What Makes a Film an Aesthetic Experience?

A truly aesthetic experience of film does not begin with the question of whether a movie is “great.” It begins earlier, in the conditions under which a viewer encounters it. What I mean is not a ranking of films, nor a canon, nor even a theory of cinematic excellence in the abstract. I mean something more modest and, at the same time, more intimate: the circumstances under which a person becomes capable of making an aesthetic judgment about a moving picture at all.

Walk around your hometown, and you will likely find buildings that were once local cinemas — a quickly dying form of architecture and disappearing gateway to aesthetic experience. 

I’m speaking here from within my own experience, bracketed and phenomenological. I know perfectly well that others will name different conditions for their own deepest encounters with film. Still, my claim is that certain conditions do not merely describe my preferences; they help make possible the experience of film as an object of aesthetic judgment. They dispose the viewer toward the sort of attention from which beauty, sublimity, originality, and formal power can actually be felt.

The first condition is simple, almost embarrassingly simple: a film must be watched without interruption. If one wants to have a genuinely aesthetic experience, one cannot be half-watching. One cannot be texting, checking email, folding laundry, and grazing across six tabs of consciousness while the movie flickers in the background. A film demands duration, and duration demands surrender. To watch a movie aesthetically is to submit, for a time, to its order of images, sounds, rhythms, and silences. It is to grant the work one’s undivided attention.

This is not a moral condemnation of distracted viewing. I have watched plenty of movies merely to unwind, to numb out, to let the mind dissolve into pleasant noise. There is nothing wrong with that. Brain rot has its place. But that is not the same thing as aesthetic experience. The point is not that every instance of film consumption must rise to the level of contemplation. The point is that if one wants to be able to say, with seriousness, “that was beautiful,” or “that was formally astonishing,” then one must cultivate the habits that make such judgment possible.

In that sense, aesthetic judgment resembles any other human capacity. If I wanted to become better at mathematics, I would accept that certain disciplines are required of me. The same is true here. To refine one’s ability to judge film aesthetically, one must learn how to watch. One must build conditions favorable to encounter.

This is why the setting of viewing matters, even if it is not absolutely determinative. A cinema is ideal not because it automatically confers importance on the work, but because it enforces concentration. The darkness, the scale, the social silence, the inability to pause or drift away—all of this protects the film from casual fragmentation. But a theater is not the only place such attention can happen. One can create it at home, in a viewing room, even in front of a laptop, if one deliberately consecrates the event: I am going to watch this film now, and for the next two hours I belong to it.

A second condition follows from the first: the less prefabricated context, the better. The strongest first aesthetic judgments often arise when one encounters a film with minimal prior explanation. Ideally, I want to know as little as possible. I do not want to be told in advance what the film “means,” why it is historically significant, how it should be interpreted, or where the emotional peaks are supposed to land. I want the work to arrive before its reputation does.

Of course, this ideal is harder and harder to achieve. Modern spectators rarely meet artworks innocently. We live among previews, discourse, canon formation, fan edits, rankings, memes, critical consensus, and algorithmic recommendation. The image often reaches us before the work does. This is true of film, but it is also true of painting. When I stand before the Mona Lisa at the Louvre, I am not encountering a virgin object. I am confronting a work whose image has already been multiplied, miniaturized, ironized, commercialized, and absorbed into mass culture. Part of what I see is not the painting itself, but the sediment of its fame. In that sense, some artworks become artifacts of their own circulation.

That does not destroy aesthetic experience, but it does complicate it. There is a difference between discovering a work and arriving at a monument. The first is an event of perception; the second is often an event of recognition.

For film, then, one important condition of aesthetic experience is the possibility of surprise. Preferably, one sees the work before the chatter closes around it.

A third condition is originality—not in the cheap sense of novelty for novelty’s sake, but in the deeper sense of voice. A film must feel as though someone is speaking through it. It must not seem merely assembled from the dead remains of other films, other franchises, other market-tested gestures. Derivativeness deadens perception because it replaces discovery with recollection. One no longer encounters form; one merely recognizes content.

This is why sequels so often fail aesthetically, even when they succeed commercially. Their problem is not that they continue a story. Their problem is that they frequently inherit too much of the imaginative burden from the previous work. Adaptations are a more complicated case. An adaptation can be great precisely because it translates, transforms, and risks. It can discover a new voice inside an old structure. But it must still sound like someone meant it. The criterion is not whether the material is borrowed; the criterion is whether the film has achieved necessity of expression.

What matters, in other words, is that the film not feel secondhand.

