The Catholic Filmmaker: Founding Statement
The Catholic Filmmaker is an online journal dedicated to the intellectual and spiritual formation of filmmakers within the Catholic Church.
Our mission is to foster a renewal of the cinematic arts in Catholic culture by forming and supporting the filmmaker in their identity as a Christian artist of the moving image.
We believe that a truly flourishing Catholic cinema is personal and poetic in essence, and humble and confident in practice.
We believe that the greatest cinema originates in a personal gift of self given form in moving images.
We believe that the truest expressions of cinema will be known equally by a profound generosity of spirit and a rigorous attention to form.
We hunger to help the individual filmmaker to discern his or her particular gifts and offer them with an overflowing heart.
We believe a truly Catholic ethos of filmmaking can arise from the particular soil of our lives; from the places, relations, and states in life which God has willed individually for each of us.
We believe that the filmmaker’s purpose, more than ever, is to see beyond the surfaces of mundanity and make visible the hidden movements of ordinary sanctity in all places.
We aim to provide a meeting place for filmmakers, critics, and scholars who share this poetic confidence in the moving image.
In sum, we hope, with God’s help, to lay foundations for a lasting and living artistic tradition of cinema in the Church.
Mission
Our main tasks are:
To explore what it means to be a Catholic Christian who makes moving images. What is the nature of my vocation as a filmmaker? How has God called me to love and serve Him in this way?
To discover the meaning of the moving image within the context of salvation history. Why has God providentially allowed the existence of the moving image in human history? What is the nature of this medium’s ‘vocation’ as a means to reveal His love to mankind?
To provide a forum for Catholic filmmakers, critics, scholars, and cinephiles to engage in charitable dialogue about the meaning of the moving image.
To support Catholic filmmakers in the pursuit of their poetic vocation through online and in-person initiatives, events, and community-building.
Principles
The Catholic Filmmaker is founded on six pillars or principles: cinephilia, history, philosophy, theology, poetry, and orthodoxy.
Cinephilia: We love the moving image. We make films because we have first beheld cinematic forms as beautiful objects in their own right. From this love, we are compelled to study the cinema in all of its diversity, seeking to understand its nature and learn, ourselves, to produce beautiful new forms.
History: Our quest is necessarily founded in history. We especially wish to ground our perspective in the respective histories of cinema, art, aesthetics, philosophy, culture, and the Church. We root ourselves firmly in understanding the events and developments of the past in order to know ourselves, where we’ve been, and where we are called to go.
Philosophy: We seek to understand the nature of the cinema. We desire to know how this medium exists, how it operates, how it produces unique encounters of beauty and meaning, and how it excites a response of loving fascination from humanity.
Theology: We seek to glimpse the meaning of the cinema as a gift of God for our particular era of salvation history. We long to see how it is meant to communicate the love of God to the human person, and how it may prepare us for His glorious return.
Poetry: We are convicted of the absolute fecundity of the moving image in its poetic vocation - its ability to take ordinary things and rearrange them so as to see the reality of being resplendent within them. We absolutely uphold the filmmaker’s poetic vocation: to behold the things of nature and with a great and gentle freedom, re-create them into meaningful forms.
Orthodoxy: We offer all of our efforts in complete fidelity and with joyful submission to the teachings and guidance of the Catholic Church, placing our labours and fruits at her service to use as she will.
Patrons
This apostolate is entrusted to the patronage of Our Lady of Mount Carmel, St. Thérèse of Lisieux, St. Charles de Foucauld, and St. John Henry Newman. A few words about each…
We place ourselves under the mantle of Our Lady of Mount Carmel because she is the mother of mystics and poets alike; those men and women who have learned to dwell in silence, gaze with the inner vision of the soul, and perceive forms hidden from the world’s eyes.
We entrust ourselves to the sisterly care of St. Thérèse of Lisieux (1873-1897), who died as the cinema was being born, because she teaches us how to do little acts with great love. May our little acts of cinema, wherever we’ve been planted, be made with great love and care.
We call on the fatherly aid of St. Charles de Foucauld (1858-1916), who flung himself again and again into his mission as a lonely seed falling into the earth. May we, too, fulfil our missions to make beautiful cinema even if we never see or taste the fruits of our labours.
Finally, we invoke the grandfatherly intercession of St. John Henry Newman (1801-1890), who so keenly navigated the intellectual and spiritual challenges of the modern world, always finding the essential way to remind philosophy, theology, art, and science of their common and irrevocable bond in the truth. May we, too, navigate the complex challenges of truly theorizing the moving image so as to share its treasures with all.
Founded October 1, 2024, on the feast of St. Thérèse of Lisieux.