The Wind in the Trees: A Cinema of Encounter
Morris Caplin - I remember the first time I understood what a film could do. Not what it could show me, but what it could do to me. I was sitting in a darkened theater—one of those old single-screen houses with worn velvet seats—and something on screen arrested me so completely that I forgot I was watching images projected on a wall. For those two hours, I wasn't consuming content. I was present to something, and that something was present to me.
Pope Leo XIV's address to filmmakers this week returns to this experience—the experience of cinema as encounter rather than entertainment, as threshold rather than distraction. "Entering a cinema is like crossing a threshold," he says, and in that simple observation lies something we've nearly forgotten in our age of infinite scroll and algorithmic feed.
The threshold matters. It marks a passage from one state to another, from the noise of the street to the silence of attention, from the scattered self to the gathered heart. In that darkness, the Pope suggests, "the eye returns to attention, the heart allows itself to be reached, the mind opens to what it had not yet imagined." This is not the passive consumption of moving images. It is the active recovery of seeing.
The Crisis of the Image
But here is what strikes me most forcefully in the Pope's words: his recognition that we are living through a crisis of the image itself. Not a shortage of images—we are drowning in them—but a crisis of their authenticity, their capacity to reveal rather than obscure human dignity. "Recover the authenticity of the image to safeguard and promote human dignity," he urges.
What does this mean, practically? It means that not all images are equal. Some images deaden us. They confirm our prejudices, feed our worst impulses, and reduce the human person to a commodity or a caricature. The algorithm, as the Pope notes, "tends to repeat what 'works'"—but what works is often what flatters, titillates, or enrages. The algorithm has no interest in truth, only in engagement.
Against this, authentic cinema offers something dangerous: possibility. "Art opens to what is possible," the Pope says. It shows us not just what is, but what might be. It reveals depths in human experience we had not named, wounds we had not acknowledged, hopes we had not dared to speak.
The Courage to Look at Wounds
There is a passage in the address that deserves to be read slowly: "Do not be afraid of confrontation with the wounds of the world. Violence, poverty, exile, solitude, addictions, and forgotten wars are wounds that ask to be seen and told. Great cinema does not exploit pain: it accompanies it, it investigates it."
To accompany pain without exploiting it—this is perhaps the defining challenge for any art that would claim to serve human dignity. How many films, how many stories, use suffering as mere spectacle, as emotional manipulation, as the pornography of the tragic? The Pope is calling filmmakers to something more difficult: to sustain the gaze on suffering without either looking away or consuming it.
This is what the great films do. They don't explain suffering or resolve it with false consolation. They stay with it. They create space for the viewer to encounter it without being overwhelmed by it. In doing so, they perform an act of love—they acknowledge that the wound is real, that it matters, that the person who suffers is not abandoned.
A Pilgrimage of Imagination
The most beautiful image in the Pope's address is his description of filmmakers as "pilgrims of imagination." A pilgrimage is not tourism. The pilgrim travels not to consume experiences but to be changed by them. The pilgrim walks toward something—toward a shrine, toward an encounter, toward a question that will not let them rest.
"The path you travel is not measured in kilometers but in images, words, emotions, shared memories, and collective desires," the Pope says. This is cinema as journey, as shared searching rather than individual entertainment. In a culture that increasingly isolates us behind our personal screens, feeding us content tailored to our profiles, cinema remains stubbornly communal. We sit together in the dark. We laugh, we weep, we hold our breath together. The film does not bend to us; we bend to it, together.
This is why the closing of cinemas matters. It's not nostalgia for an outmoded technology. It's the recognition that these spaces—physical, shared, dedicated to collective attention—are "beating hearts of our territories," as the Pope calls them. When they disappear, something more than convenience is lost. A possibility is lost: the possibility of encounter, of seeing and being seen, of discovering that your questions and longings are not yours alone.
Beauty as Invocation
"Beauty is not only evasion, but above all invocation," the Pope says. This single line might be the key to the entire address.
We often think of beauty as consolation, as relief from the harshness of the real. And it can be that. But if beauty is only that, it becomes mere escapism, a drug to numb us to what is. True beauty does something stranger and more demanding: it calls. It summons us. It says: You were made for more than this. You carry within you a desire that nothing in this world fully satisfies.
This is why beauty can be almost unbearable. It opens a wound even as it heals. It reminds us of what we lack by giving us a glimpse of what we long for. The Pope quotes David W. Griffith speaking of "the beauty of the moving wind in the trees," and immediately connects it to Jesus's words: "The wind blows where it will, and you hear its voice, but you do not know where it comes from or where it goes: so it is with everyone born of the Spirit."
The wind in the trees is free. It cannot be captured or controlled. And neither can the Spirit that moves through authentic art, through images that tell the truth about human longing, human fragility, and human hope.
What Cinema Teaches the Church
There is something else in this address, quietly revolutionary: the Pope's recognition that cinema can teach the Church. "Make cinema an art of the Spirit," he says to filmmakers. Not: bring the Spirit to cinema. But: allow cinema to become what it is meant to be, and in that becoming, the Spirit will be manifest.
This is the deep wisdom of the Incarnation applied to culture. God does not despise the material world, the human craft, the work of hands and imagination. God enters into it, takes it up, reveals himself through it. If this is true, then filmmakers need not anxiously ask whether their work is "religious enough" or "Christian enough." They need only ask: Is it true? Does it honor the dignity of the human person? Does it invite rather than manipulate? Does it accompany suffering without exploiting it?
If it does these things, it is already doing the work of the Spirit, whether it knows it or not.
Artisans of Hope
The Pope's final image is of filmmakers as "artisans of hope." Not manufacturers, not dispensers, but artisans. This means painstaking work, attention to detail, the slow craft of shaping material—light, shadow, sound, silence—into something that lives.
Hope, in this vision, is not optimism or positive thinking. Hope is what emerges when we see truly, when we acknowledge both the wound and the beauty, both the fragility and the grandeur. Hope is what we discover when we stand alone in front of the image, when we allow ourselves to be moved, when we recognize in the faces on screen some reflection of our own unspoken questions.
In an era when despair feels more honest than hope, when cynicism poses as sophistication, the Pope is asking filmmakers to be stubborn witnesses to possibility. Not to lie about reality, but to see it whole—to see that the wound is not the last word, that beauty breaks through, and that the wind moves where it will.
This is the vocation of cinema: to be a laboratory where the imagination learns again to see, where hope is not proclaimed but discovered, where the human person is revealed in all their mysterious dignity. Not as abstraction or ideal, but as presence—as this face, this gesture, this moment when the light falls just so and everything changes.
The threshold awaits. The darkness gathers. And in that darkness, if we are patient, if we are attentive, the image will come to life.