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Full-Text Articles in History of Religion

Transforming Leviathan: Job, Hobbes, Zvyagintsev And Philosophical Progression, Graham C. Goff Apr 2022

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 …


Verdens Undergang (1916) And The Birth Of Apocalyptic Film: Antecedents And Causative Forces, Wynn Gerald Hamonic Oct 2016

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 …