The Sacred and the Cinema Reconfiguring the 'Genuinely' Religious Film

For close to half a century now, scholars have debated over what comprises a 'genuinely' religious film, that is, a film that evinces an 'authentic' hierophany, or manifestation of the sacred. Often these scholars do so by pitting the films they consider to be successfully transcendental in style against those which they consider to be propagating an inauthentic sort of spiritual experience - with the Hollywood religious spectacular serving as their most notorious candidate. Providing a reassessment of religious spectaculars from around the world, the author argues that these films are patently contoured by decidedly oral norms of storytelling, and demonstrates how the very qualities that lead critics deem to call a film like The Ten Commandments 'kitsch' may in fact be the essential means by which transcendence is experienced by some viewers. The book provides a clear summation of the history of the religion and narrative cinema field, as well as bringing to light how it is that multiple modes of religious expression can exist, sometimes often contradictorily, within a single religious tradition.

Epigraph \ Preface \ 1. TacklingTranscendence: An Introduction \ 2. A History of the Sacred as a Field of Study\ 3. A History of the Sacred and the Cinema \ 4. The Oral Contours of theReligious Spectacular \ 5. The Alphabetically Literate Contours of the Transcendental Style \ 6. Varietiesof Hierophanic Experience \ 7. Technologizing Hierophany: Concluding Remarks \ Notes\ Bibliography \ Index