RELIGION AND FILM pdf download

Religion And Film

RELIGION AND FILM

‘The developing field of religion and film is very new and encourages a wide range of different interests and approaches, as Melanie Wright rightly acknowledges in this substantial contribution to film and religion studies

. The whole area has not yet developed very far, is something of a hodge-podge, and to a certain degree we do not yet know what we are doing.

By selecting a particular systematic approach to religion and film – which incorporates an analysis of narrative, style, content and reception – Wright makes a great step forward for the whole field.

Her cultural studies approach to the topic proposes a clearly defined solution to the subject’s fragmentariness: a challenge that is long overdue.

Moreover, the account she gives of each film that she considers is thorough, fascinating and enlightening!‘ Many in religion and film studies do little more than use filmed stories to illustrate religious pieties.

Melanie Wright is different. In this admirably informed and wonderfully fluent book, she argues for a cultural studies approach to religion and film which attends as much to the production, visual grammar and reception of a film as to its story.

For it is only when we understand a film in its structure and cultural contexts that we can begin to understand its many meanings, including the religious.

This book is both an excellent introduction to religion and film – to religion in film and as film – and a much needed challenge to a facile use of film by theologians unversed in film studies and cinematic cultures’.