Construction of Denominational Reality: A Theo-Political Discourse Analysis of "Muhammad: The Messenger of God"
Construction of Denominational Reality: A Theo-Political Discourse Analysis of "Muhammad: The Messenger of God"

Summary/Abstract: For social analysis, cinema offers researchers a comprehensive data store. The time and space having been redesigned through cinematography cannot be shaped independently of the director's internalized ideological, social, cultural and political realities. The argument of the paper is the instrumentalization of the cinema to construct daily realities with discursive codes through the director’s personal perceptions reflected to the film. Throughout the paper questions such as through which methods the director develops his cinematic language to shape the reality, how he reshapes society’s realities to create a new image of The Prophet and what kind of motivations inspire him to practise a retrospective outlook are tried to be answered. Discourse analysis of our data has been carried out with the phenomenological method. In the analyses, it has been observed that theo-political associations such as language, lineage, ahl al-bayt, evaluation of past events with today's concepts play an active role in denominationally-constructed realities. The implications of contemporary Shiite views is conveyed to the audience with cinematographic techniques such the disruption of time integrity with flashbacks, the narrator of the film, the reflection of miracles with the deus ex machina technique, etc.

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