Exploring Film and Christianity

Rita Benis is a Researcher at the Centre for Comparative Studies at the University of Lisbon, Portugal. Sérgio Dias Branco is Associate Professor of Film Studies at the University of Coimbra, Portugal.

Introduction: Exploring Film and Christianity

Rita Benis and Sérgio Dias Branco

Part I: Theory
1. The European Tradition?: Film and Christianity Beyond the Canon

Catherine Wheatley

2. “Little Sister Reality”: The Franciscan Sources of Bazin’s Philosophy of Cinema

John Caruana

3. Pattern, Rupture, Reaction: Christian Theology and the Temporal Dynamics of Cinema

Joseph G. Kickasola

Part II: Expression

4. Cinema Places Us Waiting for What?: A Religious Look at the Cinema of João Salaviza

José Tolentino Mendonça

5. Filming the Soul: From Robert Bresson to Manoel de Oliveira

Maria Rosário Lupi Bello

6. On Christian Values and Bresson’s Forms: A Contribution to a Philosophical Legacy of Cinema

Maria Irene Aparício

Part III: Depiction

7. Andrei Tarkovsky’s Nostalgia: Personal Search and Spiritual Redemption

Mário Avelar

8. The Striving Promissory: On the Immobile Movement of Promise in The Given Word (1962)

José Manuel Martins

9. Herzog’s Kasper Hauser, or The Enigma of the Hidden God

Paolo Stellino

10. Remembrance of a Lost Spring

Adriana Martins

11. Theft and Return: An Augustinian Reading of Robert Bresson’s Pickpocket

Gerard Loughlin

12. To Be is to Be Free: Cybernetic Life as Christian Subjectivity in Blade Runner 2049

M. Gail Hamner

Part IV: Experience

13. Surface and Depth: Icons in Tarkovsky’s Andrei Rublev

Bruno C. Duarte

14. Revisioning Christian Film Aesthetics in Martin Scorsese’s Silence

Dan Chyutin

15. Film Viewing as Actuosa Participatio: The Tree of Life’s Sacramental Experience

Pablo Alzola

16. Movement as a Core of Being: Watching Terrence Malick’s Knight of Cups Through David Bentley Hart’s Theology

Denys Kondyuk