Abstract
Although serious writing on religion and the cinema can be traced back at least as far as the late 1960s, with a considerable expansion having taken place over the last decade or so, this literature has, if truth be told, made little impact on the mainstream of either film and media studies or religious studies. Overwhelmingly theological in its orientation and based almost entirely on the analysis of films as “texts,” scholarship on religion and film and religion has grown into a lively subfield of its own, without ever really gaining the credibility of its parent disciplines.1 This is especially apparent in work on American culture, the world’s most important market for film production and reception.
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Notes
The work of Stewart Hoover and associates is particularly important here. Introducing an important collection of essays, Hoover and Knut Lundby argue for a “more complex understanding” of “media, religion, and culture… as an interrelated web within society” (Stewart M. Hoover and Knut Lundby, eds., Rethinking Media, Religion, and Culture [Thousand Oaks: Sage, 1997], 3). For further developments see Stewart M. Hoover Religion in the News: Faith and Journalism in American Public Discourse (Thousand Oaks: Sage, 1998); David Morgan, Visual Piety: A History and Theory of Popular Religious Images (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998)
David Morgan, Protestants and Pictures: Religion, Visual Culture, and the Age of American Mass Production (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999)
Jolyon Mitchell, Visually Speaking: Radio and the Renaissance of Preaching (Edinburgh: T & T Clark, 1999)
Bruce David Forbes and Jeffrey H. Mahan, eds., Religion and Popular Culture in America (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000)
Stewart M. Hoover and Lynn Schofield Clark, eds., Practicing Religion in the Age of the Media: Explorations in Media, Religion, and Culture (New York: Columbia University Press, 2002).
See, for example, Joel W. Martin and Conrad E. Ostwalt, eds., Screening the Sacred: Religion, Myth, and Ideology in Popular American Film (Boulder: Westview Press, 1995)
Margaret R. Miles, Seeing and Believing: Religion and Values in the Movies (Boston: Beacon Press, 1996)
Albert Bergesen and Andrew M. Greeley, God in the Movies: A Sociological Investigation (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers, 2000).
Philip Schlesinger, Media, State and Nation: Political Violence and Collective Identities (London: Sage, 1991), 173–74
Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origins and Spread of Nationalism rev. and extended ed. (London: Verso, 1991).
Ernest Gellner, Nations and Nationalism (Oxford: Blackwell, 1983)
Eric Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger, eds., The Invention of Tradition (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983)
Eric J. Hobsbawm, Nations and Nationalism Since 1780: Programme, Myth, Reality (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990)
Homi K. Babha, ed., Nation and Narration (London: Routledge, 1990)
Anthony D. Smith, National Identity (London: Penguin, 1991). For an especially useful recent overview of the sociological background to the study of nations and national identity orientated specifically toward the study of “national cinemas,” see Philip Schlesinger, “The Sociological Scope of ‘National Cinema,’” in Cinema and Nation: Interdisciplinary Approaches to Nationalism and National Identity Mette Hjort and Scott MacKenzie, eds. (London: Routledge, 2000), 19–31.
For a critical account of how the notion of sui generis religion has been routinely reproduced by scholars seeking to validate the field of religious studies within the academy, see Russell T. McCutcheon, Manufacturing Religion: The Discourse on Sui Generis Religion and the Politics of Nostalgia (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997).
Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America J. P. Mayer and Max Lerner, eds., trans. George Lawrence (New York: Harper and Row, 1966 [1835]).
Robert N. Bellah, “Civil Religion in America,” Daedalus 96 (1967): 1–21.
See, for example, Russell E. Richey, and Donald G. Jones, eds., American Civil Religion (New York: Harper & Row, 1974)
Robert N. Bellah, The Broken Covenant: American Civil Religion in a Time of Trial (New York: Seaburg Press, 1975)
John Wilson, Public Religion in American Culture (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1979)
George A. Kelly, Politics and Religious Consciousness in America New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Inc., 1984)
Wilbur Zelinsky, Nation into State: The Shifting Symbolic Foundations of American Nationalism (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1988)
Phillip E. Hammond, Amanda Porterfield, James G. Moseley, and Jonathan D. Sarna, “Forum: American Civil Religion Revisited,” Religion and American Culture 4.1 (1994): 1–23.
