The Cinema as Religious Experience

Film Producer George Miller (Babe, The Witches of Eastwick):

I believe cinema is now the most powerful secular religion and people gather in cinemas to experience things collectively the way they once did in church. The cinema storytellers have become the new priests. They're doing the work of a lot of our religious institutions, which have so concretized the metaphors in their stories, taken so much of the poetry, mystery, and mysticism out of religious belief, that people look for other places to question their spirituality. (Italics mine)

Quoted in Reel Spirituality: Theology and Film in Dialogue, by Robert K.. Johnston.

Photo Credit

"Orpheum Theatre and Site" by Teemu008

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