Another condition, and one I find increasingly important, is the film’s relation to setting. Cinema is uniquely gifted in its capacity to render place. Because it is visual, because it unfolds in time, because it can linger, return, and accumulate, film can make a setting feel inhabited rather than merely depicted. A powerful film gives us not just a backdrop but a world with texture, weather, light, routine, social atmosphere. It lets a place become legible.

This is one reason Martin Scorsese’s Casino is such a useful example. It is not merely a crime film set in Las Vegas; Las Vegas becomes one of the film’s structuring presences, almost a character in its own right. The city’s spectacle, greed, brightness, and decay are not decorative—they are part of the narrative intelligence of the film. Casino was directed by Martin Scorsese and stars Robert De Niro, Sharon Stone, and Joe Pesci.

Martin Scorsese's Casino — a film's surprise is often its dedication to setting.

By contrast, a film like Un Chien Andalou works through radically different means. Luis Buñuel’s 1929 short, co-written with Salvador Dalí, famously rejects conventional plot in favor of dream logic, disjunctive imagery, and startling associations. Its power is not narrative immersion but the assaultive coherence of the unconscious.  The point is not that one of these is superior to the other. It is that aesthetic experience can arise in both cases when the viewer consents to the formal logic proper to each work—narrative, in one case; surreal juxtaposition, in the other.

So perhaps the condition here is not “story” but intelligible form. A film must establish the terms on which it wishes to be seen, and the viewer must grant those terms a chance.

Finally, there is the human figure. Film possesses a special intimacy with faces, gestures, pauses, glances, and bodily presence. Even the most expansive cinema often turns, at decisive moments, on something minute: a hesitation before speech, the way a hand rests on a doorframe, a face registering knowledge too quickly to become language. One of the privileges of film is that it allows us to see people under the pressure of time. A good film does not simply tell us who someone is; it lets us witness becoming, concealment, revelation, and breakdown. That is one of the deepest sources of aesthetic experience in cinema: the transformation of the human face into an event of meaning.

If I had to state the argument plainly, then it would be this: a truly aesthetic experience of film requires attention, openness, and the possibility of surprise. It is deepened by uninterrupted viewing, by a setting that protects concentration, by minimal prefabricated context, by originality of voice, by a rich sense of place, and by the film’s ability to render human presence with force and specificity. These conditions do not guarantee that a film will be beautiful. But they make beauty more available to perception.

The issue, then, is not only what makes a film great. The issue is what makes us ready to encounter greatness—or beauty, or strangeness, or formal power—when it appears. Aesthetic judgment is not just a verdict we pronounce after the fact. It is a capacity we prepare in ourselves beforehand.

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The Wounded Christ and the Doubting Self: A Humanist’s Approach

I mean, I think anyone who grew up in the Christian Church—especially in a church that displayed the crucified Christ, the corpus, the body of Christ on the cross, either as a corpse or as an agonized, suffering figure—knows exactly what I am talking about. And of course, there are Christian traditions that do not depict the crucified Christ in that way. I have also seen images of Christ on the cross, radiant with resurrection, as though he has passed through suffering yet still bears it. I have seen the risen corpus with the wounds intact. And that, really, is one of the strange things about Christianity: resurrection does not erase the wounds. In John’s Gospel, the risen Jesus still says to Thomas, “Put your finger here and see my hands,” and, more intensely still, “bring your hand and put it into my side” (John 20:27).

Crucified Christ
Credit: Mosan or Rhenish third quarter 12th century (The Metropolitan Museum of Art)

That scene, to me, has always been one of the most psychologically compelling moments in the Gospels, even if it does not always get the same theological attention as the Passion itself. Caravaggio understood that. In The Incredulity of Saint Thomas—an oil painting usually dated to 1601–1602 and now in Potsdam—he compresses the whole drama into four bodies and one wound. Thomas does not merely look. He probes. Christ guides the hand. The whole painting is built around that terrible intimacy: doubt made tactile, faith forced through flesh. 

And I think that is why Thomas matters. He is not Judas, the catastrophe. He is not Peter, the blustering future leader. He is not Paul, the brilliant convert and architect. Thomas is smaller than that, closer to the rest of us. He wants proof. He cannot quite get there on charisma alone, or testimony alone, or rumor alone. And honestly, that is why I have always felt that, in some deep way, we are all Thomas. Jesus says, “Do not be unbelieving, but believe,” and Thomas responds with one of the great cries of the New Testament: “My Lord and my God!” (John 20:28). But he only gets there by way of the wound. 

For me, the Christian message was always bound up with that: Christ undergoes horrific suffering in order to save humanity from sin, from fault, from the catastrophe of itself. The old Easter proclamation, the Exsultet, says it with outrageous daring: “O happy fault / that earned so great, so glorious a Redeemer!” It is one of the strangest ideas in religion—that the wound is not incidental to salvation but somehow constitutive of it, that the disaster becomes the site of redemption. 

