The Sacred and the Cinema: Reconfiguring the ‘Genuinely’ Religious Film

Description

For more than half a century now, scholars have debated over what comprises a ‘genuinely’ religious film one that evinces an ‘authentic’ manifestation of the sacred. Often these scholars do so by pitting the ‘successful’ films against those which propagate an inauthentic spiritual experience with the biblical spectacular serving as their most notorious candidate. Â This book argues that what makes a filmic manifestation of the sacred true or authentic may say more about a spectator or critic’s particular way of knowing, as influenced by alphabetic literacy, than it does about the aesthetic or philosophical and sometimes even faith-based dimensions of the sacred onscreen. Engaging with everything from Hollywood religious spectaculars, Hindu mythologicals, and an international array of films revered for their ‘transcendental style,’ The Sacred and the Cinema unveils the epistemic pressures at the heart of engaging with the sacred onscreen. The book also provides a valuable summation of the history of the sacred as a field of study, particularly as that field intersects with film. Title Page Copyright Page Dedication Page Contents Preface Chapter 1: Tackling Transcendence: An Introduction Mediated Transcendence Course of Study of the Sacred Context and Caveats Chapter 2: A History of the Sacred as a Field of Study From “With an Other” to the “Wholly Other” From the Oceanic to the Hierophanic Post-Eliade Chapter 3: A History of the Sacred and the Cinema From Birth to Bazin The Phenomenologists: Agel and Ayfre Style as Substance: Schrader Post-Film-Studies Studies of the Sacred and the Cinema Chapter 4: The Oral Contours of the Religious ­Spectacular Prelude to a New Theory of Film Hierophany Spectacular Hierophany: What the Critics Say Epical and Exoteric Abundance Divine Intervention, Masala-Style Darśan and Frontality Chapter 5: The Alphabetically Literate Contours of the Transcendental Style Reading, Writing, and Hierophanizing Epistemic Streams of Time The Ordinary as Real—and Epistemically Literate The Still, Spare, and Silent: A Literate Metaphysics Divine Intervention as Isolation Chapter 6: Varieties of Hierophanic Experience In Defense of a New Methodology Varieties of Religiously Themed Sacredness Varieties of Secular Sacredness Chapter 7: Technologizing Hierophany: Concluding Remarks Eliade Revisited Coming Full Circle Notes Chapter 1 Chapter 2 Chapter 3 Chapter 4 Chapter 5 Chapter 6 Chapter 7 Bibliography Index