Religion and Film

Moviegoers could not help but have noticed the spate of popular films dealing with religious themes and myths released in recent decades. From Godard’s Hail Mary (1985) to Scorsese’s The Last Temptation of Christ (1988) to Mel Gibson’s The Passion of the Christ (2004), Darren Aronofsky’s Noah (2014), and Garth Davis’s Mary Magdalene (2018), both Hollywood and European arthouse directors have shown an interest in (typically) Christian religious narratives, continuing the long cinematic tradition of Christ narratives (“the greatest story ever told”). Add to this the ongoing fascination with the supernatural and the occult evident in recent horror films — like James Wan’s two Conjuring films (2013 and 2016) or Robert Eggers’s The Witch (2015) — and it becomes clear that the time is ripe for revisiting one of the seminal texts on the topic, S. Brent Plate’s Religion and Film: Cinema and the Re-Creation of the World (first published in the Wallflower Press Short Cuts Series, 2009). One of the premier scholars in the field, Plate deftly combined a thorough grounding in religious studies with expertise in film theory, providing an illuminating and engaging text that has enabled readers, both academic and religious, to explore the intersection between cinema and religion. Given the history of suspicion between religion and film, it is welcome to see this field not only gaining recognition but also offering new ways of thinking through the meaning and role of religion in contemporary cultural and political debates.

As Plate observes, although religion has long been a concern of the movies, the scholarly study of cinema and religion is relatively young. A glance over the history of film theory suggests that there have been roughly three waves of research focusing on the relationship between religion and film. The first wave, dating from the 1960s to the 1980s, explored theological, metaphysical, and existentialist themes in explicitly religious films, usually within the European modernist tradition (Dreyer, Bresson, Bergman, and so on) from a broadly humanist perspective. The second one, from the late 1980s and 1990s, rejected the focus on arthouse cinema and turned instead to popular cinema, spanning explicitly religious (Christological) retellings to more implicit explorations of faith or belief. Finally, the third wave, gaining popularity over the last two decades, eschews thematic, auteur- or narrative-based approaches in favor of cultural analogies between cinema and religion, focusing specifically on audience reception of films.

Plate’s book fits neatly into the third wave, taking a broadly sociological and cultural-studies approach to the exploration of religion and film, drawing on earlier approaches, but also extending these to articulate an expanded sense of the religious. Indeed, Religion and Film is not really concerned with theological motifs, the contemporary significance of the three world religions, or the rise of New Age forms of spirituality. Rather, it compares cinema and religion as ways of constructing and presenting worlds that we can temporarily inhabit, that provide new ways of experiencing and understanding our own (mundane) sense of reality. Plate focuses on the role of both religion and cinema in practices of community formation, the generation of meaning through myth and ritual, and the creation of a sacred space that contrasts with the everyday world. Religion, in this view, refers to any cultural practice capable of cultivating our sense of living in a meaningful cosmos. Such an approach enables a rich broadening of how we might understand “the religious” and helps us to appreciate what Plate argues are the striking affinities between cinema and religion.

Plate’s central idea for the analogy between cinema and religion is that of world, or, more specifically, worldmaking. Cinema and religion are analogous ways of composing worlds through symbolic representation and ritualized practices. They both select and frame aspects of social reality in ways that are meaningful — providing communal forms of experience, focusing our attention, and drawing us into an alternative world in light of which our ordinary universe can appear as transfigured or transformed. Plate draws here on the work of other theorists, such as sociologist of religion Peter Berger’s Sacred Canopy (1967). For Berger, human communities create symbolic worlds to provide a sense of order and stability, staving off the threat of “cosmic chaos” through religion, which he describes as a “sacred canopy” providing shelter, meaning, and purpose. This enriched sense of world, however, also needs to be replenished or “re-created,” to use Plate’s term, in order to provide communities with a dynamic, renewable sense of place and purpose in both communal and cosmic senses.

Plate also draws on the work of American philosopher Nelson Goodman, in particular his concept of art and culture as “ways of worldmaking.” Human beings gain knowledge, according to Goodman, by constructing meaningful worlds via symbolic representations and processes of selection, synthesis, and comparison. Art is best defined, he claims, as a practice of “worldmaking” that composes “versions” of symbolic worlds using different media. In this respect, cinema can be understood as a practice of worldmaking that brings about symbolic works using audiovisual images, montage, and post-production techniques. Brent applies this idea to both cinema and religion, arguing by analogy that cinema and religion are ways of worldmaking that not only share many common features, but also mutually illuminate and influence each other.

