, however obscurely, of things hidden. What is being revealed? The very essence of reality itself mediated through these particular things arranged in this particular way:
“It reveals an aspect or a dimension of a person, whether it’s the actor or the director, which is not choreographed for you to see. It is produced en plus, in excess or in addition, almost involuntarily.”
Willemen cites a famous scene from On The Waterfront (1954), when Marlon Brando and Eva Marie Saint improvise their way through a flubbed take: As they walk and talk, Saint accidentally drops a glove. Brando spontaneously picks it up, fiddles with it, and even tries it on until she demands it back. They complete their dialogue without breaking character. Without the slightest trace of visible spectacle, it is a dazzling moment to behold. What is “in excess” here?
With the eyes of the first sense of epiphany, we might admire the craft on display—the control and ease of the actors or the flexibility of the camera operation. The fluidity of this scene, formally speaking, is remarkably assured. We might see with the eyes of the second epiphany the potential meanings of certain objects (the glove!), as well as gestures, inflections, pauses, and looks. A range of psychological and dramatic potentialities are hovering with bated breath throughout the scene, present but not insisting.
But how do we describe the third sense of epiphany? Words fall down, but I will make an attempt. This scene is dazzling in that it offers a kind of raw encounter with the transition from potency to perfection. Formally speaking, a sense of excess flows out of the realization that one is seeing the very principle of recta ratio factibilium (‘right reason about making’) unfold in real time. What begins as a carefully arranged bit of blocking and dialogue meant to serve a story suddenly turns, through the ingenuity of its performers and the restraint of its director, into something overflowing beyond the needs of that story. It becomes something absolutely brimming with unspoken possibilities. Both the actors and their director, Elia Kazan, become engaged in the very essence of playing, which entails exercising a profound freedom in consenting to the accident while continuing forward within the original bounds of their task. In seeing this unfold, one senses an absolute harmony achieved between rule and spontaneity, and it is this harmony which gives pleasure. But the logical explanation I have attempted to give is not registered discursively in the moment; the moment unfolds in all of its purity without needing to be explained.
Like the beauty of a poem recited again and again, the cinephilic moment cannot be exhausted by mere analysis; it simply is. Moreover, one cannot explain this epiphany by a particular mode of abstraction analysis of form or substance, because it is an epiphany of their absolute union, which is to say, their absolute integrity and wholeness. The deepest epiphany which strikes the cinephile, then, is essentially the same as that poetic epiphany which Jacques Maritain characterized as “the unconceptualizable flash of reality obscurely grasped in the mystery of the world by the intuitive emotion of the poet.” In the moment of beholding, the cinephile is not seeing with or through concepts. He is simply seeing, dare we say drinking, reality.
The deepest cinephilic moment coheres in an awareness of reality which cannot be reduced to any single efficient cause that might be isolated into a rule or formula. There may be many causes which catch the cinephile’s attention and call forth love—poetic or decorative, essential or accidental, formal or substantial—but none can be nailed down as the single cause, logically speaking, of the moment itself. We can articulate the epiphany of the cinephile, then, as a revelation of being itself—the beating heart of all reality.
And as Willemen highlights, the very condition of this moment is its involuntary character. No human intelligence, whether that be filmmaker or viewer, can ever plan or manufacture a true cinephilic moment; to even attempt to do so would ensure the opposite effect. This revelation of being, which in its essence is a grace given to all of the fine arts, comes as a necessary kind of gift, because being always needs to act. Being must spill out of the natures of things, and as cinema has taken not only words, or sounds, or colors, or stone, but all of nature as its artistic material, it has fallen to the cinema to become the privileged witness of being in the full plenitude of sensible reality.
To summarize: The epiphany of a film’s form, like all epiphanies of beauty, is received as a gift in conjunction with the intended aims of the filmmaker, whose fundamental task is to make a film well. The epiphany of a film’s substance, likewise, is received as a gift in conjunction with a filmmaker’s intentions to bind or loose the symbolic associations hovering within the things he has taken up as his poetic material. Only the epiphany of being can be said to be both pure gift and purely unintentional on the part of the filmmaker, at least insofar as the filmmaker is the efficient cause of a film. In this sense, then, the astonishing fact of the deepest cinephilic experience is that its efficient cause cannot be located by reason; it is a mystery. There is simply no reason for such things to happen, and yet they do.
Here the natural cinephile will be happy but befuddled, for he is not liable to think about a final cause. It falls to the Christian to see into the mystery and understand what, or Who, is responsible for this gift of en plus. Maritain, tracing the presence of en plus in music and poetry, calls it “a sign through which passes a superior causality, the sacrament of a separate poetry which makes a game of art.”
What happens when cinephilia enters into its proper life as a game? What does it mean for the cinephile to play? Thus we begin to approach the summit of our questions.
The Vocation of the Cinephile
We began our reflections by considering what it means to see as a contemplative, to see beneath the surfaces of things. We have considered how the cinephile fits the first two of our three characteristics—seeing intensively and seeing lovingly. What, however, is the cinephile’s relationship to the third characteristic, of seeing beyond the beloved? It is time to return to the question of the filmmaker.
Perhaps the greatest danger for the cinephile is to attempt to clutch the gift of epiphany and spend the rest of his life chasing it down again and again in film after film. For the cinephile thus possessed, suddenly the act worth doing in itself (which Pieper reminds us is fundamentally to do with true leisure) becomes another form of work. Indeed, the cinephile who falls into this gyration has entered onto the path of the curious, a restless and sterile pursuit.
