'Review of: The Routledge Companion to Religion and Film, ed. John Lyden, London 2009.' (original) (raw)
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Facing Forward, Looking Back: Religion and Film Studies in the Last Decade
On November 17, 2012, at the American Academy of Religion’s National Meeting, the Religion, Film, and Visual Culture Group sponsored a session entitled, “Facing Forward, Looking Back: Religion and Film Studies in the Last Decade.” The session focused on four recent books in the field of Religion and Film: John Lyden’s Film as Religion: Myths, Morals and Rituals (NYU, 2003); S. Brent Plate’s Religion and Film: Cinema and the Re-Creation of the World (Wallflower Press, 2009); Antonio Sison’s World Cinema, Theology, and the Human: Humanity in Deep Focus (Routledge, 2012); and Sheila Nayar’s The Sacred and the Cinema: Reconfiguring the ‘Genuinely’ Religious Film (Continuum, 2012). Each author was present to make remarks on his or her book, and then three respondents made remarks on each of the books as well. The respondents were Stefanie Knauss, Rachel Wagner, and Jolyon Thomas. Joe Kickasola introduced the session, and moderated the discussion that followed. This session represented a rare opportunity for scholars of the field of Religion and Film to reflect on the past, present, and future directions of the field, and the Journal of Religion and Film is happy to be able to include the remarks of all the presenters here.
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The introduction to a volume that collects 12 essays from contributors examining the place of religion in films from around the world. Following Fredric Jameson's nomination of cinema as a "geopolitical aesthetic," Plate's introduction adapts this to call cinema a "georeligious aesthetic." Published by Palgrave, 2003.
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Journal of Religion and Film, 2016
This paper examines two approaches to popular film to come out of religious studies. The first assumes popular culture is as valid as any culture, in which case "religious" analysis of films seeks to identify the iconography and mythology of film as expressive of a viable popular religion. The second method critiques popular film as a form of hegemonic discourse to be unmasked as supportive of classist, racist, and sexist ideologies. This paper accepts the validity of both methods and seeks to balance them by asserting that all films should be seen both as viable expressions of culture and also as ideology. Films are both to the extent that all contain multiple "texts" and multiple meanings, held together in an aporial and not entirely rational fusion. We do not need to decide which meaning is fundamental, as all are present in the film. This article is available in Journal of Religion & Film: https://digitalcommons.unomaha.edu/jrf/vol1/iss2/6 The study of film f...
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Journal of Religion and Film, 2016
Most of my students watch more movies than they read books. Some students choose not to register for Tuesday evening courses because Tuesday is "cheap movie night." Movies have captured the imagination, even if M. Darrol Bryant overstates the matter, suggesting that "the act of going to the movies is a participation in a central ritual of this culture's spiritual life." (106) Movies sometimes seem even to do our imagining for us, either fueling or disabling our vigorously imaginative, critical and constructive engagement with religious and theological issues. In my course, "Religion, Film and Popular Culture", I try to offer a context in which students can think critically about the familiar, can learn to see in fresh and challenging ways, and can begin to explore religious concerns through the lens of their movie-going experiences.
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