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

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.
 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.