Imaging religion in film
Subtitle: the politics of nostalgia
By: M. Gail Hamner
Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
Published: 2011
Place of publication: New York
Language: eng
Number of pages: 193
ISBN-13: 9780230339866
Subjects: Motion pictures; Moral and ethical aspects; Religious aspects; Nostalgia in motion pictures; Religion in motion pictures
Description: Imaging Religion in Film offers a new methodology for examining the ethico-political dimensions of religion and film, one that foregrounds film's social power both to shape subjectivity and to image contemporary social contradictions. Specifically, the text develops a Foucauldian ethics of the subject, or 'pedagogy of self,' a Deleuzian-Peircean semiotic for discussing religion in film, and a theory of religion within postmodernity that rethinks transcendence alongside a politically galvanizing nostalgia. This theoretical work prefaces analyses of three specific films: Kurosawa's Dersu Uzala (1972); Kiarostami's Taste of Cherry (1997); and the Coens' The Man Who Wasn't There (2001).
Table of contents: title: Akira Kurosawa: "what is a thing?': posing the religious in Dersu uzala (1975); title: Kiarostami: the face of modernity: alienation and transcendence in Taste of cherry (1997); title: Joel and Ethan Coen: searching for a way out: alienation and intimacy in The man who wasn't there (2001); title: Religious realism; title: Concluding thoughts.