Sacred Representation in Modern Film Chris Art

Chris Arthur (271) stated that there are some important questions as yet unanswered as to where film intersects or should intersect with religion in contemporary society. Arthur (271) believes that popular film can be an important medium of religious expression in which the sacred is represented. The thesis to be explored in this report is that many modern films that do incorporate sacred representations, particularly those that are Christian in their nature, are often the subject of controversy and debate. Religious symbolism of the sacred is, on balance, integral to many contemporary films, Christian or otherwise, which attempt to come to terms with the conflict between the secular and the religious.

Andrew Greeley (22), a Roman Catholic priest and social scientist, maintains that many of the objections that are voiced toward films such as Dogma center on the belief that only a strict orthodox, literal, or what for want of a better term could be called fundamentalist depiction of God should be permitted in film. A position such as this would undoubtedly find Cecil B. Demille's epic The Ten Commandments to be an acceptable film employing representations of the sacred while simultaneously rejecting films such as Dogma. However, says Greeley (22), Dogma offers must that is positive in terms of its legitimate interpretation of Catholic dogma (the fundamental truths which a Catholic must believe to be a Catholic); for example, a God (even a female God) so involved in t

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film presents a premise in which each of the seven deadly sins is acted out in the form of a set of murders. The killer is revealed to be a masochistic yet sadistic man with a literary turn of mind: "inspired by Dante, Shakespeare, and other navigators of man's eternal fall, he creates a private liturgical fantasy out of the scrunginess of the human race. Everyone's a sinner! The world must be punished (Gleiberman, 36)." Romney (35), commenting on the movie wrote that "the seven sins premise sounds remarkably programmatic, a fail-safe recipe for monotony; it takes the idea of serial killing to a reductively literal degree." However, Johnson (71) sees that there is a strong spiritual commentary being made in this film. Johnson (71) puts it this way: "Seven is disturbing not just because it is a creepy film about the psychopath, but because the killer's master plan� is so damn ingenious. And his grotesque handiwork resonates with a familiar logic, that of puritanical extremism in a decadent America. Seven offers no moral satisfaction� just a chilling sense of self-fulfilling prophecy." Where Dogma directly addresses images of sacred representation and The Green Mile includes a proactive spirituality, Seven is a far les

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