Film As An Expression Of Spirituality

What makes a film ‘spiritually significant’? These twelve essays explore the religious, political, social, and psychological importance of films on the Arts & Faith Top 100 list of spiritually significant films. The anthology features close readings and analyses of films by Dreyer, Antonioni, Pasolini, Kubrick, Scorsese, Schrader, Miyazaki, and others. It provides both important contributions to the understanding of canonical directors and a foundational introduction for those seeking to understand film as one expression of human spirituality.

For decades, centuries even, when people thought of spirituality, they thought only of religion. I aim to stretch the tent of spirituality in this e-book to include secular experience. My particular approach to secular spirituality is through the medium of film. Characters in the 43 films I discuss come to spirituality without religion. In some of these films, religion nibbles at the edges of events, as when, in the Brazilian film Central Station, Dora, the cynical letter writer leaves hard-bitten Rio with a boy she hopes to return to his father and finds herself surrounded by evangelicals, shrines, and churches. She does not have any kind of religious conversion, but there is no denying that the piety of the countryside softened her and escorted her into spirituality. Now and then I quote assorted Buddhists, Muslims, Christians and Jews, but usually only when their remarks throw light on secular matters. I have avoided relying on muddled mystics who write about the Great Turning Cosmic Oneness of Everything. I dont know what they are talking about.

For decades, centuries even, when people thought of spirituality, they thought only of religion. I aim to stretch the tent of spirituality in this e-book to include secular experience. My particular approach to secular spirituality is through the medium of film. Characters in the 43 films I discuss come to spirituality without religion. In some of these films, religion nibbles at the edges of events, as when, in the Brazilian film Central Station, Dora, the cynical letter writer, leaves hard-bitten Rio with a boy she hopes to return to his father and finds herself surrounded by evangelicals, shrines, and churches. She does not have any kind of religious conversion, but there is no denying that the piety of the countryside softened her and escorted her into spirituality. Now and then I quote assorted Buddhists, Muslims, Christians and Jews, but usually only when their remarks throw light on secular matters. I have avoided relying on muddled mystics who write about the Great Turning Cosmic Oneness of Everything. I dont know what they are talking about.

Religion and cinema share a capacity for world making, ritualizing, mythologizing, and creating sacred time and space. Through cinematography, mise-en-scène, editing, and other production activities, film takes the world “out there” and refashions it. Religion achieves similar ends by setting apart particular objects and periods of time, telling stories, and gathering people together for communal actions and concentrated focus. The result of both cinema and religious practice is a re-created world: a world of fantasy, a world of ideology, a world we long to live in, or a world we wish to avoid at all costs. Religion and Film introduces readers to both religious studies and film studies by focusing on the formal similarities between cinema and religious practices and on the ways they each re-create the world. Explorations of film show how the cinematic experience relies on similar aesthetic devices on which religious rituals have long relied: sight, sound, the taste of food, the body, and communal experience. Meanwhile, a deeper understanding of the aesthetic nature of religious rituals can alter our understanding of film production. Utilizing terminology and theoretical insights from the study of religion as well as the study of film, Religion and Film shows that by paying attention to the ways films are constructed, we can shed new light on the ways religious myths and rituals are constructed and vice versa. This thoroughly revised and expanded new edition is designed to appeal to the needs of courses in religion as well as film departments. In addition to two new chapters, this edition has been restructured into three distinct sections that offer students and instructors theories and methods for thinking about cinema in ways that more fully connect film studies with religious studies.

A comprehensive study of theology and film that explores how the Christian faith is portrayed in film throughout history.

From silent films to contemporary blockbusters, religion has always proved a popular theme for the cinema. However, all too often religion and film are discussed from narrowly confessional perspectives, with the result that the field has long been dominated by the question of a film's fidelity to a religious text or worldview, or its value as a tool in ministry and mission. "Religion and Film: An Introduction" seeks to redress this balance, and argues for a new, holistic approach to the subject that draws on work from cultural studies, religious studies and film studies alike. Wright argues that the 'meanings' of a film are not encoded by its textual organisation, but are bound up with its interpretation by viewers in specific contexts. Focusing on religiously diverse films like "The Ten Commandments", "La Passion de Jeanne d'Arc", "Kadosh", "Lagaan", "My Son the Fanatic", "Keeping the Faith", "The Wicker Man" and Mel Gibson's "The Passion of The Christ", the author looks at varied screen representations of religion; at films shaped by strong convictions about the place of religion in society; and at the roles that audiences play as consumers of film. The book will have strong appeal to students as well as general readers interested in all aspects of the inter-relationship of religion and the cinema.

Contributors from richly diverse backgrounds explore a wide range of current issues concerning the interrelationship of religion and film.