Medieval saints and modern screens : divine visions as cinematic experience
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Abstract
At the age of six, I took a vow of silence. I had witnessed something so
exquisite, so evanescent that I had to memorialize it. I had to sacrifice my
words on the altar of something greater than myself. What engendered
this act? The impossible purity of love shared by a singing bibliophile and
a bestial curmudgeon. I had just seen Beauty and the Beast (Gary Trousdale
and Kirk Wise, 1991) at the cinema. In the dark embrace of a nondescript
multiplex on an otherwise forgotten afternoon, I had seen – and felt – the
truth of the universe, or so it seemed. It was, for want of a better word,
mystical. Sure, the singing teapot didn’t hurt my complete and overwrought
devotion to the film. And I had to abandon my silence a few hours later, so
as to stop annoying my Mum. But still. For those brief few hours, I ascended
the lofty heights of knowledge of how to be human, how to be in the world,
and perhaps most importantly how, eventually, I would be an adult. I was
in the film; the film was in me.
The principal contentions formulated in this book lie in the crux of that
experience, and are threaded through the analyses in the pages that follow.
I maintain that medieval mystical episodes are made intelligible to modern
audiences through reference to the filmic – the language, form, and lived
experience of cinema. Similarly, reference to the realm of the mystical
affords a means to express the disconcerting physical and emotional effects
of watching cinema. Moreover, cinematic spectatorship affords, at times, a
(more or less) secular experience of visionary transcendence: an ‘agape-ic
encounter’. This transcendent experience is functionally identical to the
episodes of ecstasy which are the mainstay of medieval hagiography. This
is not to say that all moviegoers are, actually, Catholic mystics, if only they
knew it. Rather, I attest that our use, enjoyment, and conceptualization
of cinema – and more recently, three-dimensional virtual environments
online – reflect our enduring preoccupation with those topics which were
previously the domain of religion, and thus hagiography.
Palabras clave
Medieval Saints; Cinematic experienceCreative Commons
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/Link to resource
https://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctt1zxxxhzCollections
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