Formations of sight in Aquinas, film and filmmaking

This paper explores Thomas Aquinas’ notion of divine creativity or poiesis as a model for the formation of the human intellect and shows how the artform of film symbolically performs this formative vision. In the first part of the paper, I draw on John Milbank and Catherine Pickstock’s Truth in Aquinas and Jacques Maritain’s work on the virtue of art. For Aquinas, human beings do not only participate in the act of divine creativity by the fact of their created-ness. Their tendency towards symbolic self-expression, i.e. the human intellect’s capacity to move from idea to form, also constitutes a call to self-formation. That is, the human being is to model the divine poetic gaze, which sees-as-making (in creation, the incarnation) - by perfecting their rational-discursive powers towards a simple, direct understanding. The working habitus of the artist, who sees-by-touch, is here a living example for this formative practice and journey towards poiesis. Having laid out the pedagogical framing of the paper, I will then, in the second part, explore how the artform of the moving image symbolically performs this formative vision. Enlisting the help of film phenomenologist Vivian Sobchack, I suggest that film’s grounding in time and space, as the artform of the moving image, both symbolically models the formative effect (being summoned into vision), as well as the call to self-formation (as the cultivation of vision), that is integral to a historically-bound human poiesis, when imitative of divine creativity. To illustrate these metaphors for human self-formation, I will also investigate the filmmaker’s work practice, his seeing-as-making, by drawing on The Silent Messenger; an indie film, which explores the nature of human vision through a Sci-Fi scenario.