Secret Cinema: Gnostic Vision in Film (New York and London: Continuum, 2006)
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This book explores theoretical issues of a new cinematic genre: commercial films that promote Gnosticism or its esoteric offshoots, Cabbalism and alchemy.  These issues center on a contradiction: films devoted to a reality behind appearance are illusions divorced from facts.  How can mainstream esoteric movies—films keen on secret, redemptive knowledge—escape their exoteric packaging—their status as superficial commodities?  If the cinema is a product of the culture industry, a product supporting the capitalistic status quo, can any film, no matter how radical or rebellious, ever liberate the movie-going masses from shadow to substance?  The book argues that certain Gnostic films—such The Matrix and eXistenZ, A.I. and Blade Runner, Dead Man and Altered States—are keenly conscious of these contradictions.  In reflecting on the impossibility of their very existence—they are metaphysical meditations and vulgar commodities—these movies consume themselves and push audiences into vague spaces: abysses of interpretation, infinite regressions over insoluble problems.  These negations are confusing and potentially meaningless.  However, they also liberate viewers from hermeneutical conformity and release them into fresh, possibly redemptive ways of seeing.  Exploring these possibilities, Secret Cinema establishes the theoretical foundations and implications of Gnostic cinema.  The study also considers the aesthetics of irony, the virtues of the vague, the psychology of movie-watching, and the role of the cinematographic apparatus.  The book also offers fresh links between film and religion, philosophy, and psychology.  Finally, this book broadly meditates on the material attractions of the movies, those gorgeous lights and lolling shadows, but also on cinema’s spiritual invitations, the gaps between the pictures: empty spaces at the heart of life.