Representing Religion In World Cinema

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Book Reviews / Pneuma 29 (2007) 131-178

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S. Brent Plate, ed., Representing Religion in World Cinema: Filmmaking, Mythmaking, Cul- ture Making (New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2003). xii + 272 pp., $28.95, paper.

The aim of this collection of essays is to explore the complex linkages between religion, culture, and cinema throughout the world from a variety of interdisciplinary perspectives. In so doing, the volume strives to understand the role of cinema in communal life as a “georeligious aesthetic” through which religious beliefs, practices, and images are continu- ally shaped, performed, and redefined. Of course, individual religious traditions may also be said to possess their own intrinsic aesthetic. While all religious traditions are carried along (and transformed in the process) by combinations of media, whether those are oral, written, visual, or electronic, this book explores the ways religion has been altered by the medium of film and also the way religion has shaped the use of that medium itself. One of the strengths of the book is the two-way street on which the various crosscultural explora- tions between religion and cinema are made to travel.

T roughout the volume, the authors are all keenly aware that the “religious” dimensions of cinema are not simply a matter of the message or content of films but also their form and reception. If, as the editor says, “filmmaking is related to culture making is related to myth- making” (2), then in our present world both religion and film are intertwined in the way persons and communities make meaning insofar as both religion and film participate in the shared activities of “framing” a world and “projecting” a world.

The volume is organized into three sections, each of which includes a cross section of perspectives drawn from film and media studies, sociology and anthropology, cultural stud- ies, and religious studies. The first section, “Re-mythologizing Cinema,” explores the way cinema participates in the ongoing process of mythmaking that is intrinsic to religious life — the way, for example, films from around the globe adapt religious traditions to con- temporary settings and diverse cultures. The second section, “Re-presenting Religion,” focuses on the various ways cinema shapes and alters religion through its mediation of religious traditions and its re-presentations of them — again, not merely in terms of content but also of form. The third section, “Making Films, Making Nations,” examines the “nation” as one of the primary contexts in which meaning is made and in which the social imagina- tion is molded. The articles look specifically at the way mythic filmmaking participates in the process of nation building and the role of religion in that process.

One article that will be of particular interest to those engaged in Pentecostal Theology is found in the second section but could have been placed in any of the three. In “Pentecostal- ism, Prosperity, and Popular Cinema in Ghana,” Birgit Meyer examines the popular video film industry in Ghana and its indebtedness to and transformation of what she calls a “Pente costally infused” or “Pentecostalite public culture” (123). Ghana’s transformation from colonial administration to a strongly centralized and state-controlled social apparatus to a nation that is today increasingly open to modern urban prosperity and neoliberal capitalism parallels the growth and ascendancy of Pentecostal-Charismatic religion, espe- cially those forms that advocate for some variety of a “prosperity gospel.” The video film industry is an enormously popular grassroots medium that has imbibed this popular Pen- tecostalism (even when the filmmakers are not themselves religious) and is characterized by its playing to a Pentecostal “style” that associates salvation with modernity and prosperity

© Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2007 DOI: 10.1163/157007407X178463

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Book Reviews / Pneuma 29 (2007) 131-178

while at the same time performing morality tales that warn against greed and lust when prosperity is sought for its own sake without faith in God. In this way, the local video cin- ema has come to occupy much of the same public space as the church (churches often meet in cinema halls) and has thereby helped to perpetuate a Pentecostal ethos while at the same time transforming and shaping that ethos publicly.

Anyone interested in studying the way visual media both shapes and is shaped by con- temporary forms of religious life will find this and other articles in the volume enriching and helpful.

Reviewed by Bryan Stone

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