1. Reconfiguring the “Genuinely” Religious Film: The Oral Contours of the Overabundant Epic.
- Author
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Nayar, Sheila J.
- Subjects
RELIGIOUS films ,BOLLYWOOD ,MOTION picture industry ,MOTION pictures & religion ,HOLY, The ,ORAL communication - Abstract
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]
- Published
- 2010
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