This article examines how documentary film attempts to represent mystical experience through comparative analysis of Parviz Kimiavi's The Garden of Stones (1976) and American documentaries featuring Samuel Lewis, particularly Sunseed (1973). Rather than assuming terms like "sacred" or "authentic," the study grounds its analysis in empirical definitions from William James, historical scholarship...
This article examines how Abbas Kiarostami’s The Wind Will Carry Us (1999) creates sacred experience through systematic absence within contemporary slow cinema aesthetics. While previous scholarship has focused on religious content in spiritual cinema, this analysis demonstrates how formal techniques—particularly strategic concealment and extended duration—generate contemplative states without...
Baraka: A World Beyond Words (1992) is a guided meditation that aims to induce the transcendent experience in the viewer. Through the eyes of a Zen Buddhist monk, the viewer is invited to meditate on the various phenomena that testify to the existence of the transcendent (the first eight chapters), to experience the everyday world where the transcendent is painfully absent (the next eleven...
Abstract This article explores the implicit theory of mysticism in Ciro Guerra’s 2015 film Embrace of the Serpent (Sp. El abrazo de la serpiente). While many theories of mysticism argue that true mystical experience is unmediated and, therefore, universal, Guerra makes a more provocative statement in the film. He depicts two Westerners’ attempts to have an entheogenic mystical experience in...
Abstract Recognized as a masterpiece of French cinema, Robert Bresson's Diary of a Country Priest (1951) dramatizes a young priest's encounters with grace during the months he spends in his first parish in the rural village of Ambricourt. During this time, the priest keeps a journal in which he records both the outer events of his life in Ambricourt and his inner experiences of a transcendent...
Can horror characterize a religious experience? Can God today still be terrifying (tremendum) as well as attractive (fascinans)? The Rapture presents a horrifying view of an apparently malevolent God. Can such a view be tolerated in today's Western culture? Can Sharon's be an authentic religious experience? The film suspends the viewer between a variety of interpretations. Is the story of the...