Religion and Film: Cinema and the Re-Creation of the World (review)

In the preface to Religion and Film: Cinema and the Re-Creation of the World, S. Brent Plate makes clear what this book is not. It is not a book about seeing religious images or tropes in film. Nor is it a book about theologies implicit in cinema. Instead, this short, provocative book makes the claim to study both religion and film as ways of seeing that can be read as "world-making" (viii). Instead of looking at religion in film, Plate compares religion and film. He shows how both cinema and religious ritual frame the world by selecting and ordering the cosmos thereby instructing the viewer how to see time and space.

Plate accurately situates his recent work in the context of three waves of scholarship on religion and film. The first wave concentrated on analyses of serious art-house cinema while the second wave turned to popular Hollywood cinema. Both of these waves structured their approaches in terms of the verbal narrative of films. The third wave, to which this book belongs, turned away from narrative approaches to film and instead moved to looking at film through the lens of film criticism and theory. Scholars of the third wave are invested in understanding the medium of film; in other words, they look to understand films as films, rather than as vehicles for narrative messages.

Because it is a book not centred on reading specific narratives, Plate is able to draw upon a variety of films (of various genres and time periods) in order to engage the reader in understanding film form. The first half of his book is concerned with the formal elements of film. By aligning film and religion, Plate seeks to address "the ways myths and rituals might be seen by way of cinematography, editing, and mise-en-scène" (ix).

This approach is illustrated by Plate's treatment of the opening sequences of two very different films: George Lucas's 1970s classic Stars Wars and Ron Fricke's non-narrative experimental film Baraka. In both cases, Plate pays close attention to the opening of the films, examining how the director creates a cosmogony by selecting what the viewer sees and hears.

Plate's analysis begins with a narrative reading of the Star Wars. Star Wars, like Genesis, opens with a move to mythological time. The prologue starts with the phrase, "A long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away," which is reminiscent of Genesis 1.1: "In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth." But it is in Plate's analysis of the sequence of images that we really see the usefulness of reading film in a non-narrative way. The opening shots of both Baraka and Star Wars start by having the viewer see and hear the serenity of the cosmos. For example, after the prologue of Star Wars, Plate notes that the music dwindles to a lone flute. The viewer is left with the vastness of space before the camera tilts downwards to reveal a starship battle. Likewise, Plate notes that the opening shots of Baraka show the still mountains of the Himalayas before cutting to a Japanese snow monkey sitting in a hot spring, seemingly contemplating the universe.

Plate skilfully shows that both of these sequences operate much like myth by suturing (through editing) the heavens and earth, or the Himalayas with the mountains of Japan. By comparing these visual cosmogonies with creation myths that move from order to chaos, Plate convincingly shows that by going beyond narrative and examining the elements of film, in sight and sound, films are a visual mythology.

The second half of Plate's book turns to the ways films connect with viewers materially.

Here Plate turns his attention to such topics as the ritual performances that accompany the showings of the cult classic Rocky Horror Picture Show and the ways people have used...