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Articles 1 - 26 of 26
Full-Text Articles in Arts and Humanities
Mary Magdalene On Film In Twenty-First Century: A Feminist Theological Critique, Mary Ann Beavis
Mary Magdalene On Film In Twenty-First Century: A Feminist Theological Critique, Mary Ann Beavis
Journal of Religion & Film
Since the turn of the millennium, several films (and one popular TV series) featuring Mary Magdalene as a significant character, or even as the central character, have been produced. A few, specifically Son of God (2104), The Chosen (2017-), and Mary Magdalene (2019), gained a wide audience through some combination of theatrical release, television, and streaming services. Unlike earlier productions that unfailingly portrayed her conventionally as a penitent prostitute, these and other, less well-known films of recent decades have departed from this traditional Magdalene. This is no doubt due, among other things, to the influence of feminist theology and biblical …
From Patriarchal Stereotypes To Matriarchal Pleasures Of Hybridity: Representation Of A Muslim Family In Berlin, Rahime Özgün Kehya Dr
From Patriarchal Stereotypes To Matriarchal Pleasures Of Hybridity: Representation Of A Muslim Family In Berlin, Rahime Özgün Kehya Dr
Journal of Religion & Film
Sinan Çetin’s blockbuster Berlin in Berlin (1993) is a Turkish-German co-production. In contrast to certain representational tendencies with German orientalism or Turkish occidentalism, it deconstructs the intersectional structures of migration, religion, and gender. The portrayal of religion in films about Turkish-German labour migration is a kind of cultural narcissism often projected into national cinema by denigrating the faith of the other and glorifying one’s own religion. However, perspectives at such intersections are critical and require sensitivity in filmmaking, as films can create prejudice or help build peaceful relationships around these sensitive issues. The paper employs discourse analysis in linking Derrida’s …
Reframing Space: Religion, History, And Memory In The Early Documentary Film Of The Yugoslav Space, Milja Radovic
Reframing Space: Religion, History, And Memory In The Early Documentary Film Of The Yugoslav Space, Milja Radovic
Journal of Religion & Film
This paper examines cinematic representations of religion and religious communities in the early cinema of the Yugoslav space. This paper introduces the readers to the rich heritage of the cinema of the Yugoslav space by providing 1) the first study of the representations of religion and the concepts of faith in the early film, and 2) novel approaches in reading religion and history through film. Film is used as a primary rather than supplementary source in historical research on diverse religious and ethnic communities in this part of the Balkan Peninsula. This is the first study that investigates the importance, …
Transforming Leviathan: Job, Hobbes, Zvyagintsev And Philosophical Progression, Graham C. Goff
Transforming Leviathan: Job, Hobbes, Zvyagintsev And Philosophical Progression, Graham C. Goff
Journal of Religion & Film
The allegory of Leviathan, the biblical serpent of the seas, has undergone numerous distinct and even antithetical conceptions since its origin in the book of Job. Most prominently, Leviathan was the namesake of Thomas Hobbes’s 1651 political treatise and Andrey Zvyagintsev’s 2014 film of the same name, a damning indictment of Russian corruption. These three iterations underscore the societal transition from the recognition of power as being derived from God to the secularization of power in Hobbes’s philosophy, to the negation of the legitimacy of divine and secular institutional power, in Zvyagintsev’s controversial film. This examination of Leviathan’s three unique …
Seeing And Interpreting Visions Of The Next Age In Interstellar, Nancy Wright
Seeing And Interpreting Visions Of The Next Age In Interstellar, Nancy Wright
Journal of Religion & Film
Christopher Nolan’s Interstellar (2014) uses multiple styles of cinematography – documentary, painterly and expressionistic – to guide interpretation of its apocalyptic review of history. Within the prologue and epilogue of the science fiction film, clips from interviews originally filmed for Ken Burns’s The Dust Bowl (2012) invite questions about how to interpret documentary, revisionist and eschatological reviews of history. Cinematography functions as a self-reflexive cue to spectators within and outside the mise-en-scène to engage in eschatological interpretation. The representation of spectatorship and vision reveals the challenge of interpreting prophetic visions of the last things and the next age, which are …
Films For The Colonies: Cinema And The Preservation Of The British Empire, Thomas Barker
Films For The Colonies: Cinema And The Preservation Of The British Empire, Thomas Barker
Journal of Religion & Film
This is a book review of Tom Rice, Films for the Colonies: Cinema and the Preservation of the British Empire (University of California Press, 2019).
