Cinema and Religion Essay -- Religious Religion Culture Essays

Cinema and Religion Entertainment media are contributing to the emergence of new and novel forms of spiritual and religious phenomena in our contemporary (and past) culture. The essays in this issue explore diverse facets of the morphing relationship between entertainment, spirituality and culture. Over the last century, the cinema has played a vital role in the expression and representation of Judeo-Christian religious practices and beliefs. Early cinema told the life of Christ in the Passion Play and Cecil B DeMille produced two spectacular versions of The Ten Commandments in 1923 and 1956. While cinema represented religious themes and figures, religious institutions also shaped the emergence of this moving image technology and its role within Western society; the wondrous moving image provided by the cinematrographe could open the viewer’s eyes to the work of God or, somewhat paradoxically, do the Devil's work by deceiving them with its illusionary spectacles. Two significant changes in this relationship between cinema and religion are occurring in our Post-millennial era. Firstly, the cinema is now participant in a complex audio-visual and textual culture that includes both established and emerging media – a Multiverse created from computer games, comic books, television programs, theme parks, virtual reality technologies and other new media. Secondly, traditional forms of religious practices and spiritual beliefs are shifting from their familiar locations in the church and community. Once, the cinema was seen as analogous to the Church because it provided a sacred space of worship. Now, however, the theme park, the computer game and cyberspace are the realms for an emerging Post-Millennial spirituality. We need to... ...rent media that shape and inform the fantastic and the spiritual in Western culture: from Francis I, C16th King of France who, reflecting a nascent version of the media star, constructed himself as a figure of worship; to the landscapes of Stephen King story worlds that present the reader with uncanny, Gothic spaces and narrative scenarios that question the ‘normality’ of everyday reality; to the transcendental pursuits of the magician and magic lantern technology; or the worship-like experiences inherent to fan cultures. We are living in an era where cultural identities, beliefs, forms of religious community, models of consciousness and what it means to be human are being transfigured. In the light of this transfiguration this issue of Refractory considers the relationship between media, religion, and the fantastic; and the every day and the sacred and the uncanny.