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Full-Text Articles in Arts and Humanities
Fixing Ground Zero: Race And Religion In Francis Lawrence’S I Am Legend, Michael E. Heyes
Fixing Ground Zero: Race And Religion In Francis Lawrence’S I Am Legend, Michael E. Heyes
Journal of Religion & Film
Francis Lawrence’s I Am Legend is a complex intertext of Matheson’s novel of the same name and its two previous film adaptations. While the film attempts to depict racism as monstrous, the frequent invocation of 9/11 imagery and Christian symbolism throughout the film recodes the vampiric dark-seekers as radical Islamic terrorists. This serves to further enshrine an us/Christians vs. them/Muslim dichotomy present in post-9/11 America, a dichotomy that the film presents as “curable” through the spread of Christianity and the fall of Islam.
The Movie Mogul, Moses And Muslims: Islamic Elements In Cecil B. Demille’S The Ten Commandments (1956), Michael D. Calabria Ofm
The Movie Mogul, Moses And Muslims: Islamic Elements In Cecil B. Demille’S The Ten Commandments (1956), Michael D. Calabria Ofm
Journal of Religion & Film
Cecil B. DeMille’s 1956 film, The Ten Commandments, has come to define the genre of the biblical epic. It has earned a permanent place in American culture due to its annual airing on television during the Easter and Passover holidays. Most viewers are unaware, however, that DeMille had sought to make a film that would appeal to Jews, Christians and Muslims at a time when their common Abrahamic ancestry had yet to be articulated, and interreligious dialogue was all but unheard of. To this end, Henry Noerdlinger, DeMille’s researcher for the film, consulted the Qur’an, and screenwriters incorporated Islamic …