Reconfiguring the “Genuinely” Religious Film: The Oral Contours of the Overabundant Epic.

RELIGIOUS films; BOLLYWOOD; MOTION picture industry; MOTION pictures & religion; HOLY, The; ORAL communication

MUMBAI (India); UNITED States; INDIA

This paper argues that manifestations of the sacred in Hollywood biblical spectaculars, as well as in films from Bollywood (the Hollywood of Bombay), have been significantly contoured by a reticulate set of oral norms. That is, the films' depictions of hierophany are tied to a way of knowing that maintains roots in orality (as distinct from a way of knowing historically permitted and/or induced by a cultural investment in the written word). Such orally inflected norms as epical and exoteric abundance, melodrama, frontality, and a telescoping of the real into the mythic compel us to re-think the common critical assumption that religious spectaculars are not authentically manifesting the sacred or that they can only be operating as escapist metaphors. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

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