Description
About the Author
S. Brent Plate is a writer, editor, and visiting associate professor of religious studies at Hamilton College. His books include Representing Religion in World Cinema: Filmmaking, Mythmaking, Culture Making (2003), Blasphemy: Art That Offends (2006), and A History of Religion in 51/2 Objects: Bringing the Spiritual to Its Senses (2014). Plate is also cofounder and managing editor of the journal Material Religion: The Journal of Objects, Art, and Belief.
Reviews
Contributes crucially to film theory as much as religious studies, marking a pivotal moment in the humanities in which religiosity, mythology, media, and narratology are once again being revisited in the continued critique of the Enlightenment, Western society, and secular humanism. * Reading Religion *
This new standalone version is erudite yet accessible, with a truly inclusive and knowledgeable appreciation of both cinema and religion. -- Joel Mayward * Journal of Film and Religion *
[This] volume is a stimulating contribution to the field of film and religion that will be read with profit by scholars in the field, graduate students and others with an interest in this conversation. -- Stefanie Knauss * Journal of Religion, Film, and Media *
Plate gives us the best introduction into the exploration of religion and film by brilliantly interweaving the worldmaking of religious myths and rituals, sacred times, and spaces, with the worldmaking of cinema. Insightful and illuminating, Religion and Film helps us to understand the stagings, structures, and embodiments of film in the light of religion and to rethink the dynamics of religion in the light of film. -- David Chidester, author of Authentic Fakes: Religion and American Popular Culture
A truly compelling comparative study. The analogues between filmic and religious worldmaking are richly illuminating, bringing the reader to fresh insights about the structure and dynamics of both mediums. Setting aside the customary approach of simply analyzing religious themes in movies, this volume compares mythic and ritual ways of constructing a world with cinematic processes such as framing, focus, editorial selection, lighting, camera angle, voice, use of time and space, and iconicity-doing so with lucidity, ingenuity, and masterful use of a repertoire of interpretive frameworks. -- William Paden, University of Vermont
Spiritual questions are still anathema to most film theorists. On the other hand, many religious scholars who dabble in cinema have treated it illustratively and shown a blunt insensitivity to the specifics of film form. This book is exemplary in the cogent and creative way it builds a bridge between these two alienated intellectual worlds. Plate's unfailingly perceptive mise-en-scene analysis discovers the visual mythologizing at work in an eclectic filmography ranging from George Lucas to Dziga Vertov and Stan Brakhage. At the same time, he remains critically aware of politics and ideology, attempting a more inclusive definition of religion that goes beyond the dogmatic and the doctrinal. A wonderfully syncretic study that offers an amazing bricolage of ideas. -- Peter Matthews, University of the Arts London
Book Information
ISBN 9780231176750
Author S. Brent Plate
Format Paperback
Page Count 224
Imprint Columbia University Press
Publisher Columbia University Press