CinemaThe Georeligious Aesthetic S. Brent Plate (bio) Cinema is a georeligious aesthetic.1 Since its mytho-historical origins in the 1890s, cinema has traversed the world, nestling into the nooks and crannies of big cities and rural villages alike. From the cafes of Paris to the Nigerian New Wave, from Mexico’s first and second Golden Ages to Bollywood’s star system, cinema has transformed most everything it has come into contact with. Gender, sex, age, race, language, ethnicity, religion, sexuality, nationality, body image and ability, and history itself have all been remade through the apparatus of filmmaking, distribution, and reception. Cinema is never neutral, never just an “escape,” and never less so than when it is connected to religious life and tradition. Throughout history, religious traditions have travelled across the geography of the earth, or cemented themselves in one place, through media. The Protestant Reformation traveled through Europe via new developments of the printing press, while Buddhism traveled through Japan via puppeteers and oral storytellers. The ancient Israelites established themselves in Jerusalem through the creation of a great temple, while Mormons established themselves in Salt Lake City through their great temple (architecture, too, is a medium). From parchment scrolls and holy shrines through paper books and traveling theater, and on up through radio and the internet, media have made religions what they are. Cinema is a special kind of medium that appeals to specific aspects of human aesthetic life. Aesthetics, the term’s ancient Greek roots reminds us, pertains to sense perception.2 Cinema primarily affects the audio and visual facets of the human sensorium—though a good deal of synaesthesia [End Page 203] occurs in the cinematic experience as is the case when a scene of food preparation is portrayed and audiences find themselves salivating. As an aesthetic medium, cinema is, to use the words of Marshall McLuhan, an “extension” of humans. The audio-visual medium allows humans to see and hear farther than the naked eye and ear. When we watch films, we sense worlds beyond our own, even while our own world gets re-created. We do not just see other worlds through films. Rather, films touch us. Once the show is over, we stand up, go out into the world, and begin to see, hear, smell, taste, and touch it all just a little differently.3 As a georeligious aesthetic, traveling the world and appealing to the senses, cinema shows how religious life and practice gets entangled in politics, economics, and even competing religious traditions. Whether fiction or documentary, films tell stories of sabotage and espionage, romance and comedy, animal behavior and human tragedy, money heists and family life. In these generic guises, many of the complexities of life are laid out and made available for audiences to analyze in accessible portions. Yet, cinema does not simply “represent” these entanglements, for it is itself part of the entanglement. The making, distributing, watching, and discussing of films and videos is overseen by religious, political, and commercial organizations, and requires ample amounts of funding and labor. Meanwhile, viewers and reviewers come to their own conclusions about individual films, telling others about what they saw and heard in conversation and on social media. To discuss cinema as a georeligious aesthetic is to take into account the many facets of cinematic work and experience, of which the film “text” is just a piece. Cinema is now well into its second century and showing signs of decline. The global pandemic of COVID-19 has revealed some of its weaknesses and the titles of stories in major media outlets during the summer of 2020 continually asked about the future of cinema. Theaters are shutting down as streaming services rise, and the aesthetic and religious effects of this shift is being played out now. Whether consumed on a big screen in the company of a hundred other people, or on small screen in the privacy of one’s bedroom, watching film and video is still an audio-visual experience that triggers and engages specific neural pathways in the brain. And yet, these experiences are vastly different, and the effects of the different viewing environments change the meanings of the audio...
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Nov 20, 2024
Tara Prakash 
Open Access