This might seem surprising to readers, who may assume that popular Hollywood movies have little in common with the rituals of the church, mosque, or synagogue. As Plate argues, however, we gain much by recognizing how both religion and cinema construct symbolic worlds that shape our self-understanding, as well as our sense of place in both natural and cultural universes. Both involve the selection, framing, and organization of a meaningful world, and both require symbols, myths, and ritualized practice for these worlds to be rendered and recreated. Indeed, myths and rituals, for Plate, operate remarkably like films: “they utilize techniques of framing, thus including some themes, objects, and events while excluding others, and they serve to focus the participants’ attention in ways that invite humans into their worlds to become participants.” Both religion and cinema draw on materials already available to us culturally, but synthesize and recreate new worlds through symbol, ritual, and myth to create a sense of communal identity, participation, and belonging.

Plate’s engaging inquiry commences with the important observation that cinema is our premier form of cultural mythmaking, a ubiquitous way of engaging with our treasure trove of mythic narratives. He draws attention, moreover, to the fact that myths are not simply written or spoken tales but can be multisensorial narrative experiences. Tales of origins, heroic quests, the search for identity, and binding moral, cultural, and religious narratives are richly represented in film, which uses all resources at its disposal to create an immersive sense of world within which these mythic tales unfold. Movies use primarily nonverbal means — image, sound, music, and composition (mise-en-scène) — to construct cinematic worlds that aesthetically convey this kind of mythic and symbolic meaning. Films like Star Wars (1977) and The Matrix (1999) provide convincing examples of how cinema engages in an eclectic mixing of “cosmogonies and hero myths in multiple ways, generating brand new mythologies for the twenty-first century.” It is not just their reworking of myths — the manner in which they create inhabitable worlds makes movies mythological. Star Wars’s mythic tropes of Luke Skywalker’s hero’s journey, and the Dao-like opposing energies of “the Force,” The Matrix’s references to “Zion” as a longed-for place of return from exile, with Morpheus playing the role of “pagan Lord of the Dreamworld,” all attest to the mythic richness of these films.

At the same time, Plate points to the intertwining of myth and ideology in popular cinema. The Matrix, for example, still adverts to the Hollywood myth centered on the formation of the white heterosexual couple (Neo and Trinity) coupled with a white savior myth (Neo as the One) that trumps its more alternative cultural-mythic elements. Despite its imbrication with ideology, film, like myth more generally, is an inherently eclectic cultural form, which becomes readily apparent in cinematic adaptations of religious myths. Mel Gibson’s The Passion of the Christ, for example, is a multi-mediated mythic mash-up par excellence. As Plate remarks, it draws on the following influences:

[A] millennium’s worth of Passion plays, the Stations of the Cross, the writings of nineteenth-century (anti-Semitic and possibly insane) mystic Anne Catherine Emmerich (channeled through Clemens Brentano), Renaissance and Baroque paintings (especially from Rembrandt and Caravaggio), the New Testament gospels, some brief historical scholarship, and a century’s worth of “Jesus films” (from early films on the life and passion of Jesus to Sidney Olcott’s From the Manger to the Cross [1911] to Nicholas Ray’s King of Kings [1961] and Martin Scorsese’s The Last Temptation of Christ [1988]).

Stylistically, the film also draws on the horror genre (the opening scenes referencing Wes Craven and John Carpenter), and its graphic depiction of violence and suffering is legendary. This only underlines the syncretic nature of cinematic mythmaking, which recreates the world via audiovisual means, engaging our senses and emotions as much as our memories and intellects.

Plate then turns to the relationship between rituals and film, exploring how “ritual’s forms and functions tell us [something important] about the ways films are created,” and examining how filmmaking can tell us something about “the aesthetic impulses behind rituals.” Here the focus is on the ways that camera movements, the use of color and light, and specific patterns of montage can create distinctive worlds through the ritualized composition of space and time. The opening sequence of David Lynch’s Blue Velvet (1986), for example, creates a contrasting sense of world through camera movement, color, and mise-en-scène: “cosmos above, chaos below.” The revelation of this cinematic world is itself a kind of cosmogonic act, revealing this “mythic” small American town as superficially quiet, peaceful, and orderly on the surface but seething with chaotic primeval life, malevolent forces rumbling in its darker depths. Cinematography and editing help create a sense of world with distinctive features — like Blue Velvet’s dazzling primary colors, slow tracking shots of posed characters, contrasting with the disturbing sounds and murky visuals suggesting darker, ancient forces — that are carefully composed and ordered in a ritual-like manner. Cinematic composition — including framing, camera movements, light and color, sound and music — creates an inhabitable world replete with mythic and symbolic meaning.

