Description
Cinema and Salvation: Explorations in Film and Theology
Though the Orthodox Church has long supported iconography, music, architecture, and other traditional art forms, it has been slow to reflect theologically on photography and especially film. Called the "youngest and most powerful of the arts," this course approaches film and the cinema as an important dialogue partner for the theologian. Films are a barometer indicating where our culture is at; they reveal what we value as human beings, they ask our deepest questions, and reflect our most basic desires and dreams. This course explores the connections between faith and film, attending both to the content of films and their purely cinematic, filmic, and aesthetic forms, with special attention to what has been called "transcendental film style." The films under consideration are grouped according to traditional theological themes (Creation, Redemption, Vocation, Celebration), and include the major films of Andrei Tarkovsky and Terre