Arts and Humanities Commons^™

Screen Jesus: Portrayals Of Christ In Television And Film, Steven Vredenburgh

Journal of Religion & Film

This is a book review of Peter Malone, Screen Jesus: Portrayals of Christ in Television and Film (Boulder, CO: Roman & Littlefield, 2012).

Verdens Undergang (1916) And The Birth Of Apocalyptic Film: Antecedents And Causative Forces, Wynn Gerald Hamonic

Journal of Religion & Film

This essay describes the antecedents and causative forces giving rise to the birth of apocalyptic cinema in the early 20th Century and the first apocalyptic feature, Verdens Undergang (1916). Apocalyptic cinema's roots can be traced back to apocalyptic literary tradition beginning 200 BCE, New Testament apocalyptic writings, the rise of premillenialism in the mid-19th Century, 19th century apocalyptic fiction, a growing distrust in human self-determination, escalating wars and tragedies from 1880 to 1912 reaching a larger audience through a burgeoning press, horrors and disillusionment caused by the First World War, a growing belief in a dystopian future, and changes in …

“It’S Not A Fucking Book, It’S A Weapon!”: Authority, Power, And Mediation In The Book Of Eli, Seth M. Walker

Journal of Religion & Film

The mediation of religious narratives through sacred texts is intimately bound to the power relations involved in their transmission and maintenance. Those who possess such mediated messages and control their access and interpretation have historically held privileged positions of authority, especially when those positions are not easily contested. The 2010 film The Book of Eli uniquely engages these elements by placing the alleged last copy of the King James Version of the Christian Bible at the forefront of a clash between different individuals in a post-nuclear wasteland. This paper, drawing on Max Weber’s notion of “charisma,” and scholars addressing religion, …

Zen Noir Vis-À-Vis Myers-Briggs Personality Typology: Semiotic Multivalency As Grounds For Dialog, Edward J. Godfrey

Journal of Religion & Film

Marc Rosenbush’s film, Zen Noir (2004) is at first glance a Buddhist film wherein a troubled detective finds himself at a Zen temple with a murder to solve. But upon further investigation, it becomes evident that the film can also be understood in terms of Myers-Briggs personality typology, which is an extension of the personology and depth psychology of C.G. Jung. This suggests a multivalency which allows the imagery of the film to be interpreted in two different ways; as both suggesting Zen enlightenment and Jungian individuation. To assist with this comparison, this paper introduces the Ten Ox-Herding Paintings of …

The Crimes Of Love. The (Un)Censored Version Of The Flood Story In Noah (2014), Wojciech Kosior

Journal of Religion & Film

A swift survey of Noah reviews clearly shows that the audience’s sensitivity was challenged in several regards; Noah was portrayed as a “religious extremist” and “borderline psychopath”, the Creator proved to be a “distant—unaware or uncaring—overseer”, while Aronofsky himself was said to have a “sinister purpose of leading people to believe that Christianity and Judaism are something they are not.” On closer examination, however, the above summarized pleas are not entirely relevant for two basic reasons. First, the movie consists of ideas that have been in use since antiquity, rearranged and composed into a new-old story and all the arguments …

Bearing Witness: The Sight Of A Sacrifice In Cristian Mungiu's Beyond The Hills, Megan Girdwood

Journal of Religion & Film

Drawing on the theories of sacrifice advanced by Sigmund Freud (1913) and René Girard (1972; 1982), this article interprets the exorcism depicted by Romanian director Cristian Mungiu in Beyond the Hills (2012) as a sacrifice. Explicating Girard’s defence of Freud, I use his framing of sacrifice as a function of religion to reassess scholarship addressing the parallels between liturgical and cinematic forms of representation. If, as some scholars propose, the practices of the cinema-goer and the worshipper mirror each other, then the sacrificial witness portrayed by Mungiu constitutes a third pillar in this discourse. I argue that Mungiu dramatizes the …

Risen, Katie Turner

Journal of Religion & Film

This is a film review of Risen (2016), directed by Kevin Reynolds.

Almost Holy, William L. Blizek

Journal of Religion & Film

This is a film review of Almost Holy (2015), directed by Steve Hoover.

