Reverse Shot: The Holy Moment.

Introducing the Spring 2004 issue, the editors of Reverse Shot remark that one possible explanation for the prolonged and astounding success of Mel Gibson's The Passion of the Christ lies in the perception common in mainstream audiences that there are no or sadly few other movies addressing their spiritual concerns. But cinematic history, moreover, recent cinematic history is shot through with widely varying approaches to the most essential questions:

To quote André Bazin, who saw cinema's harnessing and recreation of life as representative of God's very act of creation, these are our "Holy Moments," passageways to understanding our universe through concerns of faith, wrestling with this life and the one after, seeking answers, dealing with uncertainty. In discussions of films from Bergman to Pasolini, from Sergei Parajanov to Woody Allen, we find that truly spiritual artistic works can either locate a greater divine presence or be haunted by its absence, that it's the search for meaning, rather than moral certainty, that connects the body with the spirit.

Besides two full takes on Gibson's film from Michael Koresky and Jeff Reichert, the bulk of the issue is divided into three sections - "Presence," "Absence" and "The Search" - in which five or six films are each examined by various writers.

And then there are a dozen reviews of new releases and one DVD review: Julien Lapointe on Guy Maddin's Dracula: Pages from a Virgin's Diary.

Posted by dwhudson at April 27, 2004 9:10 AM