Art Cinema and Theology

1. Front Matter

   Pages i-xii

   PDF

2. Introduction: The Word was Made Film

   • Justin Ponder

   Pages 1-24

3. “All Is Grace”: Sound and Grace in Robert Bresson’s Diary of a Country Priest

   • Justin Ponder

   Pages 25-65

4. “Life. Yes. Life.”: Editing and Miracles in Carl Theodor Dreyer’s Ordet

   • Justin Ponder

   Pages 67-113

5. “The Whole Earth Is Full of His Glory”: Lighting and Suffering in Ingmar Bergman’s Winter Light

   • Justin Ponder

   Pages 115-160

6. “No One Must Know of This”: Close-up and Heresy in Luis Buñuel’s The Milky Way

   • Justin Ponder

   Pages 161-201

7. Conclusion: … And Dwelt Among Us

   • Justin Ponder

   Pages 203-209

8. Back Matter

   Pages 211-214

   PDF

This book examines postmodern theology and how it relates to the cinematic style of Robert Bresson, Carl Theodor Dreyer, Ingmar Bergman, and Luis Buñuel. Ponder demonstrates how these filmmakers forefront religious issues in their use of mise en scène. He investigates both the technical qualities of film “flesh” and its theological features. The chapters show how art cinema uses sound, editing, lighting, and close-ups in ways that critique doctrine’s authoritarianism, as well as philosophy’s individualism, to suggest postmodern theologies that emphasize community. Through this book we learn how the cinematic style of modernist auteurs relates to postmodern theology and how the industry of art cinema constructs certain kinds of film-watching subjectivity. 

• Christianity
• Auteur
• Movies
• Religion
• Postmodernism
• theology on screen
• Postmodern cinema
• Religious films

“While others have called for informed dialogue between film studies and theology, Ponder goes further in modelling detailed study of four aspects of filmmaking connected to four auteurs hailed by cineastes as well as theologians. He shows how their distinctive techniques support a postmodern theology in which meaning is found only in community, and in the process indicates with detail and insight how film technique serves content and not only form.” (John Lyden, editor of Journal of Religion & Film and author of Film as Religion: Myths, Morals, and Rituals, 2003)

“In Ponder's unpacking of a film's narrative features, his exploration of the movie's visual/aural elements (sound, editing, lighting, and cinematography) is superb, as is his wide-ranging theological investigations, helping to illumine the film's theological depths. His thesis, that a film's sound and images complicate/nuance/deepen its narrative meaning andcan be enriched by the parallel use of theological criticism as an alternate form of "critical theory" is provocative.” (Robert K. Johnston, Professor of Theology and Culture, Fuller Theological Seminary, USA. Author of Reel Spirituality, 2006, Useless Beauty: Ecclesiastes through the Lens of Contemporary Film, 2004; co-editor of God in the Movies, 2017)

• Marian University in Fond du Lac, Fond du Lac, USA

  Justin Ponder

Justin Ponder is Associate Professor of English at Marian University, USA. He has written on theology and film in the Journal of Religion and Film, Religion and the Arts, and Imaginatio et Ratio.

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