The Patriarch (Mahana), Ken Derry

Journal of Religion & Film

This is a film review of The Patriarch (2016), directed by Lee Tamahori.

Arrival, Ken Derry

Journal of Religion & Film

This is a film review of Arrival (2015), directed by Denis Villeneuve .

Between Documentary And Fiction: The Films Of Kore-Eda Hirokazu, Marc Yamada

Journal of Religion & Film

This article investigates the representation of Buddhist values through the interplay between drama and documentary in two of Kore-eda’s films—After Life (Wandafuru Raifu, 1998) and I Wish (Kiseki, 2011). It will argue that the spiritual aspirations of these two films is a product of their nondualistic treatment of a documentary and dramatic style of filmmaking.

Six Ways Of Looking At Anomalisa, David L. Smith

Journal of Religion & Film

Anomalisa is a parable about the nature of human fulfilment that explores the tension between other-worldly desire (the conviction that real life must be “elsewhere”) and the kind of fulfilment that comes from a more transparent relationship to things as they are. The film explores this religious theme not only through its story, but through the way the story comments on its own embodiment as a puppet show—a work of stop-motion animation. In this paper, I try to tease out the film’s complex reflections on the real and the artificial (in particular, on the ways that a desire for “the …

Not Alone: "Ironic Faith," The Comic Worldview, And Process Theology In Monty Python's Life Of Brian, Kathleen J. Cassity

Journal of Religion & Film

Steven Benko points out that far from being anti-religious, Monty Python’s Life of Brian posits a type of belief he calls “ironic faith,” though he believes that the version evoked by this film falls short of calling for social transformation. If, however, we consider the resonance between process theology's "becoming-over-being" and the open-ended “humorous outlook” as articulated by philosopher of comedy John Morreall, we can interpret Life of Brian as suggesting the possibility of social transformation through its concluding evocation of a shared humanity that surmounts isolation, hierarchy, and socially constructed barriers by promoting what sociologist Robert Putnam calls "bridging …

Rejecting The Ethnic Community In Little Caesar, The Public Enemy, And Scarface, Bryan Mead

Journal of Religion & Film

Film scholars commonly suggest that the 1930s American movie gangster represented marginalized Italian and Irish-American film-goers, and that these gangsters provided a visual and aural outlet for ethnic audience frustrations with American societal mores. However, while movie gangsters clearly struggle with WASP society, the ethnic gangster’s struggle against his own community deserves further exploration. The main characters in gangster films of the early 1930s repeatedly forge an individualistic identity and, in consequence, separate themselves from their ethnic peers and their family, two major symbols of their communal culture. This rejection of community is also a rejection of the distinctly Italian …

From Marseille To Mecca: Reconciling The Secular And The Religious In Le Grand Voyage (The Big Trip) (2004), Yahya Laayouni

Journal of Religion & Film

By the early 1980’s, a generation of children of Maghrebi (North African) parents born and/or raised in France started to become more visible, particularly after they organized a march in 1983 from Marseille to Paris under the slogan “For Equality and against Racism.” This generation was introduced to the public as the “Beur generation.” The word ‘Beur,’ coined by this generation, is the result of a Parisian back slang and means ‘Arab.’ It quickly gained popularity and has been used to refer to children of Maghrebi origins living in France. As much as it has been hard for the Beurs …

Fetish, Sacrifice And Tragic Freedom In The Dardenne Brothers' La Promesse, Andrew Small

Journal of Religion & Film

Fetish, Sacrifice and Tragic Freedom and in the Dardenne Brothers’ La Promesse

(Abstract)

The purpose of this article is to begin drawing attention to the strong likelihood that Freud’s Totem and Taboo (1913) contributed important ideas to the creation of La Promesse (1996) by Luc and Jean-Pierre Dardenne. In the current article, we take note of just two of its most important aspects: animism, and the childlike recurrence of totemism. In La Promesse, these concepts are elaborated in relationship to a small African statue present in the home of the West African illegal immigrants, Assita and Hamidou. The sculpture …

