Film and Media Studies Commons^™

Verónica, Kyle Derkson

Journal of Religion & Film

This is a film review of Verónica (2017), directed by Paco Plaza.

Dreams, Doubt, And Dread: The Spiritual In Film, Joel Mayward

Journal of Religion & Film

This is a book review of Zachary Settle and Taylor Worley, eds. Dreams, Doubt, and Dread: The Spiritual in Film. Eugene, OR: Wipf and Stock, 2016.

The Little Hours, Frederick Ruf, Kathryn Wade

Journal of Religion & Film

This is a film review of The Little Hours (2017), directed by Jeff Baena.

Beatriz At Dinner, Kevin V. Dodd

Journal of Religion & Film

This is a film review of Beatriz at Dinner (2017), directed by Miguel Arteta.

Reflections On A Lifetime Of Reading, Frederick W. Guyette Mr.

South Carolina Libraries

Here I give an account of my life as a reader. The first books I remember enjoying are those that were read aloud on Captain Kangaroo, such as Mike Mulligan and His Steam Shovel, The Story about Ping, and Stone Soup. When I was a little older, in school we learned about science and current events from the stories in Weekly Reader. This was followed by an interest in baseball and the sports page in the local newspaper. In high school, I was more interested in films than books, but “visual literacy” has it place in life, …

Religious And National Identity In My Name Is Khan (Hindi Translation), Kathleen M. Erndl

Journal of Religion & Film

The Bollywood film, My Name Is Khan (2010) is the story of an Indian Muslim man, Rizwan Khan, with Asberger’s Syndrome, living in the San Francisco area and married to an Indian Hindu woman, who, post 9/11, sets off on a journey across the United States to tell the President, “My name is Khan, and I’m not a terrorist.” Filmed in lush settings in both India and the U.S., this high-budget production was a blockbuster both in India and abroad. For director Karan Johar, known for his highly successful glossy romantic dramas, such as Kuch Kuch Hota Hai (1998) and …

Card Tricks: A Workflow For Scalability And Dynamic Content Creation Using Paper2d And Unreal Engine 4, Owen Gottlieb, Dakota Herold, Edward Amidon

Presentations and other scholarship

In this paper, we describe the design and technological methods of

our dynamic sprite system in Lost & Found, a table-top-to-mobile

card game designed to improve literacy regarding prosocial

aspects of religious legal systems, specifically, collaboration and

cooperation. Harnessing the capabilities of Unreal Engine’s

Paper2D system, we created a dynamic content creation pipeline

that empowered our game designers so that they could rapidly

iterate on the game’s systems and balance externally from the

engine. Utilizing the Unreal Blueprint component system we were

also able to modularize each actor during runtime as data may be

changed. The technological approach behind Lost …

Communicating The Justice And Peace Of God In Africa Today, Walter Ihejirika

Journal of Global Catholicism

Engaging with the work and theories of Arnold van Gennep and Victor Turner, the article charts out a spirituality of communication within Nigerian Catholicism. Discussing the intersection between various forms of media and community, the article argues for the utilization of media in the pursuit of social justice and the dismantling of inequalities.

Editor's Introduction, Marc Roscoe Loustau

Journal of Global Catholicism

Introduction to African Catholicism: Contemporary Issues: Volume: 1, Issue 2 of the Journal of Global Catholicism

Films And Religion: An Analysis Of Aamir Khan's Pk (Hindi Translation), Monisa Qadri, Sabeha Mufti

Journal of Religion & Film

This is a Hindi translation of an essay that also appears in this issue in English. The translation is by Pritam Katoch.

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 …

Spiritual Media Experiences, Trait Transcendence, And Enjoyment Of Popular Films, Sophie Janicke, Srividya Ramasubramanian

Communication Faculty Articles and Research

Recent scholarship on media psychology acknowledges that media entertainment offers not only purely hedonistic enjoyment but also meaningful experiences. This study expands our understanding of media enjoyment by exploring the role of media entertainment in evoking spiritual emotions and beliefs, such as those related to connectedness, blessedness, and transcendence. Results from an online survey (N=220) indicate that media entertainment elicits meaningful as well as spiritual emotions and increases the saliency of spiritual beliefs as related to self-actualization and spiritual experiences in everyday life. Furthermore, trait transcendence and eudaimonic media motivations add to the explanation of audiences’ mediated spiritual experiences. Open-ended …

Time Travel, Labour History, And The Null Curriculum: New Design Knowledge For Mobile Augmented Reality History Games, Owen Gottlieb

Articles

This paper presents a case study drawn from design-based research (DBR) on a mobile, place-based augmented reality history game. Using DBR methods, the game was developed by the author as a history learning intervention for fifth to seventh graders. The game is built upon historical narratives of disenfranchised populations that are seldom taught, those typically relegated to the 'null curriculum'. These narratives include the stories of women immigrant labour leaders in the early twentieth century, more than a decade before suffrage. The project understands the purpose of history education as the preparation of informed citizens. In paying particular attention to …

Blade Runner And The Divine Menace, Alexander W. Pickens

MAD-RUSH Undergraduate Research Conference

Following the decline of Christianity in mainstream Western culture, a void rose in the moral and societal code. Those writers that emerged presented alternate visions that worked their way into the literature of the 20th century. Karl Marx's interpretation of the structure of labor in capitalism presented a new societal hierarchy whose finer points have been worked out in the complex film Blade Runner. This dystopian nightmare, in which a Marxist interpretation of current society bogged down by the ennui of capitalist accumulation is confronted, describes a new religious order based upon this economic theory. Central to this reimagining …

