Religion in Contemporary European Cinema

The Postsecular Constellation

Costica Bradatan, Camil Ungureanu

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN:
  9780415733762
• eBook ISBN:
  9781317860174
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Religion

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

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Introduction: Dealing (Visibly) in “Things Not Seen”
• 1 Deconstructing Christianity in Contemporary European Cinema: Nanni Moretti’s Habemus Papam and Jean-Luc Nancy’s Dis-Enclosure
• 2 “Casting Fire Onto the Earth”: The Holy Fool in Russian Cinema
• 3 The New Aesthetics of Muslim Spirituality in Turkey: Yusuf’s Trilogy by Semih Kaplanoğlu
• 4 Pasolini: Religion and Sacrifice
• 5 Entangled in God’s Story. A Reading of Krzysztof Kieślowski’s Blind Chance
• 6 The Evidence of Things Not Seen: Sound and the Neighbor in Kieślowski, Haneke, Martel
• 7 Bruno Dumont’s Cinema: Nihilism and the Disintegration of the Christian Imaginary
• 8 Religion Against Religion in Lars von Trier
• 9 The Banalities of Evil: Polanski, Kubrick, and the Reinvention of Horror
• 10 Postsecular Ethics: The Case of Iñárritu’s Biutiful
• 11 Understanding Religion and Film in “Postsecular” Russia
• Final Remarks: What Is the Use of Postsecularism? Conceptual Clarifications and Two Illustrations
• List of Contributors
• Index