The Ephemeral Cathedral : Bodies of Stone and Configurations of Film

At first sight, a statue that appears in a film is a prop among others. It can serve to situate the action, it can be an attribute of a character, indicating the person’s taste and social status, and it can become a world-making detail, as in historical epics set in antiquity, where statues serve as the kind of ornament used to describe the world of the film and lend it credibility. But as it appears in a film, it raises questions about film as an art of the gesture, and about the power of film to endow inanimate objects with agency.