The secular, pluralist culture of the West encourages a subjective
approach to spiritual truth where stimulating emotional
experiences, such as those provided by film, can contribute to
personal conceptions of the sacred. Examining Stanley Kubrick's
2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) as the principal case-study and Gaspar
Noe's Enter the Void (2009) and Lars von Trier's Melancholia (2011)
as comparative examples, Sarah Balstrup argues that these directors
harness the affective properties of film to generate altered states
of perception in a manner analogous to religious practice. Powerful
feelings of dissociation and indescribable significance typical of
mystical testimony appear in viewer responses to these films,
demonstrating the continued sacralisation of such states of mind.
In their own way, each film confronts the viewer with an
apocalyptic revelation of the impersonal forces of the universe,
moving away from personhood and the human narrative, into pure
sensation. They present a non-deterministic spiritual truth that
can be intuited but not explained, mirroring developments in the
religious sphere. Investigating the relationship between cinematic
technique and religious experience, Spiritual Sensations offers an
alternative approach to the study of religion and film that has
been principally focused on narrative symbolism and the
dramatisation of values. Spiritual Sensations makes a further
contribution to the field by analysing films contextually,
considering viewers' subjective responses in light of religious and
cultural change.
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