Revising Mary Queen Of Scots: From Protestant Persecution To Patriarchal Struggle, Jennifer M. Desilva, Emily K. Mcguire
Revising Mary Queen Of Scots: From Protestant Persecution To Patriarchal Struggle, Jennifer M. Desilva, Emily K. Mcguire
Journal of Religion & Film
Since Mary Queen of Scots’ execution in 1587, she has become a symbol of Scottish identity, failed female leadership, and Catholic martyrdom. Throughout the twentieth century, Mary was regularly depicted on screen (Ford, 1936; Froelich, 1940; Jarrott, 1971) as a thrice-wed Catholic queen, unable to rule her country due to her feminine nature and Catholic roots. However, with the rise of third wave feminism and postfeminism in media, coupled with the increased influence of female directors and writers, Mary’s characterization has shifted from portraying female/emotional weakness and religious sacrifice to female/collaborative strength in hardship and a struggle against patriarchal prejudice. …
Corruption As Shared Culpability: Religion, Family, And Society In Andrey Zvyagintsev's Leviathan (2014), Maria Hristova
Corruption As Shared Culpability: Religion, Family, And Society In Andrey Zvyagintsev's Leviathan (2014), Maria Hristova
Journal of Religion & Film
This article engages in close analysis of how Andrey Zvyagintsev depicts corruption and its various manifestations: moral, familial, societal, and institutional, in Leviathan (Leviafan, 2014). While other post-Soviet films address the problem of prevalent corruption in Russia, Zvyagintsev’s work is the first to provoke strong public reactions, not only from government and Russian Orthodox Church officials, but also from Orthodox and political activist groups. The film demonstrates that the instances of legal and moral failings in one aspect of existence are a sign of a much deeper and wider-ranging problem that affects all other spheres of human experience. …
Apocalypse And Eschatology In John Ford's The Grapes Of Wrath (1940), Nancy Wright
Apocalypse And Eschatology In John Ford's The Grapes Of Wrath (1940), Nancy Wright
Journal of Religion & Film
John Ford’s The Grapes of Wrath (1940) visualizes conventions of the apocalypse genre to represent not simply a particular historical setting, the Great Depression, but also a vision of history to be interpreted in terms of eschatology. Expressionistic photography transforms the characters’ experiences into enigmatic visions that invite and guide interpretation. A comparison of montage sequences in Ford’s The Grapes of Wrath and Pare Lorentz’s The Plow That Broke The Plains (1936), a Farm Security Administration documentary, clarifies how Ford’s narrative film aligns spectators within and outside the mise-en-scène.
Between Idealization Of A Martyr And Critic Of A Society: Analysis Of Axel Corti’S "Der Fall Jägerstätter", Jakub Gortat
Between Idealization Of A Martyr And Critic Of A Society: Analysis Of Axel Corti’S "Der Fall Jägerstätter", Jakub Gortat
Journal of Religion & Film
The new film approach to the figure of Franz Jägerstätter by Terrence Mallick in 2019 is an occasion to take a critical look at the first movie about the Catholic martyr that was made by the Austrian director Axel Corti in 1971. Although the movie turned out be to a huge success and until now is viewed as one of the turning points in coming to terms with the Nazi past in the Austrian film history, it idealizes, against the director’s intentions, the protagonist and preserves some of the characteristic elements of the history discourse of the times it was …
Religion And Culture In Inherit The Wind, Zachary Sheldon
Religion And Culture In Inherit The Wind, Zachary Sheldon
Journal of Religion & Film
Stanley Kramer’s Inherit the Wind (1960) has long been considered a classic for its indictment of McCarthyism as allegorized in a dramatic treatment of the Scopes Monkey Trial. But for all its political messaging, the film is also patently up front in its treatment of religious perspectives on culture. The presence of such material may be read allegorically but may also be read in connection with the period of the film’s production, as a statement piece on religious perspectives of media such as film. This article examines the religious messaging in Inherit the Wind in conjunction with religious perspectives of …
Touched By Grace? A Look At Grace In Bergman's Winter Light And Martin Luther's Writings, Kjartan Leer-Salvesen
Touched By Grace? A Look At Grace In Bergman's Winter Light And Martin Luther's Writings, Kjartan Leer-Salvesen
Journal of Religion & Film
Ingmar Bergman holds a prominent place in the lineup of directors who have used cinema to investigate the meaning of life in a godless world. The so-called “Trilogy of God’s Silence” is often identified as the place where Bergman struggled most profoundly with core themes from the Christian faith. In Winter Light, he explores the topic of doubt, devastatingly, through a minister’s religious and existential crisis. This article, however, proposes that Martin Luther’s theology may provide resources for reappraising Bergman’s canonical film.