The screen and movie theater, like the altar and place of worship, create a portal to another world; the aesthetic experience of this movie-world creates a “sacred space” in contrast to the everyday world, an experience of immersion “allowing people to interact with the alternative world, enacting the myths that help establish those world structures.” Examining films as diverse as Lasse Hallström’s Chocolat (2000), Marleen Gorris’s Antonia’s Line (1995), Dziga Vertov’s avant-garde classic Man with a Movie Camera (1929), and Ron Fricke’s environmental cine-symphony Baraka (1992), Plate elaborates the implicit parallels between the creation of an aesthetic world through cinematic composition and the creation of a sacred space through religious rituals. The composition of cinematic space, especially the symbolic connotations of vertical (transcendence) versus horizontal movement (immanence), contributes to the creation of a complex, deeply human world replete with meaning. He elaborates this claim through focused film examples, such as the futuristic dystopia of Fritz Lang’s Metropolis (1927) — with its architectural heights and slum-like depths reflecting the clash of class, technology, and alienated humanity — or the horizontal lines of everyday, small-town pilgrimage, the quietly meditative and surprisingly moral “slow” road movie that is Lynch’s The Straight Story (1999).

In Part II of the book, Plate turns to what he calls “religious cinematics.” By this he means the manner in which film elicits an immersive experience, a bodily form of engagement through a “formalized liturgy of symbolic sensations”; one that can cause us to “shudder or sob, laugh or leap,” encouraging the body “to believe, and also to doubt,” especially in relation to images of death, pain, and suffering. Body genres such as horror provide exemplary cases of this kind of experience. Plate focuses on William Friedkin’s The Exorcist (1973), whose content, themes, and style are clearly germane to the exploration of religious cinematics. It is not simply narrative that explains the power of horror; rather, it is the physical-emotional reactions — our visceral, affective, and corporeal responses — that generate the powerful “non-rational” experiences that Plate links with religious responses to pain and suffering. Drawing on Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology, Plate presents a thoroughly corporeal account of our responses to horror, which are grounded in bodily perceptual belief and corporeal responsiveness toward what we are seeing on screen. It is not the plot of The Exorcist that generated the global phenomenon of fear and distress in audiences, but rather the physical-emotional responses to it, “The ways cinematic bodies were moved by the film” — not just its shocking, visceral images, but also its innovative soundtrack, which famously included “the sounds of pigs being driven to slaughter for the noise of the demons being exorcised” and “the voice of the devil coming out of Regan’s mouth.”

Plate also extends his inquiry from fictional horror to real-world engagements with death. He moves deftly from cinema’s fascination with both preserving life and overcoming death through visual representation to those rare attempts in avant-garde film and documentary film to present death, the dead body, on screen. The most notable example here is Stan Brakhage’s confronting silent documentation of medical autopsies in The Act of Seeing with One’s Own Eyes (1971). Brakhage’s attempt to symbolize death through cinematic presentation remains powerful and provocative, especially when presented as an attempt to use (literal-medical) “defacement” as part of a cinematic technique to “recreate the world” — to reveal the sacred at the heart of the Western clinical and scientific treatment of the body as corpse.

The importance of the face and the close-up in cinema is well known and offers one of the most distinctive elements explaining the emotional power of movies. Plate draws here on evolutionary biology and cognitivist theories to support his claim that facial expression is key not only to social relationships but also to exploring the boundaries between self and other. Studies of the face in visual images across religious traditions points to “the power of frontality in images and icons”; how faces look back at viewers and thereby “establish a relationship between deities and devotees” is also evident in film. The iconoclastic ban on representations of divinity also found expression in popular cinema, with the face of Christ being avoided in Hollywood film during the Production Code era — in Quo Vadis (1951) and Ben-Hur (1959), for example — appearing again only in Cecil B. DeMille’s blue-eyed Jesus (Jeffrey Hunter) in King of Kings (1961). The “face-to-face” encounter, whether in dramatic conflict or erotic exchange, is a powerful emotional element of cinematic world-creation. It shapes our sense of the world, coloring it with emotion and feeling, not only in regard to romantic love, but also spiritual or divine love (as evident, for instance, in Terrence Malick’s recent films). Emotional contagion effects (mirroring the emotional expressions of others) and nonverbal communication (expressing emotion physically in ways that resist verbal articulation) are powerful ways of binding audience and screen, opening up the possibility of an emotional and imaginative transfer between the world of the film and that of the viewer.

