Sacred and the Cinema

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.

Media are not only things that are plugged into a wall. Media are also spoken and scribbled, sung and swayed to. Nayar's The Sacred and the Cinema pick sapart the multi-mediated layers of film to show the embedded oral and literate dimensions, without which we cannot understand the sacrality of cinema. The book provides an excellent overview of studies in the subfield of "religion and film," just as it pushes forward to new directions.Film's own multimedia nature entails the need for a multimedia, and multisensual approach to it. Nayar amply provides this., Sheila Nayar has shown how the art of film draws on the stylistic conventions of both orality and literacy, hence film narratives that convey the sacred may do so either through a mythological spectacle of abundance in melodrama, action, and characters, or through a literary narrative that points towards the "transcendental style" of private religious experience, ambiguity, and stillness. Furthermore, she acknowledges that there is no absolute division between the two modalities, as a film may partake of both, and in the end the viewers construct meanings from their own cultural, artistic, and religious sensibilities. This book advances discussion about Religion and Film beyond old dichotomies of "popular" and "art" films, or"sacred" and "secular" films, to show how the religious in film is constantly evolving and finding new forms of expression. As such, it is a significant contribution to new understandings of Religion and Film, and the typologies by which we approach their intersection.'

Sheila J. Nayar is Associate Professor of English and Communication Studies at Greensboro College, North Carolina, USA.