Neo-Gnosticism At The Movies, Michael Kaler
Neo-Gnosticism At The Movies, Michael Kaler
Journal of Religion & Film
A number of American films released in the mid/late 1990s drew on, or have been discussed in the context of, gnosticism—a loose, imprecise umbrella term usually applied to a number of heterodox early Christian literary traditions. The Matrix is the most famous of this group of films, which also includes such films as Pleasantville, Dark City, The Truman Show, and Thirteenth Floor. This curious trend would not have been possible had it not been for the emergence of gnosticism in mainstream culture generally; as well, gnosticism’s emphasis on the spectacular, constructed and ultimately illusory nature of apparent reality became especially …
An Old Film In A New Light: Lighting As The Key To Johannine Identity In "Ordet", Richard V. Goodwin
An Old Film In A New Light: Lighting As The Key To Johannine Identity In "Ordet", Richard V. Goodwin
Journal of Religion & Film
In his essay on Carl Theodor Dreyer’s Ordet, P. Adams Sitney draws a parallel between the protagonist, Johannes, and John the Evangelist, author of the fourth gospel. He suggests that the delusional Johannes’s sanity returns upon the recovery of his own name, turning on the invocation of his biblical namesake, John the Evangelist. Compelling as Sitney’s is, however, I argue that we arrive at a more helpful interpretation by attending to an aspect that has been largely overlooked in critical discussion of the film: lighting. Careful analysis of the lighting yields a perspective in which Johannes is understood to …
The Problem With David: Masculinity And Morality In Biblical Cinema, Kevin M. Mcgeough
The Problem With David: Masculinity And Morality In Biblical Cinema, Kevin M. Mcgeough
Journal of Religion & Film
The King David of the Bible, and especially as portrayed in the books of Samuel, is one of the most complex characters in ancient literature. We are told his story from his youth as a shepherd until his death as king of Israel. He kills a mighty warrior with a slingshot, goes to war with his king and later his son, and has an affair that threatens to throw his kingdom into disarray. The stories surrounding David seem perfect for cinematic adaptation yet what makes this character so compelling has been problematic for filmmakers. Here, three types of Biblical filmmaking …
Sundance Film Festival 2018, John C. Lyden
Sundance Film Festival 2018, John C. Lyden
Journal of Religion & Film
Introduction to the Sundance Film Festival 2018.
