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Film as Hierophany

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  09 September 2014

Michael Bird
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Abstract

Within the discussion of religious art there arises the fascinating question of how art can engender the awareness of those special (hierophanous) moments in culture where the sacred dimension breaks through into otherwise profane experience. This question requires a consideration of the peculiar relationship which a given art form has to its world (e.g., imitation vs. interpretation, recording vs. transformation).

The special potency of cinematic art in its relationship to physical and spiritual reality, and to surface and depth, is the subject of the present article. While religion-and-film discussions frequently focus upon religious themes in film, the purpose of the following analysis is that of considering a theology of film, taking account of fundamental questions of cinematic theory. Among thinkers whose systems suggest possibilities for dialogue are theologian (Paul Tillich), a phenómenologist (Mikel Dufrenne) and a “school” of film theorists, including especially the followers of André Bazin.

Type
Articles
Information
Horizons , Volume 6 , Issue 1 , Spring 1979 , pp. 81 - 97
Copyright
Copyright © The College Theology Society 1979

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References

1 Eliade, Mircea, The Sacred and the Profane (New York: Harper Torchbooks, 1961), pp. 11–12, 20–24.Google Scholar

2 Ibid., p. 11.

3 Ibid., p. 11.

4 Ibid., p. 12.

5 Ibid., p. 12.

6 Tillich, Paul, Systematic Theology, I (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1951), p. 85.Google Scholar

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9 Tillich, , The Protestant Era, p. 68.Google Scholar In the field of artistic expression, this self-transcending realism becomes most evident when form is shattered in order that depth may become visible (cf. “Existential Aspects of Modern Art,” in Carl Michalson, Christianity and the Existentialists, pp. 128–147).

10 Ibid., p. 78.

11 Ibid., p. 79.

12 Dufrenne, Mikel, The Phenomenology of Aesthetic Experience (Evanston: The University of Chicago Press, 1973), p. 55.Google Scholar

13 Dufrenne's work is characterized by Edward Casey as the fulfillment of a trend: “In this respect, it is by no means accidental that his Phenomenology brings the decade to a close. For it represents a return to that fundamental and most concrete level of human experience which the Greeks had called aisthesis: ‘sense experience’. After Baumgarten and Kant, aesthetic experience had become increasingly divorced from sensory experience…. In opposition to such aestheticism, Dufrenne attempted to restore a measure of the meaning of aisthesis by providing a base for aesthetic experience in the open availability of feeling and perception” (Casey, Edward, Introduction to Dufrenne, The Phenomenology of Aesthetic Experience, p. xviGoogle Scholar).

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18 Ibid., p. 549.

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23 Ibid., p.35.

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45 Ibid., p. 298.

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48 Ibid., p. 12.

49 Durgnat, Raymond, “Le Journal d'un Cure de Campagne,” in Cameron, Ian, The Films of Robert Bresson, p. 47.Google Scholar

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52 Albeit one of the cinema's more restrained examples of the principle.

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