The conception and representation of the prophet in cinema

The issue of the depiction and representation of the sacred has been one of the most fundamental problems in theology and art history. In the 19th century, the traditional narrative forms have been carrying on for centuries. Cinema, which has undertaken at the end of the day and surpassed other narrative forms in terms of its influence, has become the most important medium in which the said discussion is carried out. In particular, with the beginning of the shooting of films that can be classified as prophetic films, the questions of what should be evaluated under the umbrella of holiness, which manifestations of the sacred and how they can be depicted and represented began to be asked again. In this context, the main effort of the study is to try to understand how the prophets of Judaism, Christianity and Islam, which are classified as monotheistic religions, are conceived and represented as sacred images in the cinema and what differences stand out in terms of the religions in question in this transfer. While doing this, the broad-axis theoretical infrastructure of the structuralist school, which has come to the fore among the analysis methods on motion pictures in recent years, has been used and the study has been designed as a qualitative research because it allows the image of the prophet to be evaluated within the meanings of religions and to reveal the subject from a holistic perspective. The findings, which emerged as a result of the content analysis carried out on three highly representative films selected according to the evaluations of movie critics and viewing rates, show that the visions of the prophets of the films have similarities with the holy texts and in the context of basic fiction, but the biggest divergence occurs in representation.