There is no one answer to the problems of curiosity or “hasty satisfaction” which we have touched on, but I think the most potent and natural progress of the cinephile to be seen is for him to let go and play, which is to say, make cinema himself. In doing so, he will pass from the epiphany of things seen passively through viewing, and enter into the epiphanies of things seen actively while making. It is a feature of cinephilic movements throughout history that some, even many, inevitably turn from seeing to making, and in doing so, make utterly singular contributions to the cinematic treasury of mankind.
To return to Pieper once more, this is precisely the solution he offers way back in 1952 for the cleansing of vision: “to be active oneself in artistic creation, producing shapes and forms for the eye to see.” That he had no intention of applying this to the moving image seems pretty clear, but he would surely be happy to see a true principle bringing relief to an area genuinely in need of enlightenment. The contemplative thus becomes the artist.
There is a reason that cinephilia has proven so fertile to filmmaking wherever it has put down deep roots. Because he sees the poetic potential of things, the cinephile offers to the filmmaker the freedom to see reality more deeply and to receive from it the precious gifts of things waiting to become poetry—things which because of their mundanity would be disdained and swept aside by the industrial modes of filmmaking.
The witness of the cinephile, then, grants permission to forgo the passing and shortsighted rules imposed by extrinsic concerns like profitability, mass appeal, social pressure—in short, all of the concerns of conventionalism. Concerns that have no business dictating the poietic process of making a film can be ignored and the true good of the film nurtured without interference. When this happens, even if he lacks important resources, the filmmaker enters into a kind of freedom for making which cannot be purchased; it can only be received.
Practically speaking, the awakened filmmaker is no longer beholden to make films out of the influences of other forces like audience taste, economic conditions, social pressure, and so on. This is not to say that these forces will not exert any influence on the making of a work—they always do and always shall—but simply that the filmmaker who has seen the deepest secrets of cinema is able to resist them when they attempt to exert authority in the realm of poiesis, of making this and not that.
In this sense, then, the cinephilic dynamic is nothing but the wellspring of cinematic inspiration itself; the vital means of renewal whenever opsis becomes too dominant. Thus do we see how cinephilia throughout history inevitably produces vital and original filmmakers. When such a change occurs, it is because they realize they can do no more as cinephile to press more deeply into the reality of the moving image. The only way to continue the quest is by making; and not so much by making new films to press into, but to press into the essences of things themselves through film. Wherever ‘new waves’ occur in existing film cultures, there is always some connection to this desire to flee from opsis and return to reality; to come closer to essences.
But we are not finished with opsis. We do not reject it outright, for it is simply a good thing out of its proper order. And here we might alight on the greatest scandal and the greatest glory of cinephilia: the deepest epiphany can happen anywhere, through any moving image work, even the most opsis-ruled monstrosity. That this is the case does not inherently justify the moral and formal defects of a work of cinema, nor does it require the cinephile to seek out that which is best avoided. What it does is to simply affirm the reality of being which will not be denied its high privileges anywhere. That poetic potential can still be found under the tyranny of opsis is one of the great discoveries of the cinephile’s existence, one that true cinephiles relish and in some ways, prize most highly. This is precisely what we see over and over throughout history whenever cinephiles champion some work of popular cinema rejected by the critical establishment not for what it is, but for what it appears to be. Only the cinephile has the gumption, being open to being wherever it is, to truly approach the opsis-work on its own terms as a genuine work deserving fair sight. And when he finds real being buried down there, he acts as the man with the pearl of great price: in a sense, he sells everything (even his critical credibility, if necessary) to testify to the truth.
And when the cinephile turns to making, he grants opsis an opportunity for redemption. One of the constant surprises of cinema, as with all narrative art, is its capacity to reformulate mediocre or crude material into something utterly new and stunning. The cinephile does this by resetting the poetic order; by returning opsis to its proper place—but not empty-handed. Whatever insights the opsis-work revealed, even in its brokenness—maybe the brilliance of a colour, or the presence of an actor, or the raw beauty of a melodramatic exchange—can now be shared in a more integral way; can be brought into being even more affectively and effectively.
In the end, what does the cinephilic dynamic tell us most of all? It tells us to hope. This hope rests in the treasure of the cinephile: the encounter with being. It tells us something essential about the magnitude of cinema’s potential. It consoles us that there is an answer to the often demoralizing quest to discover cinema’s true purpose for existing, which is to say, its true purpose in salvation history. It tells us that this strange and overwhelming medium which is still so young and unknown to us is not cut off from the deepest things; indeed, it is acutely caught up with them. In fact, it is desperate to reveal things to us, as desperate as we are to find them. Where man and cinema meet in the clear sight—the true spectacle—of real being, a real cry meets a real answer; real thirst meets real drink; a real heart is touched by real love. That all of this leads ultimately into the pre-conceptual realm—without words; without signs—is the sign and seal of its authenticity.
The cinephile exists, then, to behold goodness in this little province of creation. But she also exists to return with the good news that bounds back to us, plenifold and panting: O Man not this, your eye-filling substitute for reality; not this, the fruit of your mastery of nature; not even this, the sign of your pretense to godhood, will keep you from Me. I will meet you here, too and bring you back to Me.
In the face of such love, nothing else remains but for the cinephile to take up his camera-stylo and reply. What will he say? Not the words of a scientist or a newsman, not the cries of a prophet or mutterings of a priest. The cinephile called into his highest potential as a maker can only say one thing. With all the poets of all the ages, using all of the things under his gaze, he sings one word again and again, twenty-four times a second: “Magnificat.”
In the print edition, the word poietically appeared incorrectly as politically. Poietically reflects the truly intended sense of the line. Dappled Things sincerely regrets the error.