And then there is kenosis, that great Christian word for divine self-emptying. In Philippians, Christ is described as one who “emptied himself, / taking the form of a slave,” and who “became obedient to the point of death— / even death on a cross.” That is not just humility. That is divine abasement pushed to its outer limit. Von Balthasar, in a line that gets right to the heart of the matter, says, “no path of redemption can make a detour around it.” (von Balthasar 57). He means the Cross. He means that Christianity does not let you skip over humiliation, abandonment, flesh, blood, or death and still call it redemption. 

That, to me, is the twist in Christianity. Plenty of mythologies allow the gods to visit human beings in disguise or assume human form for a time. But Christianity says something more radical and, frankly, more disturbing: God does not merely visit. God becomes human and then submits to degradation, torture, and execution. The Paschal Mystery is not just resurrection. It is suffering, death, and resurrection. And I think sometimes Christians rush too quickly to the third term because the second one is so brutal. But if you linger there—if you really linger there—it is a terrifying religion. 

Jesus himself, at least in the Gospels, is not mild in the way people often want him to be. He is magnetic, cutting, aphoristic, often severe. He speaks in parables that are simple on the surface and devastating underneath. He tells the rich young man, “go, sell what you have and give to [the] poor,” and then follow him (Matthew 19:21, Luke 12:33). But the rich young man cannot do it. Jesus says it is easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than for a rich person to enter the kingdom of God (Matthew 19:24). That is not a soft religion. That is not spiritual accessorizing. That is a demand for transformation so total that it feels, at times, almost impossible. 

So yes, Christianity can look like the Olympics of the religions: not because it is better, but because it often frames discipleship as complete surrender, the remaking of the self through identification with Christ. There is a rhetoric of totality in it—die to self, take up your cross, be conformed to the suffering Christ—that can be profound, beautiful, and for some people utterly life-giving. But it can also become psychologically dangerous when it turns suffering into a moral requirement or self-erasure into a virtue in itself. That is where I have had to part ways with certain forms of it. I do not need any theology that tells me I must make a sacrament out of my own diminishment. 

That is part of why Kierkegaard’s meditation on Lazarus has always haunted me. In The Sickness Unto Death, reflecting on John 11, he writes: “because He lives, therefore this sickness is not unto death.” He is trying to think through the difference between ordinary mortality and spiritual annihilation. Lazarus dies, yes, but for Kierkegaard the real horror is not bodily death alone; it is despair, the self lost to itself, the death beneath death. That is a powerful insight. It names something real. But it also intensifies the Christian drama to an almost unbearable degree: not only must you die, you must fear the wrong kind of death. 

And I think that is where my own resistance enters. I am not mocking belief. I have known extraordinary Christians—Catholic, Orthodox, Protestant—whose faith made them more humane, more generous, less petty, less cruel. I have also known Christians who were insufferable, controlling, and spiritually colonizing. What I cannot stand is the assumption that one path must become everybody’s path, that one religious imagination must swallow all the others whole. Leave me out of it. I do not need to be assimilated into your metaphysics to have a soul, a conscience, or a meaningful life. A tree has many roots. Water finds more than one way. That is not relativism. That is just spiritual adulthood.

And maybe that is where I am right now, personally. I have been going through it a bit—a low-grade depression, a small crisis, whatever you want to call it. Some mornings it is hard to get up and go to work. And one thing I keep circling back to is this: I do not need to become a servant to self-abnegation. I do not need to imitate the suffering Christ in order to justify my own suffering. I do not need to hurt more than I already hurt. If there is any wisdom I want right now, it is not the sanctification of pain. It is the permission to remain here, in the ordinary, and not despise the ordinary.

That is why Epicureanism, however badly people caricature it, sometimes feels like a healthier corrective than Christian masochism. Not because it says, gorge yourself and forget the world, but because it reminds you that pleasure can be modest, local, embodied, fleeting, and still real. Eat the ice cream. Enjoy the afternoon. Let the warmth of a stupid, passing thing be enough for the moment in which it is given. That is not gluttony. That is not moral collapse. That is simply refusing to turn human life into one long rehearsal for annihilation.

And maybe that is the final thing I mean. Christianity, at its most compelling, stares directly at mortality and says that death does not get the last word. I understand the force of that. I understand why the image of the crucified Christ seized me as a teenager, why the holy cards, the saints, the wounds, the mysteries, the whole theater of it all felt so aesthetically and spiritually charged. But I also think there comes a point when one has to ask whether one is being saved by that vision or crushed beneath it. That is where I am. Still thinking. Still arguing. Still moved by it. Still unconvinced. Still, in some deep and irritating way, Thomas.

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