‘Insight’, Secrecy, Beasts, and Beauty: Struggles over the Making of a Ghanaian Documentary on ‘African traditional religion’ (original) (raw)

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.

Sensational Movies and the Anthropology of Religion: Towards a Comparative Moral Imaginary

Birgit Meyer's Sensational Movies brings together some of the signal themes that have defined her scholarly career at the intersection of Pentecostalism in Africa and the material mediation of religious life. Her ethnographic study of the burgeoning Ghanaian film industry focuses on the ways in which film not only reflects the local moral imagination at a time of social change but also helps to shape and literally produce new forms of imagination that combine, for example, the dualistic Pentecostal ethos with self-conscious stylistic modernism and contested nostalgia for the rural African past. Meyer carefully details both the market forces that constrain film-makers to produce certain kinds of films and the contested cultural politics of African self-representation. The result is a model ethnography for dealing with the complexities of modern cultural production while managing to avoid the all-too-easy collapse into fashionable postmodern solipsism. Meyer does not ignore the films or the filmic imaginary, but she pays attention to the people and sociopolitical contexts behind film production as well. This is crucial, because it allows Meyer to weigh in on some of the major theoretical issues running through today's anthropology of religion. Sensational Movies is the work of a mature scholar who has learned to cut through the Gordian knots of protracted scholarly debate in just a few elegant sentences. While she clearly is interested in the lived experience that transcends mere interpretation of cultures, for

To Commend or To Critique? The Question of Religion and Film Studies

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...

Representing Religion in World Cinema - TOC + Introduction

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.

Cinema: Journal of Philosophy and the Moving Image, no. 4, "Philosophy of Religion

2018

The fourth issue of "Cinema" addresses the topic of philosophy of religion and its connections with cinematic art. Film and religion have been fruitful research topics taken in conjunction. Researchers in this specific field have focused on particular periods (like the censorship era in the USA), on representations of religious traditions and practices (Sufism, for example), and on different theoretical approaches (such as feminism) and broad topics (ethics, for instance) within film studies. Film and philosophy have also had a productive relation in recent years. Different philosophical fields have addressed film, from the philosophy of art to the philosophy of mind, yet philosophy of religion has been a field lacking in the discussion of film. This issue aims at addressing this lack.