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  • Film, Aesthetica Mortis, and the Culture of LifePicturing Motion After Modernity
  • Bruno M. Shah OP (bio)

Qui vivat et non videat mortem?

Ps 89:48

Opening Credits

Film is an original medium of the technological age. As such, film is uniquely disposed to manifest the aesthetic forms of our contemporary culture. By “aesthetic” is meant a frame of reference, according to which perceptions are apprehended, arranged, and interpreted—a framework in which sensation and meaning are integrated. By “form” is meant the main reason, theme, or style that renders general aesthetics into a particular kind. The aesthetic form that this article explores is “of death” as given in the experience of film.

We can speak “of death” in two ways, according to subjective or objective senses of the genitive—as “the aesthetics of death” or as “the aesthetics of death,” respectively. In the first way, it is that whose perception is ordered by death to be life-taking; in the second, it is that whose perception takes death into life-giving account.

Such terms seem to presage a bleak discourse. To the contrary, the author’s eyes strain in the twilight of dawn, not dusk. Somewhat [End Page 100] like Binx Bolling in Walker Percy’s novel The Moviegoer, we might say that “movies are onto the search but they screw it up.”1 But this also means that, when film aspires to be an art of the beautiful, an art of human life, it can uniquely manifest a modern hope for redemption. It might even exercise and nourish that hope.

The overall point of this article is to prospect evangelical-philosophical gains for the cultivation of human life (read: “the culture of life”) in the present age. We endeavor to end, neither in defeat nor in triumph, but in potentiality. In other words, what follows is an exercise in evangelical thinking.2 The practice is to describe some of what can be said, not to define what must be said. The goal is to irradiate mind and heart. Evangelical thinking believes that the mysterious economy of the Incarnation has sown seeds of the Word even in historical events and cultural phenomena; that secular dynamics or values and even their cultural and artefactual structurations are, in a way, “subjects of grace,” or better, subjects of graced reflection.3 These dynamics and the structures through which they operate must be apprehended, purified, and elevated. Trying to understand Christianly the time and place in which one lives, then, is transformative. Such is the task of an evangelical-philosophical reflection.

In our phenomenology of film, we shall see a certain life-death-and-resurrection structure. We shall also discover three values or essential dynamics at play within this structure: technological, epistemological, and moral or spiritual. Our Christian philosophical reduction of filmic experience to its structure and valuation is designed to provide a unique appreciation for the modern envisioning and recognition of hope.

Our order of exposition shall treat death, film, and finally, the twofold aesthetica mortis in film, supplemented by a reading of three films of Terrence Malick.4

The discussion that follows contains a spoiler or two. But true art cannot be spoiled. In a good story or drama, at least, knowledge of the ending invites re-readings and renewed participations, which can reiterate the initial peripeteia or discouragement of the reader’s [End Page 101] otherwise informed expectations.5 Such is the art of Christian life, after all. We know how it ends; “faith is the substance of what is hoped for,” says the Good Book (Heb 11:1); and this makes existence all the more surprising and rewarding.

“O Death, Where is Thy Sting?” (1 Cor 15 :55)

A pastoral and philosophical aside will also serve to segue: in focusing upon death, we do not mean to be morbid, only realistic. This is arguably the main reason to be Christian: it is the most realistic of wisdoms and arts. The finality of death is the premier concern for the unique kind of being that we are. Existentialism was on to something. According to ancient Greek categories, the kind of being we are properly concerns death: we are “mortals...

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