“Take My Film and Let It Be”: Critics and Consecration in Faith-Based Cinema
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This study represents an attempt to better understand how religion fits into the discourse between filmmakers and critics who review their work. The author uses the thought of French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu—specifically, his notions of cultural capital and consecration—to analyze mainstream reviewers’ responses to the motion pictures of Alex and Stephen Kendrick, two brothers who have endeavoured to make mainstream films that “communicate the gospel without compromise.” In analyzing reviews of the Kendricks’ five “faith-based” films, a consistent pattern of comments from the reviewers is evident, a pattern that expresses negativity toward the brothers’ aesthetic, social, and theological choices. Also apparent, though, is an ongoing conversation in which the filmmakers seem to recognize the importance of listening to reviewers, even if the filmmakers have not toned down their message. Reviewer comments for War Room, a film whose budget and box office success have pushed it into the mainstream in spite of its very religious content, show that the filmmakers not only appear aware of the concerns expressed by critics but also persist in their attachment to religious filmic content that may not appeal to secular critics who, in Bourdieu’s terms, have a high level of “cultural capital.” With Bourdieu’s work in mind, the study suggests that many of the disagreements between the filmmakers and reviewers have as much to do with religion, class, and taste as they do aesthetics.
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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 | 0.012 | 0.046 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.012 | 0.014 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.012 | 0.005 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.005 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 0.000 |
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".