Sharon A. Suh by Silver Screen Buddha: Buddhism In Asian And Western Film, and: Seeing Like The Buddha: Enlightenment Through Film by Francisca Cho (review)

The academic field of "religion and film" studies has gained significant momentum in the past two decades. The research has been conducted almost entirely by scholars of religious studies, with very few cinema studies scholars taking up the topics. As general works in the field have given way to more specific studies, "Buddhism and film" has emerged as a vibrant subfield. In the past five years, books such as Gary Storhoff and John Whalen-Bridge's edited Buddhism and American Cinema, and Ronald Green's Buddhism Goes to the Movies have appeared. They are now joined by Sharon A. Suh's Silver Screen Buddha and Francisca Cho's Seeing Like the Buddha.

Suh's and Cho's books represent a significant maturing of the religion and film enterprise in general, moving well beyond simple literary analyses of films in order to think through the visual practices of the cinematic experience, how watching films can be as "religious" as the content of a film. Neither book pays much heed to sound—the "audio" of the audiovisual medium—but both are interested in bodily practices of cinematic reception. Suh and Cho both believe, and I agree, that films can change us. They are not mere escapes from the world, they are implicated with it.

Both Cho and Suh refer to films in their entirety, and often "read" the overall plots, unpacking the importance of the narratives. Suh often includes a few films per chapter, while Cho mainly sticks to one film per chapter, except for chapter 6 on the films of Terrence Malick, and a final chapter that picks up on two quite distinct films. Both cover some of the same films—for example, Spring, Summer, Fall, Winter … and Spring—and both roam across "Asian and Western films," though that primarily means films from Korea, Japan, and the United States. What makes these two studies so useful is their attention to visual practices and ways of seeing.

Cho's short book is comprised of seven chapters. Chapter 1 is something like an "introduction" and chapter 7 is something like a "conclusion," though those designations are not made entirely clear. The first chapter toggles between an introduction to Buddhist visuality and an introduction to the book itself, with forays into Jamaican American Renee Cox's controversial photograph Yo Mama's Last Supper, Buddhist doctrines, and an architectural overview of Borobudur, each offering lessons in seeing practices. The final chapter returns to Buddhist visuality, and then moves to consider Andy Warhol's eight-hour film Empire as an example of the form of Buddhist meditation practices.

In many ways, chapters 2 through 6 of Seeing Like the Buddha are separable essays, each one about a single film. Yet, one of the more thought-provoking aspects about the flow of the book is that it moves from Buddhist content to Buddhist form. The first discussion, in chapter 2, is about Kim Kiduk's 2004 film, Spring, Summer, Fall, Winter … and Spring, certainly the most overtly Buddhist film in the bunch. Chapters 3, 4, and 5 concern Nang Nak, Rashomon, and Maborosi, respectively. Each one progressively has less and less to do with Buddhism. By the time we get to chapter 6, we are looking at the films of Terrence Malick, a cinematic set that contains no explicit Buddhist content. This narrative movement through the chapters is encapsulated by the final two sentences of the book: "The way art allows one to perceive the world … brings Buddhas to life everywhere. And this manner of seeing the Buddha is in fact to see what the Buddha himself saw" (p. 144). The progression through the seven chapters is a slow 180-degree turn, from looking at the Buddha to seeing like the Buddha.

Throughout...