Salvation from Cinema offers something new to the burgeoning field of "religion and film": the religious significance of film technique. Discussing the history of both cinematic devices and film theory, Crystal Downing argues that attention to the material medium echoes Christian doctrine about the materiality of Christ’s body as the medium of salvation. Downing cites Jewish, Muslim, Buddhist, and Hindu perspectives on film in order to compare and clarify the significance of medium within the frameworks of multiple traditions. This book will be useful to professors and students interested in the relationship between religion and film.

Is there more to going to the movies than just mindless entertainment? Author Gareth Higgins, avid moviegoer and film critic, says there is. How Movies Helped Save My Soul is a guidebook for looking at films and finding hidden spiritual truths. With chapters on fear, God, justice, love, power, and more, Higgins teaches how to make sense of the spiritual by looking at films with a new perspective. From The Matrix to Magnolia, Fight Club to Field of Dreams, Higgins takes the reader through more than 200 films that, if looked at the right way, just might change lives. Movie buffs and novices alike will find much to enjoy, provoke, amuse, challenge and confound in How Movies Helped Save My Soul. Book jacket.

Examines the personal life and the professional work and success of the director of "Pulp Fiction"

Companion website includes additional information on gear updates, video samples, and interviews.

From Al Jolson in blackface to Song of the South, there is a long history of racism in Hollywood film. Yet as early as the 1930s, movie studios carefully vetted their releases, removing racially offensive language like the “N-word.” This censorship did not stem from purely humanitarian concerns, but rather from worries about boycotts from civil rights groups and loss of revenue from African American filmgoers. Cinema Civil Rights presents the untold history of how Black audiences, activists, and lobbyists influenced the representation of race in Hollywood in the decades before the 1960s civil rights era. Employing a nuanced analysis of power, Ellen C. Scott reveals how these representations were shaped by a complex set of negotiations between various individuals and organizations. Rather than simply recounting the perspective of film studios, she calls our attention to a variety of other influential institutions, from protest groups to state censorship boards. Scott demonstrates not only how civil rights debates helped shaped the movies, but also how the movies themselves provided a vital public forum for addressing taboo subjects like interracial sexuality, segregation, and lynching. Emotionally gripping, theoretically sophisticated, and meticulously researched, Cinema Civil Rights presents us with an in-depth look at the film industry’s role in both articulating and censoring the national conversation on race.

Much work in the field of theology and film lacks a really theological focus. This book suggests a methodology based on the recognition of the imagination as the fundamental category in producing and interpreting film. The argument is presented that the imagination holds theological significance when it is conceived of in certain ways. As a result, the book adopts the 'paradigmatic imagination' (an imagination which works within the paradigms of scripture) or 'theological imagination' (one grounded in theological forms), which is both noetic (it is the image-making faculty of the mind) and almost ontological (it is that which draws human beings into the future which they are able to construct or bring into being). Once the theological (paradigmatic) imagination has been identified and justified, its insights will be applied to 'Jesus films' and 'Christ figure films' asking whether or not they provide us with valid Christological understanding. Films with redemptive or salvific themes are discussed as is the popularity of mythical stories and animation. The final chapter will make the case that the engagement of the theological imagination with film is a method in practical theology