Courses » FILM 230: Film and Religion

Description: Religion echoes humanity's spiritual search for meaning and truth; film projects humanity’s deepest hopes and fears on-screen. But what happens when the two worlds of religion and film overlap and engage one another in conversation? FILM 230 examines the medium of film as a window for contemplating religious semantics in contemporary culture; it focuses on how filmmakers have borrowed from religion to articulate various cultural and aesthetic ideas, concerns, and stories. This course will encompass both explicitly and implicitly religious film narratives, using a broad cross-section of genres – from Jesus movies to secular sci-fi flicks – and a wide range of denominational lenses and imaginations, to compare religion in film, religion through film and religion as film. We will contemplate topics such as the sermonic nature of cinema, film spectatorship as religious experience, transcendent soundtracks, Christian symbolism, scriptural intertextuality and the pervasive incorporation of Christ-figures in even the most secular of flicks. Our goal is to observe thematically and comparatively the power of film to sculpt modern religious perceptions. As our culture shifts from literacy to visuality, it is as important as ever to think critically about how our most popular story-telling medium reflects and refracts facets of our religious nature and enters into discourse with, challenges, and even embodies, core Christian beliefs, both onscreen and off. FILM 230 will combine film screenings and discussion with accompanying readings and lectures.
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