At Religion Dispatches, S. Brent Plate answers ten questions about his new book, Religion and Film: Cinema and the Recreation of the World. He says:
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.
Read the full interview here.