Film as means for Religious Experience

David Clarkson, Blog on Film as means for Religious Experience, April 11, 2016

Before this class, I did not see film as such a large means to express religious experience. Films like, The Passion of the Christ, were obviously religious films that expressed religious beliefs or themes, but other than the few movies that were so obviously religious, I did not notice the religious aspects of film. Most movies have a few religious moments, but I never noticed these moments as possibly the main point of the film. After watching the abundance of films we have seen in this class through close observation and analysis, I have started to appreciate and notice the underlying themes of film more often. I am surprised with how many films, that I had seen before, have religious themes that are so central to understanding the film. For example, in The Last Samurai, I never noticed the religious aspects of Buddhism to be so central to Algren's character development. I tended to look at that movie, before this class, as just a film that had intense battle scenes with an American soldier who overcame a lot. I thought that Algren chose the samurai because of the girl, and not because of the experience he had with their rituals and religious aspects. It is cool to gain a deeper and more accurate understanding of the themes and cornerstone values that these films present, and I will forever watch films from a enlarged lense. However, I think it is important that these films, though they may be helpful reminders of our beliefs, do not become our chief means of experiencing and expressing our religious beliefs. Scripture should be the only basis of our doctrine