Bibliographic record
Abstract
THE RELIGIOUS FILM: CHRISTIANITY AND THE HAGIOPIC Pamela Grace. West Sussex: Wiley-Blackwell, 2009, 180 pp. In preparing to teach an undergraduate seminar on religion and media, I have been looking for readings that approach the subject from the critical framework practiced by cinema and media studies. This has been surprisingly difficult. Although publications on the topic have certainly been multiplying, most of them, whether broad collections of essays or more focused examinations of particular icons, emerge from a theological perspective that operates with little attention to the aesthetic and communicative powers of audiovisual texts. Pamela Grace not only understands the complex doctrinal and emotional issues at stake in evaluating representations of religion; she also brings a set of analytical tools to these films that allows for their excavation as objects of art and ideology. The Religious Film provides a solid historical framework for some exciting theoretical conclusions, which makes it a comfortable book for undergraduates that is simultaneously full of rewarding material for more advanced readers. Scholarship on religion and media tends to be plagued by the potential enormity of its corpus: essentially, a book on the topic could be (and frequently is) asked to cover all the world's religions throughout media history. Grace avoids this pitfall by delimiting her objects through a careful definition of a genre. Using the term hagiopic, Grace separates films that detail the lives of holy figures from those that treat religion more generally. She determines to study the Christian hagiopic exclusively, describing a setting that operates according to what she calls miracle-time, an ancient location introduced by a prophetic voice-over narrator and peppered with robed men and women who might at any moment be visited by angels or cured of fatal illnesses. It is easy to imagine what films Grace has in mind, but although Joan of Arc (1928) and The Passion of the Christ (2004) feature prominently in her book, she also includes unusual films, such as Jesus Christ, Superstar (1973) and Jesus of Montreal (1989), that reveal our assumptions about the genre. These films share an attribute that provides the basis of a subtle political critique: because of their exceptional status, the suffering endured by these titular characters does not promote a greater understanding of the world's injustices but instead causes viewers to identify with them as victims. Thus, the hagiopic opens itself to intense emotional responses that nevertheless fail to inspire social change. After three initial chapters that introduce the genre, contextualize it historically, and review the relevant literature (a section that is valuable for students wanting to do more research on an individual text or perspective), Grace's remaining six chapters each focus on one or two films that typify different kinds of hagiopics. Rather than follow a chronological trajectory (which the author provides in brief in chapter 2), Grace organizes the chapters in relation to the aspects of the genre she identified at the outset. Thus, the fourth chapter, on Nicholas Ray's King of Kings (1961), deals with the notion of spectacle. Though it may seem strange that Grace chose to focus on this King of Kings rather than Cecil B. DeMille's 1927 version, her selection is important, for through her reading of the film as a commentary on negative representations of Judaism, she demonstrates the dangers of the anti-Semitism that proliferated in pre-World War II hagiopics and reemerged as a problem decades after the Holocaust. Without glossing over its inconsistencies, Grace shows how Ray's King of Kings constructs anticlimactic images that implicitly critique the standard biblical epic, of which DeMille stands as a primary representative. …
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.003 | 0.006 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.003 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.010 | 0.002 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".