Imaging Religion In Film: The Politics Of Nostalgia (new Approaches To Religion And Power)

This book offers a new methodology for examining the ethico-political dimensions of religion and film which foregrounds film's social power both to shape subjectivity and to image contemporary social contradictions and analyses three specific films: Kurosawa's Dersu Uzala; Kiarostami's Taste of Cherry; and the Coens' The Man Who Wasn't There. Imaging Religion in Film offers a new methodology for examining the ethico-political dimensions of religion and film, one that foregrounds film's social power both to shape subjectivity and to image contemporary social contradictions. Specifically, the text develops a Foucauldian ethics of the subject, or 'pedagogy of self, ' a Deleuzian-Peircean semiotic for discussing religion in film, and a theory of religion within postmodernity that rethinks transcendence alongside a politically galvanizing nostalgia. This theoretical work prefaces analyses of three specific films: Kurosawa's Dersu Uzala (1972); Kiarostami's Taste of Cherry (1997); and the Coens' The Man Who Wasn't There (2001) Front Matter....Pages i-xvii Introduction: Interpreting Religion and Film....Pages 1-32 Front Matter....Pages 33-33 Akira Kurosawa: “What Is a Thing?”; Posing the Religious in Dersu Uzala (1975)....Pages 35-62 Abbas Kiarostami: The Face of Modernity; Alienation and Transcendence in Taste of Cherry (1997)....Pages 63-95 Joel and Ethan Coen: Searching for a Way Out; Alienation and Intimacy in The Man Who Wasn’t There (2001)....Pages 97-129 Front Matter....Pages 131-131 Religious Realism....Pages 133-141 Concluding Thoughts....Pages 143-150 Back Matter....Pages 151-193