Drawing on Emmanuel Levinas, Plate also emphasizes the ethical import of the “face-to-face encounter.” It is the face that defines the cinematic ethics at the heart of religious cinematics, with its rich solicitation of the “emotional-based activity of empathy.” For Plate, cinema offers the possibility of an aesthetic encounter with the face of an Other, one that opens up a space of ethical experience: a cultural, religious, and sensuous encounter eliciting affinities and empathies that may have the power to transform us morally. Cinematic ethics means that cinema has the potential to move us toward a more ethical mode of being — from a self-regarding to an other-oriented attitude toward our world. Cognitive psychology too suggests that exposure to images of others — faces, bodies, and worlds outside our own familiar spheres — can expand our perceptual and ethical horizons, enabling us to “learn to see differently.” In this way, an ethical form of religious cinematics becomes possible, a cinematic “mindfulness” or “spiritual-sensual discipline, a ritualized form of viewing that stimulates connections between the world on-screen and on the streets.” Here the relationship between religion and cinema becomes intimate and profound as an experience of cinematic ethics that offers us “the possibility for aesthetic, ethical, and religious re-creation.”

This experience of exchange is manifest in the ritualized ways that audiences interact with films beyond the movie theater and in ways that form communities of like-minded souls. Cult films, movie fandom, and the use of movie references, characters, and costumes in all manner of cultural activities — from tourism to weddings — suggest that the worldmaking expressed on screen readily translates into the re-creation of the everyday world. From Rocky Horror Picture Show (1975) screenings, tourism pilgrimages to the Hobbiton Movie Set (near Matamata in New Zealand, where much of the Lord of the Rings trilogy was shot), to reenactments of epic journeys visiting sites depicted in films such as Into the Wild (2007), the parallels between the practices of ritualized mythmaking in religion and cinema become striking and compelling. As Plate remarks, the footprints of movies are left in a multitude of cultural sites, social spaces, political discourses, wilderness areas, and religious forms of consciousness throughout the world. Cinema and religion are revealed as kindred ways of worldmaking with much more in common than we might have thought.

Plate’s emphasis in this second edition of Religion and Film on audience reception also expands our sense of the manner in which we can think of cinema as akin to a “religious” form of cultural practice and shared experience. For all its secular compatibility, however, this illuminating analogy does raise some intriguing questions. Is it enough to say that any cultural practice of shared engagement with a meaningful work qualifies both the film and the engagement as “religious”? Sport would certainly qualify as religious on this account, as would forms of popular music and other kinds of collective cultural activity. As with any argument from analogy, for every parallel there are also corresponding disanalogies that should be borne in mind. To list a few, cinema need not have any relationship with theology, spirituality, or faith, whereas it is hard to think of religion without these features. Cinema is consumed as “entertainment” in industrial-commercial contexts of mass consumption — and in increasingly “personalized” platforms such as online streaming or handheld digital devices — whereas these aspects of mass entertainment seem at odds with what is conventionally understood as religious worship. The “aesthetic” aspect of religious devotion and worship, not to mention religious art and architecture, is intended to attune and transport the recipient toward an experience of the divine, whereas in cinematic experience no such transcendence is (typically) intended or even desirable (the tension between religious devotees and movie fans concerning “immoral” depictions of violence, sexuality, or blasphemy is a case in point).

On the other hand, there has been a notable upswing in the exploration of explicitly religious themes in recent popular and art cinema — surely, a worthy topic for reflection when it comes to the kinship between religion and film. Plate’s illuminating contextual, audience reception approach, although expanding our conception of both religion and cinema, does divert attention away from narrative “content.” This “content” is what many contemporary religious films have brought to the fore, particularly those exploring the nexus between religion, culture, and politics (one need only think of recent films dealing with Christian theology, religious cults, or with the question of Islamic fundamentalism and Western geopolitics).

