Film technique and religion

This chapter examines the technical logics whereby moving images (film) gather visual, affective, and narrative meaning. Different logics, initially developed by D. W. Griffith and Sergei Eisenstein, were then nuanced, torqued, and challenged by various film schools over the decades of the twentieth century in order to convey changing dominant and non-dominant meanings. Both the examination of film technique (“formal analysis”) and the history of how formal analysis is taken up by different cultures and different cultural moments (“cultural analysis”) are considered. Though this chapter argues that no film technique (or its cultural uptake) can be essentially “religious,” examples are given of the various ways techniques and analysis afford salient religious interpretations.