Luminous

This ground breaking book is a tour de force by any standards as Mike has watched over 400 films on spiritual themes in researching it. He draws on all of these in his analysis and recommends 60 must see films at the end. The book serves as a companion to watching films as an adjunct to the spiritual life and its title, based on a metaphor of light, indicates 'a moment of insight or understanding' that may be conveyed in a film; more especially, 'a film that contains within its dramatic presentation both the potential for spiritual transformation and the aesthetic mastery of light in the moving image.' The book is organised around 12 themes including spiritual aesthetics, the esoteric, death and dying, ghosts and the afterlife, reincarnation and resurrection, teachers of wisdom, people in spiritual community, violence, forgiveness and atonement, East versus West and secular versus spiritual. This only conveys the barest outline of the richness of Mike's discussion of specific films within these overall themes. Importantly, he defines the core of spirituality as a profound connectedness, and its opposite as an anguished alienation. He provides useful summaries at the end of each chapter, and his last two chapters also provide a commentary on our times, especially around the secular text of much of modern life. Overall, Mike reminds us of how special film is as a medium expressed through moving light and how it can make an important contribution to our understanding of spiritual life.