Spiritual Cinema: Agel, Merleau-Ponty and the Cinematic Real

This article seeks to retrieve the work of Henri Agel, and his collaborator Amédée Ayfre, for our theoretical understanding of film-philosophy. I explore their distinctive contribution to thinking philosophically about film and assess the relative merits of their work for the phenomenology of film. While exceptionally valuable for religious and theological interpretations of film I proceed to argue that Agel and Ayfre’s work needs to be supplemented with the work of Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s film-phenomenology to adequately express the temporal and motional nature of film. Merleau-Ponty’s work I contend while exceptionally valuable is brief and underdeveloped, and therefore does not fully draw out the implications of some claims about film-phenomenology. Therefore, I conclude by developing a theory of spiritual realism for film-philosophy. Spiritual realism understands the essential conditions of film-philosophy as a form of embodied perceptual experience, embedded in historical and ethical concrete reflection.