Paradoxes of the Catholic Filmmaker

An introduction.

What does it mean to be a Catholic filmmaker?

If you are a person who identifies as both a Catholic and a filmmaker, this is without doubt one of those questions that you’ve heard many times. Perhaps you’re altogether tired of hearing it. Perhaps it isn’t even worth dwelling upon at all.

And yet, every time you’re in a room with other Catholic film professionals, discussing cinema in culturally Catholic settings, or just swapping movie opinions at the parish coffee hour, it remains the unspoken backdrop of every conversation, every interaction, and every opinion. We might roll our eyes at it, sigh whenever it pokes its head in, or try to ignore it altogether, but the fact is that it is never, ever going to leave us alone.

One thing I have noticed over the years with this question is the paradoxical quality of responses it tends to evoke. Everyone has strong ideas of what it means to be Catholic, and what it means to be a filmmaker, but as soon as the two are invoked together, all bets are off.

On one end, you might hear that to be a Catholic filmmaker is no different from being a Catholic janitor or athlete or farmer. To do any kind of work requires knowledge and skill in doing certain tasks properly, and questions of religious identity do not especially matter in carrying out the ordinary functions of many kinds of labour. Being Catholic has nothing to do with making a good film, per se, since it’s entirely possible to spend one’s whole career making films about anything but religious subjects. A filmmaker can die in the state of grace without ever having touched religion in his or her films.

On top of this fact, everyone knows well that being a faithful Catholic is no guarantee of a product’s overall quality. If one doesn’t actually know the basics of how to shoot and edit, they won’t find any assistance in the Catechism. All this in mind, it seems there is little point in attaching “Catholic” to “filmmaker” as an adjective.

On the other side of the question, you might hear an insistence that, no, to be a Catholic filmmaker implies a certain personal responsibility to make only works which intentionally build up the Body of Christ, particularly through proclaiming and teaching the truth, and above all, the truth of the Gospel. To be a filmmaker who identifies in this manner seems to require accepting certain kinds of tasks, or at least adhering to a certain set of criteria, and that the specific nature of one’s religious identity not only matters deeply, but is absolutely vital to the work an artist produces.

The question, then, whether we are for or against the structuring power of “Catholic” in “Catholic filmmaker,” is firmly one of identity, that principle which informs all personal acts without exception. It is a question not only of a “what” but of a “who,” for there is no such thing as a Catholic filmmaker, or a filmmaker of any sort, that is not first and foremost a person. To call oneself a Catholic filmmaker is to accept a certain form of identity, and to reject it is to reject the same, so as to carve out a different one. Indeed, it is quite common among Christ-loving filmmakers of all sorts to find a sort of wholesale dismissal of labels like “Christian filmmaker,” not because they reject Christian identity itself, but because they reject a certain personally-coloured idea of how the two terms are intended to function together: Whatever that function is, it isn’t me. And perhaps this is the clearest answer as to why this question of identity haunts every collision of filmmaking with Christian faith: being deeply personal in nature, it cannot possibly suffice as a universal definition, except in the broadest sense of “Christian,” “Catholic,” and “filmmaker.”¹

And yet, we still want to know; we cannot help hungering for universals. How do we soothe this desire to know our condition more fully? The obvious answer is that it depends what we mean, individually, by Catholic as well as filmmaker. And here the trail we’re following to uncover an identity would seem to grow even more tangled, for we live in an age when the meanings of both terms seem more porous and paradoxical than ever before.

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For example, on the question of Catholic identity, are we speaking about any baptized Catholic who picks up a camera, regardless of whether they believe and live according to the teachings of the Church? Is it merely enough to have a “Catholic imagination” or “afterimage,”² a way of using material that is haunted by the influence of sacramental life, even if one ceases to live it? Or are we talking about only those who remain in the Church, and who continue to receive the sacraments, to pray, and to grow in faith and love? Do we go even further and limit our definition to those who make films explicitly about the content of the faith?

