‘Seeing Like a Movie’: Cultivating the Poetic Gaze with Thomas Aquinas and the Artform of the Moving Image

Abstract

Why does Aquinas go to the movies and what does all of this have to do with education? In order to shed light on this productive confusion, I shall explore Thomas Aquinas’ medieval notion of divine poiesis not merely as a theological or metaphysical intrusion of the pedagogical field, but as a model and metaphor that philosophises on the nature, purpose and practice of human self-formation. In the first part, I draw on John Milbank and Catherine Pickstock’s Truth in Aquinas and Jacques Maritain’s work on the virtue of art. For St Thomas, human beings do not only participate in the act of divine creativity by the fact of their created-ness. By imitation of God’s free, self-forgetting aesthetic movement from idea to form (modelled in the creation, the incarnation), humans—with the artist as the key example—are to cultivate their mimetic capacity for a ‘simple’ aesthetic seeing-as-making. Having laid out Aquinas’ philosophy of human formation, I will then, in the second part, enlist the help of film phenomenologist Vivian Sobchack. Here, I suggest that the artform of film’s mimesis, echoing the divine ‘simple’ seeing-as-making, performs the ontological goodness of creation by showing us that the world is worthy to be looked at with interest. In the artform of the moving image, the filmmaker’s existential vision is always a relational ‘shared sight’, because film only comes into its final form ‘as a way of seeing and understanding’ when the spectator freely participates in its vision. To illustrate how film may embody, or indeed subvert, this shared journey of relational formation towards poetic vision, I draw on Plato’s concerns about the mimetic ‘music’ arts and finish with a practical example: the making-of The Silent Messenger; an indie film, which explores the formation of human vision through a Sci-Fi scenario.