1st Edition
Exploring Film and Christianity Movement as Immobility
This book examines the connections between film and Christianity, considering how films express and depict Christian faith and spirituality and provide experiences associated with it. The notion of movement as immobility (from Simone Weil) is employed to describe film and its images in motion. Its movements can reconnect us with the movements of the world, those motions in which a mysterious sense of order, what Weil calls ‘immobility’, arises. Film is understood as a privileged form to access inscrutable spiritual (in)visibilities that can be linked with Christian concepts and practices. The chapters in this volume offer new studies of hailed directors such as Andrei Tarkovsky and Robert Bresson combined with analyses of recent notable films including Terrence Malick’s Knight of Cups, Martin Scorsese’s Silence, and Denis Villeneuve’s Blade Runner 2049. Organised around the productive topics of theory, expression, depiction and experience, they make a valuable contribution to interdisciplinary research on film and Christianity.
Introduction: Exploring Film and Christianity
Rita Benis and Sérgio Dias Branco
Part I: Theory
1. The European Tradition?: Film and Christianity Beyond the Canon
Catherine Wheatley
2. “Little Sister Reality”: The Franciscan Sources of Bazin’s Philosophy of Cinema
John Caruana
3. Pattern, Rupture, Reaction: Christian Theology and the Temporal Dynamics of Cinema
Joseph G. Kickasola
Part II: Expression
4. Cinema Places Us Waiting for What?: A Religious Look at the Cinema of João Salaviza
José Tolentino Mendonça
5. Filming the Soul: From Robert Bresson to Manoel de Oliveira
Maria Rosário Lupi Bello
6. On Christian Values and Bresson’s Forms: A Contribution to a Philosophical Legacy of Cinema
Maria Irene Aparício
Part III: Depiction
7. Andrei Tarkovsky’s Nostalgia: Personal Search and Spiritual Redemption
Mário Avelar
8. The Striving Promissory: On the Immobile Movement of Promise in The Given Word (1962)
José Manuel Martins
9. Herzog’s Kasper Hauser, or The Enigma of the Hidden God
Paolo Stellino
10. Remembrance of a Lost Spring
Adriana Martins
11. Theft and Return: An Augustinian Reading of Robert Bresson’s Pickpocket
Gerard Loughlin
12. To Be is to Be Free: Cybernetic Life as Christian Subjectivity in Blade Runner 2049
M. Gail Hamner
Part IV: Experience
13. Surface and Depth: Icons in Tarkovsky’s Andrei Rublev
Bruno C. Duarte
14. Revisioning Christian Film Aesthetics in Martin Scorsese’s Silence
Dan Chyutin
15. Film Viewing as Actuosa Participatio: The Tree of Life’s Sacramental Experience
Pablo Alzola
16. Movement as a Core of Being: Watching Terrence Malick’s Knight of Cups Through David Bentley Hart’s Theology
Denys Kondyuk
Biography
Rita Benis is a Researcher at the Centre for Comparative Studies at the University of Lisbon,
Portugal.
Sérgio Dias Branco is Associate Professor of Film Studies at the University of Coimbra, Portugal.
