Essays, criticism, journal entries, and prose presentations on cinema, theology, and the recovery of the Catholic imagination. Long-form, unhurried, in our own voice.
The phrase "Catholic film" is most often deployed to describe a category of religious-themed entertainment — saints, scripture, the lives of the holy. It is a useful descriptive shorthand, but it is also profoundly misleading. The Catholic imagination, properly understood, is not a subject matter but a way of seeing. It is the conviction that creation is sacramental, that matter participates in spirit, and that beauty is the visible form of the good…
Continue ReadingA letter from the founder on the long pause between Beatific Vision's first season — 2010 to 2012 — and its resumption in 2024. On the work of law, the formation of a family, the maintenance of conviction across years of apparent silence, and the slow consolidation of what is now an integrated media enterprise…
Continue ReadingThe mainstream studios are no longer in the business of cinema; they are in the business of intellectual property exploitation. This is not a moral indictment but a structural one. A studio that has hollowed out its R&D function, mortgaged its catalogs, and committed itself to franchise extension cannot be expected to produce art. It is producing what the system rewards: yield…
Continue ReadingRobert Bresson's films are difficult to describe and impossible to imitate, in part because his work proceeds from a theological premise that contemporary cinema has largely abandoned: that the human face, attentively framed and quietly held, is itself a site of grace. To recover Bresson is to recover a doctrine of the visible, and the labor that doctrine demands of the maker…
Continue ReadingThe film score composer and music producer behind Kairos Films & Music Composition Studio reflects on three continents of work in secular media, the Catholic creator's persistent loneliness in the industry, and what would change if there were proper institutional homes for serious Catholic artists. A conversation conducted by correspondence…
Continue ReadingA quarterly print and digital journal, publishing serious criticism, archival recovery, theological essay, and original Catholic film theory. Published in association with the Catholic Film Institute. First issue forthcoming.
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