Bibliographic record
Abstract
Reviewed by: Religion and Film: Cinema and the Re-Creation of the World Melissa S. Conroy S. Brent Plate . Religion and Film: Cinema and the Re-Creation of the World. New York: Wallflower Press, 2008. 112 pp. $22.00 (US). ISBN: 978-1-90564-69-5 In the preface to Religion and Film: Cinema and the Re-Creation of the World, S. Brent Plate makes clear what this book is not. It is not a book about seeing religious images or tropes in film. Nor is it a book about theologies implicit in cinema. Instead, this short, provocative book makes the claim to study both religion and film as ways of seeing that can be read as "world-making" (viii). Instead of looking at religion in film, Plate compares religion and film. He shows how both cinema and religious ritual frame the world by selecting and ordering the cosmos thereby instructing the viewer how to see time and space. Plate accurately situates his recent work in the context of three waves of scholarship on religion and film. The first wave concentrated on analyses of serious art-house cinema while the second wave turned to popular Hollywood cinema. Both of these waves structured their approaches in terms of the verbal narrative of films. The third wave, to which this book belongs, turned away from narrative approaches to film and instead moved to looking at film through the lens of film criticism and theory. Scholars of the third wave are invested in understanding the medium of film; in other words, they look to understand films as films, rather than as vehicles for narrative messages. Because it is a book not centred on reading specific narratives, Plate is able to draw upon a variety of films (of various genres and time periods) in order to engage the reader in understanding film form. The first half of his book is concerned with the formal elements of film. By aligning film and religion, Plate seeks to address "the ways myths and rituals might be seen by way of cinematography, editing, and mise-en-scène" (ix). This approach is illustrated by Plate's treatment of the opening sequences of two very different films: George Lucas's 1970s classic Stars Wars and Ron Fricke's non-narrative experimental film Baraka. In both cases, Plate pays close attention to the opening of the films, examining how the director creates a cosmogony by selecting what the viewer sees and hears. Plate's analysis begins with a narrative reading of the Star Wars. Star Wars, like Genesis, opens with a move to mythological time. The prologue starts with the phrase, "A long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away," which is reminiscent of Genesis 1.1: "In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth." But it is in Plate's analysis of the sequence of images that we really see the usefulness of reading film in a non-narrative way. The opening shots of both Baraka and Star Wars start by having the viewer see and hear the serenity of the cosmos. For example, after the prologue of Star Wars, Plate notes that the music dwindles to a lone flute. The viewer is left with the vastness of space before the camera tilts downwards to reveal a starship battle. Likewise, Plate notes that the opening shots of Baraka show the still mountains of the Himalayas before cutting to a Japanese snow monkey sitting in a hot spring, seemingly contemplating the universe. Plate skilfully shows that both of these sequences operate much like myth by suturing (through editing) the heavens and earth, or the Himalayas with the mountains of Japan. By comparing these visual cosmogonies with creation myths that move from order to chaos, Plate [End Page 330] convincingly shows that by going beyond narrative and examining the elements of film, in sight and sound, films are a visual mythology. The second half of Plate's book turns to the ways films connect with viewers materially. Here Plate turns his attention to such topics as the ritual performances that accompany the showings of the cult classic Rocky Horror Picture Show and the ways people have used...
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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 | 0.004 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.003 | 0.006 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.004 | 0.004 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.017 | 0.004 |
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".