In a similar sense, what do we make of the various contradictions we see? How do we account for artists of faith who produce morally or theologically suspect works; who place the needs of a given work’s function - its entertainment value or formal splendour - above their personal Christian witness? Conversely, how do we account for those who produce formally deficient works, who would seem to prefer doing away with poetic forms altogether if it would permit a more efficacious transmission of the Gospel?

By no means do these questions exhaust our curiosity. As we’ve already noted, to speak of the Catholic identity of a filmmaker is to consider a vast range of possible answers. Within the confines of Christ’s mystical Body, there are as many paths to God as there are unique personalities to walk them - how might a general definition of the Catholic filmmaker possibly account for such a diversity of personal experience? In other words, what are the common threads of Catholic identity which might be found among a plurality of filmmakers who see themselves, clearly or dimly, positively or negatively, as some sort of “Catholic filmmaker?”

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In a similar sense, as the moving image has escaped the bonds of celluloid, indeed of all analog media, of how much use is an increasingly antiquated term like “filmmaker?” The meaning of “movies” or “film” as a category still means “narrative feature films,” to most mainstream viewers, but there is no question that the moving-image makers of today must accept working in just about any other format in order to begin and sustain a filmmaking career. Indeed, as the moving image continues to evolve in our time into the ubiquitous image of human culture, regardless of whatever screen or surface it inhabits, how much further will the concept of the filmmaker retain its classical connotations as an elevated craft, an elite discipline, a fundamentally artistic vocation?

I have my doubts. After all, we are swimming in moving images which have no real purpose beyond brute functionality. Indeed, the film school graduates of today can be certain of only one consolation: they will always eat, for with the wholesale explosion of “content creation,” or information-driven media, there has never been more demand for the most rudimentary skills of the filmmaker. Everyone now has something to say, and needs someone willing to record it and cut it together. All that is asked in our media climate is the competence to point a camera, get clean “coverage,” and edit it together in as direct and efficient a manner as possible. Not even the classic two-camera setup for ensuring basic continuity during interviews has survived intact, for the rise of diaristic, direct-to-camera monologues has completely normalized the jump cut as a means to cut unnecessary fat.

What are no longer in demand, if ever they were, are the poetic sensibilities which film schools were originally meant to discover, awaken, and encourage, to say nothing of the skills necessary to realize that sensibility into a film’s form. What do I mean by poetic? Simply that animating emanation of the soul which produces poetry, the most fundamental and complete form of human communication.³ As Dana Gioia tells us, poetry is the most primordial, universal, and rhythmic form of human expression, and in its fullest flowering, it fulfills a fourfold desire “to delight, instruct, console, and commemorate.”⁴ The only thing that can be said with any certainty about today’s media culture is that it knows how to instruct. Delighting, consoling, and commemorating are not totally absent, but neither are they the primary goal of today’s moving image makers, even in a Hollywood dominated by a generation that received its flash-freezed vocation, in one terrible, awesome instant, from the unsuspecting hands of George Lucas.

To say “filmmaker” in our time still suggests the image of the director, the supposed final arbiter of decisions on a given production. For me, filmmaker still connotes the same sense as auteur, author, the one who is the final cause of a film’s particular nature; who imparts to a film its animating principle, forms it in his image, and protects it from competing interests. But my conviction of the filmmaker as a fundamentally personal and poetic creator has never been less convincing than it is now, an age when moving images are recruited for every possible function under the sun, except those which are intentionally personal and intentionally poetic.

The bitter paradox of the modern film career is precisely this: the experience of wonder which accompanies any truly poetic encounter, that very event in cinema which convinces a young man or woman to take up their camera, too, is precisely that which no one on this earth will ask them to create in turn. That which is most necessary for them to share is the very thing which nobody knows to ask for. Whatever poetry they long to give to the world will have to fight its way into existence, not necessarily against opposition, but against overwhelming indifference.