Religion and Film is a fascinating and impressive text, both engaging and illuminating. It opens up new ways of thinking for the uninitiated as well as providing thought-provoking theses for the more expert reader. And it makes the otherwise confusing relationship between religion and film perspicuous and persuasive in ways that few academic studies have been able to achieve. It does raise the question, however, whether certain films, like other forms of religious art, could prompt or elicit religious experience: is a “conversion cinema” possible today? Or do the spheres of the aesthetic and the ethical, as Kierkegaard suggests, lead us to the threshold of the religious, without presenting it directly as such (since it is an object of faith rather than of representation). This would press the idea of cinematic worldmaking to another level of (philosophical and religious) reflection, one that might open up the possibility of talking more freely about film as a religious art.

Religion Goes to the Movies.  By Robert Sinnerbrink. Los Angeles Review of Books , May 25,    2018.

More information on the book . Columbia University Press.

Questions for Brent Plate on Religion and Film: Cinema and the Re-Creation of the World (London: Wallflower Press, 2008)

What inspired you to write Religion and Film? What sparked your interest?

The key inspiration for the book has undoubtedly been my students, first at the University of Vermont, and then Texas Christian University. Students respond to films in ways they don’t respond to standard textbooks. Don’t get me wrong, I continue to be an avid reader (I’m all into short stories these days) and, of course, I wrote a book about films. I continue to have my students read words, but I’ve increasingly felt that these words must be put into dialogue with the fleshed-out realities of life. Films are arguably not “fleshed out” either, at least in their fictionalized guises, but they do register via audio-visual paths that are inaccessible to the experience of reading. I’m now at Hamilton College and finding the same kind of responses from my students.

It is one thing for me to lecture about the Hajj to Mecca as part of an “Intro to Islam” section, but quite another for me to show a breathtaking film like the French/Moroccan production, Le Grand Voyage (director: Ishmael Ferroukhi, 2004). In Ferroukhi’s fictional film we see people, quite average people, in the flesh and working through the same difficulties that all non-Muslims also go through: struggles with families, and particularly father-son relations. What is wonderful about this film is that it is about people who happen to be “Muslims,” and not about “Islam” per se. Part of their lives are oriented around prayers and the Hajj, but they have many other aspects of their lives.

What’s the most important take-home message for readers?

Films and religions are analogous, and we can learn a lot about one through the other. They are like each other because they both create worlds (not just narratives) for their viewers and adherents. They bring viewers/adherents before the screen/altar and offer them glimpses of another world: a promised world, a despised world, or a world in which life consists of myriad choices between one scenario or another.

One of film’s functions is to create alternative worlds and invite its viewers to partake in its audio-visual delights. We experience these worlds through the screen and speakers, before returning—enriched, depressed, enlivened, transformed—to mundane life. Film productions take the known world and re-create it, offering sometimes hopeful and sometimes dreadful glimpses into What If? What if the world is destroyed by global warming/an asteroid/a monster arising from the sea? What if a beautiful woman was actually attracted to an ugly, dumb man without a future? Such activities are analogous to what religions do, particularly through their myths, rituals, and texts: highlight, condemn, praise, or glorify certain ways of being in the world. The blind can be healed, rivers might be goddesses, the dead are potentially resurrected, animals are capable of prophesying to humans, and amulets have the power to ward off evil spirits. Through incantation or special effects anything is possible.

Anything you had to leave out?

 Since I was writing this as part of Wallflower’s “Short Cuts” series (all books in the series are no more than 144 pages) I had to leave out a lot. What I still want to write about are specific films such as: Darren Aronofsky’s (director of the recent, The Wrestler) first film, π [pi] which is a brilliant look into the relations between mystical visions and migraine headaches, humanity and artificial intelligence; David Lynch’s The Straight Story, its relations to The Wizard of Oz, and religious understandings of pilgrimage in general; apocalypse and anime, examining the ways Western apocalyptic visions are merged with Eastern visions in Japanese animated films like Neon Genesis Evangelion, Ghost in the Shell, and Akira; and the connection between animated films and hero myths, seeing how fascinating it is that, for instance, Finding Nemo, Shrek, and Princess Mononoke all evoke a quite rigid and classical hero mythical structure.

Ultimately, though this may be a book in itself, is a deeper investigation into what some of us have been terming “visual ethics”: The means by which our ways of seeing have ethical implications. Most humans are born with sight but not the ability to see, that is a learned process. We are trained to see through the visual elements of culture that surround us—from the shape and color of our nursery to the films we watch and rituals we partake in. All of this verges into the realm of the ethical.