Robert N. Bellah, “Religion and the Legitimation of the American Republic,” in Robert N. Bellah and Philip E. Hammond, Varieties of Civil Religion (San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1980), 15.
Robert N. Bellah, Richard Madsen, William M. Sullivan, Ann Swidler, and Steven M. Tipton, Habits of the Heart: Individualism and Commitment in American Life (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985).
Garth Jowett, Film: The Democratic Art (Boston and Toronto: Little, Brown and Company, 1976), 35.
Charles H. Long, Significations (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1986).
Henry F. May, Protestant Churches and Industrial America (New York: Harper & Row, 1949), 91
Phillip E. Hammond, “In Search of a Protestant Twentieth Century: American Religion and Power Since 1900,” Review of Religious Research 24.3 (1983): 281–294.
Martin E. Marty, Pilgrims in Their Own hand: 500 Years of Religion in America (New York: Penguin, 1985), 337–71.
Robert Wiebe, The Search for Order, 1877–1920 (New York: Hill and Wang, 1967).
Richard M. Abrams, “The Failure of Progressivism,” in The Shaping of Twentieth Century America: Interpretive Essays 2d. ed., Richard M. Abrams and Lawrence W. Levine, eds. (Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1971), 209.
Lary May, Screening Out the Past (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1983), 68,61,74.
Richard Schickel, D. W. Griffith: An American Life (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1984), 33.
Scott Simmon, The Films of D. W. Griffith (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 147–53. See also Ann Douglas, The Feminization of American Culture (Garden City, NJ: Doubleday, 1988); T. J. Jackson Lears, No Place of Grace: Antimodernism and the Transformation of American Culture, 1880–1920 (New York: Pantheon Books, 1981).
Clyde Taylor, “The Re-Birth of the Aesthetic in Cinema,” in The Birth of Whiteness: Race and the Emergence of U.S. Cinema Daniel Bernardi, ed. (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1996), 16.
Philip French quoted by David Robinson, sleeve notes to The Birth of a Nation directed by D. W. Griffith (London: Connoisseur Video, 1993).
Thomas R. Cripps, “The Reaction of the Negro to the Motion Picture, ‘Birth of a Nation,’” in Focus on Birth of a Nation, Fred Silva, ed. (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1971), 111.
Pierre Sorlin, The Film in History: Restaging the Past (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1980), 30
Janet Staiger, Interpreting Films: Studies in the Historical Reception of American Cinema (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1992), 152.
See for example, D. W. Griffith, “The Motion Picture and Witch Burners,” reprinted in Focus on Birth of a Nation, Fred Silva, ed. (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1971), 96–99, and D. W. Griffith, The Rise and Fall of Free Speech in America (Los Angeles: D. W. Griffith, 1916).
Gaines M. Foster, Ghosts of the Confederacy: Defeat, the Lost Cause, and the New South (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987).
Sacvan Bercovitch, The American Jeremiad (Madison: University of Wisconsin, 1978), xiii, xi, 9.
Winthrop’s sermon is widely available in a number of collections, including, Robert N. Bellah, Richard Madsen, William M. Sullivan, Ann Swidler, and Steven M. Tipton, eds. Individualism and Commitment in American Life: Readings on the Themes of “Habits of the Heart” (New York: Harper Torchbooks, 1988), 22–27.
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© 2003 S. Brent Plate
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Jozajtis, K. (2003). “The Eyes of All People Are Upon Us”. In: Plate, S.B. (eds) Representing Religion in World Cinema. Religion/Culture/Critique. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-137-10034-4_13
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