It is this paradox and this scandal, which is no less pronounced within Catholic culture, that fuels my particular agony around the concept of the filmmaker. It is a way of making which is useful for an astonishing array of functions, but which will not be satisfied with anything less than the heights of poetry.

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If we return to the question of the filmmaker in the Church, we’ll soon be confronted by another reality which is even more perplexing: the fact that the cinema has no liturgical function, and will never have one, presents an unavoidable obstacle to conceptualizing the filmmaker as an artistic being fully activated and fully giving to Catholic life. It is a conflict which somewhat calls into question cinema’s hard fought membership in the roll call of the fine arts. After all, the secular practitioner of the traditional, primordial “arts of the beautiful,”⁵ in leaving behind immoral uses of their arts, always has the consolation of being invited to serve the Church in turning their talents to making sacred art, a task which is always intrinsically connected to the liturgical life of the Church. They need not give up the essential nature of their work, but in a way are given the means to consecrate it and turn it towards its most pure purpose; towards assisting at the very font of Christian worship.

The musician, architect, and poet can rest in the consolation of offering their gifts in ways directly subservient to the needs of the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass. The painter and the sculptor can adorn sacred space with beautiful images. Even the dancer and the actor may exult in the solemn beauty of bodily and vocal form which the liturgy asks of priests, servers, lectors, and laity. What is there for the filmmaker to offer for the sake of the liturgy? Nothing. Or, at least, nothing beyond herself - the same as anyone else. If the filmmaker longs to offer her gift, her photographic “moving images,” to assist the sacred rites, she must be content with the fact that the only moving images Our Lord longs to see at Mass are those which He, Himself, has made .⁶

When faced with these challenges, we can begin to understand why so many throw up their hands in frustration when the question of the Catholic filmmaker is raised. To the pile, we might add one more: to claim to be a Catholic filmmaker implies a historical meaning of its own, one which exists in a long tradition of art-making. If a Catholic filmmaker stops to really consider what his role is in the whole plan of Divine Providence, he will find it difficult to connect his function as a filmmaker with the broader tradition of Christian art that precedes the invention of moving pictures. Where is the intrinsic, historically visible link between the cinema and the traditional fine arts? If it exists, it’s not visible to the naked, historical eye.

This is because, at first blush, the particular charm of the moving image cannot simply be explained as a development or transference of some other fine art into a new form, as though those elements of theatre or painting or poetry which seem to anticipate motion pictures, hold the secret of our fascination with the moving image. The classical fine arts did not make a Cambrian leap into the moving image. There is no one-to-one ratio that can help us. If our filmmaker cannot see the connection between the new art and the old, he will be plunged into uncertainty about both film’s status as an art and of his own purpose as a filmmaker. For, if cinema - with all of its overwhelming psychological power - isn’t intrinsically of the same vine as the fine arts, what exactly is it? And if it is somehow apart from the unceasing tradition of Christian artistic beauty, what does that make the filmmaker, who in the year 2024 is conceived inside and outside the Church, without question, as an artist?

The fact that film’s ontological equality with the fine arts has been tacitly admitted by secular culture on the grounds of its psychological power is not necessarily a good reason for Christians to do the same, even though it remains a naturally appealing one. For, if Catholic practitioners of the cinema sincerely wish to put the psychological potential of the moving image at the service of the Gospel, we must grapple with the real nature of the power of fascination it exerts.

The answer, which we cannot treat here, surely has to do with man’s love of imitating reality, so keenly observed by Aristotle in the Poetics, and surely lies deep in a tangle of psychological responses and metaphysical causes which, if followed back to their source, would eventually place the cinema on the same map as the traditional fine arts, albeit not as their direct descendant. In some ways, that is of little help, since it only seems to confirm the moving image as something new, something other, something amazing but fundamentally remote from the other arts. If a Catholic filmmaker is troubled by this, because he understands himself to be an artist, he will have to re-examine his understanding of art itself in order to find the real order of things. The problem is that very few filmmakers are willing to become metaphysicians, even though they frequently navigate challenges which are best explained by metaphysics.