What are some of the biggest misconceptions about your topic?

At this particular moment in history, and in the wake of Mel Gibson’s The Passion of the Christ, easily the biggest misconception is that a book with an English title like Religion and Film must be about “Christianity and film,” and especially “Jesus” films. I wrote this book to get away from all that (even though I did myself edit a book on Gibson’s film), and even my publishers initially wanted to put an image from Gibson’s film on the cover (luckily they were smart enough and my protests were loud enough to get a much more subdued and relevant cover image). I can’t cease being amazed by how much Christianity and Hollywood have been welded/wedded, especially in the minds of the critics: as if everyone who dies in a film is somehow a “Christ figure.” In the immortal words of Woody Allen, “If Jesus came back today and saw what was going on in his name, he wouldn’t stop throwing up.” It is safe to say that Allen’s comments can be applied to a lot of religious film criticism.

Did you have a specific audience in mind when writing?

As with the above point the main audience is, I hope, students. I tried to write this in an accessible way, introducing key themes in religious studies alongside key themes in film studies. I find my home primarily in religious studies, and I’m sure that the book leans in that direction, but I’m pleased that a great film studies press has been interested in publishing it, a press that really has no other religious studies titles in its catalog. There is a wonderful, vibrant, even if still fledging field of “religion and film” that exists, and my book is actually, and somewhat unfortunately, the third book to appear in the last four years with the same title! (Melanie Wright’s wonderful book with the same title came out a couple years ago now, though we are doing some quite different things.)

What I am hoping to see is much more of a convergence between film/cinema studies and religious studies. Most of what goes by the name “religion and film” is firmly situated in religious studies, and the religion scholars are starting to actually take account of all that’s going on in film and motion picture studies, realizing that a film isn’t just about the narrative of a film. It’s great to be in the company of people like John Lyden, Gaye Ortiz, Gordon Lynch, Rob Johnston, Melanie Wright, and others who really realize the difference between a film and a work of literature. At the same time, it is quite unfortunate how little film studies scholars pay attention to religion in any depth, even as many of the major filmmakers of the last hundred years (e.g., Bresson, Buñuel, Ozu, Kurosawa, Spielberg, Lucas, Scorsese, et al.) have been quite explicit about the religious dimensions to their work.

Are you hoping to just inform readers? Give them pleasure? Piss them off?

I’m really hoping to challenge readers to be aware of things they possibly haven’t before: To suggest to film lovers that a great many of the narratives and audio-visual encounters experienced through film are actually deeply embedded in religious mythologies. Likewise, to suggest to scholars and adherents of religion that religion isn’t just a bunch of words and thoughts in the head, but about lived life, images, and sounds (and smells and feelings, etc.), and we might actually get this point better by watching a film then by reading a book.

I hope there is some pleasure in the experience of reading Religion and Film, some recalled evocations of film scenes that people might conjure upon reading. At the same time I hope readers will also be provoked to go and try out some new films. Many of the films I write about have been more or less successful in the box office, though I’ve laced these films with others less successful, and tried to encourage people, along with Netflix, to say, “If you liked this, how about this?”

Religion Dispatches.    May 16, 2010.

Listen to  a talk Kristian Petersen had with S. Brent Plate, New Books Network ,  November 5, 2012.  

Also of interest :

Director Paul Schrader and cinema’s relationship with religion.

(There was a Cinema and Transcendence conference, held at the TIFF in 2017. Director and screenwriter Paul Schrader authored Transcendental Style in Film in his 20s, bringing to the fore within the field of film studies a discussion on the relationship between cinema and religion. )

There is, smack in the centre of commercial moviemaking in the 21st century, a weird little enclave, largely untrammelled by many mainstream moviegoers who descend on the multiplex on a Friday night.

When it premiered earlier this year, despite withering reviews (including my own, in these pages), the Christian blockbuster The Shack pulled up in third place at the box office, behind heavyweights Logan and Get Out. Religion – meaning watered-down, non-denominational takes on Christianity – is big business in Hollywood. The 2014 Christian drama Heaven Is for Real, about a boy named Colton Burpo who travels to heaven during a near-death experience, raked in more than $100-million (U.S.) against its $12-million budget. Others, such as last year's Miracles from Heaven, pulled similarly impressive numbers. Such garishly uplifting religious films as these constitute their own own cinematic ghetto – or, more accurately, a sterile cul-de-sac, scrubbed of swears and sexual activity.

