In seeking a working definition of the film director’s role, we might do no worse than claim that the director affords us the opportunity to see things spectacularly. The word “spectacular”, of course, derives from the Latin spectaculum, meaning a show, a performance, a public display. The “spectacular” is an opening onto beauty or wonderment that appeals specifically to the eyes. It’s an ocular means of allurement, which we will see in Kenji Mizoguchi’s The Story of the Last Chrysanthemum.
Sight, along with hearing, is one of Aquinas’s maxime cognoscitivi; that is, one of the two senses most bound up with knowledge of the world insofar as these senses are more capable of abstracting from the bodily toward the universal truth. But whereas hearing is often discussed in terms of immersion (sound invades our ears and we have no “earlids” to close it out; sound pulses through our bodies, modifying our corporeal vibrations to its own), sight appears to involve distance. It’s partly for this reason that we rely so heavily upon sight as a guarantor of objectivity: seeing, as they say, is believing.