Studies of images underlie many of the texts in this study, particularly in relation to the religious imagination. From the classic studies of major works to the New Film Histories of the 1970s, where specific and. In subsequent books, Kreitzer will continue to pay attention to the new conversations of the texts.
Scott deftly uses the teachings of the New Testament to evaluate the film's messages. Bergesen and Greeley (2000) continue this investigation of the question in relation to the religious imagination. DeMille's Samson and Delilah (1949)' and Lindvall's (2002) mischievously titled 'The Organ in the Sanctuary: Silent Film and Paradigmatic Images of Suspicious Clergy'.
Concepts dealing with pilgrimage and the wonders of life also underlie Young's (2001) treatment of the director. Perlmutter (1997) reads Krzysztof Kieslowski's Decalogue and sees the fusion of Father-God and Fatherland. In the issue of Zametne svetlobne pasti (2000), dedicated to the relationship, several fresh trends can be observed.
Jesus and Mel Gibson's The Passion of the Christ: The Film, the Gospels and the Claims of History. Passion Play as Palimpsest: The Nature of the Text in Early Film History.
Introduction
Film History and Religion
Pre-cinematic Studies
Religious Film Histories
Roman Catholics and the Legion of Decency . 5
Couvares finds a complex cultural-turkampfon church/industry relationship prior to the development of the Production Code. A second series of essays examines the aesthetic roots and narrative issues of the film Passion Plays.
History of Christian Filmmaking
Film Criticism and Religion
The first and most widespread approach stems from Niebuhr's (1951) classic discussion of the relationship between Christ and culture. Dufrenne's phenomenological notion of a "sensual realism" offers the spectator a romantic experience of the "depth" of the world through art.
Critical Texts of Avoidance
By the late 1960s, works such as Summers (1969) and McClain (1970) represent the church's divergent critical approaches to the Hollywood industry. According to Johnston (2000c), critics of the left are as guilty as those of the right in judging Hollywood.
Assimilation and Syncretism
In his remedies for this moral destructiveness in films, he suggests that films should suggest rather than impose, opening the subconscious to the dimensions of the marvelous. These approaches effect a slippery assimilation of film and religion, a kind of indistinguishable blending of two realms in which major themes are reduced to universal human concerns rather than theological ones.
Engagement and Dialogue
Sunlight reflected in the many moons of culture, each era sees from its horizon of interpretation, literature seen in its cinematic adaptations/versions. For a true dialogue, the author's intention must be to fully listen to the text. A trend extension of dialogue has been the category of intertextual criticism with its innovative hermeneutics.
Under a larger category of The Duke, Scott offers a fascinating comparison between Paul's Philippians' hymn and John Wayne's The Shootist, as paradigm shifts of savior figures. The voice of the author is now dominant, (Barthes's dead authors are revived and revived.) The scholars as well as film and Bible texts are intertextual constructs. Coates (2002) unleashes some of the freshest and most challenging material on our subject through his eclectic, interdisciplinary methodologies.
Exploring cinematic conceptualizations of Jesus, Satan, and the Madonna, Coates questions the nature of the Christ figure.
Catholic and Protestant Imaginations
His key distinction between religion (institutionalized ritual) and spirituality (living and dynamic) enables him to articulate theoretical arguments about how films elicit beauty and sublimity (and horror!) and the necessity of a unity between the two realms. Looking at issues of representation in the European films of directors such as Tarkovsky, Kieslowski, Dreyer and Godard, he examines the redemptive function attributed to the indexical realism of film art and deals with the most disturbing and problematic material Hollywood would make. I dare not tell. In a section on aspects of popular imagery of the priesthood, he contrasts Romantic notions of a religious vocation against the emotional/libidinal drives valued by Romanticism.
Through films like Ponette and Spirit of the Beehive, Coates carefully teases out patterns of a personal and childlike quest to know God. His Adornian approach gives primacy to the object when he looks at the gospel's kerygma and multiple textuality. Coates' contribution herein offers one of the most fertile (and even feverish) hatchings of ideas in our field, evoking mystery and provoking dialogue.
Homiletical material is scattered throughout, from the morality of Woody Allen to the soteriology of Clint Eastwood.
Biblical Spectaculars and the Jesus Films
Among other treatments, Baugh contrasts Pasolini's masterpiece with Scorsese's naïve, superficial and neurotic treatment of the Gospel story. Babington and Evans, Stern, Jefford and Debona (1999) aims to explore Jesus films in an adult education classroom, asking questions and suggesting topics for discussion. While choosing to look at films through different lenses such as social, political and cultural contexts, it is a general overview of films.
