The Garden and the Gardener: Film, Creativity, and the Gift of Creation

Abstract In his essay ‘From God the Artist to Man the Creator’, Jean‐Louis Chrétien considers the possibility that human creativity can participate in divine creativity. As created, creative beings, Chrétien suggests that our art and other creative enterprise may become a site for participation in God's act of creation. This article takes its lead from Chrétien, reading his essay closely before considering the poetics of film, and the possibility that cinematic art is a significant locus for such a theology of participation. In order to explore this further, I engage the film theory of Laura U. Marks, suggesting that the form of cinematic representation facilitates the theological potentials of the medium. I then offer an analysis of Andrei Tarkovsky's 1966 film Andrei Rublev , which develops the preceding discussion both through the film's thematic content and its formal composition. Throughout, I deploy the twin motifs of the garden and the gardener (Genesis 2:15) in order to conceptualise the vocation of the human artist within the doctrine of creation. Finally, this opens up the sacramental idiom, and the possibility that the work of the artist consecrates the gift of creation.