‘Film’s Lessons in Vision’: Towards the Virtue of an Impure Artform

Abstract In this paper, I explore the poetic virtue of filmmaking. In the first part, I look at the virtue of art more generally, drawing on Catholic philosopher Jacques Maritain’s Aquinas-inspired conception of poetic virtue. In the rest of the paper, I then map Maritain’s poetic virtue onto the artform of the moving image, its processes of production and reception. Here, I show how poetic intuition is conceived by filmmakers such as David Lynch and translated into the realities of filmmaking in the Sci-Fi mystery thriller, The Silent Messenger , in which I was involved in as producer and performer. Enlisting the help of film philosopher Alain Badiou and film phenomenologist Vivian Sobchack, I claim that for the poetic virtue of film to come into full presence, both filmmaker and viewer need to take responsibility for their moral capacity for gaze. It is only when the viewer loses themselves (their self) in the shared sight of the filmmaker, and the artist respects the audience’s own intellectual creativity, that film can teach us that seeing is always a relational enterprise, one that brings our human relationships – in all its tragedy and beauty – into shared vision.