The Sacred and the Cinema Reconfiguring the 'Genuinely' Religious 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. -- S. Brent Plate, author of Religion and Film: Cinema and the Re-Creation of the World (2009), and co-editor of The Religion and Film Reader (2007) 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.' -- John Lyden, Visiting Professor of Philosophy and Religion at Grand View University, Iowa, USA, author of Film as Religion: Myths, Morals, and Rituals (2003) and editor of The Routledge Companion to Religion and Film (2009)