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A29–402
Color of Paradise
Friday, 8:00 PM–10:00 PM
Hyatt Regency–Hanover D*

Sponsored by the Religion, Film, and Visual Culture Group.

1999, directed by Majid Majidi. Farsi, with English subtitles. 90 minutes.

Set in Tehran and the countryside of Iran, The Color of Paradise (Rang-e Khoda) explores the world from the point of view of Muhammad, a blind boy, whose widowed father, Hashem, would rather not be burdened by his son so that he can remarry and pursue a “normal” life. Majidi employs child and untrained actors, minimal non-diegetic music, and simple cinematography — all of which add to the simplicity and spiritual power of the film. Through the heightened senses and feelings of Muhammad, the audience is invited to view the world, and themselves, anew.

The Color of Paradise is a fable of a child’s innocence and a complex look at faith and humanity. Visually magnificent and wrenchingly moving, the film tells the story of a boy whose inability to see the world only enhances his ability to feel its powerful forces.” (www.sonypictures.com)

A29–403
Songs from the Second Floor
Friday, 8:00 PM–10:00 PM
Hyatt Regency–Hanover AB*

Sponsored by the Religion, Film, and Visual Culture Group.

2000, directed by Roy Andersson. Swedish, with English subtitles. 98 minutes.

Taking place in a Swedish-speaking Everycity and shot as static-camera tableaus, Roy Andersson’s deadpan absurdist dark comedy Songs from the Second Floor (2000) follows an interlocking network of characters amidst an economic recession of apocalyptic dimensions. The film opens as Pelle Wigert (Torbjörn Fahlström) has been ordered by his CEO Lennart (Bengt C. W. Carlsson) to lay off 1,000 workers. Pelle follows the order but, in protest, smashes his boss over the head with a gold club. Meanwhile, the ghostly populace has turned away from faith. Even church leaders obsessively talk about their loss in housing values, and a massive traffic jam runs through the center of the city as thousands flee to an unknown destination rather than confront their unquestioned faith in the free market. Alongside the cars, stockbrokers walk through the street flagellating each other in penance in Monty Python-esque fashion. At the center of the narrative is the family of Kalle (Lars Nordh), who burns down his furniture store in an attempt to reap the insurance and then turns to selling Jesus icons to try to turn a profit, but no one is buying.

A30–405
New York Doll
Saturday, 8:00 PM–10:00 PM
Hyatt Regency–Hanover D*

Sponsored by the Arts, Literature, and Religion Group and the Mormon Studies Consultation.

2005, directed by Greg Whitely. 75 minutes.

New York Doll is a 2005 Sundance Film Festival award winner that treats the formation, demise, and 2004 reunion performance of the New York Dolls, an influential “glam-rock,” “proto-punk” band who performed in the early 1970s. On the verge of major success, the group was brought down by an excess of undisciplined sex, drugs, drink, and internal conflict. Three band members died, two went on to achieve modest individual musical success. Against this backdrop, the film centers on bassist Arthur “Killer” Kane, intersecting his role in the band, his conversion to religion (Mormonism), his poverty and loneliness, and his reunion performance with the band, all preceding his death from leukemia. At once provocative, surprising, and moving, the film lends itself to considerations of, among other themes, “redemption,” estrangement and reconciliation, and religion and culture.

A30–406
Dirt!
Saturday, 8:00 PM–10:00 PM
Hyatt Regency–Hanover AB*

Sponsored by the Religion and Ecology Group, the Forum on Religion and Ecology, and the Sustainability Task Force.

2009, directed by Bill Benenson, Gene Rosow, and Eleonore Dailly. 86 minutes.

You are invited to watch the topical movie Dirt!, narrated by Jamie Lee Curtis. This movie brings to life the environmental, economic, social, and political impact that the soil has. Come, watch, and take part in a conversation about the Earth’s most valuable and underappreciated source of fertility — from its miraculous beginning to its crippling degradation. The opening scenes of the film dive into the wonderment of the soil. Made from the same elements as the stars, plants, and animals, and us, “dirt is very much alive.” The real change lies in our notion of what dirt is. The movie teaches us: “When humans arrived two million years ago, everything changed for dirt. And from that moment on, the fate of dirt and humans has been intimately linked.” Dirt!’s more than a discussion of what is happening to Earth. It is a call to action.

A31–402
White Ribbon
Sunday, 8:00 PM–10:00 PM
Hyatt Regency–Hanover D*

Sponsored by the Religion, Film, and Visual Culture Group.

2009, directed by Michael Haneke. German, with English subtitles. 144 minutes.