Jesus is the central signifier of the holy, but only one of many, which also includes movie versions of Judas. Mikkelson and Gregg interpret the film's depictions in light of parallel biblical texts and relevant historical works by Josephus, Tacitus, and others, and construct a commentary on one cinematic gospel with little theological research. The literature on director Mel Gibson's The Passion of the Christ is expected to add new, lively, and controversial chapters to the subgenre of the Jesus film (Corley & Webb, 2004).
In the first significant study, O'Brien (2004) looks at the filmmaker's violent religious absolutes, which brought a radical turn to the Jesus films.
The Christ Figure
Representational Studies
Within the same Bowling Green University Popular Culture series, Lindvall (1993) catalogs nine cinematic representations of the church, from social structure, political institution, center of hypocrisy, museum, supernatural fortress, sanctuary, place of romance, source of healing and transcendence, and God house and God's people. In another work, Lindvall (1987) also explores the different representations of military chaplains throughout historical film periods. Kozlovic (2002) extends his studies of divine figures in popular cinema to examine what he calls the sacred servant categories (from Samson to Saint Francis), seeking a "taxonomic study of the mundane sacred" as well as tracing the typecasting of actors Joseph Schildkraut as Judas character in four DeMille films.
As such, it covers all sorts of holy aliens and cyborg saviors within the sci-fi genre, as well as finding a transmogrified Bible within western genre films. Ostwalt (1999) provides a useful ethnographic study of the southern Pentecostal/Holiness tradition and sees in the film a portrayal of the small rural church as idyllic rather than an exposé of the charlatan evangelist, but an honest examination of a flawed minister, which "does not lose humanity either for sanctification or for evil" (p. 672). Beginning with the question of the meaning of holiness, Sanders delves into such theologically important issues as holiness, passion for God, martyrdom, asceticism, evangelism, miracles, and poverty.
Chapters on the Holocaust and the Virgin Mary complete the book and an interesting exploration of the fine line between saint and psychotic.
Feminist and Cultural Criticism
Auteur Criticism
One of the first critical studies to overtly deal with a director's religious worldview was Gibson (1969), who offers close readings of seven Bergman films dealing with the absence of God. The Scandinavian heritage would not be complete without recognition of the works of the Danish director Carl Dreyer (Passion of Joan of Arc, The Word). In the book, he assembles a wild and provocative set of critical essays, each assuming that the American films in question derive from the American director's religious sensibility.
As a critic, Rohmer himself sees Christian symbolism in Alfred Hitchcock and proposed the cinema as "the cathedral of the 20th century". Ferlita (1977) looks at the ironic religious narratives of Italy's foremost female author, Lina Wertmuller. Blake accepts the film of the wandering Catholic who wanted to be a priest, The Last Temptation, as a prayer and an act of worship.
The fall of the mighty reminds Irwin of houses built on sand, with the acts of repentance and redemption.
Individual Film Criticism
One can also find treatment of the religion of producers, especially of Walt Disney, whose own creed once appeared in Daily Guideposts. Jewett (1997), in one of the best intersections of theology with film, limns Groundhog Day. Gardner (1999) examines how Jeffrey Katzenberg and DreamWorks reduced the telling of the Exodus story, The Prince of Egypt, to the level of Greek mythology.
The author believes that fictionalizing and animating the Holy Word diminishes the importance of biblical characters for DC comic book heroes. Fisher (1998) looks at Sunrise: A Song of Two Humans and finds the dialectical binaries of Madonna/Whore and city/countryside, but neglects a fuller theological treatment of this sublimely religious film. Cripps (1979) tackles a more religious background in Green Pastures, but we wish for a more substantial treatment of the religious elements.
Beginning with the cinematic adaptation of Umberto Eco's Name of the Rose, Lamm explores the idea that if we laugh at God, the world will fall into chaos.
Audiences and Reception Studies
Hollywood, Main Street, and the Church: Trying to Censor Movies Before the Production Code. Pictured: Small-town audiences and the creation of movie-going culture. The Most Dangerous Anti-Semitic Photoplay on Film: American Jews and the King of Kings.
Smith (Eds.), Ministry and message: What Americans see and read about their leaders (pp. 47-48). King of Kings and Tsar of All Rushes: The Appropriateness of Christ's Story. Propaganda for God: Pastor Charles Taze Russell and the Multimedia Photo-Drama of Creation (1914).
Film Faith and Cultural Conflict: The Case of Martin Scorsese's The Last Temptation of Christ. John Calvin Meets the Creature from the Black Lagoon: The Dutch Reformed Church and the Movies 1928-1966. The Development of 'The New Frontier' in Alien and Aliens: Patriarchal Co-optation of the Feminine Archetype.