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To be clear, I am not claiming many or even most Catholic filmmakers think about such things. Most are likely too busy with the practical demands in front of them to give much conscious thought to metaphysics and whatnot.

What I am claiming, and intend to defend in subsequent chapters of this essay, is the notion that the Catholic filmmaker’s existence - whether it enters into her conscious experience or not - is deeply structured by certain tensions which run through every facet of Catholic film culture, which is to say, through every convergence of Catholicism, human nature, and the photographic moving image. These tensions tend to reveal themselves in a quasi-paradoxical manner which, true or not, structure the desires and imagination of everyone who participates in Catholic film culture - viewers, critics, and filmmakers alike - as an authentic response to the reality of the moving image. If our experience of Catholic culture’s relationship with cinema is constantly fraught with the stress of certain cringe-inducing aspects, it is no wonder that we have little incentive to positively define the Catholic filmmaker at all.

What am I talking about? The remainder of this essay will analyze three particular cases.

First, we will explore a number of paradoxical trends within the history of Catholic engagement with cinema. These trends all affirm that the Church has not slacked in her response to the meaning of cinema, and yet, somehow, so much effort and knowledge has not translated into a vibrant, poetic, or confident Catholic culture of cinema.

Second, we will consider the fundamental object of fear that, at least in my experience, nearly all Catholic filmmakers seem to share in common: the Lame Catholic Film. Catholic filmmakers are constantly worried they will inadvertently make a Lame Catholic Film, or be mistaken for a Lame Catholic Film, or be associated in any way with a culture that approves Lame Catholic Films. What is the Lame Catholic Film? How did it come to live rent-free in the heads of both viewers and filmmakers alike? And what is our responsibility toward those brothers and sisters of ours who make and obviously derive benefits from it?

Third, we will examine a tension which Catholic filmmakers often experience in their sense of personal identity: do I identify more as a Catholic or more as a filmmaker? That these two roles, two modes of being, are not fundamentally in conflict is not much consolation, because, I propose, a great many filmmakers still tend to experience a conflict between them in some sense. What is the source of this conflict and how, if we can, do we expose its falsity?

Finally, we’ll attempt to uncover some answers to all of these mysteries by considering the big question underlying so many of our considerations here: what is Catholic film culture? Indeed, it seems that so much of the debris which obscures our ability to begin theorizing the identity of the Catholic filmmaker is tied up in the filmmaker’s peculiar, even toxic, relationship with Catholic film culture. Must it always be the case, and is there a way to heal that dynamic?

Next (coming soon): 1. Paradoxes of Catholic Film Culture

Photo: Beth Jnr on Unsplash

1. I am reminded of Joseph Ratzinger’s famous comments about the beautifully personal nature of salvation: “As many ways as there are people. For even within the same faith each man’s way is an entirely personal one… the one way is so big that it becomes a personal way for each man.” Quoted by Peter Seewald in Salt of the Earth (1996), p. 32

2. Here I am thinking of Richard A. Blake’s Afterimage: The Indelible Catholic Imagination of Six American Filmmakers (2000), which proposes that a “Catholic afterimage” - a recurrence of sacramental and culturally Catholic imagery and ideas - exists within in the films of Martin Scorsese, Alfred Hitchcock, Frank Capra, John Ford, Francis Ford Coppola, and Brian De Palma.

3. “Communication is more than the expression of ideas and the indication of emotion. At its most profound level it is the giving of self in love.” Communio et Progressio, s11, 1972

4. Dana Gioia, Poetry as Enchantment, 2015

5. I prefer to use Étienne Gilson’s (or is it the French in general?) more precise term for the “fine arts.” These arts typically include Painting, Sculpture, Music, Dance, Architecture, Poetry and/or Theatre.

6. I am grateful to Lauren Spohn for coining this observation with typically poetic aplomb.