Elsewhere, biblical stories are drained of any true theological resonance and recast as modern superhero epics, resulting in stuff such as Ridley Scott's Exodus: Gods and Kings, Timur Bekmambetov's remake of Ben-Hur, Darren Aronofsky's Noah. Meanwhile, a conspicuously, devotedly religious movie such as Martin Scorsese's Silence flounders at the box office – apparently too challenging, and unwilling to preach to the converted, to draw in the major audience it deserves.

Yet, in the art houses and more challenging film-festival programs and even, from time to time, in the narrow margins of commercial filmmaking, there exists a more severe, serious strain of spiritual cinema, one unburdened by the strictures of dogma and unconcerned with the razzle-dazzle of plagues of frogs, runaway chariots, biblical flood preparation tips and what, exactly, heaven itself looks like.

It's a cinema of quietude; of slowness, stillness and devastating moments of subtle grace. It's the cinema of transcendence. And it's the subject of a two-day conference hosted in Toronto this weekend by the Institute for Christian Studies.

"We've been taught that all there is is what appears to us," says John Caruana, a professor of philosophy at Ryerson and co-organizer of the Cinema and Transcendence conference, to be held at the TIFF Lightbox. "Science and this technological world that we live in has inculcated this sense in us. On an existential level, some of us – including those of us who don't identify with religion – would say that there is something else. We do yearn. We do desire something more."

This ineffable something more has obsessed countless filmmakers: from Carl Theodor Dreyer to Robert Bresson, Scorsese, Lars von Trier, Bruno Dumont and Terrence Malick. But to grapple with this idea of transcendence in cinema, Caruana says, one must first understand the state of film scholarship in the early 1970s.

"There was hardly anyone talking about the relationship between cinema and religion," he explains. "In film studies, people were interested in politics, ideology, feminism, representations of gender. Religion and spirituality was really on no one's radar. Then, out of nowhere, this book was published by the University of California Press by this unknown scholar."

The scholar was Paul Schrader, who is better known as a screenwriter (Taxi Driver, Raging Bull) and filmmaker (Hardcore). The book was Transcendental Style in Film, and it drew a stylistic through-line connecting the worlds of three disparate filmmakers: Denmark's Dreyer, France's Bresson and Japan's Yasujiro Ozu.

"The insight I had was that spirituality in art is about style," Schrader says over the phone from New York, ahead of his appearance in Toronto for the ICS conference. "It's not about themes. It's a Tao. It's a way of getting yourself more in tune with the otherworldly, with the spiritual." For Schrader, what these films transcend are the particularities of their cultural context, along with the humdrum banality of the everyday, the world of appearances that Caruana describes. They accomplish this through a deployment of film style that, as Schrader writes his book's 1972 edition, "seeks to maximize the mystery of existence."

Published some 45 years ago, Schrader's book can't account for the development of transcendental cinema into the present moment. For instance, Schrader describes Soviet Russian filmmaker Tarkovsky as a "fulcrum" in the development of transcendental style. With his focus on duration, and what he called "sculpting in time," Tarkovsky is also seen as a progenitor of "slow cinema": a contemporary phenomenon in global art cinema practised by the likes of Lav Diaz, Pedro Costa, and Carlos Reygadas, directors whose films are distinguished by long run times, protracted takes, and a general air of contemplation. "Some of them are parodies," Schrader harrumphs. "They become about the experience of watching them. The subject matter is the duration of the experience. How long will you sit there while a man crosses the screen, like in a Bela Tarr film?"

                                                                        

For Caruana, the transcendental style Schrader describes has begat a new mode of filmmaking, which he terms "postsecular cinema." These are films that confront the spiritual stirrings present in Dryer, Ozu, Bresson etc., but from a more contemporary vantage point. "Our modern secular world simply lacks a vocabulary to express these deep-seated yearnings," he says. "What intrigues me is that people with no particular religious background are also fascinated and interested in these kinds of questions."

This raises a curious question: Why does this mode of spiritual/transcendent filmmaking seem to attract filmmakers (and viewers) who otherwise have little use for religion, or God? Imagine a March in which you've ponied up 100-plus dollars for a bus pass, on the assumption the chilly weather will necessitate the frequent use of public transit. But then imagine that, just a week or so into this hypothetical March, the winter chill gives way to an early spring thaw, and you don't have much use for your public-transit pass. But, having paid so much for it, you decide to take the bus everywhere anyway. This is what religion is like for those who were raised on religion but fell out of the flock: a spiritual sunk cost.

