Film Art as a Form of Christian Discourse Representation

The article is devoted to assessing the potential of film art as a form of Christian discourse elements representation and identifying ways to actualize Christian discourse in works of cinema based on the material of the American Christian drama “The Case for Christ”. The analysis of the film as an integral and complete product of film art is conducted at the level of three components: verbal, non-verbal and cinematographic. The results of the study show that at the level of verbal components, the most frequent structural type of biblicalisms are sentences. In most cases biblical lexical units were used in nominative and pragmatic functions. At the non-verbal level, the functioning of the Christian discourse in the film under study is expressed in the presence of episodes depicting a meeting of believers, a clergyman giving a sermon, the internal and external structure of a temple, as well as the presence of a cross as a symbol of Christianity and the ringing of church bells. The cinematographic techniques used in the film to express the inherent meanings include such techniques as the special construction of frames and their sequence, changing the distance from the camera to the object, working with colour, light and sound. The results of the study show that cinema as a synthetic art form has a significant impact on recipients and can serve as a means of representing Christian discourse, enriching film art with enduring values.