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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.
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Summary
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. S. Brent Plate shows that by paying attention to the ways films are constructed, we can shed new light on myths and rituals and vice versa.
Report
A truly compelling comparative study. The analogues between filmic and religious 'worldmaking' are richly illuminating, bringing the reader to fresh insights about the structure and dynamics of both mediums. Setting aside the customary approach of simply analyzing religious themes in movies, the volume compares mythic and ritual ways of constructing a world with cinematic processes such as framing and focus, editorial selection, lighting, camera angle, voice, use of time and space and iconicity - doing so with lucidity, ingenuity and masterful use of a repertoire of interpretive frameworks. William Paden, University of Vermont
