Sacred vocabularies for world cinema: transfiguring ancient aural and visual modalities to express sacredness for the contemporary age

UnrestrictedScholarship conditioned by western epistemological paradigms when evaluating the epic-style feature or art house films with an intense sacred sub-text, if acknowledging of the sacredness read such a phenomena through frameworks trained to observe, record and notice divine experiences in a purely external sense, in terms of socio-political implications or the overt material history of the representational practice. In terms of confronting these films or the phenomena they have sought to express for what they actually do and the psychic meaning making frameworks they create, would require of them to investigate the foundational assumptions of the epistemologies shaping the westernized scholar's view of human interiority and divinity. It is precisely this kind of critical confrontation in an interior epistemological sense that is attempted by the view informing this dissertation. This project is dedicated to the creation of a modern epistemology that draws back into the purview of reason and critical analysis the subject of sacredness and the cultural vocabularies that have evolved (particularly in a cinematic sense) to represent such a force.; The three major sections of this project that studies such a phenomenon, are dedicated to 1) a critical study of Euro-American filmmakers specifically Frank Capra, Jean Jacques Annaud, Paul Wagner and Martin Scorsese and their cinematic projects that realize for the screen the sacredness that sustains the mythic land of Shangri La or Shambhala, the utopia that has been projected across the space of the historically "real" Himalayan kingdom of Tibet, 2) an in depth analysis and evaluation of the New Zealand-Australian filmmaker Jane Campion and the Japanese filmmaker Kei Kumai and their respective films dedicated to expressing sublime dimensions of the divine force internal to the ideal of the South Asian Goddess figure as Durga, as the Ganges and as Chamunda; and 3) uncovering the sacred undercurrent and vocabulary of compassion Indian Filmmaker Mani Ratnam mobilizes in his "Terror-Trilogy" to suggest ways of transfiguring the interior reality of a terrorist, to facilitate the near "impossible" access he or she might have for benevolence