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

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 …

Satanic Humans: Using Satanic Tropes To Guide And Misguide The Audience, Adam L. Porter

Journal of Religion & Film

One of the differences between Christ and Satan is that the former is clearly described in the Gospels, but the latter is not. Rather, a large number of different stories grew up around the character of Satan over the last 2000 years. Authors and artists can dip into the pool of Satan myths and find different versions of the character they can adapt for their own purposes. I am interested in identifying what satanic symbols have become popular in Hollywood films, so in 2013 I wrote an essay that analyzed several films featuring super-human characters and identified several traits beyond …

Two-Spirit Mexica Youth And Transgender Mixtec/Muxe Media: La Mission (2009), Two Spirit: Injunuity (2013), And Libertad (2015), Gabriel S. Estrada

Journal of Religion & Film

Independent directors Peter Bratt, Adrian Baker, and Avila-Hanna create differing trans-border queer Indigenous media that resist Eurocentric cic-heteropatriarchy. While Bratt’s feature-length narrative film La Mission (2009) features a masculine Mexica gay teenager who survives fused homophobic and trans*-phobic violence, Baker’s short animation Two Spirit: Injunuity (2013) makes stronger trans* and two-spirit Mexica youth identity affirmations. Avila-Hanna’s short documentary Libertad (2015) offers the clearest transgender narrative of the three films as it focuses on a California transgender Mixtec immigrant activist who is coming of age as a woman with the aid of hormones and gender affirming surgery. This article’s trans*- and …

Superhero Films: A Fascist National Complex Or Exemplars Of Moral Virtue?, Chris Yogerst

Journal of Religion & Film

This paper deals with the "why" regarding our collective desire for superhero narratives. My goal is to build on the many definitions of a superhero and find a framework that we as scholars can use to evaluate how superhero films present inspirational moral virtue and not zealous nationalism of any kind. In the process I want to address the problems with some of the scholarly work done on the connection to superheroes and heroism both historically and immediately after 9/11, particularly those who have argued that American superheroism is a fascist myth, and show how the recent evolution of the …

Global Catastrophe In Motion Pictures As Meaning And Message: The Functions Of Apocalyptic Cinema In American Film, Wynn Gerald Hamonic

Journal of Religion & Film

The steady rise in production of American apocalyptic films and the genre's enduring popularity over the last seven decades can be explained by the functions the film genre serves. Through an analysis of a broad range of apocalyptic films along with the application of several theoretical and critical approaches to the study of film, the author describes seven functions commonly found in American apocalyptic cinema expressed both in terms of its meaning (the underlying purpose of the film) and its message (the ideas the filmmakers want to convey to the audience). Apocalyptic cinema helps the viewer make sense of the …

"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 …

How To Attain Liberation From A False World? The Gnostic Myth Of Sophia In Dark City (1998), Fryderyk Kwiatkowski

Journal of Religion & Film

In the second half of the 20th century, a fascinating revival of ancient Gnostic ideas in American popular culture could be observed. One of the major streams through which Gnostic ideas are transmitted is Hollywood cinema. Many works that emerged at the end of 1990s can be viewed through the ideas of ancient Gnostic systems: The Truman Show (1998), The Thirteenth Floor (1999), The Others (2001), Vanilla Sky (2001) or The Matrix trilogy (1999-2003).

In this article, the author analyses Dark City (1998) and demonstrates that the story depicted in the film is heavily indebted to the Gnostic myth of …

Problem-Based Learning And Two Studies Of The Journal Of Religion And Film: Self-Sacrifice And Music, Ken Derry

Journal of Religion & Film

This article offers a case study for using problem-based learning (PBL) in a religion and film course. PBL is an open-ended, experiential approach to teaching, which requires students to engage with a real world problem in groups. While many university classes are based on a lecture format and variations of that format, PBL asks students to take greater ownership of their learning. The problem drives what students will learn, how they will learn it, and what they produce to assess that learning. Students in a fourth-year PBL class at the University of Toronto Mississauga were given the following problem: analyze …

Amar Akbar Anthony: Bollywood, Brotherhood, And The Nation, Kathryn C. Hardy

Journal of Religion & Film

This is a book review of William Elison, Christian Lee Novetzke, and Andy Rotman, Amar Akbar Anthony: Bollywood, Brotherhood, and the Nation (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2016).

Coen: Framing Religion In Amoral Order, Richard Goodwin

Journal of Religion & Film

This is a book review of Elijah Siegler, ed., Coen: Framing Religion in Amoral Order. Waco, Texas: Baylor University Press, 2016.

The Innocents (Les Innocentes), Joshua Canzona

Journal of Religion & Film

This is a film review of The Innocents (Les Innocentes) (2016), directed by Anne Fontaine.

Silence, Caesar A. Montevecchio

Journal of Religion & Film

This is a film review of Silence (2016), directed by Martin Scorsese.

Hidden Figures, Carol Miles

Journal of Religion & Film

This is a film review of Hidden Figures (2016), directed by Theodore Melfi.

I Love Dick, William L. Blizek

Journal of Religion & Film

This is a film review of I Love Dick (2017), directed by Jill Soloway.

Divinity, Incarnation, And The Strange Body Of Jesus In Horror Films, Mike Kugler

Northwestern Review

Through an analysis of a number of horror films or films with horror-infused aspects, such as The Last Temptation Christ, Passion of the Christ, Jesus Christ Vampire Hunter, Jesus, and Fist of Jesus, the author uses theology to reflect not only on the horror genre but also on the doctrine of the Incarnation.

The Discovery, William L. Blizek

Journal of Religion & Film

This is a film review of The Discovery (2017), directed by Charlie McDowell.