Film and Media Studies Commons^™

Freedom For The Wolf, William L. Blizek

Journal of Religion & Film

This is a film review of Freedom for the Wolf (2018), directed by Rupert Russell.

Birds Without Feathers, William L. Blizek

Journal of Religion & Film

This is a film review of Birds without Feathers (2018) directed by Wendy McColm.

Ingrid, William L. Blizek

Journal of Religion & Film

This is a film review of Ingrid (2018) directed by Morrisa Maltz.

Man On Fire, William L. Blizek

Journal of Religion & Film

This is a film review of Man on Fire (2018) directed by Joel Fendelman.

Human Affairs, John C. Lyden

Journal of Religion & Film

This is a film review of Human Affairs (2018), directed by Charlie Birns.

And Breathe Normally, John C. Lyden

Journal of Religion & Film

This is a film review of And Breathe Normally (2018), directed by Isold Uggadottir.

Butterflies, John C. Lyden

Journal of Religion & Film

This is a film review of Butterflies (2018), directed by Tolga Karacelik.

Half The Picture, John C. Lyden

Journal of Religion & Film

This is a film review of Half the Picture (2018), directed by Amy Adrion.

Believer, John C. Lyden

Journal of Religion & Film

This is a film review of Believer (2018), directed by Don Argott.

This Is Home, John C. Lyden

Journal of Religion & Film

This is a film review of This is Home (2018), directed by Alexandra Shiva.

The Shape Of Water, Ken Derry

Journal of Religion & Film

This is a film review of The Shape of Water (2017), directed by Guillermo del Toro.

Waru, Ken Derry

Journal of Religion & Film

This is a film review of Waru (2017), directed by Briar Grace-Smith, Ainsley Gardiner, Renae Maihi, Casey Kaa, Awanui Simich-Pene, Chelsea Cohen, Katie Wolfe, and Paula Jones.

Revenge, Tony Michael

Journal of Religion & Film

This is a film review of Revenge (2017), directed by Coralie Fargeat.

“Those Who Don’T Remember Don’T Exist Anywhere:” Historical Redemption In Patricio Guzmán’S Nostalgia For The Light (2010), Cristina Ruiz-Poveda Vera

Journal of Religion & Film

The poetic aesthetic of Patricio Guzman’s documentary Nostalgia for the Light (2010) ponders the nature of memory and history. The film uses a metaphysical approach to explore the traumatic past of Chile, creating a sense of historical redemption as defined by Walter Benjamin (1940). Contemporary Latin American documentaries have abandoned the idea of objectivity to focus on subjective portrayals of memory as a way to capture the plurality of personal experiences of historical events. As a result, these documentaries have become more artistic and formally innovative than the previous epic informative films of the region. In the case of Guzman’s …

Scorsese’S Silence: Film As Practical Theodicy, Ian Deweese-Boyd

Journal of Religion & Film

Martin Scorsese’s adaptation of Shusaku Endo’s novel Silence takes up the anguished experience of God’s silence in the face of human suffering. The main character, the Jesuit priest Sabastião Rodrigues, finds his faith gutted by the appalling silence of God as he witnesses the horrific persecution of Christians in seventeenth century Japan. Yujin Nagasawa calls the particularly intense combination of the problems of divine hiddenness and evil the problem of divine absence that resists resolution through explanations that have typically characterized the theodicies offered by philosophers. Drawing on the thought of Ignatius of Loyola, this essay explores the way …

Now That Was A Nice Hanging: The Hateful Eight As Parable?, Richard G. Walsh

Journal of Religion & Film

The opening of Quentin Tarantino’s The Hateful Eight conjoins the iconic landscape of the Western, Christianity’s chief symbol the crucifix, and Tarantino’s oeuvre. The film gives the crucifix so much screen time that one wonders what its significance might be. That the film climaxes with the lynching of Daisy Domergue renders the crucifix teasingly parabolic. The opening-closing frame parallels the two hangings, as do the various eulogies associated with the lynching. That Daisy’s lynching takes place at the hands of the film’s two surviving characters—who, like the horses that lead the stagecoach team delivering Daisy to her fate, are black …

Still Banned After All These Years- Retracing The Journey Of Cavani’S ‘Revolutionary’ Galileo (1968)., Silvia Angeli

Journal of Religion & Film

“Revolutionary” and “scandalous” are adjectives the late Ettore Bernabei, General Director of Italian State Television (RAI) from 1961 to 1974, used to describe Liliana Cavani’s Galileo (1968) in a 2005 interview for Corriere della Sera. Such harsh judgment reflects the undiminished hostility of a significant branch of Italian Catholicism toward the film. The fact that almost 50 years after its release Galileo has yet to be broadcast on public television despite being commissioned by it unequivocally confirms this hostility. Based on primary sources such as press articles and archival sources, this article chronicles Galileo’s incredible journey through …

A Fight Over Souls: Documentary Films On The Rwandan Genocide With A Christian Theme, Tommy Gustafsson

Journal of Religion & Film

The 1994 genocide against the Tutsis in Rwanda have spawned over 150 feature films and feature-length documentaries, making it into the second most audio-visually recreated genocide after the Holocaust. Within this large body of historical films a subgenre have emerged with a distinctive Christian theme. This article explores these Christian themed documentary films about the Rwandan genocide and positions them within a film historical perspective as well as analyzes and contextualizes them as a subgenre of films about the Rwandan genocide within films about genocide in general. Of note are how memory and historiography are used, and the links between …

Fixing Ground Zero: Race And Religion In Francis Lawrence’S I Am Legend, Michael E. Heyes

Journal of Religion & Film

Francis Lawrence’s I Am Legend is a complex intertext of Matheson’s novel of the same name and its two previous film adaptations. While the film attempts to depict racism as monstrous, the frequent invocation of 9/11 imagery and Christian symbolism throughout the film recodes the vampiric dark-seekers as radical Islamic terrorists. This serves to further enshrine an us/Christians vs. them/Muslim dichotomy present in post-9/11 America, a dichotomy that the film presents as “curable” through the spread of Christianity and the fall of Islam.

Les Affamés, J. Barton Scott

Journal of Religion & Film

This is a film review of Les Affamés, directed by Robin Aubert.

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.

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 …

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 …

A Social History Of Iranian Cinema (Farsi Translation), Kristian Petersen

Journal of Religion & Film

This is a Farsi translation of Kristian Petersen's book review of A Social History of Iranian Cinema by Hamid Naficy. The translation was done by Elham Rastegari.

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 …