“Mimesis” concerns the character of representation. Aristotle held that there was an analogical relationship whereby words referred to a world distinct from them, and so, he said, “art imitates the works of nature”.1 Film, for example, begins with the raw material of space and time, but then re-presents them in new ways. It follows that, in our writing about the dialogue between philosophy/theology and film, we cannot simply rehearse the literary-oriented specifics of plot and character, but must, rather, examine how persons, places, and things are visually framed – or, perhaps, not framed – within a filmic image. As for “hermeneutics”, a good definition is the one Paul Ricoeur offers, when he speaks of hermeneutics as “the theory of the rules that preside over an exegesis – that is, over an interpretation of a particular text or group of signs that may be viewed as a text”.2 A key question is whether theological and philosophical insights are there to be discovered in the text, or are they, as it were, “discovered” by the reader. There is a sense, I suggest, in that interpretation must be creative in order to be exact.
The clause “art imitates nature” can be found in several passages in the Aristotelian corpus: Phys. 1943 21, 1993 17; De Mundo 396b12; Poetics 14473 14-17, 1448b4-24. All references (except De Mundo) refer to Richard McKeon’s The Basic Works of Aristotle (New York: Random House, 1966). 2 P. Ricœur, Freud and Philosophy: An Essay on Interpretation, trans. Denis Savage (New Haven, 1970), p. 8. 1
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