“He Who Kills The Body, Kills The Soul That Inhabits It”: Feminist Filmmaking, Religion, And Spiritual Identification In Vision, Carl Laamanen

Journal of Religion & Film

In this article, I argue that the 2009 film, Vision: From the Life of Hildegard of Bingen, presents an example of feminist filmmaking that seeks to draw viewers into spiritual identification with the protagonist, 12^th-century mystic Hildegard, through its narrative and formal techniques, encouraging the audience to share in Hildegard’s visionary experiences. The film does so in an explicitly feminist way, drawing upon unconventional visual and sonic aesthetics to highlight the power and authority of Hildegard’s spiritual experiences. In particular, Vision’s use of music and sound points toward a conception of feminine spirituality that values the …

The Eyes Have It: Film, Editing, And Postmodern Theological Hermeneutics, James M. Hansen Mr.

Journal of Religion & Film

This article attempts to show the fruitful dialogue which exists when one cross-pollinates hermeneutics and the task of film editing. Though seemingly unrelated, their engagement is a rich collaboration that brings a deeper appreciation for the cinematic process as well as an alternative way of looking at the interpretive process as it relates to Scripture. This article traces the history of and approaches to cinematic editing in hopes that it might provide a significant interlocutor to the burgeoning field of hermeneutical studies.

The Roles Of Violence In Recent Biblical Cinema: The Passion, Noah, And Exodus: Gods And Kings, Kevin M. Mcgeough

Journal of Religion & Film

When The Passion was released, its extremely graphic violence horrified critics and scholars of religion although its success at the box office indicates that this, if anything, made the story of Jesus more appealing for viewers. Now that more time has passed and expectations surrounding levels of acceptable violence in cinema have changed, it is worth reconsidering how cinematic violence is used as reception strategy in Biblical cinema. Considering The Passion with more recent Biblical films, Noah and Exodus: Gods and Kings, it becomes apparent that violence is not only used to expand laconic Biblical narratives but to invest …

Seeing The Light, Hearing The Call: Women Religious As Spectators And Subjects Of Popular Nun Films, Maureen A. Sabine Professor

Journal of Religion & Film

Though popular films like The Bells of St. Mary’s (1945), Heaven Knows, Mr. Allison (1957), The Nun’s Story (1959), and The Sound of Music (1965) have routinely been criticized for circulating polarized stereotypes about nuns, convent memoirs indicate that some women felt the stirrings of a religious vocation from watching these movies. This article arose out of interest in whether other women heard God’s call through nun films, and is based on a survey of 86 sisters from 28 different communities who had entered the convent between 1947 and 2007, and were prepared to discuss what they saw in these …

Hollywood Biblical Epics: Camp Spectacle And Queer Style From The Silent Era To The Modern Day, Kent L. Brintnall

Journal of Religion & Film

This is a book review of Richard Lindsay, Hollywood Biblical Epics: Camp Spectacle and Queer Style from the Silent Era to the Modern Day (Denver, CO: Praeger, 2015).

Films And Religion: An Analysis Of Aamir Khan’S Pk, Monisa Qadri, Sabeha Mufti

Journal of Religion & Film

Every year, the Indian film industry produces the highest number of films in the world and also figures at the top position for ticket sales, but that does not make the society completely tolerant of how different issues are represented in films. That is a question which PK (2014), the biggest Bollywood grosser of all times, raised. This satirical comedy is based on challenging the superstitions labelled as religious practices in Indian society. India, being home to multiple religions and a diverse cultural fabric, supports many layers of understanding about faith, religion, rituals, and beliefs, which form a sensitive issue. …

The Qur’Anic Epic In Iranian Cinema, Nacim Pak-Shiraz

Journal of Religion & Film

The representation of religious figures in Islam has become particularly controversial in recent years. The creation of religious films has, therefore, turned into a highly sensitive undertaking. Iranian cinema is one of the very few in the Muslim world to have employed this new medium in imagining and narrating stories of revered religious figures. In this article I examine the complex socio-political context of Iran to study the relatively late emergence of the epic genre in Iranian cinema. I then study the recent creation and development of ‘Qur’anic Films’ within Iranian cinema with specific reference to Kingdom of Solomon ( …