Schrader uses a different analogy. For him, the human brain is like a computer, deeply encrypted with all manner of political, ideological and religious coding far too early in life. "Your computer gets programmed real early," he says. "Let's make it 12, for the sake of argument. After 12 years, all that software is loaded in. And you're going to be running that software for the rest of your life."

As Caruana notes, it's telling that many filmmakers associated with transcendental or postsecular cinema are lapsed, agnostic or out-and-out atheistic. Bresson identified as a "Christian atheist." Tarkovsky was deeply spiritual, although his more explicitly religious films were censored by the Soviet government. So he snuck spiritual themes into his sci-fi spectacles Solaris and Stalker.

Dreyer made several high-profile films with religious subject matter, yet seemingly remained ambivalent to organized faith. Dreyer's fellow Dane, von Trier, interviewed about his 1996 film, Breaking the Waves, claimed, a bit confusingly, "I'm Catholic, but I don't pray to Catholicism for Catholicism's sake." Malick's films seem influenced as much by U.S. transcendentalist philosophy as a distinctly Christian world view.

Schrader, too, has a conflicted relationship with religion. He was a raised Calvinist and was undertaking a preseminary education at Calvin College when he got turned on to cinema. "I was a product of the Christian school system," he says. "Then the sixties happened, and movies happened. I fell in love with the European cinema of the sixties and I walked away [from the church]. I kept trying to find some connection between the life I came from, and the life I now inhabited."

"What these filmmakers all share in common," Caruana says, "is that they've relinquished the idea of absolute certainty. … This kind of cinema invites us to reflect on the loss of confidence that many of us are experiencing under the supposed reign of reason and secularism. Secularism promised us that it would address and finally resolve all these burning questions that typically were dealt with within a religious framework. Yet, here we are in 2017 and these questions have not gone away." Look no further than von Trier's 2011's drama, Melancholia, for a model for this collapse of confidence and the waning of secularism. In that film, Kiefer Sutherland's astronomer dies by suicide when faced with the end of the world. His secular belief in authority of science wasn't enough to assuage his fear of death or obviate his cowardice.

Against a contemporary religious climate that seems to lure us toward extremes of belief – be it in news reports of Islamic fundamentalism, reactions from a hollow and conservative Christian right or the shrill barking of haughty, gratingly pompous "New Atheists" – postsecular cinema's resignation to not knowing is fortifying. Instead of being bullied into belief, religious or otherwise, the viewer is encouraged to meet these films on their own terms. For Schrader, this has always been the guiding force of the transcendental style. "Transcendental cinema is meditative cinema," he says. "It's trying to get you to go to that place, without forcing you. It leans away from you. Religious cinema leans in towards you and tries to grab you by the throat. A transcendental film leans away from and tries to get you to lean in toward it."

Religious blockbusters in the style of The Shack force the viewer into a closer relationship with the Christian God. By contrast, transcendental films, postsecular movies and even certain strains of slow cinema, offer the more ambivalent hope of that ineffable, unquantifiable something more that lurks out there beyond science, reason and religion itself.

In his 1986 manifesto, Sculpting in Time, Tarkovsky offers his own definition of the transcendent and of the potential of cinema itself. "Art," he writes, "must carry man's craving for the ideal, must be an expression of his reaching out towards it; that art must give man hope and faith. And the more hopeless the world in the artist's version, the more clearly perhaps must we see the ideal that stands in opposition – otherwise life becomes impossible!"

Today, thirsting postsecular viewers may find solace in cinema's promise of transcendence. In Bresson, hope is seeded in seemingly benign gestures such as one human hand touching another. In Dreyer, a close-up of a face racked with pain extends an offer an empathy. In Malick, the cosmological and quotidian are bound together. In such cases, to paraphrase Tarkovsky again, cinema becomes the symbolic extension of existence itself. Hope teems on the edges of everyday banality, and life itself begins to seem slightly more possible.

Transcendental Style: Spirituality in the Films of Bresson, Dreyer and Ozu runs April 8-25 at the TIFF Lightbox.

By John Semley.  The Globe and Mail. March 30, 2017.