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American Film Studies

University of Nebraska at Omaha

Religion

Publication Year

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Gender, Race, And Religion In An African Enlightenment, Jonathan D. Lyonhart Apr 2022

Gender, Race, And Religion In An African Enlightenment, Jonathan D. Lyonhart

Journal of Religion & Film

Black Panther (2018) not only heralded a new future for representation in big-budget films but also gave an alternative vision of the past, one which recasts the Enlightenment within an African context. By going through its technological enlightenment in isolation from Western ideals and dominance, Wakanda opens a space for reflecting on alternate ways progress can—and still might—unfold. More specifically, this alternative history creates room for reimagining how modernity—with its myriad social, scientific, and religious paradigm shifts—could have negotiated questions of race, and, in turn, how race could have informed and redirected some of the lesser impulses of modernity. Similar …


Religion And Moral Injury In American Vietnam War Films, Mary F. Brewer Oct 2021

Religion And Moral Injury In American Vietnam War Films, Mary F. Brewer

Journal of Religion & Film

This essay focuses on the representation of religion in Stanley Kubrick’s Full Metal Jacket (1987), Oliver Stone’s Born on the Fourth of July (1989), and Brian de Palma’s Casualties of War (1989). It explores how religion intersects with the experience of moral trauma at an individual level, and how the films portray moral injury to be as damaging an aspect of war trauma for Vietnam veterans as grievous physical harm. Further, the essay considers how moral injury is a fundamental component of the collective trauma the nation experienced and, in turn, the culture wars that erupted during and after the …


Religion And Violence In Jesse James Films, 1972–2010, Travis Warren Cooper Apr 2017

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 …