Religion in Contemporary European Cinema
The Postsecular Constellation
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Book Description
The religious landscape in Europe is changing dramatically. While the authority of institutional religion has weakened, a growing number of people now desire individualized religious and spiritual experiences, finding the self-complacency of secularism unfulfilling. The "crisis of religion" is itself a form of religious life. A sense of complex, subterraneous interaction between religious, heterodox, secular and atheistic experiences has thus emerged, which makes the phenomenon all the more fascinating to study, and this is what Religion in Contemporary European Cinema does. The book explores the mutual influences, structural analogies, shared dilemmas, as well as the historical roots of such a "post-secular constellation" as seen through the lens of European cinema. Bringing together scholars from film theory and political science, ethics and philosophy of religion, philosophy of film and theology, this volume casts new light on the relationship between the religious and secular experience after the death of the death of God.
Table of Contents
Introduction: Dealing (Visibly) in "Things not Seen" Costica Bradatan 1. Deconstructing Christianity in Contemporary European Cinema: Nanni Moretti’s Habemus Papam and Jean-Luc Nancy’s Dis-enclosure Catherine Wheatley 2. ‘Casting Fire onto the Earth’: The Holy Fool in Russian Cinema Alina Birzache 3. The New Aesthetics of Muslim Spirituality in Turkey: Yusuf’s Trilogy By Semih Kaplanoğlu Asuman Suner 4. Pasolini: Religion and Sacrifice Geoffrey Nowell-Smith 5. Entangled in God’s Story. A Reading of Krzysztof Kieślowski’s Blind Chance Costica Bradatan 6. The Evidence of Things Not Seen: Sound and the Neighbour in Kieślowski, Haneke, Martel Paul Coates 7. Bruno Dumont’s Cinema: Nihilism and the Disintegration of the Christian Imaginary John Caruana 8. Religion against Religion in Lars von Trier Camil Ungureanu 9. The Banalities of Evil: Polanski, Kubrick, and the Reinvention of Horror Nathan Abrams 10. Postsecular Ethics: The Case of Iñárritu’s Biutiful Robert Sinnerbrink 11. Understanding Religion and Film in ‘Post-secular’ Russia Jolyon Mitchell Final Remarks: What is the Use of Postsecularism? Conceptual Clarifications and Two Illustrations Camil Ungureanu
Editor(s)
Biography
Costica Bradatan is Professor of Humanities in the Honors College at Texas Tech University, US
Camil Ungureanu is Assistant Professor of Political Philosophy at Universitat Pompeu Fabra, Spain
Reviews
"Bradatan…sets the stage for the 11 contributions when he states that secular worldviews, along with the rise to prominence of the modern nation-state, are often imagined to be ‘intellectually insufficient and seen as offering existentially poor options.’ To the contrary, cinema, as the authors here all rightly know, has always been linked with the sacred. The essays in this collection all find ways these linkages are occurring." – S. Brent Plate, Hamilton College, USA in the Los Angeles Review of Books