Austrian director Michael Haneke has been challenging his audiences with tales of repression and violence for over twenty years. In films such as Benny’s Video (1992), Funny Games (1997; American version, 2007), The Piano Teacher (2001), and Caché (2005), Haneke has consistently interrogated Euro-American middle-class life, exposing the cruelties that reside just beneath its surface. Haneke’s most recent work, White Ribbon, which won the Palme D’Or at Cannes and was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film, extends on these themes but also charts out fascinating new territory. The film is set in the small town of Eichwald in pre-World War I Germany. At first appearance, the denizens of Eichwald — and especially the children — appear to be solid, upstanding folk. But Haneke proceeds to expose the vicious underside of this surface reality and the traumas that emanate from the patriarchal figures at the center of the film’s action: the local baron, the baron’s steward, the town’s doctor, and especially the Lutheran pastor. Strange, anonymous, brutal crimes begin to occur in the town, and no one can determine their origin. Haneke sustains this mystery brilliantly, opening a unique space for reflection on religion, agency, and modern institutions — and on the violence that continually threatens to engulf us.

A31–403
Soldiers of Conscience
Sunday, 8:00 PM–10:00 PM
Hyatt Regency–Hanover AB*

Sponsored by the Religion, Film, and Visual Culture Group and the Religions, Social Conflict, and Peace Group.

2007, directed by Catherine Ryan and Gary Weimberg. 86 minutes.

Soldiers of Conscience is a dramatic window on the dilemma of individual U.S. soldiers in the current Iraq War — when their finger is on the trigger and another human being is in their gun-sight. Made with cooperation from the U.S. Army and narrated by Peter Coyote, the film profiles eight American soldiers, including four who decide not to kill and become conscientious objectors; and four who believe in their duty to kill if necessary. The film reveals all of them wrestling with the morality of killing in war, not as a philosophical problem, but as soldiers experience it — a split-second decision in combat that can never be forgotten or undone. Soldiers of Conscience is not a film that tells an audience what to think, nor is it about the situation in Iraq today. Instead, it tells a bigger story about human nature and war. The film begins with a little-known fact — after World War II, the Army’s own studies revealed that as many as 75 percent of combat soldiers, given a chance to fire on the enemy, failed to do so. The studies showed that soldiers, despite training, propaganda and social sanction, retained a surprising inhibition when it came to taking human life. The statistics surprised and alarmed America’s generals, who developed training techniques to overcome the reluctance to kill. But if the military found a solution to its problem, the moral contradiction for the individual soldier remained. The mental and emotional burdens carried by soldiers who have killed ripple across America’s families and communities after each of its recent wars. As this film shows, every soldier is inescapably a soldier of conscience.” (www.soldiers-themovie.com)

A1–400
Finding God in the City of Angels
Monday, 8:00 PM–10:00 PM
Hyatt Regency–Hanover D*

2010, directed by Jennifer Jessum.

A documentary film reflecting the multicultural diversity of religious life in the greater Los Angeles area, Finding God in the City of Angels is a research project of the Institute for Signifying Scriptures, based at Graduate University. The film presents and explores the meaning of the wide variety of ways — in prayer, song, dance, performance, visual art, storytelling, or preaching, and so forth — in which different communities signify and engage their “scriptures.” The exploration focuses on diverse settings and types of communities — from a small Skid Row church in downtown Los Angeles to a massive Chinese Buddhist Temple in Hacienda Heights; from an Orthodox Jewish synagogue on Venice Beach to an alternative religious group that meets in a hair salon in Inglewood; from the first Indigenous Peoples of Los Angeles to the Goddess Temple of Orange County — and what their dynamics and performances tell us about a complex social phenomenon.

A1–401
Chaplains Under Fire
Monday, 8:00 PM–10:00 PM
Hyatt Regency–Hanover AB*

2010, directed by Lee Adair Lawrence and Terry Nickelson. 94 minutes.

Are government rules against proselytizing preventing military chaplains from praying in accordance with their faiths? Are care chaplains violating the Constitution, viewing troops as “low-hanging fruit,” ripe for conversion? A new documentary, Chaplains Under Fire, goes behind the contradictory headlines to the heart of what chaplains do and the church-state tensions they face.

*Room locations are subject to change. Please check your Program Book onsite to confirm the location when you arrive at the Annual Meeting.

 

This website contains archived issues of Religious Studies News published online from March 2010 to May 2013, and PDF versions of print editions published from Winter 2001 to October 2009.

This site also contains archived issues of Spotlight on Teaching (May 1999 to May 2013) and Spotlight on Theological Education (March 2007 to March 2013).

For current issues of RSN, beginning with the October 2013 issue, please see here.


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