Religion And Violence In Jesse James Films, 1972–2010, Travis Warren Cooper
Religion And Violence In Jesse James Films, 1972–2010, Travis Warren Cooper
Journal of Religion & Film
This essay analyzes recent depictions of Jesse James in cinema, examining filmic portrayals of the figure between the years of 1972 and 2010. Working from the intersection of the anthropology of film and religious studies approaches to popular culture, the essay fills significant gaps in the study of James folklore. As no substantial examinations of the religious aspects of the James myths exist, I hone in on the legend’s religiosity as contested in filmic form. Films, including revisionist Westerns, are not unlike oral-history statements recorded and analyzed by anthropologists, folklorists, and ethnographers. Jesse James movies, in other words, have much …
“To See My Home Before I Die”: The Trip To Bountiful, Memento Mori, And The Experience Of Death, Margaret Sullivan
“To See My Home Before I Die”: The Trip To Bountiful, Memento Mori, And The Experience Of Death, Margaret Sullivan
Journal of Religion & Film
This article analyzes the portrayal of death in Peter Masterson’s 1985 film The Trip to Bountiful. My claim is that the experience of death, in the film, functions as a tool both for the elderly main character’s increased self-understanding and for her conscious, ethical action. I enter this discussion through an examination of late deconstruction’s ethical turn and the argument that aporetic unknowing, if experienced and endured, leads to the chance for real, authentic action. I then demonstrate how the film depicts such an aporetic encounter with death, and do so, in large part, by focusing on the film’s final …
"I Do Feel The Fire!": The Transformations Of Prison-Based Black Male Converts To Islam In South Central, Malcolm X, And Oz, Kameron J. Copeland
"I Do Feel The Fire!": The Transformations Of Prison-Based Black Male Converts To Islam In South Central, Malcolm X, And Oz, Kameron J. Copeland
Journal of Religion & Film
Historically, imprisoned Black male converts to Islam have been known for their narratives of redemption and struggles for religious freedom behind bars. While Islam possesses a strong visible presence throughout predominately Black areas of inner cities, it has become a natural feature of Black popular culture in mediums such as hip-hop, film, and literature. By the 1990s, the portrayal of Islamic conversions yielding Malcolm X-style transformations among young Black men, who formerly embodied self-destructiveness, were visible in films featuring Black male protagonists. The prison-based transformations typically involved highly influential Black Muslim leaders improving the social conditions of the inmate, the …
“It’S Not A Fucking Book, It’S A Weapon!”: Authority, Power, And Mediation In The Book Of Eli, Seth M. Walker
“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, …
Rejecting The Ethnic Community In Little Caesar, The Public Enemy, And Scarface, Bryan Mead
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
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 …
You’Ve Gotta Keep The Faith: Making Sense Of Disaster In Post 9/11 Apocalyptic Cinema, Matthew Leggatt
You’Ve Gotta Keep The Faith: Making Sense Of Disaster In Post 9/11 Apocalyptic Cinema, Matthew Leggatt
Journal of Religion & Film
Abstract: Chronologically examining the role of faith based narratives in the Hollywood apocalypse since the mid-90s, this article charts their reintroduction in the period after 9/11. Through the study of an extensive array of contemporary films the different structures of faith they offer and an exploration of how such faith is used in order to make meaning from disaster, I assert that post 9/11 apocalyptic movies have grappled with issues of faith and meaning in a far more complex way than in the films of the 90s, questioning the value of such faith in a post-disaster world. In concluding, I …
A Path Less Traveled: Rethinking Spirituality In The Films Of Alejandro Jodorowsky, Adam Breckenridge
A Path Less Traveled: Rethinking Spirituality In The Films Of Alejandro Jodorowsky, Adam Breckenridge
Journal of Religion & Film
This essay seeks to add to the scholarship around the films of Alejandro Jodorowsky by looking at how Jodorowsky challenge to mainstream religion and spirituality in two of his major films: El Topo and The Holy Mountain. I situate both these films within their cultural context and, working with Slavoj Zizek’s idea of the sadistic trap, explore how they challenge not only mainstream religious beliefs but countercultural ones as well. By doing so, I hope to cast some light on what makes the subversive nature of his films so valuable and to provide some guidance to two films that …
Cloud Atlas, Ting Guo
Cloud Atlas, Ting Guo
Journal of Religion & Film
This is a film review of Cloud Atlas (2012) which aims to address what constitutes the reasons for the success of this film and the humanistic theme in which they are rooted, despite the seemingly Buddhist philosophy such as reincarnation this film embodies.
Melodrama On A Mission: Latter-Day Saint Film And The Melodramatic Mode, Airen Hall
Melodrama On A Mission: Latter-Day Saint Film And The Melodramatic Mode, Airen Hall
Journal of Religion & Film
This article examines how the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (the Mormon Church) makes use of the melodramatic mode in creating short and feature length films for both insider and outsider consumption. The argument is made that the melodramatic mode gives the LDS Church a particularly meaningful tool for accomplishing three key goals: to encourage conversion or re-conversion by provoking tears and pathos, to work out social issues, and to create and maintain a certain identity for the Church as victim-hero. As such, the melodramatic mode is a means for identity formation and community building, significant in a …