Religion and cinema share a capacity for world making, ritualizing, mythologizing, and creating sacred time and space. Through cinematography, mise-en-scène, editing, and other production activities, film takes the world “out there” and refashions it. Religion achieves similar ends by setting apart particular objects and periods of time, telling stories, and gathering people together for communal actions and concentrated focus. The result of both cinema and religious practice is a re-created world: a world of fantasy, a world of ideology, a world we long to live in, or a world we wish to avoid at all costs. Religion and Film introduces readers to both religious studies and film studies by focusing on the formal similarities between cinema and religious practices and on the ways they each re-create the world. Explorations of film show how the cinematic experience relies on similar aesthetic devices on which religious rituals have long relied: sight, sound, the taste of food, the body, and communal experience. Meanwhile, a deeper understanding of the aesthetic nature of religious rituals can alter our understanding of film production. Utilizing terminology and theoretical insights from the study of religion as well as the study of film, Religion and Film shows that by paying attention to the ways films are constructed, we can shed new light on the ways religious myths and rituals are constructed and vice versa. This thoroughly revised and expanded new edition is designed to appeal to the needs of courses in religion as well as film departments. In addition to two new chapters, this edition has been restructured into three distinct sections that offer students and instructors theories and methods for thinking about cinema in ways that more fully connect film studies with religious studies.

This book examines postmodern theology and how it relates to the cinematic style of Robert Bresson, Carl Theodor Dreyer, Ingmar Bergman, and Luis Buñuel. Ponder demonstrates how these filmmakers forefront religious issues in their use of mise en scène. He investigates both the technical qualities of film “flesh” and its theological features. The chapters show how art cinema uses sound, editing, lighting, and close-ups in ways that critique doctrine’s authoritarianism, as well as philosophy’s individualism, to suggest postmodern theologies that emphasize community. Through this book we learn how the cinematic style of modernist auteurs relates to postmodern theology and how the industry of art cinema constructs certain kinds of film-watching subjectivity.

World Cinema, Theology, and the Human builds an engaging intertextual dialogue between nine acclaimed films of world cinema and a range of theological perspectives that touch on the theme of human experience. This book engages with the power of film to trigger hermeneutical impulses and theological conversation stemming from resonant humanity unfolding onscreen. However, it is film as art, not theology as normative text, which lays down a bridge to the possibility of critical dialogue. In this approach, film is emancipated from a theological agenda, and as an art form, given space to speak on its own terms in dialogue with theology.

Forging an open-minded but reasoned dialogue between nine acclaimed titles of world cinema, and a range of theological perspectives that touch on the theme of human experience, World Cinema, Theology, and the Human offers fresh portals of insight for the interdisciplinary area of Theology and Film. In Sison’s approach, it is the cinematic representation of vivid humanity, not necessarily propositional statements about God and religion, that lays down a bridge to a conversation with theology. Thus, the book’s project is to look for the divine presence, written not on tablets of stone, but on "tablets of human hearts" depicted on screen by way of audiovisual language. Seeking to redress the interdiscipline’s narrow predilection for Hollywood blockbusters, the book casts its net wider to include a culturally diverse selection of case studies– from festival gems such as Singapore’s Be With Me and South Africa’s Yesterday, to widely-acclaimed sleeper hits such as Britain’s Slumdog Millionaire and New Zealand’s Whale Rider. The book will appeal to scholars of theology and religious/cultural studies interested in the Theology/Religion-Film interface, and, because of its commitment to an examination of film qua film, a crossover readership from film studies.

The connection between theology and film is a hot topic in the academy and the church. But research and writing on methodology and hermeneutics is lacking. This comprehensive collection identifies the overlooked or undervalued areas in the current discussions of film and theology. Including contributions from the leaders in the field, Reframing Theology and Film helps deepen the conversation while bringing it to a new level of prominence. Professors and students of theology and film, libraries, pastors, and film buffs will benefit from this much-needed resource.

Is cinema evil, or sacramental? Can films make theological contributions? Can film-viewing be a religious practice? How do films, values and power interact? The study of film and religion engages a range of diverse questions through different approaches and methods. In this contribution, I distinguish three complementary approaches. In the first part, I discuss those that focus on the film as text, the representation of religion in film, and how theology happens in film. The next section will broaden this perspective by taking into consideration how films affect audiences, and how the relationship between film and audience might have religious dimensions or serve religious functions. In the third part, attention to the text and the audience are combined with the consideration of both film and religion as agents in cultural processes in order to think about how film and religion are shaped by and shape value systems and ideologies. In the last section I will begin to tackle the difficult question of theory and method. I consciously postpone this part until the end because, in many cases, methodologies and theoretical frameworks are implied in and emerge from concrete case studies rather than being consciously reflected upon. This final section has two goals: it will make explicit some of these underlying assumptions to serve as a starting point for a more sustained reflection on the theories and methodologies of the field, and it will highlight some of the pitfalls we encounter if we are not methodologically and theoretically precise in our work.

This book explores the theological power of film and seeks to render a properly theological account of cinematic art. It considers: What theology and theological practice does cinematic art give rise to? What are the perceptual and affective potentials of film for theology, and what, if anything, is theological about the cinematic medium itself? The author argues that film is a fundamentally embodied art form, a haptic and somatic medium of perception-cum-expression. This, combined with the distinct temporal aesthetic of film, invests cinema with profound theological potentials. The chapters explore these potentials through theological-cinematic analysis, emphasising the themes of encounter, embodiment, time, and contemplation, as well as three intimately connected doctrines of Christian theology: creation, incarnation, and eschatology. Throughout the book, the films and writings of the Russian director Andrei Tarkovsky emerge as a singular illustration of the theological power of film, becoming a crucial resource for theologicalcinematic analysis.