Acts of God: Film, Religion, and FX

My movie-going beginnings coincided with the age of the religious blockbuster, and I knew transcendence when I heard it. Quo Vadis?, The Robe, Ben Hur ... The Choir! where was it? Later, Guys and Dolls, The Sound of Music you climbed every mountain, sat down when you rocked the boat. You felt you were in The Choir, but it was not you, exactly. In late adolescence, on the late show, I thrilled to the depiction of the earthly production of the choir, Angels with Dirty Faces, Going My Way, The Bells of Saint Mary's, in parochial disciplines that pointed to but hardly accounted for, the choir, its epiphanic penetration, its unsponsored otherworldness, its protean "FX." There was an-other world, religion in film, religion and film, film, even, as religion.