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

摘要

This paper argues that manifestations of the sacred in Hollywoodnbiblical spectaculars, as well as in films from Bollywood (thenHollywood of Bombay), have been significantly contoured by a reti-nculate set of oral norms. That is, the films’ depictions of hierophanynare tied to a way of knowing that maintains roots in orality (as dis-ntinct from a way of knowing historically permitted and/or induced byna cultural investment in the written word). Such orally inflectednnorms as epical and exoteric abundance, melodrama, frontality, and antelescoping of the real into the mythic compel us to re-think thencommon critical assumption that religious spectaculars are not auth-nentically manifesting the sacred or that they can only be operating asnescapist metaphors.