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Articles 1 - 9 of 9
Full-Text Articles in Continental Philosophy
Get Busy Living: Leaping Out Of Confinement With Kierkegaard In The Shawshank Redemption, Christian Wilken
Get Busy Living: Leaping Out Of Confinement With Kierkegaard In The Shawshank Redemption, Christian Wilken
Journal of Religion & Film
This article offers a Kierkegaardian reading of The Shawshank Redemption (1994), arguing that the film functions not as a miracle narrative but as a cinematic enactment of existential theology. While existing scholarship frequently interprets Shawshank through biblical typology or Foucauldian notions of incarceration, few consider how the film dramatizes Kierkegaard’s categories of anxiety, despair, and the leap of faith. Shawshank presents prison as more than a space of punishment—it becomes a refuge from the “dizziness of freedom,” a structured escape from the terrifying burden of possibility. Brooks’s suicide tragically embodies what Kierkegaard calls the “despair of weakness,” the inability to …
Spiritual Cinema: Agel, Merleau-Ponty And The Cinematic Real, Patrick O'Connor Dr
Spiritual Cinema: Agel, Merleau-Ponty And The Cinematic Real, Patrick O'Connor Dr
Journal of Religion & Film
This article seeks to retrieve the work of Henri Agel, and his collaborator Amédée Ayfre, for our theoretical understanding of film-philosophy. I explore their distinctive contribution to thinking philosophically about film and assess the relative merits of their work for the phenomenology of film. While exceptionally valuable for religious and theological interpretations of film I proceed to argue that Agel and Ayfre’s work needs to be supplemented with the work of Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s film-phenomenology to adequately express the temporal and motional nature of film. Merleau-Ponty’s work I contend while exceptionally valuable is brief and underdeveloped, and therefore does not fully …
“He Who Laughs Last!” Terrorists, Nihilists, And Jokers, William S. Chavez, Luke Mccracken
“He Who Laughs Last!” Terrorists, Nihilists, And Jokers, William S. Chavez, Luke Mccracken
Journal of Religion & Film
Since his debut in 1940, the Joker, famed adversary of the Batman, continues to permeate the American cultural mediascape not merely as an object of consumption but as an ongoing production of popular imagination. Joker mythmakers post-1986 have reimagined the character not as superhuman but as “depressingly ordinary,” inspiring audiences both to empathize with his existential plight and to fear his terroristic violence as an increasingly compelling model of reactionary resistance to institutionality. This article examines the recent history of modern terrorism in conjunction with the “pathological nihilism” diagnosed by Nietzsche in order to elucidate the stakes and implications of …
Terrence Malick Beyond Nature And Grace: Song To Song And The Experience Of Forgiveness, Elisa Zocchi
Terrence Malick Beyond Nature And Grace: Song To Song And The Experience Of Forgiveness, Elisa Zocchi
Journal of Religion & Film
In The Tree of Life Terrence Malick poses the question of the relation between the order of grace and the order of nature in the cosmos and in human existence, a question presented through the relation of mother and father in the O'Brien family. The aim of this article is to analyze this issue and to present the role of glory in The Tree of Life as the transfiguration of nature operated by grace. Specifically, the example of forgiveness as one strand of this glory seems to be an helpful tool to understand the movie. Forgiveness, already present in The …
The Little Hours, Frederick Ruf, Kathryn Wade
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.
Personal Identity And Angelic Touch In Wim Wenders' Wings Of Desire, Chris Venner
Personal Identity And Angelic Touch In Wim Wenders' Wings Of Desire, Chris Venner
Journal of Religion & Film
Wenders' Wings of Desire offers a rich tapestry for theorists of personal identity and its relationship to the Other. Set in a Berlin where angels walk among humans, it depicts those angels reorienting humans' lives with but a touch. Martin Heidegger and Gilles Deleuze also theorize the Other's touch as central to any change in the self. Bringing Wenders' film into dialogue with their theories offers new insights into the film's central question, “Why am I me and not you?”
The Binding Of Abraham: Inverting The Akedah In Fail-Safe And Wargames, Hunter B. Dukes
The Binding Of Abraham: Inverting The Akedah In Fail-Safe And Wargames, Hunter B. Dukes
Journal of Religion & Film
This article draws upon Søren Kierkegaard's Fear and Trembling and Jacques Derrida's The Gift of Death to trace how two exemplars of atomic bomb cinema reinterpret the Binding of Isaac (Akedah). Released during the twin peaks of Cold War tension, Fail-Safe (1964) and WarGames (1983) invert the Akedah of Genesis 22. In both films, an act of sacrificial patricide accompanies or replaces the sacrifice of an Isaac-like son. When viewed in the context of Cold War cultural politics—events such as Norman Morrison’s Abrahamic self-immolation and Kent State’s rejection of George Segal’s sacrificial memorial— the inverted Akedah emerges as …
There’S No Place Like Home: From Oz To Antichrist, J. Sage Elwell
There’S No Place Like Home: From Oz To Antichrist, J. Sage Elwell
Journal of Religion & Film
This article explores the dialectic of the uncanny in The Wizard of Oz (Victor Flemming, 1939) and Antichrist (Lars von Trier, 2009), treating the latter as a sequel to the former such that we encounter Dorothy first as a young girl and then as a grown woman. I observe that the uncanny entails a repressive and expressive moment that is cinematically rendered in these two films, and drawing on Freud and Žižek, I argue that in Dorothy’s evolution from Oz to Antichrist we see that the witches and wizards and gods and devils of our own minds are known to …
Scapegoats And Redemption On Shutter Island, Cari Myers
Scapegoats And Redemption On Shutter Island, Cari Myers
Journal of Religion & Film
The themes of redemptive violence, scapegoating, and ritual in the films of Martin Scorsese have provided much grist for critical scholarship. While it is going too far to claim that Scorsese is intentionally interpreting Girardian themes (which are themselves borrowed from a rich mythological tradition), the comparisons between the theorist and the director are compelling. My goal here is to establish the primary themes of scapegoating, mimesis, the cycle of violence, and feuding identities that occur in both Girard’s works and Scorsese’s films and pull them forward into a more recent work of Scorsese, Shutter Island.