ABSTRACT

The religious landscape in Europe is changing dramatically. While the authority of institutional religion has weakened, a growing number of people now desire individualized religious and spiritual experiences, finding the self-complacency of secularism unfulfilling. The "crisis of religion" is itself a form of religious life. A sense of complex, subterraneous interaction between religious, heterodox, secular and atheistic experiences has thus emerged, which makes the phenomenon all the more fascinating to study, and this is what Religion in Contemporary European Cinema does. The book explores the mutual influences, structural analogies, shared dilemmas, as well as the historical roots of such a "post-secular constellation" as seen through the lens of European cinema. Bringing together scholars from film theory and political science, ethics and philosophy of religion, philosophy of film and theology, this volume casts new light on the relationship between the religious and secular experience after the death of the death of God.

chapter |10 pages

Introduction

Dealing (Visibly) in “Things Not Seen” 1

chapter 1|16 pages

Deconstructing Christianity in Contemporary European Cinema

Nanni Moretti's Habemus Papam and Jean-Luc Nancy's Dis-Enclosure

chapter 2|17 pages

“Casting Fire Onto the Earth”

The Holy Fool in Russian Cinema

chapter 3|17 pages

The New Aesthetics of Muslim Spirituality in Turkey

Yusuf's Trilogy by Semih Kaplanoğlu

chapter 4|13 pages

Pasolini

Religion and Sacrifice

chapter 5|17 pages

Entangled in God's Story

A Reading of Krzysztof Kieślowski's Blind Chance 1

chapter 6|19 pages

The Evidence of Things Not Seen

Sound and the Neighbor in Kieślowski, Haneke, Martel

chapter 7|16 pages

Bruno Dumont's Cinema

Nihilism and the Disintegration of the Christian Imaginary

chapter 9|21 pages

The Banalities of Evil

Polanski, Kubrick, and the Reinvention of Horror

chapter 10|20 pages

Postsecular Ethics

The Case of Iñárritu's Biutiful

chapter |19 pages

Final Remarks: What is the Use of Postsecularism?

Conceptual Clarifications and Two Illustrations