Page - 157 - in JRFM - Journal Religion Film Media, Volume 06/01

audience’s experience during and after the screening, paying special attention to the sensory, embodied nature of reception, and the “afterlife” of a film in real-life rituals, spaces and experiences (chapters 4, 5 and 6). Plate also combines the earlier two waves’ respective attention to arthouse cinema and Hollywood, drawing on a wide range of films from Hollywood and US independent cinema, international cinema, contemporary films and material from the very early times of filmmaking. With generous illustrations serving as visual arguments and including stills from less accessible old films, the volume provides a substantial theoretical advancement in the reflection on film and religion through in-depth engagement with cinema across the breadth of time and space. The volume is divided in three parts, which focus, respectively, on parallels in aesthetic choices in religion and film, on audience experience during the screening and on the traces that films leave after the screening in “real life”. The first part’s in- vestigation of the “similarities of aesthetic tactics between religion making and film- making” (4) analyzes the filmic forms used to put the afilmic world into the diegetic world of films, looking in particular at myth, ritual and sacred space (chapters 1–3). While the discussion of myth is probably the most developed, all chapters show how the study of film and its techniques can contribute to the understanding of religion, and vice versa, for example by analyzing the way in which myths, like films, are made through the montage of pre-existing, multimedia elements rather than being original creations ex nihilo. Especially interesting in this part is Plate’s analysis of how myths, rituals and spaces in film and religion are shaped by ideologies and can serve to perpetuate them, such as the myth of white male supremacy or the gendered hierarchies of spatial orientation, with the vertical axis being associated with the masculine and transcendent, and the horizontal axis with femininity and worldliness. But as both films and religions re-create the world, they can also func- tion to resignify spaces or re-edit myths in a way that reconfigures their ideological matrix and thus provides an alternative vision. The second part focuses on reception, and especially, following Maurice Mer- leau-Ponty’s phenomenological tradition, on an analysis of the viewing subject that takes seriously their embodied presence and participation in the film. This includes a reflection on the body as a medium and the synaesthetic nature of reception in the cinema, when audio-visual stimuli can create a variety of sensory perceptions that combine to make sense of a film (chapter 4). Returning to the notion of ritual, Plate notes how film functions much like religious rituals in forming sensory perceptions and physical and emotional responses. The ethical dimension of such embodied re- ception is developed through an analysis of the filmic technique of close-ups in dia- logue with Emmanuel Levinas’s reflection on the face of the other person as issuing an ethical challenge (chapter 5). Drawing on cognitive sciences as well as the Hindu 156 | Stefanie Knauss www.jrfm.eu 2020, 6/1, 155–158